A short distance beyond the second break in the freeway Lee stopped. I looked past him and saw a cluster of ruined buildings in the trees. Lee raised his hands to his mouth and made a passable imitation of a gull cry three times in a row, then three again, and from the buildings a shrill whistle replied. We approached the largest of the buildings, and were met halfway there by a group of men who greeted us loudly. They led us into the building, where a small fire gave off little light and lots of smoke. The men from San Diego—seven of them—surveyed Tom and me.
“You sure took a piece of time to get two specimens no better than these,” a short man with a large belly said. He pulled on his beard and barked a laugh, but his little reddened eyes didn’t look amused.
“Ain’t San Onofre serious about talking to the Mayor?” the man next to him said. It was the first time I had ever heard San put in front of Onofre.
“Now enough of that,” Jennings said. “This here is Tom Barnard, one of the oldest living Americans—”
“Granted,” said the short man.
“And one of Onofre’s leaders. And this boy here is his most able assistant.”
Tom didn’t even flinch during all this; he stared calmly at the short man, head tilted to the side like he was contemplating a new sort of bug. Lee hadn’t stopped to listen. He was gathering rope under one arm, and he only paused to look up and say, “Get that fire out and get on the cars. I want to be in San Diego by sunup.”
The men got their gear together and doused the fire, and we left the building and the freeway, striking out into the forest behind Lee, in the direction of the ocean. We had only walked twenty or thirty paces when Lee stopped and lit a lantern.
In the gleam of light I saw their train: a platform on metal wheels, with a long bar set on a block in the middle of it. The men started throwing their stuff on the train, and behind the first I saw a second one. Approaching it I stepped over the rails. They were just like the rails that crossed our valley—bumpy and corroded, with spongy beams set every few feet under them. Tom and I stood watching as sledgehammers and axes, bundles of rope and bags of clanking metal stakes were stowed on the two platforms.
Quickly everything was aboard, and we climbed on the front train behind Lee and Jennings. Two of the men stood at the ends of the crossbar; one pulled on the high end, assisted by Lee, and with a crunch we were rolling over the rusty rails. When that end of the crossbar was low, the short man with the belly hauled down with all his weight on the other end. The two men traded pulls, and away we went, followed by the other car.
We rolled out of the copse of trees that had hidden the trains, onto a brush-covered plain. Here the hills lifted a few miles inland, rather than directly from the coast, and what trees there were grew mostly in the ravines. The rails ran just to the sea side of the freeway, and I could see the ocean from time to time when we topped a rise, silvered gray under low clouds. We passed a headland that had taken Nicolin and me half a day to walk to; it was as far south as I had ever been. From there on I was in new territory.
The car’s wheels ground over the tracks with a sound like a rasp cutting metal, and we picked up speed until we were going faster than a man could run. Rolling down a slope we moved even faster, and a cold wind struck me; the rotten ties flashed under the car so fast I couldn’t make out any individual ties! Tom’s beard was blowing back over his shoulders like a flag, and he grinned at me. “The only way to travel, eh?” I nodded vigorously, too excited to speak. It felt like we were flying, no matter the crunch and rattle from below. “How f-fast are we going?” I stammered out.
Tom looked over the side, put his hand up to the wind. “About thirty miles an hour,” he said. “Maybe thirty-five. It’s been a good long while since I’ve gone this fast, I’ll tell you.”
“Thirty miles an hour!” I cried. “Yeee-ow!”
The men laughed at me, but I didn’t care. So far as I was concerned, they were the fools; we were going thirty miles an hour, and they sat there trying to avoid the wind!
“Want to pull?” Jennings said from the back end of the crossbar. At that the men laughed again.
“Do I!” I said. Jennings stepped aside and I took the T at the end of the pole on its upswing. When I pulled down on it I could feel the car surge forward, all out of proportion to the force I had exerted, and I whooped again. I pulled hard, and saw the white grin of the man pulling across from me. He pulled just as hard, and we made that car fly down Pendleton like we were in a dream. All of a sudden I knew what it had been like to live in the old time, I knew that power they had wielded. All Tom’s stories and all his books had told me of it, but now I felt it in my muscles and my skin, I could see it flying all by me, and it was exhilarating. We pumped that car down those tracks. Behind us the men on the following car hooted and hollered: “Hey up there! Who you got on the bar?” “We know it ain’t Jennings doing that!” The men on both cars laughed at that. “It is Jennings,” one of them said. “I didn’t know you missed your wife that much!” “What are you worried she’s up to?” “Better not waste all your pumping up here!” “Throw us a tow rope if you feel that good!”
“Slow it down some,” Lee said after a while. “We got a ways to go, don’t want to tire out those poor men back there.”
So we slowed a bit. Still, when one of the men took my place, I was sweating from the effort, and standing there I chilled fast. I sat down and huddled in my coat. The land got hillier. On the up slopes we all had to get up and help pump the bar; on the downs we rolled so fast I wouldn’t have stood up for silver.
We passed a bit of white cloth, hanging from a pole. Lee stood and pulled the brake lever, and we came to a halt blasting red sparks over the trackbed, with a screech that made me shudder, it hurt my ears so.
“Now comes the complicated part,” Jennings said, and jumped off the car. In the sudden silence I could hear running water ahead of us. Tom and I got off the train and followed the rest of the men down the tracks. There in a dip lay a considerable stream, about half the width of our valley’s river. Black posts stuck out of the surface in a double line, all the way across. Beams and planks connected some of the posts, and extended to the banks on either side, but there were big gaps as well, and all in all it was a wreck. Each post knocked up a little circle of foam from the river, showing it was a fast stream.
“That’s our bridge foundation,” Jennings said to Tom and me, while Lee directed the men on the bank. “The pilings are in pretty good shape. We leveled them, and brought up some beams that sit over the pilings sideways, like lintels. Then we set rail over the beams at the right gauge, and roll the cars over, and haul all the beams and rail to the other bank after us. It’s a lot of work, but with the material hidden no one can tell we’re crossing this bridge.”
“Very ingenious,” Tom said.
Three or four more lanterns had been lit, and their light was directed at the pilings by metal reflectors. The men hustled about in the dark, cursing at manzanita and brambleberry, and pulling the beams out of the brush down to the bank. They hooked these beams onto a thick length of rope that they had fished out of the shallows. This rope extended across the river under the water, was threaded through a large pulley, and came back under the stream to our side. The ten crossbeams, or ties, were hauled out into the river upstream from the pilings, and then the rope was slackened till the ties floated between the pilings. Men balancing on the pilings—they got out to them on narrow planks—would then fish the ties up and secure them atop the pilings.