On the Wrong Track (6 page)

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Authors: Steve Hockensmith

BOOK: On the Wrong Track
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“Why should I believe you?”
“It’s me, Mr. Morrison! Kip Hickey!” the kid called out. “Trust me! We ain’t bein’ robbed!”
“They might have a gun to your head! They might be
making
you say that!”
“But they’re not!” Kip yelled back.
“But they might be!”
“But they’re
not
!”
“But they
might be
!”
As the debate raged on, I peeked around to see what had become of my brother. He’d found the safest spot of all: underneath the train, directly below the baggage car door. He still had the lantern with him, and its light created eerie, oily shadows amongst the bars and boards beneath the Pacific Express.
A long, lumpy silhouette stood out from all the rest. It was stretched out on some of the rods under the car, behind Old Red. I blinked my eyes, hoping they’d come to their senses, but they insisted on seeing what they saw: the outline of a man.
“Holy shit, Gustav … I think there’s another body stuck up under there.”
But I was wrong. It wasn’t a corpse. It was a living, breathing man, and he dropped down onto the tracks before my brother could turn around.
EL NUMERO UNO
Or, A Crowned Sovereign Lands in a Royal Mess
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
There was a thud,
and Gustav came flying out from under the train. His lantern spun from his grip, throwing wild flashes of light into the night before cracking Lockhart full on in the face. It was only by a miracle the lamp didn’t bust open and cover the Pinkerton in burning oil, lighting up his head like the tip of a six-foot match.
“Ow!” howled Lockhart.
“What was that?” yelled Morrison.
“Somebody
kicked
me,” grumbled Old Red.
“There’s a man under the train!” hollered I.
Bang!
said Morrison’s rifle.
“Eyaaah!” screamed just about everybody else.
The only person who
didn’t
have anything to say was whoever’d put the boot to my brother. With the lantern doused, all I could see of him was a hunched, shuffling shape, but it was clear where that shape was headed—over to the other side of the train. Once he got out from beneath the car, he’d have no trouble losing himself in the desert’s black expanse.
“There he goes!” I shouted. “Stop him!”
Nobody near me was in any position to give chase, however, as a fellow’s hardly at his speediest when he’s flat on his stomach with his hands over his head. So Lockhart opted to do his chasing with a bullet, raising his .44 and pointing it at the underside of the car—and more or less at
me
.
Not only was I uncomfortably close to the line of fire, I wouldn’t have trusted the old Pinkerton’s aim at high noon, let alone in the dark of night. And even if he did manage to miss me, there was plenty of metal nearby—wheels, rails, rods—that could easily ricochet his shot through the wrong skull.
“Uhhh, Mr. Lockhart—,” I began.
But there was no time for talk. Gustav was closer to him, and he simply reached out and twisted the gun from the man’s grip.
Lockhart gaped at him a moment before his shock gave way to fury.
“You stupid son of a—”
He was interrupted by an
oof
and a heavy thump from the other side of the train.
“Hey!” I called into the blackness. “Is somebody over there? Did you catch him?”
“I got him,” a deep voice replied. “What’s goin’ on over
there
?”
“The express messenger’s takin’ potshots at us!”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.
Morrison!
It’s Bedford! The fireman! Get your finger off the trigger ’fore you hurt somebody!”
“But we’re being robbed!” Morrison yelled back. “Aren’t we?”
“This ain’t no robbery! A circus is what it is! Now just get ahold of yourself, would you?”
“Well … alright,” Morrison said weakly. “But I’m still not opening the door.”
The rifle slowly slid back into its slot and disappeared.
As the men scattered around outside began pushing themselves to their feet, an unexpected sound arose with them: laughter. The passengers were just gray outlines there in the gloom, but I’d seen them well enough on the train. They were tradesmen and merchants, comfortable men headed home to comfortable lives. No wonder they were chuckling
and chattering like it was intermission at a Wild West show. This
was
a show to them. They hadn’t seen enough death to know better.
I suppose a gunfight would’ve been the perfect capper to the evening as far as they were concerned, and Burl Lockhart seemed ready to oblige. He snatched his gun back from my brother as the both of them stood up.
“Don’t you
ever
get in my way again.”
He stepped even closer to Gustav, literally going toe-to-toe with him. The blow he’d taken from the lantern had knocked his mustache so askew, one end was practically poking him in the eye, yet there was nothing even remotely funny about it—not if you could see the bitter scowl on his bony face.
“Fine,” Old Red said. “Next time you wanna do a damn fool thing, I’ll just stand aside and let you.”
“Why, you cocky little—”
“Say, fellers,” I said, somehow managing to squeeze my not insubstantial bulk between them, “let’s go see who that was under the train, huh?”
I turned to drag Gustav away, but there was no need. A party with another lantern was rounding the locomotive, and both Lockhart and Old Red hurried toward the light, moving side by side like a couple thoroughbreds in a dead heat.
It was Wiltrout, the conductor, with the lantern. Behind him was the engineer and a muscle-bound Negro in soot-stained overalls—the train’s fireman, by the look of him. But it wasn’t a coal shovel the Negro was hefting now. He was dragging along a heavily bearded fellow in clothes so tattered it looked like he’d dressed himself in old mops. The tramp tried to dig in his heels, yet that didn’t slow the Negro one jot, and the man’s flap-soled shoes merely plowed up twin furrows in the sand.
“Unhand me, you great brute!” the hobo commanded, his voice surprisingly deep, his diction highfalutin. He even rolled his
r
’s. “Have you no respect for royalty?”
“Anybody hurt here?” Wiltrout asked us, ignoring the tramp’s protests.
After a moment of head shakings and mumbled noes, the conductor turned toward the express car.
“I’ll have a word with you later, Morrison,” he said sternly.
I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard a whimper rise up from inside the car.
“Now.” Wiltrout faced us again and jerked his head at the Negro. “Bedford here says this little yegg crawled out from under one of the cars. Anybody see where he came from?”
“I did.” I pointed at the baggage car. “He was tucked away under there.”
While Wiltrout walked to the baggage car and shined his lantern underneath, Bedford and the engineer turned suspicious glares on their prisoner, the both of them practically growling and baring their teeth.
“He was riding the rods, alright,” the conductor announced, leaning in to inspect the undercarriage. “His bindle’s still here. When’d you get on, ’bo? When we took on water at Wells? Or was it Promontory?”
With a sudden twist of his shoulders, the tramp freed himself from Bedford’s clutches. But rather than flee, he began brushing off his ragged clothes with leisurely, exaggerated dignity. The dust flew from him in great billowing clouds that swirled like smoke in the lamplight, and he ended by giving his beard a shake that turned it from ash white to coal black.
“I embark and disembark where I please,” he said when he was through preening. “The particulars are no concern of yours.”
“Is that a fact?” Wiltrout said coldly. He turned to the crowd with a stuffed and mounted smile on his face. “Alright, folks. Everything’s under control. Return to your seats. We’ll be under way shortly.”
“Oh, no, you don’t—I know what you’re up to!” the tramp jeered at him. “Hustling away the witnesses so you can beat the helpless ’bo into a false confession. Well, it won’t work.” He took a step forward and spread his arms wide. “Ladies and gentlemen! Hear my words! I am
El Numero Uno, King of the Hoboes—and I had nothing to do with that man’s death!”
This pronouncement landed amidst the passengers like an anvil in a pond, and a wave of excited jabber rose up and swept across the crowd.
“There won’t be no beatin’s,” my brother assured the hobo. “Just a proper investigation.”
Lockhart coughed out a mocking guffaw.
“All anyone needs to ‘investigate’ are the stains on this filthy yegg’s clothes,” Wiltrout said, moving his lantern closer to El Numero Uno. “Fresh blood.”
The passengers’ babblings turned to gasps. Forget Buffalo Bill—old Will Shakespeare himself couldn’t have put on a better show.
“Of course, I was splattered with some blood!” the King of the Hoboes protested. “The man got caught in the gears not four feet from me. Why, I saw his head plucked from his neck like a grape off the vine. But that’s all I did.
See
. He fell off the train with no help from me.”
“You expect us to believe you? A dirty bum?” Kip wailed, his eyes wide and wet. He aimed a finger at the hobo like the barrel of a gun. “You killed Joe! You killed my
friend
!”
“I’m sorry, kid,” Old Red said, giving his head a slow, sorrowful shake. “But the data don’t back that up.”
“‘Data’?” Lockhart sneered.
“Facts.”
Gustav pointed at the baggage car. “This El Numero Uno feller was tucked away under there, right? So tell me how he could swing up to the side of the car, open the door from the outside, kill the baggageman, and swing back down again without gettin’ chopped to mincemeat himself? And if you can give me all that
how,
then I’ll just ask you for a single good
why
.”
What Lockhart gave him instead was a tremendous raspberry. (It’s entirely possible the Pinkerton produced the sound via another method—it was so dark out there I couldn’t say for certain. Nevertheless, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt in this account.)
“The how
and
the why of it are plain as day,” he said. “The King of
the Riffraff there didn’t start out ridin’ the rods. He sneaked inside with the baggage before we left the station. The baggageman found him and got knifed for his trouble, and the tramp pushed him out the side door. When the train stopped, El Assholio Grande knew someone had spotted the body, and he needed a new place to hide. So he ducked up under the car.”
There was a flurry of motion through our audience—two dozen satisfied nods. The crowd hadn’t gotten a gunfight, but it was seeing a duel, and just then Lockhart looked to be the winner.
“Poppycock!” El Numero Uno blurted out. “I never stepped foot inside that—”
Bedford clapped one of his big hands on the tramp’s arm and gave him a jerk that sent a puff of dust into the air.
“Shut up, you,” the Negro snapped.
“Hel-lo,” Old Red mumbled, his spine snapping up straight. Then, louder: “Hey, Bedford—do that again.”
“Do what again?”
“Give him a good shake.”
Bedford looked bewildered, but he wasn’t going to pass up another chance to beat out the hobo like a dirty rug. He yanked the man left and right, and so much dust went billowing off him that Wiltrout and the engineer started coughing. Seeing as a fireman like Bedford needs the muscle to shovel a ton of coal a day into a white-hot furnace, El Numero Uno was lucky his arms and legs didn’t go flying off, too. Not that he looked particularly grateful.
“Stop
this
at
once,
you
black
devil!”
he protested, his words fading in and out as Bedford snapped him like a bullwhip.
“Thank you, that’ll do,” my brother said.
The fireman let El Numero Uno go.
“Barbarians,” the tramp spat as he set about straightening his rags again.
“Tell me, Bedford,” Old Red said, “did you bread El Numero Uno after you caught him?”
“Bread?”
“You know—roll him in flour for fryin’. Cuz if you didn’t, I’d have to say that’s
dust
the man’s coated in head to foot. And if it is dust, well … where did it come from?”
Bedford and his fellow railroaders responded with mere glares, leaving it to their prisoner to offer the answer.
“From riding under the train!” El Numero Uno shouted out like a “Hallelujah!” He laughed and ran his fingers roughly through his hair, sending out yet another cloud of dust. “Yes, indeed! Ride the rods through the Great Salt Desert and you’ll look like you’ve been bathing in talcum. You’ll end up looking like
me
!”
“Please,” Lockhart snorted. “So he’s dirty. So what? The man’s a goddamn bum.”
“It
had
to be him,” Kip blurted out, practically sobbing. “There’s no other—”
“Enough!” Wiltrout roared. He hoisted his lantern high over his conductor’s cap, and suddenly he seemed a foot taller. “The Southern Pacific has a schedule to maintain, and we’re late enough as it is. Everyone—back aboard!”
“Hold on,” Gustav said. “I need to do some more clue-huntin’ before—”
“Now!”
Wiltrout bellowed. When he spoke again, he wasn’t talking
to
my brother so much as
through
him. “We’re less than ninety minutes from Carlin, Nevada. It’ll be up to the law there to sort all this out.”
“What about him?” Bedford asked, jerking a thumb at El Numero Uno.
“We’ll keep him in the baggage car till we reach town.” Wiltrout shifted his gaze back to my brother and me. “I suppose I’d be hoping for too much if I were to ask if you brought handcuffs with you?”

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