“Where’s your train crew?” Bell asked.
“I was keeping up steam before they were born. Sent every hand below to work on the coffer dams. Just had to catch my breath. Something’s wrong. What do I smell? Is that fire on the bridge?”
“The coal has ignited. Uncouple your engine. I’ll pull the train off.”
With Hennessy directing brake- and yardmen, who ran around throwing switches, Bell drove the Baldwin off the special, ran it forward, then backed it onto the bridge. Partway across, he coupled onto the lead coal gondola, while every man still in the yard worked to switch a path of rails to an isolated siding where the burning train could be safely moved.
Bell shoved the Johnson bar forward and notched the throttle ahead, feeding steam to the pistons. This was the hard part. He had spent enough time in the cab to know how to drive locomotives, but driving and pulling fifty heavy gondolas were two different propositions. The wheels spun, the train did not move. He remembered the sand valve, which spread sand under the wheels to improve adhesion, and found its lever. Smoke was billowing from the gondolas now, and he saw flames start to shoot up. He reached for the throttle to try again.
Suddenly, the Wrecker spoke through the side window.
“With what will you replace the weight?” he asked mockingly. “More coal?”
57
“BALLAST WOULD HOLD THE BRIDGE, BUT SOMEHOW SIGNALS GOT crossed. Hennessy ordered track ballast. He kept getting coal. I wonder how that happened.”
The Wrecker swung into the cab through the open back and whipped a knife from his boot.
Suspecting a backup weapon identical to the sword he had ruined, Bell swiftly drew his Browning and pulled the trigger. But the automatic had suffered one too many douses of mud and water. It jammed. He heard the Wrecker’s knife click. The telescoping blade flew out and struck him before he could move in the confined space.
It was no flesh wound, but a terrible thrust below Bell’s shoulder. Stunned, wondering if the sword had punctured his lung, Bell reached under his jacket. He felt warm blood on his hand. He couldn’t focus his eyes. The Wrecker was standing over him, and Bell was surprised to discover that he had collapsed to the footplate.
58
CHARLES KINCAID DREW HIS SWORD BACK TO RUN ISAAC BELL through his heart.
“I was not unaware of my weapon’s weakness,” he said. “It wasn’t made to stand up to a beat. So I always carry an extra.”
“So do I,” said Bell. He tugged from an inside pocket Kincaid’s own derringer, which he had picked up from the tracks earlier. It was slippery with his blood, sliding in his hand. The shock of the wound was making him see double, fading in and out of awareness. He gathered his spirit, focused like a headlight on Kincaid’s broad chest, and fired.
Kincaid stepped back with a look of disbelief. He dropped his sword. Rage twisted his handsome features as he fell backward off the locomotive to the tracks.
Bell tried to stand. He was having difficulty getting his legs under him. From far below, beneath the bridge, he heard cries of alarm. A steam whistle on a barge crane set up a desperate scream. He dragged himself to the back of the cab. From there, he saw what was terrifying the men working on the piers. Upstream, the Wrecker’s dam had broken at last. The flood crest was on the march.
An angry white wave, tall as a house and studded with cut logs and whole trees, filled the river from shore to shore. Shouting men struggled to move the electric dynamos above the flood. A barge overturned. The work lights went dark.
Bell grabbed onto the Johnson bar and fought to regain his feet. The bridge was shaking the locomotive. Flames were shooting skyward from the coal cars. If he moved the burning train, he would save the bridge from the fire. But even dead on the tracks, the Wrecker would have his way. If Bell moved the train, he would remove the stabilizing weight, and the bridge would collapse from the scouring floodwater. If he didn’t move the train, the bridge would burn. Already he smelled burning creosote as the crossties under the train began to smoulder.
The only solution was a compromise.
Bell reversed the Johnson bar, notched open the throttle, and backed the train to the edge of the bridge. Holding tight to handrails, he climbed down painfully. A yard foreman came running, casting fear-filled eyes on the burning train. “We’re opening switches, mister, so you can move her onto a siding out of the way.”
“No, I need tools. Get me a crowbar and a spike puller.”
“We gotta shunt her aside before she sets off the whole yard.”
“Leave the train right here,” Bell ordered calmly. “I will need it in a moment. Now, please get me those tools.”
The foreman ran off and returned in a moment. Bell took the spike puller and the heavy crowbar and shambled across the bridge as fast as the hole in his chest would let him. On the way, he passed the Wrecker’s still form huddled between the rails. The train had passed clean over him but not mauled his body. Bell kept going almost to the far side. There he crouched down and began prying spikes out of the fishplates that held the rails on the upstream side of the bridge.
He could feel the bridge shaking violently now that the train was off it. A glance below showed the Cascade Canyon River raging like an ocean in a hurricane. Mind reeling from a lack of oxygen and lost blood, he felt himself getting giddy as he desperately pried up spike after spike.
Who’s the Wrecker now? he thought. The tables were turned. Isaac Bell, chief investigator for the Van Dorn Detective Agency, was battling with every ounce of his failing strength to derail a train.
It was getting harder to breathe, and he could see a bubble of blood rising and falling from the wound in his chest. If Kincaid’s sword had punctured his chest cavity and he didn’t get help soon, air would fill it and collapse his lung. But he had to free an entire length of rail first.
THE WRECKER WAS NOT as grievously wounded as Bell, but he was equally determined. He had regained consciousness as Bell shambled past with a spike puller. Now, ignoring a bullet lodged between two ribs, he was running, doubled over, as fast as he could toward the coal train. The detective’s spike puller told him all he had to know. Bell meant to derail the burning train into the river to divert floodwater from the weakened piers.
He reached the locomotive, dragged himself up to the cab, and shoveled several scoops of coal into the firebox.
“Hey, what are you doing?” shouted a trainman, climbing the ladder to the cab. “Mr. Bell said to leave the train here.”
Kincaid drew the long-barreled revolver he had taken from his Thomas Flyer and shot the man. Then he set the locomotive steaming ahead with a sure hand on the throttle and sand valve. The drive wheels bit smoothly, the couplers unslacked, and the locomotive drew the coal cars onto the bridge. The Wrecker saw the probing white beam of the headlight fall on Isaac Bell, who was struggling to loosen the rail.
THE HEAVY COAL TRAIN dampened the vibrations shaking the bridge. Feeling the difference, Bell looked up into the blinding beam of a locomotive headlamp and knew instantly that his derringer shot had not killed Charles Kincaid.
The locomotive was bearing down on him. He felt its wheels grinding the rails. Now he saw Kincaid thrust his head from the cab window, his face a mask of hatred. His mouth spread in a ghastly grin of triumph, and Bell heard the steam huff harder as the Wrecker opened the throttle.
Bell ripped the final spike out of its crosstie. Then he hurled his weight against the crowbar, battling with fading strength to shift the loosened rail before Kincaid ran him over.
Bell felt the front truck wheels roll onto his rail. The weight of the engine was holding it down. Summoning his last strength, he moved it the vital “one inch between here and eternity.”