No Job for a Lady (13 page)

“Nellie, no one is there.”

“They must have fallen off.”

I push by him and open the door to check out the gangway. With no overlap between the cars, the gangway is open to the elements. I try to see if there is blood on the floor, but I can’t see anything—it’s too dark.

It’s just a couple of steps to the next car, and the door to that one is closed. I lean out and look back in the direction Howard and his attacker must have landed when they went off the train. All I see is night and the desert terrain next to the tracks slipping by. The train has not stopped or even slowed down.

“Why didn’t they stop the train?” I ask no one in particular.

“Why should they stop the train?” a passenger asks me.

“A man went off. He was being attacked by a creature.”

“A creature!”
The poor passenger backs away in horror as other passengers gasp at my proclamation.

“What creature?” Sundance asks.

“I don’t know. It cut his throat.”

“A creature cut his throat?” Sundance says. “I didn’t see any blood out there. Nellie, you’re making no sense.”

“I’m telling you, a creature—”

“What’s going on?”
the conductor shouts in heavily accented English as he comes running down the corridor. He’s obese and it’s hard for him to run, breathe, and talk at the same time. His face is all red. Behind him is the porter who prepared our berths and served us dinner.

“Why isn’t the train stopping?” I ask.

“Stopping? Why should it stop?”

“I pulled the cord. A man was attacked. He was thrown off the train.”

“A man was thrown off the train!”

“Yes! A friend of his.” I gesture at Sundance. “He was attacked by a creature.”

“A creature!”

“Yes…” I feel faint and helpless and begin to sway.

Sundance grabs my arm to steady me. “Nellie, they can’t stop the train. We’re going down a grade.”

Roger rushes up to me. “What happened? Are you all right?” He looks at Sundance. “Did you hurt her?”

“Hell no! I found her standing here, yelling like a banshee.”

By this time, the aisle is completely filled with people in bedclothes. They’re jabbering and staring at me like I’m a lunatic.

“I knew it.” A man steps forward, his wife by his side. “She’s the one.”

“She’s the one what?” Roger asks.

“The one who started rumors that we’re going to be robbed by bandidos.” The man accuses me with a short, fat, stubby finger.

“What? What are you talking about?” I ask.

“That’s correct,” his wife says. “My husband told me she started a rumor about bandidos attacking the train. Later, we saw her gushing champagne with a diplomat. Disgraceful behavior for a young lady, if you ask me.”

“But—but—I—I—” I sway dizzily and Roger steadies me.

“Look at her. She’s still intoxicated,” the wife says with disgust.

Roger, Sundance, and the others stare at me with questions in their eyes. Unfortunately, she’s right. The champagne has made me queasy.

“You don’t understand!”

A deep, icy chill envelopes me and I break out in a sweat. I’m the only one who saw anything. There is no evidence in the gangway, not even a drop of blood. And I’m not really certain as to what the thing was behind the man. But Sundance was there, too.

“You saw it.” It’s a demand to Sundance, not a question.

“Saw it?” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Nellie, I’m sure you saw something, but I didn’t see anything.”

“What did you see, Nellie?” Roger asks.

“That drunken old prospector who cooks for the cowboys was on the gangway. I saw him through the window and then … I don’t know what it—it was, but something strange was attacking him. Then both went off the train. I think. I’m not sure.”

Roger interrupts an angry outburst from the conductor. “There’s a simple answer to all this. Let’s see if this cook-prospector, or whatever the devil he is, is still on the train.”

20

I know what I saw.

It’s morning and I am reassuring myself after the fitful night I spent running over and over in my mind’s eye what I saw, and occasionally peeking out between the crack in my curtain to see if the creature that attacked the prospector has decided to come back to get rid of me.

Naturally, the train never stopped.

Roger and I are at breakfast with Don Antonio and Gertrude, who whispered to me just as we sat down, “Let’s talk later.”

I gave her a little smile in agreement. I really need to talk to her. I feel like the train leper—no, make that the object of the cruel curiosity people display when staring at a circus freak.

No mention has been made about the events last night—yet. But I am certain the consul general wants to discuss it and assure himself that nothing negative about his country will flow from it into an article by me. I feel as if there is a time bomb under my chair that will explode when the subject comes up.

Roger has not mentioned the matter, either, though I expected to be confronted with it the moment I climbed down from my berth. He no doubt avoided the subject out of pure fear that I would become irrational and attack him with the only potential weapon I brought on the trip, a large jar of face cream I cannot live without.

No mention was made, either, of the way he took advantage of me when I lost my balance.

A man joins us, Jack Thompson. He’s about forty and the bulge hanging over his belt is well developed and no doubt still in its infancy.

“Señor Thompson is a farm equipment salesman from El Paso,” Don Antonio tells us.

Hearing the men talk about the hay reapers and threshing machines that Thompson sells to the more prosperous Mexican farmers doesn’t help take my mind off last night’s incident.

All I keep thinking is that there is one vindication for my tale: A search was made, at Roger’s and my insistence, for Howard.
And he is missing.
But that didn’t settle the matter in the eyes of anyone but me. Seeing a “creature” had been too much for anyone to swallow—even me.

“He still can’t be found?” I ask Don Antonio.

The question pops out of my mouth when Thompson pauses for a moment about how a reaper bundles and binds hay.

This creates a longer pause and everyone looks at me.

“Sorry. I’m afraid it just slipped out of my thoughts.”

“Yes, he is still missing,” Don Antonio says. “Another search was made this morning at my insistence. I even had the top of the entire length of the train checked. He would have to be smaller than a mouse to keep hidden.”

The consul nods his head to Thompson. “Señor Thompson has an interesting theory about what occurred last night. He has been kind enough to join us this morning to share it with us. It appears to explain a great deal.”

“No one doubts you saw the old-timer go off the train,” Thompson says in a condescending tone that I personally want to smack. “But his pack is also missing. And that indicates he jumped ship.”

I already knew this. The fact his belongs were missing and that he had been acting paranoid about people trying to get his “treasure map” left the impression his exit had been voluntary. To everyone but me, that is.

Don Antonio taps his coffee cup with his spoon to signal a waiter that it’s empty. He appears to choose his words carefully as he speaks to me. “Señor Thompson and I believe that the man planned to jump the train right at the moment it peaked the hill and started its descent. That way, the train would have been barely moving and it would have been an easy jump.”

“And why would he do that—voluntarily?” I ask.

“To get away from the cowboys who he thought were going to steal the treasure map he constantly rattled on about. He had joined them as a cook and talked about the map and soon began to express fear that the others would steal it. The foreman of the cowboys, Señor Maddock, says the old gringo had threatened to leave the train before and had been kept from going at every stop because he had been given advanced wages.”

The sequence of events had a ring of truth to it, but I’m not going to be bullied by a show of authority. I saw something strange and I’m not backing down from it. I shake my head. “I don’t know—”

“Paranoia, ma’am,” Mr. Thompson says. “It rages like a fever with gold hunters, and for good reason. There is always someone after their grubstake or jumping their claim. I’ve dealt with prospectors before. Have grubstaked a number of ’em myself, though I’ve yet to see the color of gold in return. But they’re all the same. Think they’ve found the mother lode and sleep with a gun in their bedroll because they’re convinced someone will steal it.”

“So you think he jumped off to go and seek or protect that Aztec treasure he was always mumbling about?” Roger asks Thompson.

“That’s about the sum of it. Let me ask you this. How do we account for that bedroll and gear he carried in a big fawn-colored sack being gone, too?” He gives me a contrived sympathetic look that makes my jaw tighten. “And I think you’ll agree with me that it’s unlikely any, uh, any nonhuman thing managed to traipse down a train aisle to steal his possessions after all the ruckus you caused.”

I stir, uneasy in my chair, antsy, my anger rising, ready to launch. “And the creature I saw? The
nonhuman.
This you believe is a figment of my imagination? Better yet, perhaps my frail female constitution couldn’t take a second glass of champagne with all the excitement of being in Mexico?”

“Actually, señorita,” Don Antonio says, smiling with great charm, his tone silky, “we do think that you saw something that any of us would have thought freakish. Is that not true, señor?” He looks to Mr. Thompson.

“What happened is clear as a bell from where I sit. Sundance helped us figure it out last night by doing a little test. Look behind you.”

I turn around, to find Sundance with a fawn-colored bedroll slung over his shoulder.

“You think that’s my creature?”

“Quite, as our young friend from Britain might put it,” Thompson says. “Anyone looking through a dirty window in the dark could easily believe it to be something not human. We borrowed that from another cowboy because it’s very similar to Howard’s bedroll.”

“It could be mistaken for an ugly face in the dark,” Roger says. “It was dark and the window is so dirty, you can hardly see through it anytime.”

Gertrude starts to say something, but she clams up when I glare at her.

I also clamp my trap shut. I know when I am defeated. And to be honest, deep down, in a tiny recess of my reasonable mind, I have some doubts myself as to what I actually saw. However, I know it wasn’t that silly bedroll. But was it a creature? And did I see fear on the man’s face … or his face twisted in that drunken sneer I’d seen before?

Sundance is waiting for me when we leave. He takes off his hat and gives me his charming, boyish grin.

“Just trying to help, Nellie.”

“Thank you. But next time you see me being lynched, please don’t whip the horse out from under me.

Roger gives me a look as we pass on. “That should make him feel guilty.”

“I hope so.”

21

I ditched Roger after breakfast, telling him I was going to take refuge somewhere where I wouldn’t be stared at.

He assured me that the incident had already been forgotten, but I shrugged that off—it was still burning fresh in me, so I was sure there were many others who hadn’t forgotten.

I gave the porter in the last car a coin to deliver a note to Gertrude to meet me there.

The last car of the train is an older passenger one with hard wooden bench seats in need of repair, making it the least occupied. Gertrude obviously wanted a private meeting, and there was too much chance that her uncle would catch us huddled in the parlor car.

She pats my hand as she sits down next to me. “You poor thing. What a horror you’ve been through.”

“Actually, I think the prospector had it much worse. I appreciate your uncle’s having taken time to create a sequence of events in which I save face.”

“You don’t accept the wrinkled bag theory?”

“Not unless champagne affects one like opium and I was hallucinating. It’s just…” I shake my head. “I know what I saw wasn’t human but also wasn’t wrinkled cloth.”

She bites her lower lip. “Nellie, I’m going to tell you something, but please don’t write about it in a story to your newspaper. Don Antonio would be very upset if he knew I had spoken to you about it.”

“What is it?”

“Did the creature you saw remind you of anything?”

“No, I’ve never seen anything like it. And I got only a brief glimpse of it through a dirty window in the dark.”

“Could it have been a mask?”

“A mask? Yes, I suppose it could have been. It was rather feline, like a cat—maybe a mountain lion.”

“How about a jaguar?”

“A jaguar? I don’t know. They look rather like big cats, don’t they? Like cougars, what we call mountain lions?”

“Yes, similar to your mountain lions, but bigger. Jaguars can weigh several hundred pounds. They are quite fierce animals. To the ancient Mexicans, jaguars were not just kings of the jungle but also sacred beasts with magical powers.”

It’s obvious she is trying to tell me something but is having a hard time getting it out.

“Gertrude, what are you trying to say? That I saw a jaguar last night? Because if that is so, they are wandering around on two feet and slicing people’s throats with big hunting knives.”

“Maybe…”

“Maybe? Now you’re sounding like me.”

“Hear me out. Don Antonio told us that after the Spanish conquest, many Aztecs hid their treasures. But that’s not all that happened. A resistance arose, a secret society devoted to driving out the Spanish. It never created a major revolt against the invaders; instead, the members operated as assassins who attacked Spaniards, most often at night along lonely roads.”

“Sounds like other assassination cults in history. Wasn’t there a Jewish group around the time of Christ that killed the Roman invaders of Israel?”

“The Sicarii. What the Romans called ‘dagger men.’ Judas Iscariot might have been a member. During the Crusades, an Islamic group of assassins, the Hashshashin, arose to attack Christian leaders. It’s where we got the word
assassin.
The secret Aztec group had the same purpose—to drive out the enemy that had enslaved its people.