“Surprised as hell. Plumb ready to jump out of his skin. He wasn’t expecting company.”
This was almost too good to be true, thought Bell, excitement rising. “Can you describe him?”
“Clean-shaven fellow, no beard, miner’s cap on his head. Hair was probably black. Big ears. Sharp nose. Eyes wide-set. Couldn’t see their color. It wasn’t that bright. Narrow cheeks-I mean, a little sunken. Wide mouth, sort of like yours, excepting the mustache.”
Bell was not accustomed to witnesses itemizing specifics so readily. Ordinarily, it took listening closely and asking many subtle questions to elicit such detail. But the lumberjack had the memory of a newspaper reporter. Or an artist. Which gave Bell an idea. “If I could bring you a sketch artist, could you tell him what you saw while he draws it on paper?”
“I’ll draw him for you.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Donny’s a good drawer,” said his mother.
Bell looked dubiously at Albert’s rough hands. His fingers were as thick as sausages and ribbed with calluses. But being an artist would explain the lumberjack’s recollection for detail. Again Bell thought, What an astonishing break. Too good to be true.
“Get me pencil and paper,” said Don Albert. “I know how to draw.”
Bell gave him his pocket notebook and a pencil. With astonishingly quick, deft strokes, the powerful hands sketched a handsome face with chiseled features. Bell studied it carefully, hopes sinking. Too good to be true indeed.
Concealing his disappointment, he patted the injured giant lightly on the shoulder. “Thank you, partner. That’s a big help. Now do one of me.”
“You?”
“Could you draw my picture?” Bell asked. It was a simple test of the giant’s powers of observation
“Well, sure.” Again the thick fingers flew. A few minutes later, Bell held it to the light. “It’s almost like looking in the mirror. You really draw what you see, don’t you?”
“Why the hell else do it?”
“Thank you very much, Donny. You rest easy, now.” He pressed several gold pieces into the old woman’s hand, two hundred dollars, enough to carry them through the winter, hurried back to where he had tied his horse, and rode uphill to the construction yard. He found Joseph Van Dorn pacing outside Hennessy’s railcar, smoking a cigar.
“Well?”
“The lumberjack is an artist,” said Bell. “He saw the Wrecker. He drew me a face.” He opened his notebook and showed Van Dorn the first drawing. “Do you recognize this man?”
“Of course.” growled Van Dorn. “Don’t you?”
“Broncho Billy Anderson.”
“The actor.”
“That poor devil must have seen him in The Great Train Robbery.”
The Great Train Robberywas a gripping motion picture of several years back. After shooting up the train, the outlaws made their get-away on the locomotive, which they uncoupled and rode to their horses waiting up the line, pursued by a posse. There were few people in America who had not seen it at least once.
“I will never forget the first time I saw that motion picture,” said Van Dorn. “I was in New York City in the Hammerstein’s Vaudeville at Forty-second and Broadway. It was the kind of theater where they ran a picture between the acts. When the picture started, we all got up as usual to walk out for a smoke or a drink. But then a few turned back to look at it, and then slowly everyone took his seat again as the picture went on. Mesmerizing … I’d seen the play back in the nineties. But the picture was better.”
“As I recall,” Bell said, “Broncho Billy played several different parts.”
“I heard that he’s traveling the West on his own train now, making pictures.”
“Yes,” said Bell. “Broncho Billy has started up his own picture studio.”
“Don’t suppose that leaves him much time to wreck railroads,” Van Dorn said drily. “Which leaves us nowhere.”
“Not quite nowhere,” said Bell.
Van Dorn looked incredulous. “Our lumberjack recalls a famous actor whose image in a moving picture stuck in what’s left of his head.”
“Look at this. I tested him to see how accurate he is.” He showed Van Dorn the sketch of himself.
“Son of a gun. That’s pretty good. He drew this?”
“While I was sitting there. He can really draw faces as they are.”
“Not entirely. He’s got your ears all wrong. And he gave you a cleft in your chin just like Broncho Billy’s. Yours is a scar, not a cleft.”
“He’s not perfect, but he’s pretty close. Besides, Marion says it looks like a cleft.”
“Marion is prejudiced, you lucky devil. The point is, our lumberjack could have seen any one of Broncho Billy’s pictures. Or he might have seen him on the stage somewhere.”
“But, either way, we know what the Wrecker looks like.”
“Are you suggesting that he actually looks like Broncho Billy’s twin?”
“More like a cousin.” Detail by detail, Bell pointed out the features of the lumberjack’s sketch. “Not his twin. But if the Wrecker’s face jogged the lumberjack’s memory of Broncho Billy, then we are looking for a man who has a similar broad high brow, a cleft chin, a penetrating gaze, an intelligent face with strong features, and big ears. Not Broncho Billy’s twin, exactly. But I would say that the Wrecker looks more in general like a matinee idol.”
Van Dorn puffed angrily on his cigar. “Am I to instruct my detectives not to arrest ugly mugs?”
Isaac Bell pushed back, demanding his boss see the possibilities. The more he thought about it, the more he felt they were on to something. “How old do you suppose this fellow is?”
Van Dorn scowled at the drawing. “Anywhere from his late twenties to early forties.”
“We are looking for a handsome man somewhere in his late twenties, thirties, or early forties. We’ll print copies of this. Take it around, show it to the hobos. Show it to stationmasters and ticket clerks wherever he might have fled on a train. Anyone who might have seen him.”
“So far that’s no one. No one alive anyway. Except for your Michelangelo lumberjack.”
Bell said, “I’m still betting on the machinist or the blacksmith who drilled that hole in the Glendale hook.”
“Sanders’s boys might hit it lucky,” Van Dorn agreed. “It’s been in the newspapers enough, and, God knows, I’ve made it clear to him that his soft berth in Los Angeles is at risk of a transfer to Missoula, Montana. Failing that, maybe someone will see the Wrecker next time and survive the experience. And we do know there will be a next time.”
“There will be a next time,” Bell agreed grimly. “Unless we stop him first.”
12
THE HOBO JUNGLE OUTSIDE OGDEN FILLED A THINLY WOODED spot between the railroad tracks and a stream that provided clean water for drinking and washing. It was one of the largest jungles in the country-nine rail lines converging in one place offered a steady flow of freight trains steaming night and day in every direction-and growing larger every day. As the Panic put factories out of business, more and more men rode the rails to find work. Their hats marked them as newcomers. City men’s derbies outnumbered miners’ caps and range riders’ J.B.s these days. There was even a sprinkling of trilbies and homburgs worn by former men of means who had never dreamed they would be down-and-out.
A thousand hobos were hurrying to finish cleanup before dark. They scrubbed laundry and cookpots in cans of boiling water, hung laundered clothes on ropes and tree limbs and set pots upside down on rocks to dry. When night fell, they kicked dirt on their fires and sat back to eat meager meals in the dark.
Campfires would have been welcomed. Northern Utah was cold in November, and snow flurries had blown repeatedly over the camp. Five thousand feet above sea level, it was exposed to westerly gales off nearby Great Salt Lake and easterly gusts tumbling down from the Wasatch Mountains. But the railroad bulls from the Ogden yards had raided the jungle with pistols and billy clubs three nights in a row to convince the burgeoning population to move on. No one wanted them back for the fourth, so it was no night for campfires. They ate in silence, worrying about the bulls and fearing winter.