Cape Hell (11 page)

For a third of a second I was airborne, prey to the first crosswind that would hurl me out the side into open air. Then I landed, throwing myself sideways to avoid colliding with Joseph, standing at the front with a hand on the throttle. I came up shoulder-first against something diabolically hard sticking out of the cab's side, bruising the bone and turning my lungs inside out. I feel the tender spot still when the barometer drops; and it's been forty years since I rode outside a train.

The man at the throttle glanced back over his own shoulder. “I gave you up.”

“You almost did on that last bend.” I rubbed the place where I'd struck, gasping for breath.

“I dared not stop. These hills swarm with bandits who fall upon everything standing still and worry it to the bone.”

I nodded. That last effort had exhausted the wind I needed for conversation.

He pointed at the firebox and a pair of sooty leather gloves jammed inside the handle. “We are losing steam.”

I nodded again, put on the gloves, and fell upon the woodpile. I wrenched free a squarish chunk, opened the box, and poked the wood inside. It caught like a curl of paper, the flames burning blue along the bottom edge. I repeated the action until there was no more room in the box. The heat drew all the moisture from my pores and baked my face until I was sure it was as dark as the Indian's.

“Take the wood from the bottom. The rest is green.”

I was no longer
senor
to him. His promotion to master of the
Ghost
hadn't come so suddenly he'd failed to note the shift in our relationship.

From Alamos we climbed and climbed, the scenery turning from green to near black in its density; my ears popped, and still we were only in the foothills. To our left the country rose in succeeding folds of old-growth wood, the limbs pregnant with leaves, the trunks straight up and down and as close together as ribs of corduroy. They had no place to fall if they fell. It seemed nothing could squeeze between them: yet when I wasn't stoking the fire Joseph kept me entertained with stories of marauding bears, half-human predators, and pumas that pounced without warning.

“We have them up north,” I said.

“Not like these cats. They strike with the sun at their backs, making no noise, so that you are aware of one only when it is eating you alive.”

“You've seen this?”

“Eben, my sister's husband, died in this way. I could do nothing; so of course I watched.”

His family, it turned out, was a wealth of uncles, cousins, and brothers-in-law whose deaths he'd witnessed, or whose remains had been found half-devoured after days of searching. To hear him tell it the local wildlife had been living on the sole diet of his people for generations. I couldn't tell how much of what he said was truth and how much invention, to keep me under his influence; but I found the heft of the two revolvers reassuring.

As I chucked wood, I couldn't stop thinking about the pistol Hector Cansado had told me he had hidden somewhere in the cab, the one he claimed Joseph didn't know existed. Just because the Indian had saved my life didn't mean he wouldn't reclaim it the moment I was no longer needed, and there was no sense in allowing him a weapon beyond the axe he'd used on the engineer. DeBeauclair, the vanished Pinkerton, had reported Oscar Childress' recruitment of Indians into his private army. The promise of plunder would explain why Joseph had chosen to press on rather than turn back.

Every time I pulled something out of the tender I expected the fabled pistol to fall out. There didn't seem to be any other place in those close quarters, crowded as they were with levers, gauges, handles, and every description of cast-iron protuberances, to have concealed it, and I had to be ready to scoop it up when it appeared.

Unless he'd found it already and had it hidden under his overalls.

*   *   *

Up and up
we scaled into the black heart of the Mother Mountains, the engine laboring like a broken-winded mount, guided only by a map whose artists were dust and the memory of a fleeting glimpse at the updated chart in Felix Bonaparte's office, with its bilious green blob representing what Blackthorne had called the ideal habitat of dragons.

Thought of the attorney in his modern circumstances brought me back from the medieval nature of our present location.

“Where's the nearest telegraph office after Alamos?” I shouted above the straining of the engine.

“Cabo Falso. Four hundred miles.”

“We can expect a welcoming party there. Férreo wouldn't have lost any time wiring the authorities we're on our way.”

“There are no authorities in Cabo Falso. It is run by whores and brigands.”

“That's a relief. I thought we might be in trouble.”

Teeth showed in a face stained permanently by soot. Apart from that, his having taken full possession of the controls, I found it hard to tell him from the slain engineer.

*   *   *

Higher yet, and
then we leveled off, chugging along the brawny shoulder of the mountains. The sun blazed red briefly, flickering like wildfire between passing trunks, then vanished, as if snuffed out between a monstrous thumb and forefinger. In the sudden darkness, pairs of eyes glittered green in the reflected light of the lamp mounted on the front of the boiler, like cold jewels strung out raggedly. Absent the pull of gravity, I found time between replacing logs to ask if there was a place where we might put up for the night. I wasn't up to full strength yet, and the trip alongside a speeding train had been no remedy. My muscles burned from tugging loose logs and stooping to pitch them into the firebox. Belatedly, I realized that apart from the inevitable watery broth to keep up my constitution I hadn't eaten in days.

“In ten miles, perhaps,” he said, “if there are no rockslides to stop us before then. Pray there are not. If the tracks are blocked, we must reverse directions for as many miles as we have traveled, and since this train does not move as fast backwards, what bandits we have passed would find it a simple thing to board us from above, when we are too busy with the engine to defend ourselves. We must not stop below these rotten shelves of shale.” He pointed upward through the cab opening, to ragged escarpments of black against a sky only slightly less dark. Pallid starlight showed through semicircular spaces, like fresh bites taken from a crust of bread.

“Does this country never relent?”

“You have not yet seen her at her worst.”

He said it with a kind of pride. Everyone has a proprietary interest in the place he calls home. In the absence of anything good to boast of, he'll compete with anyone for the bad.

He wasn't exaggerating, as it turned out. I once survived three days and two nights in a barn stacked with frozen corpses in the comfort of knowing that at least it wasn't the Sierras.

For a long time we traveled in silence. Then he said:

“There is a dugout, carved into the rock by no one knows who, no one knows how long ago, with logs for shelter from monsoons; the originals have rotted away, but those who come there to rest have replaced them from time to time. It has been used by trappers, missionaries, and other wanderers. If it is still there it would be a safe place to spend the night. Such rocks as might fall have fallen already, and one can see all the way to the valley below.”

“What about above?”

He tugged on the whistle. A bull elk that had been preparing to cross the tracks swung its great antlered head our way, eyes glowing in the light of the lamp, and backed away into the woods.

“If you seek to be safe from everything, you should never have come to this place.”

 

FIFTEEN

At first I
thought the dugout had fallen in, or been carried away by rocks; the Sierras were continually shifting shape, like the beasts in Indian lore. The spot Joseph had pointed out, cleared from forest that had grown right up to the tracks, looked swept clean in the shaft of light from the champing locomotive: A crumb-scraper couldn't have been more thorough. Then the fog and drifting steam parted to expose something black and gaping, as if the mountain had opened its mouth to expel sulphurous smoke from its lungs. It was the entrance to a structure erected in partnership between nature and man.

Joseph busied himself with the engine while I retrieved the Whitney rifle and scouted out the location, gripping the weapon in one hand and a bull's-eye lantern in the other. I tipped open the louvers, directing the beam inside the arrangement of mossy logs with a roof made of rocky outcrop and an extension of poles shingled with bark. Apart from the usual rubbish of temporary habitation and the palpable odor of earth, mildew, and sodden wood-ash, it was unoccupied, at least by humans. I'd half expected to disturb a sow bear sleeping with her cubs or at the very least a nest of rats. A beetle nearly the size of my hand stirred and scaled the Pike's Peak of my toe, that was all. I shook free of it and hung the lantern from the end of a pole by its bail to investigate the rest.

A pile of moldy rags got the attention first of my nose, then my eyes as a likely resting place for rattlers. It lay heaped in the corner where a windscreen of logs chinked with clay and dead leaves met the side of the hill, where a previous tenant would have flung it to lighten his load before venturing back out. I picked up a stick, poked at the heap, and when nothing issued forth twisted the stick, winding a bit of rotting cloth around the end, and tugged it free. Something tumbled out, rattling like hollow wooden flutes; something rolled across the packed clay floor and came to rest against my foot, leering up at me with the porcelain grin of death.

I started; but I'd seen human skulls before. Stripped of flesh and gutted of brains, they offered no harm. It wore a patch of black hair like peat on a rock and two inches above the right eye-socket a hexagonal hole as big as my fist. It might have been made by a stone falling, but I doubted it.

“
Que pasa?
” Joseph's call, bent out of shape by damp and distance. I ignored it, stirring the stick among the bones. Something crackled; I speared it and brought it up into the light. It was a scrap of foolscap, as yellow as any of the dead leaves stuck among the chinking between the logs, but marked with script written in faded ink:

gone up the tracks for help, but

That was it: a journal entry of some kind. Who'd gone up the tracks for help I might never know, but if he'd returned with it he'd been too late.

I brought the scrap close to my eyes. It seemed to be deteriorating as I looked at it, from sudden exposure to the open air, like the mummified remains of an ancient Incan king disinterred after centuries; but it was more recent than that. Like Judge Blackthorne, I had little faith in a man's personality revealing itself in his hand, but I knew a closed loop from an uncrossed
t
; and I knew as sure as I was a hundred miles from the civilized world that I was reading the last words of Agent DeBeauclair, the Pinkerton operative who'd disappeared after filing his last report on Oscar Childress.

“A friend?”

I jumped again. Joseph stood in the entrance, the light from the lantern lying on his square cheeks and the edge of the axe in his hand.

*   *   *

“DeBeauclair is a
French name,
sí
?” The Indian crunched cracked corn. “I would think he would look more foreign.”

I sat across the fire from him in the entrance of the dugout, the Whitney across my lap. The fire was of my own making, chunks from the tender chopped into kindling with the axe Joseph had brought. The light of the flames crawled and twitched over the bone face where it had come to rest, changing its expression from amused idiocy to deep contemplation. Outside, tree frogs, night birds, crickets, and cicadas made a racket, as deafening as in any city. The bay, hobbled just outside the halo of heat, grazed and switched its tail at mosquitoes the size of chimney swifts. I ate beef from the tin with a spoon, washed it down with water, and passed him the canteen. “We're all the same under the skin. What do you think made that hole?”

“A rock from a sling or a stone axe.” He drank, his jaws grinding without cease. His molars must have been worn down to stumps.

“Not a ball from a percussion weapon.”

“I know of none that would make a wound that size.”

“I do. I saw my share of them in the war.”

“I cannot think why white people should make war on each other except over horses.”

“We can't all be as civilized as Indians. Who do you think he sent for help?”

“Someone unreliable, I should think.”

Something cried, sounding close. In town, I would have put it down to a colicky baby. In that country it made the hairs bristle at the top of my spine. “There's your puma. You must have a cousin or two left.”

“I think I am that cousin. Perhaps my great-great-grandfather destroyed all the litter-mates of a cat that has sworn not to die until it has done for his family as well.”

“It didn't kill the detective, that's plain. There'd be no bones left to tell the tale.”

“Bandits. Yellow fever, and the hole came later. The great bird of death swooped down and snatched his soul. Where is the good in guessing?
He
is beyond caring.”

“He cared enough to write something, but that scrap is all that's left.” I'd found a ball of shredded paper left by a brood of mice. They'd built the nest inside the dead man's rib cage, from the record of his last days. “What was he doing here? It's a long way into the wilderness, even if he rode a horse or took along a pack animal.”

He helped himself to another handful of corn. “What are
you
doing here?”

“They say, even his enemies, that Childress is a brilliant man. I came to see what makes him shine.”

“You wish to learn from him about horses and making money?”