“What’s his name?”
“Don Albert.”
Bell borrowed a horse from the railway police stable and urged the animal at a quick clip to the boomtown that had sprung up behind the railhead. It was down in a hollow, a temporary city of tents, shacks, and abandoned freight cars outfitted to house the saloons, dance halls, and whorehouses that served the construction crews. Midweek, midafternoon, the narrow dirt streets were deserted, as if the occupants were catching their breath before the next payday Saturday night.
Bell poked his head into a dingy saloon. The barkeep, presiding over planks resting on whiskey barrels, looked up morosely from a week-old Sacramento newspaper. “Where,” Bell asked him, “do the lumberjacks hang out?”
“The Double Eagle, just down the street. But you won’t find any there now. They’re sawing crossties up the mountain. Working double shifts to get ‘em down before it snows.”
Bell thanked him and headed for the Double Eagle, a battered boxcar off the trucks. A painted sign on the roof depicted a red eagle with wings spread and they had found a set of swinging doors somewhere. As in the previous saloon, the only occupant was a barkeep, as morose as the last. He brightened when Bell tossed a coin on his plank.
“What’ll you have, mister?”
“I’m looking for the lumberjack who got hurt in the accident. Don Albert.”
“I heard he’s in a coma.”
“I heard he wakes up now and then,” said Bell. “Where can I find him?”
“Are you a cinder dick?”
“Do I look like a cinder dick?”
“I don’t know, mister. They’ve been swarming around here like flies on a carcass.” He sized Bell up again and came to a decision. “There’s an old lady in a shack tending him down by the creek. Follow the ruts down to the water, you can’t miss it.”
Leaving his horse where he had tied it, Bell descended to the creek, which by the smell wafting up the slope served as the town’s sewer. He passed an ancient Central Pacific boxcar that had once been painted yellow. From one of the holes cut in the side that served as windows, a young woman with a runny nose called, “You found it, handsome. This is the spot you’re looking for.”
“Thank you, no,” Bell answered politely.
“Honey, you’ll find nothing down there better than this.”
“I’m looking for the lady taking care of the lumberjack who got hurt?”
“Mister, she’s retired.”
Bell kept walking until he came to a row of rickety shacks hammered out of wood from packing crates. Here and there were stenciled their original contents. SPIKES. COTTON WOOL. PICK HANDLES. OVERALLS.
Outside of one marked PIANO ROLLS, he saw an old woman sitting on an overturned bucket, holding her head in her hands. Her hair was white. Her clothing, a cotton dress with a shawl around her shoulders, was too thin for the cold damp rising from the fetid creek. She saw him coming and jumped up with an expression of terror.
“He’s not here!” she cried.
“Who? Take it easy, ma‘am. I won’t hurt you.”
“Donny!” she yelled. “The law’s come.”
Bell said, “I’m not the law. I-”
“Donny! Run!”
Out of the shack stormed a six-foot-five lumberjack. He had an enormous walrus mustache that drooped below his grizzled chin, long greasy hair, and a bowie knife in his fist.
“Are you Don Albert?” asked Bell.
“Donny’s my cousin,” said the lumberjack. “You better run while you can, mister. This is family.”
Concerned that Don Albert was belting out the back door, Bell reached for his hat and brought his hand down filled with his .44 derringer. “I enjoy a knife fight as much as the next man, but right now I haven’t the time. Drop it!”
The lumberjack did not blink. Instead, he backed up four fast steps and pulled a second, shorter knife that had no handle. “Want to bet I can throw this more accurate than you can shoot that snub nose?” he asked.
“I’m not a gambler,” said Bell, whipped his new Browning from his coat, and shot the bowie knife out of the lumberjack’s hand. The lumberjack gave a howl of pain and stared in disbelief at his shiny knife spinning through the sunlight. Bell said, “I can always hit a bowie, but that short one you’re holding I’m not sure. So, just to be on the safe side, I’m going plug your hand instead.”
The lumberjack dropped his throwing knife.
“Where is Don Albert?” Bell asked.
“Don’t bother him, mister. He’s hurt bad.”
“If he’s hurt bad, he should be in the hospital.”
“Cain’t be in the hospital.”
“Why?”
“The cinder dicks’ll blame him for the runaway.”
“Why?”
“He was on it.”
“On it?” Bell echoed. “Do you expect me to believe he survived a mile-a-minute crash?”
“Yes, sir. ‘Cause he did.”
“Donny’s got a head like a cannonball,” said the old woman.
Bell pried the story, step-by-step, out of the lumberjack and the old woman, who turned out to be Don Albert’s mother. Albert had been sleeping off an innocent drunk on the gondola when he interrupted the man who set the gondola rolling. The man had bashed him in the head with a crowbar.
“Skull like pig iron,” the lumberjack assured Bell, and Don’s mother agreed. Tearfully, she explained that every time Don had opened his eyes in the hospital, a railroad dick would shout at him. “Donny was afraid to tell them about the man who bashed him.”
“Why?” Bell asked.
“He reckoned they wouldn’t believe him, so he pretended to be hurt worse than he was. I told Cousin John here. And he rounded up his friends to carry Donny off when the doctor was eating his supper.”
Bell assured her that he would make sure the railroad police didn’t bother her son. “I’m a Van Dorn investigator, ma‘am. They’re under my command. I’ll tell them to leave you be.” At last, he persuaded her to take him into the shack.
“Donny? There’s a man to see you.”
Bell sat on a crate beside the plank bed where the bandage-swathed Don Albert was sleeping on a straw mattress. He was a big man, bigger than his cousin, with a large moon of a face, a mustache like his cousin‘s, and enormous, work-splintered hands. His mother rubbed the back of his hand and he began to stir.
“Donny? There’s a man to see you.”
He regarded Bell through murky eyes, which cleared up as they came into focus. When he was fully awake, they were an intense stony blue, which spoke of fierce intelligence. Bell’s interest quickened. Not only was the man not in a state of coma, he seemed the sort who might have made a sharp observer. And he was the only man Bell knew of who had been within just a few feet of the Wrecker and was still alive.
“How are you feeling?” Bell asked.
“Head hurts.”
“I’m not surprised.”
Don Albert laughed, then winced at the pain it caused him.
“I understand a fellow bashed you one.”
Albert nodded slowly. “With a crowbar, I believe. Least, that’s what it felt like. Iron, not wood. Sure didn’t feel like an ax handle.”
Bell nodded. Don Albert spoke as a man who had been slugged by at least one ax handle in his life, which would not be that unusual for a lumberjack. “Did you happen to see his face?”
Albert glanced at his cousin and then his mother.
She said, “Mr. Bell says he’ll tell the cinder dicks to lay off.”
“He’s a straight shooter,” said John.
Don Albert nodded, wincing again as movement resonated through his head. “Yeah, I saw his face.”
“It was night,” said Bell.
“Stars on the hill are like searchlights. I had no campfire down there on the car, nothing to blind my eyes. Yeah, I could see him. Also, I was looking down at him-I was up on top of the ties-and he looked up into the starlight when I spoke, so I seen his face clear.”
“Do you remember what he looked like?”