The tall detective held his control wheel in one hand and scrutinized the trestle with his field glasses. The maze of timbers would offer excellent cover for men with rifles. And they could have hidden the Thomas in its shadows. But he saw neither the men nor their auto. Suddenly he heard two sharp explosions – louder than the roar of the Gnome. He knew they weren’t gunshots. Nor had they come from the trestle but from directly beneath him, as if from the locomotive.
The big black Atlantic slowed abruptly. Its high drive wheels ground sparks from the rails as the engineer fought to stop his long train as fast as he could. The loud reports, Bell realized, had been caused by torpedoes – detonating caps of fulminate of mercury attached to the rails with lead straps to signal trouble ahead. When a locomotive passed over them, they exploded loudly enough for the engineer and fireman to hear over the roar of the firebox and the thunder of the steam.
Bell saw white smoke spewing from the brake shoes under every car, and the train clashed and banged to a halt halfway across the trestle. Instantly, the locomotive emitted five puffs of steam from its whistle. Five whistles signaled a brakeman to jump from the rear car – Preston Whiteway’s private carriage – and run back along the tracks waving a red flag to warn trains steaming behind it that the special had stopped suddenly for an emergency and was blocking the tracks. By then Bell had overflown the train and the trestle.
He saw the glitter of sunlight on glass.
In the same instant, he spotted the Thomas parked in the shadow of a rail-maintenance shack. The sun flashed again on a telescope sight. He counted two rifles braced on the roof of the shack, spitting red fire.
It was a brilliantly laid trap – the train stopped as a distraction, the rock-steady shooting position, the shock of total surprise. And Bell knew that if he were the young aviatrix whose name was painted on the side of his yellow monoplane, Frost would have killed her in the second hail of fire when she veered away instinctively, thus presenting a bigger target broadside.
Isaac Bell dove straight at the shack, sheered away at the last moment to aim clear of his propeller, and emptied his Remington’s five-shot magazine so fast that the sound of the shots blended together in a roar like a cannon. Circling up and back, he saw that he had hit the gunmen to either side of Frost. He extracted the empty magazine, slipped a full one in its place, and dove again.
Frost did not shoot at him. Bell wondered if he had hit Frost, too, and wounded him too badly to fight. But, no, Frost was running to the Thomas. He cranked the motor, jumped in, and drove onto the tracks. Then, to Bell’s puzzlement, he jumped from the auto and knelt briefly beside the rails.
Frost jumped back on the Thomas and drove toward the hills.
Less than ten seconds had expired since the shooting started. Detectives were still leaping from the hangar car. Bell banked hard to chase after the Thomas. But as the Eagletipped on its side, Bell’s experience with Harry Frost’s relentless cruelty made him look carefully where Frost had knelt.
He saw smoke, a thin white trail of smoke.
Without hesitation, Isaac Bell rammed his blip switch, shoved his wheel forward, and dropped the Eagletoward the tracks. In the midst of the smoke, traveling along the rail, was a moving stud of red fire. Harry Frost had knelt on the rails and coolly lit a fuse – the fuse he had stolen from the Burbank maintenance shop along with detonators and dynamite.
He had packed the trestle with explosives, Bell realized. The attack he had planned had been twofold: shoot Josephine out of the sky, and blow Preston Whiteway’s train to Kingdom Come – along with every Van Dorn riding on it.
Bell forced the Eagledown and straddled the rails with the skids. He hit so hard, the machine bounced and tried to rise again. It would have been safer to pour on the power and take her up again, but there wasn’t a moment to lose. He drove the machine down hard and felt the skids shatter on the crossties. Splintering wood, shrieking metallic protest, the Eagleslid along the railroad tracks. Bell leaped and hit the ground running.
The smoke was racing ahead of him, picking up speed as it closed with the trestle. Bell ran faster, gaining on it, and was within yards of stomping it out when it slipped over the lip of the gorge and under the trestle where he couldn’t reach.
“Back your engine!” he shouted, running onto the trestle. “Back off the bridge.”
There was no time for that. He saw the engineer gaping from his cab and his detectives running to help him, not realizing the danger. He saw Dashwood among them.
“Dash!” he shouted. “There’s a detonator fuse under the tracks. Shoot it.”
Bell climbed over the edge and down through the wooden timbers beneath the track. He saw the fuse strung timber to timber, burning brightly. Dash was quick – he, too, went over the side, scrambled among the timbers, and spotted the dot of fire fifty feet away. Clinging to a timber with one arm, the young detective drew his long-barreled Colt, took aim, and fired. The bullet threw splinters. The fuse kept burning. Dash fired again. The fuse leaped and jumped, and kept burning.
Bell pulled himself along under the tracks, jumping from timber to timber. Ahead, in the shadow of the locomotive, he saw bundled dynamite – dozens and dozens of sticks, enough to destroy the trestle, the train, and everyone on it. Dash fired again. The fuse fire danced on.
Isaac Bell leaped onto a horizontal cross timber, drew his Browning smoothly from his coat, and fired once.
The dancing flame vanished. A wisp of smoke stood in its place, wavered in a puff of wind, then drifted away as if the fuse had been a candle snuffed out to end a pleasant evening.
Bell scrambled back up on the tracks and ran to the train to issue orders.
Josephine’s Van Dorn mechanicians were good men but city men, next to useless out of doors. “Crank Whiteway’s roadster,” he told them, “and run it down the ramp. Defuse the dynamite under the bridge. Then fix the skids so my machine can fly.
“Dash! You cover the boys working on my machine. Shoot Frost in the head if the sidewinder doubles back.” He gestured Dash closer, and added under his breath, “Don’t let Celere near my machine. Oh, by the way, I know your mother gave you that Colt. But I would take it kindly if you would allow my gunsmith to fix you up with a proper Browning.
“Texas Walt! You come with me!”
Bell jumped behind the steering wheel of Preston Whiteway’s yellow Rolls-Royce. Walt Hatfield piled in next to him with a couple of lever-action Winchesters, and they drove off the trestle and raced up the railroad tracks toward the foothills of the Coast Range.
After three miles of the grade steepening and scrub growth and clumps of low trees intruding on the grassland, they found the Thomas Flyer stopped in the middle of the tracks with two tires punctured by loose railroad spikes. Texas Walt spotted Frost’s trail, first from loose ballast where he had run down the railroad embankment, then from his trampling through the knee-high grass.
Bell covered the thickets and rock outcroppings ahead with a Winchester while Hatfield loped from a scuff in the sand to a bent blade of grass to a broken twig. Bell himself was an experienced tracker, but Texas Walt could read the ground like the Comanches who had raised him.
Above the hills, thunder muttered and lightning flickered inside the swelling storm clouds. The wind puffed cold in their faces, then hot.
A blue jay bounced up from a thicket of evergreen oaks a half mile ahead.
It was mighty long range for a rifle, but Bell snapped, “Down!”
A shot echoed off the hills. Walt crumpled beside him.
40
BELL CUT TO THE RIGHT, seeking the shelter of a boulder. A.45-70 slug parted the air six inches from his cheek. Instead of diving for cover, he bounded past the boulder and into a narrow arroyo.
He raced silently up the dry creek bed, one eye ahead, the other guiding his boots around anything that would make noise. The arroyo veered more to the right – farther from Frost – even as it climbed the steepening slope. Bell put on speed. He ran flat out for a full mile, climbing all the distance. When he finally stopped to catch his breath, it was where a ledge would allow him to survey the ground he had put behind him. Slithering flat on his belly, he edged forward until he could see the back of the thicket from which Frost had fired.