“Not as tough as it sounds,” Bell assured the Van Dorns. “Fort Worth’s sheriff is kindly lending a hand with a whole passel of temporary deputies, including ranch hands in the immediate area. They’ll recognize strangers. And we’re getting railroad dicks. The Texas amp; Pacific line and the Fort Worth amp; Denver are cooperating.”
“What if Harry Frost gets the same idea and hires his own locals?” asked a Los Angeles detective who had just stepped off the train, wearing a cream-colored bowler hat and a pink necktie.
Bell said, “What do you say to that, Walt?” nodding to his old friend “Texas” Walt Hatfield, who had arrived on horseback.
Lean as a steel rail and considerably tougher, the former Texas Ranger turned Van Dorn detective squinted under the brim of his J. B. Stetson at the California dandy. “Nothin’ to stop Frost from roundin’ up a salty bunch,” he drawled. “But he can’t drive them into town, as they would be types well known by peace officers. However, Isaac,” he said to Bell, “spottin’ Harry Frost ain’t stoppin’ him. I reckon from readin’ reports of your adventures thus far, Frost ain’t scairt of nothin’. He’d charge Hell with a bucket of water.”
Bell shook his head. “Don’t count on Frost acting rashly. We’ll see no reckless attack, no hopeless charge. He told me straight, he’s not afraid of dying. But only after he kills Josephine.”
HAVING SET UP HER CAMERAS and Cooper-Hewitt lamps in the North Side Coliseum, Marion Morgan joined Isaac Bell in his Van Dorn headquarters car. Bell complimented her new split riding skirt, which she had discovered in a Fort Worth department store that catered to wealthy ranchers’ wives, then asked, “How does the wedding venue look?” Preoccupied with establishing the perimeter, he had yet to inspect the inside of the coliseum.
Marion laughed. “Do you recall how Preston described it?”
“‘The most opulent and dynamic pavilion in the entire Western Hemisphere’?”
“He left out one word: ‘livestock.’ The opulent and dynamic livestock pavilion is where they hold their National Feeders and Breeders cattle show. Josephine laughed so hard, she started crying.”
“She’s a dairy farmer’s daughter.”
“She said, ‘I’m getting married in a cow barn.’ In actual fact, it’s a grand building. Plenty of light for my cameras. Skylights in the roof, and electricity for my lamps. I’ll do fine. How about you?”
“Indoors makes it easier to guard,” said Bell.
When he did inspect it, he discovered it was indeed a wise choice, with enormous rail yards for the support trains and wedding guests’ specials, and easily dismantled corrals to make airfield space for the flying machines.
AFTER A THOUSAND-MILE RUN from Chicago on awful roads, Harry Frost’s sixty-horsepower, four-cylinder Model 35 Thomas Flyer touring car was caked in mud, gray with dust, and festooned with towropes and chains, extra gas and oil cans, and repeatedly patched spare tires. But it was running like a top, and Frost felt a kind of freedom he never experienced on a railroad, even steaming on his own special. Like Josephine used to prattle on about flying in the air-on the air, she called it, insisting that air was almost solid – in or on, a man could auto anywhere he pleased.
Thirty miles from Fort Worth, a meatpacking city that was smudging the sky with smoke, Frost ordered a halt on a low rise. He scanned the scrub-strewn prairie with powerful German field glasses he had bought for African safaris. A mile off was the railroad. A freight car sat all by itself on a remote siding that had once served a town since wiped from the map by a tornado.
“Go!”
Mike Stotts, Frost’s mechanician, cranked the Thomas’s motor. Three hours later, twenty-five miles on, they stopped again. Frost sent Stotts ahead on a bicycle, which they had stolen in Wichita Falls, to scout the territory and establish contact with Frost’s men in Fort Worth.
“You want I should go with him?” asked Dave Mayhew, Frost’s telegrapher.
“You stay here.” He could always get another mechanician, but a telegrapher who was also handy with firearms was a rare animal. Stotts was back sooner than Frost had expected. “What’s going on?”
“Picket line. They’ve got men on horses patrolling.”
“You sure they weren’t ranch hands?”
“I didn’t see any cows.”
“What about in the city?”
“Police everywhere. Half the men I saw were wearing deputy stars. And a fair portion of those who weren’t looked like detectives.”
“Did you see any rail dicks?”
“About a hundred.”
Frost ruminated in silence. Clearly, Isaac Bell was operating under the assumption that the Colt machine guns stolen from Fort Riley were in his possession.
There were other ways to skin a cat. Frost sent Mayhew up a pole to wire a Texas amp; Pacific Railway dispatcher in his employ, then headed west, skirting Fort Worth.
After dark, the Thomas Flyer climbed the embankment onto the railroad, straddled the tracks, and continued west. Frost ordered the mechanician to watch behind them for locomotive headlamps. He and the telegrapher watched ahead. Five times in the night, they pulled off the tracks to let a train pass.
HALFWAY TO ABILENE late the next day, Harry Frost watched through his field glasses as a large chuck wagon, drawn by six powerful mules, stopped next to a freight car parked on a remote Texas amp; Pacific Railway siding. The siding served an enormous ranch ten miles away that was owned by a Wall Street investment combine in which Frost held a controlling interest. Six gunmen dressed like cowboys were riding with the wagon. They dismounted, unlocked a padlock, slid open the boxcar door, and wrestled heavy crates stenciled HOLIAN PLOW WORKS SANDY HOOK CONN into the wagon.
Frost raked the endless empty miles of brush and grass with the field glasses, checking as he had repeatedly that there was no one in sight to interfere. Prairie speckled with brown clumps of mesquite grass rolled to the horizon. Clouds, or perhaps low hills, rose in the west. He spied, eight or ten miles north, a single spindly structure that could be either a windmill to pump water or a derrick to drill for oil. The tracks gleamed in a straight line east and west, edged by a ragged ribbon of telegraph wire strung along weathered poles.
They finished loading the chuck wagon. It trundled west on the rutted dirt track that paralleled the railroad, guarded by the men on horses. The Thomas caught up two miles from the siding. Up close, the appearance of the horsemen would cause any peace officer worth his salt to draw his guns for they looked less like cowboys than bank robbers. Their hands lacked the calluses and scars of range work. They wore six-guns in double holsters low on the hips and packed Winchester rifles in saddle scabbards. Surveying the three men in the Thomas, the hard-bitten gang turned expectantly to a tall man in their midst. Harry Frost had already spotted him as the leader with whom he had communicated through an intermediary he trusted from the old days.
Frost asked, “Which of you was in the Spanish War?”
Four men in campaign hats nodded.
“Did you fire the Colt?”
They nodded again, eyes still shifting toward their leader.
“Follow me. There’s a creek bed where we can mount the guns.”
No one moved.
“Herbert?” Frost said amiably. “My fellows in Chicago tell me you’re one tough outlaw. Can’t help but notice that everyone’s looking at you like you’re about to impart some wisdom. What’s on your mind?”
Herbert answered by drawling, “We was debatin’ why instead of shootin’ at flyin’ machines we oughtn’t to take your money now, and your auto, and your machine guns, and if you don’t give us no trouble, allow you all to hop a freight back to Chicago – you bein’ only three, us bein’ six.”