Power in the Blood (124 page)

“Train …,” said Nevis, and the other two began laughing again. “Train!” he screamed, and picked himself up to yank open the door. He fell into the snow after a few steps, but was able to see the train toiling along the far side of the loop, a short train, just two boxcars and a caboose, but on the flatcar riding midway stood the unmistakable shape of the elk, sunlight burnishing its flanks.

“There …,” breathed Nevis, pointing. “There …”

He heard Smith and Winnie struggling clumsily through the snow behind him. The whistle sounded again.

“That’s the one,” said Smith. “See it shine?”

They watched the train, a toy moving of its own volition a mile away, carrying its precious Christmas tree bauble. Nevis was immobilized by its arrival; the train brought with it uncertainty that his plan would work as he wished it to. It seemed, now that the time had come, a silly kind of thing to do, but he had swept up Smith and Winnie by proposing it while drunk with his own belief. Now, seeing the train, he was less sure, and he found himself shaking from more than the snow that had passed into his boots. If he had been alone, Nevis would have hidden behind the shack until the train had followed the loop around to the snow shed, entered it and passed him by; then Nevis would have gone away, and never mentioned to anyone a single word concerning his silly plan. He could still do that, if he chose.

“Better get started,” said Smith, and Nevis felt his heart squeeze itself into a knot. It was too late. He was afraid, but could not imagine why. The plan was nothing more than a prank, one last thumbing of the nose at Leo Brannan, a poor man’s revenge, pitiful, inadequate, but necessary, or so he had felt when first he thought of it.

Winnie was pulling him up from the snow. “Come
on
.…”

Nevis rose and followed his friends to the wagon. The tarpaulin there was stripped away, his creation laid bare.

“Pitiful …,” he whispered, looking at it.

“Not beautiful,” said Winnie, misunderstanding, “but it’s not supposed to be, is it?”

Smith climbed into the wagon. “Take that end,” he said. Nevis took it. “Lift,” said Smith, and Nevis lifted.

When Omie’s skin became white and her breathing slowed to a series of shallow gasps, no one touched her. She sat in the corner, her eyes wide open, seeing what the other Dugans could not. Even Zoe had never seen her in so intensely physical a trance before, and for a brief moment considered shaking her to bring Omie back from the brink of whichever psychic pit she was approaching. Only Drew’s hand on her shoulder prevented it.

Clay was outside the shack, watching the train crawl around the loop that would bring it to the long snow shed and the trap laid inside, an invisible trap no man could anticipate. He was tense, his skin twitching, even if he had to do nothing more dangerous than wait and see if events transpired as Omie had said they would. He did not feel brave; he did not feel at risk of physical harm; he was not girding himself for gunplay or confrontation. Clay admitted to himself, as the train passed from his sight at the loop’s far end, that he felt superfluous, a man pretending to be doing a man’s work. A girl was doing a man’s work that day, and he was aware of not only his noninvolvement but an unsettling shame. He should never have allowed Omie to persuade any of them to be a part of this. It was for Zoe’s sake the trap was laid, and for no one else’s. Clay wanted it to succeed only because its conclusion would allow them all to go somewhere else and begin again together. The trap inside the snow shed was a settling, an act of reprisal, anything but a conventional robbery. He had to remember that.

54

Lyle Ingalls and Pat Cullen had taken over the locomotive in Pueblo shortly before dawn, having been granted the honor of taking the elk train, as it had come to be known, along the final stages of its journey to Glory Hole. The job was theirs because both men had exemplary records for safety and punctuality, and were model citizens to boot. The Pinkerton agency’s criteria had been well met by the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad.

Their mood, as the train began gathering steam on the run west to Canon City and Salida, was one of satisfaction and professional pride. This was their reward for years of diligent service for the company. They had stared at the elk in the predawn light and been awed by its frozen majesty. This was to be the run of their careers, both men were sure. Their wives had already begun treating them differently, and when the elk was delivered safely to Leo Brannan, and Lyle and Pat came home again, their lives would have been changed forever; it was a certainty. Pat shoveled coal into the firebox like a demon fueling the atmosphere of hell, and Lyle squinted into the cone of light the Baldwin 4-6-0’s powerful acetylene lamp cast along the track ahead. Nothing could be allowed to go wrong, or their status within the D&RG would be tarnished forever.

Sunlight from the east soon allowed Lyle to switch off the lamp. The Baldwin’s firebox roared hungrily, and the first leg of the trip was accomplished in perfect time, but soon afterward, somewhere between Canon City and Salida, both men began experiencing vague sensations of disquiet. Neither mentioned it to the other, since no specific thing was the cause, but as the run proceeded through the morning, they found themselves thinking of tunnels, deadly tunnels, the kind that had killed men over the years, not only during their construction, but afterward, when locomotives were stalled inside them, resulting in asphyxiation of the crew. These thoughts were irrational, both men concluded, still not having voiced their fears, because the line from Leadville through to Glory Hole had no such tunnel, just a three-mile snow shed.

No one had ever died in a snow shed that Lyle and Pat had heard of, but both men began considering the means by which a snow shed might be compared with a tunnel, and both, by the time Salida was reached and the train turned north toward Buena Vista, had reasoned that the one thing that might render a shed as potentially deadly as a tunnel was the presence of snow all around and above the timbered structure. Snow was not as dense as rock, but would that make any real difference if a train became stranded halfway through such a thing? Lyle and Pat had been through the shed during winter many times, when it was completely covered by snow, and they knew that those three miles of travel, even if accomplished at a steady speed, generally resulted in a throbbing headache before sunlight was seen at the far end. Once out in the open air, such pain as they had was wiped away by deep inhalations of fresh air. No train had ever stalled in the shed. There was no reason to surmise that one ever would. But they could not stop thinking that one might.

Boysie Frazier had to spend more time on the flatcar simply to draw a full breath. The air in both boxcars was ripe with the odor of unwashed males, but that was not the reason Boysie needed to be outside; there was something else filling his chest, a sense of dread so intense it clutched at him like a claw around his heart. And he was not alone; other men came out onto the flatcar, and made comments on their need to be away from the stale air they had lived in for too long. Their talk was mild, apologetic almost, but their faces were drawn with fatigue and some other emotion Boysie could not decipher, a kind of trepidation that lurked so far beneath the surface of their usual selves they would not acknowledge it, or discuss it with others. Boysie recognized himself in them all, but was likewise constrained from asking any man what it was that troubled him. Chances were they had simply become bone-weary. It had been a difficult assignment for everyone, despite the lack of actual danger. Before the day was out they would be in Glory Hole, freed from responsibility for Brannan’s elk, able to wash themselves clean in oceans of hot water, able to shave again, and dress in fresh clothing. They would eat the best food that town had to offer, and become drunk if they wanted, and sleep the sleep of the just on soft mattresses. It would be heaven. Their nearness to such luxury and indulgence should have rallied the spirits of his men, but all Boysie could see were faces made taut by fear, as was his own.

After Buena Vista was passed, the inner turmoil of the engineers worsened. They still did not speak of it to each other, or to the two miserable-looking Pinkertons sharing their cab. Pat had begun to fill every minute with thoughts of his eleven-year-old daughter, but found he could not hold her steady in his mind; no matter how hard he tried to picture her as she was, one side of her face became darkened by a swirling blueness, like ink poured into clear water. Pat could not erase the least part of it, and came to realize it was not his daughter at all, but some other girl who insisted on crowding aside anything else he might wish to see while he worked, and it was she who made him consider the deadly ways of railroad tunnels, even if her lips were motionless.

For Lyle, the trip had become fraught with inexplicable moments of anxiety. He kept turning his face away from the track his locomotive traveled, expecting to see inside the cab someone other than Pat and the two Pinkertons, but there was no fifth person there, and after he had performed the same check a dozen times, Lyle began wondering if his mind had not somehow become addled, although there had never been any indications of madness in his family. He would have become angry over his own foolish behavior, if only the overwhelming fear of tunnels had receded and allowed him access to any emotion other than the foreboding that held him so tightly in its grip. His fingertips inside their heavy gauntlets were growing numb, and he knew it was not the cold that made them so.

She was out of the shack now, had stepped outside as if in a trance and positioned herself at the end of the snow shed, her feet set firmly between the tracks. No one had stopped her; Omie was a law unto herself, her blank face and rigid walk the very badge of her independence. She stood in the place of maximum danger, and began filling the snow shed with a viscous wave invisible to anyone but herself. Primeval fear, raw and shapeless, poured into the shed, an inky darkness thrust by willpower into the long and narrow receptacle prepared for its storage. Deep snow covering the shed made it impervious, a natural containing element. The waves of fear eddied along it without being dispersed, without losing any part of their strength, eventually filling the shed. In the process, Omie became weak, although her weakening was not of so obvious a nature as to alert Clay or Zoe or Drew, who stood nearby, waiting for what Omie had told them would happen.

As the final curve of the familiar loop ran beneath the wheels of the locomotive, Lyle Ingalls felt a lifting of his spirits, but when the Baldwin faced the entrance to the snow shed, Lyle’s hand reached instinctively for the brake lever. Ahead, blocking the entrance to the shed, stood something the like of which he had never seen before. The Baldwin came to a halt, its nose less than ten yards from the object, and the Pinkertons and engineers stared.

Boysie knew no stop was scheduled, and was immediately alarmed. He ordered all guns at the ready, knowing this must be the preamble to an attack. Peering through the rifle slits cut in the boxcar’s side, he could see no one near the train, but indistinct voices came to him from the locomotive’s cab. Warning his men to remain on alert, Boysie climbed up onto the tender, and saw what it was that had caused the halt. In the entrance to the snow shed stood a mockery of Leo Brannan’s elk, its body a rain barrel, its legs taken from a table, the neck a piece of bent pipe, the head a narrow wicker basket, the antlers two broom heads.

Boysie watched the area around the train, anticipating gunshots. Rifle barrels protruded from both boxcars like porcupine quills. Boysie wondered why the barrier was such a flimsy thing, when a stack of railroad ties would have been more difficult to plow aside, then realized he was confronted by intelligence of a high order; the wooden elk was so unexpected, so bizarre, it had done what ties and boulders would not have—caused the engineers to stop the train.

“Keep going!” he yelled. “What the hell did you stop for …!”

A snowball hit him in the neck. Turning, Boysie saw three figures advancing from behind cover, and barely had time to notice that one was a woman before the first rifle was fired, at which signal every other rifle on that side of the cars began firing. The three figures spun and fell, the larger of the men rising again before being cut down by so many bullets parts of his clothing disintegrated.

No answering fire came from any part of the mountainside near the tracks. Still atop the tender, Boysie asked himself how anyone could be so foolish as to mount a robbery with only three persons, and one of them a female. And not one of them had been carrying a gun. It could not be reconciled with his past experience of criminal mentality, and he did not know what to do next. The four men in the cab were looking at him, their faces blank with shock.

Boysie waved his arms frantically. “Go ahead! Go ahead! Keep going!”

Lyle did not want to go ahead. The comically grotesque wooden elk stood guard over an entrance to some kind of hell, as surely as Saint Peter stood by heaven’s gate. Despite its flimsiness, Lyle knew the thing facing his locomotive was a warning not to proceed further. The snow shed was a trap. Disaster lay waiting inside. A creature of darkness lived in the shed, a serpent three miles long, wanting them to enter its square mouth and pass willingly into its belly. Lyle was afraid of the serpent, and dismayed that a woman had been shot down before his eyes, and could not think straight anymore, only express by his inaction a reluctance to do anything but wait for an instruction to throw the train into reverse.

“Go ahead!” screamed Boysie. “What are you waiting for! Go ahead now!”

Boysie’s legs were trembling. He had no understanding of the events that had followed the stopping of the train, and was aware of his own reluctance to enter the darkness presided over by the outlandish creature planted on the tracks. He tried to think of a reason why he could legitimately order the engineer to return everyone to Leadville, but no reason came to him. The engineer and the fireman were not moving to obey him, and his own men in the cab were standing as if turned to stone. Boysie aimed his pistol at the driver, and when this was not enough, he thumbed back the hammer. Lyle released the brakes, then eased open the throttle.