The Railroad War (12 page)

Even before they turned off into the lane that led to the burning farmhouse, Jessie and the old man saw the red sky slowly fading to a malignant orange hue and growing darker as the flames consuming the dwelling began to lose intensity.

“Too bad,” the Captain said. “House is most likely lost. They go fast, once they start. A few buckets of wellwater don't do much good after a fire's begun to make headway.”

Jessie had seen fires in isolated buildings too, and knew the truth of Tinker's words. She nodded silently, keeping her eyes on the steadily waning blaze. The vehicles ahead of them had already begun to slow down, and by the time they reached a point where they could see the burning house, only its framing timbers still burned.

Silhouetted against the flames were the figures of men darting back and forth. Some of them had buckets, and when one of them braved the heat and ran in close to dash water on the dying red tongues, white clouds of steam arose. Beyond the house they could see other men and a few women carrying burlap sacks, and a half-dozen men with sacks had climbed to the roof of the main barn; these were busy beating out the occasional sparks and embers that the light night breeze carried toward them.

“Lucky the wind wasn't blowing hard. They'd have lost the barns and sheds too, if it had been,” Captain Tinker said. Then he grunted and added, “That's little enough help, with the house gone, but at least they'll have something to start from.”

“Are you sure they'll rebuild?” Jessie asked.

“Sure enough. It's their home place.”

“I wasn't thinking of it that way,” she replied. “If the railroad company's offered to buy them out, would they take the money and start over somewhere else?”

“Would you, if that was the house on your place burning?”

“No,” Jessie said after a moment's thought. “No, I'm sure I wouldn't.”

They'd reached the point now where hastily tethered horses, wagons, buggies, and an occasional shay or closed carriage had stopped in a confused crisscross array, and the buggy could go no further. Reining in, the Captain looped the leathers around the whipsocket. He reached for his cane, and Jessie jumped nimbly from the buggy and helped the old man down. She followed him to a huddle of women who stood at one side, watching the burning framework.

As they drew closer, Jessie saw that the group had formed around the few pieces of furniture that had been carried from the house during the first moments after the fire started. The salvage was pitifully meager. There were two or three straight chairs, a Boston rocker, a small table, a marble-topped commode, a child's desk, a hatrack. On the ground beside the furniture, a few odds and ends of dishes and cooking utensils were scattered.

Sitting in the rocking chair, a shawl around her shoulders, a woman was staring dry-eyed at the dying flickers of flame that still shot out thin red tongues from the few wall studs that were now all that remained of the house. Before Jessie and the Captain reached the group, they stopped and turned to look when shouts rose from the men who were still fighting the fire.

The firefighters were running from the blaze, and they saw the reason at once. The rafters were sagging, drooping sadly downward. Within a few seconds after the first warning shout, the flaming rafters cracked with a series of small explosions like sharp pistol shots, and the heavy framing timbers, which were all that remained of the roof, crashed to the ground, dragging with them a few of the wall studs. A tower of fresh flame, studded with big sparks that glowed like bright stars against the dark sky, flared up from the fallen timbers.

A sighing murmur rose from the group huddled around the bits of furniture. It was quickly overriden by the shouts of firefighters, who rushed back with their buckets and bags to douse the triangle of bright flames that had suddenly begun to dance between the studding that remained standing. Jessie and the Captain watched for a moment before moving on to join the group around the salvaged household goods.

Captain Tinker hobbled to the rocker and put his hand on the shoulder of the stonefaced woman sitting in it. He said, “We're all as sorry as can be, Rose. Count on Martha and me to help any way we can.”

“Thank you, Captain,” she replied. “I guess it could've been worse. Jethro and me are still alive. The barn and the sheds didn't go, and the stock's all saved. We'll make out.”

“How'd it start, Rose?” he asked.

“Dear only knows. One minute me and Jethro was in the bedroom getting ready to go to bed, and the next minute there was fire all around the house on the outside.”

“It didn't start from a flue, the kitchen, maybe?” he asked. “Or a stove in the parlor?”

Rose Garvey shook her head. “No. I've been wondering while I sat here how it begun.”

“And you're sure it wasn't from a flue?”

“Sure as sure, Captain. I let the kitchen fire die out after I'd cooked supper. That was around sundown, and when Jethro heard the clock in the parlor strike nine, he said it was bedtime. And the only stove that's been lit since the weather turned at summer was that one in the kitchen.”

“No, it couldn't have been a flue, then,” Tinker said, as much to himself as to Rose Garvey and Jessie. He went on, “Fires don't start by themselves, though. There's got to be a reason.” He took Jessie's arm and led her a step or two away from the group. “You live outdoors a lot, and you've got to be smart, seeing you're Alex Starbuck's daughter. I want you to do something for me, Jessie.”

“Anything you ask, Captain.”

“That fire's just about out now. In a few minutes, when the fuss around the house dies down, you go up and walk around a little bit. Take your time, and use your eyes and nose.”

“Nose?”

“You've smelled a place on the ground where somebody's used coal oil to start a fire, haven't you, Jessie?”

“I smell that every branding season. We use coal oil at the Circle Star to kindle our branding fires fast. There's so little wood around there that we don't have any kindling.”

“Then you know what you'll be trying to find.”

“You think the fire was set, don't you, Captain Tinker?”

“If it didn't start in a flue, it had to be.”

“Yes, of course,” Jessie replied thoughtfully.

“You don't have to say anything about what you've found, if you find anything at all. We'll talk about it later.”

Jessie nodded. The Captain did not have to tell her that the Garvey farm spread over land that would be needed by the railroad for their right-of-way through the north pass out of Hidden Valley.

When Captain Tinker went back to rejoin the group around Rose Garvey, Jessie made her way toward the burned skeleton that had once been a house. Other spectators, late arrivals, were beginning to go up to the ruins for a close look, and most of the men who'd been fighting the blaze were standing near the skeleton with their gear at hand to use if a gust of wind should cause a sudden flareup. The men who'd been on the barn were coming down the high ladder that leaned against the building, and in the moving, shifting crowd, no one paid attention to Jessie.

Begining at the corner of the house nearest her, Jessie moved slowly along its end, scanning the ground closely, stopping occasionally to bend down and sniff the parched soil. She'd covered the end and was halfway around the rear, near the spot where the back door had been, before she found what the Captain had suspected. Here, Garvey had built a flagstone walkway to the well. A few feet from the house, the walk split into a Y, and one arm going to the well, the other to the barn. In the angle where the Y began, the unmistakable odor of coal oil was very strong.

Though large stretches of live coals glowed redly on many of the studs that remained erect, and there were coals in the center of the devastated dwelling where the rafters had collapsed, the flames had almost completely died away. Darkness obscured detail on the ground around the walk, and Jessie dropped to her knees, trying to see whether obvious traces of the liquid remained on the ground or the flagstone. Bending down, her head close to the ground, she could see a faint sheen of the oil on one of the flat stones that made up the walk.

A man's voice broke into her concentration, asking, “Did you lose something, Jessie?”

Looking up into the gloom, Jessie recognized Jed Clemson standing a short distance away. She said, “No. Captain Tinker asked me to look for something.”

“From the looks of things, you've found it.”

“I think I have.” She hesitated for a moment, then decided it wasn't likely that the Captain would object to her sharing what she'd found with his nephew. She said, “Come here and look and smell the ground, Jed. See if I'm right.”

“Right about what?” Jed asked. He came to where Jessie was kneeling, and hunkered down beside her. His eyes followed her finger, pointed at the stained flagstone. He bent forward, lowered his head, and sniffed. “Coal oil.”

“That's what the Captain asked me to look for.”

“He suspects somebody set the house afire?”

“What he said was that if the fire didn't start in a flue, someone must have started it from outside. And Mrs. Garvey told us that the fire in her kitchen stove went out hours ago.”

“You and Captain Bob have been busy while I was up on the barn roof,” Jed commented. He looked at the smeared stone in thoughtful silence. “Captain Bob's generally right,” he said. He extended his hand to help Jessie rise. “Come on, let's go tell him about this.”

“Let's do it quietly, though, Jed, where nobody else can hear us,” Jessie suggested. She took Jed's hand and pulled herself to her feet. “I'm not sure the Captain wants anybody else to know just yet that the fire was deliberately set.”

They rounded the corner of the house. A half-dozen lanterns had been lighted by now, but compared to the brilliance that the burning house had so recently shed on the scene, the lanterns were as ineffective as fireflies in dispelling the gloom. There were very few men still keeping watch on the dying embers now; all but two or three had joined the crowd clustered around the chair where Rose Garvey sat.

Jessie and Jed began working their way through the crowd. As they drew closer to its center, Jessie saw that a man with a soot-smeared face stood beside Captain Tinker, behind the chair in which Mrs. Garvey was sitting. Jessie could see that the man who was standing facing them had obviously not been among those fighting the fire. His coat looked bandbox-fresh, and a clean white collar gleamed below the brim of the gray derby that he'd pushed to the back of his head. The faces of the Captain and the Garveys were turned toward the newcomer, and as Jessie and Jed drew closer, she could hear what the man was saying. She knew who he was then, and didn't need Jed's whispered indentification.

“That's Prosser, the land agent for the railroad,” he said.

“I had an idea that was who he was,” she replied. “Come on, Jed. Let's get up to where we can whisper to the Captain and tell him what we found.” They began wiggling through the crowd.

Prosser was saying persuasively, “Now you don't want to rebuild here, I'm sure. Why, this place will always have unhappy memories for you, Mrs. Garvey. If you take my offer, you can buy a farm somewhere else and build a fine new house, buy brand-new furniture, everything you need to give you a fresh start. You won't always be reminded of what happened to you here.”

“I'd as soon stay,” Rose Garvey said quietly. “And I imagine Jethro would too.”

“Certain sure, I would!” Garvey said emphatically.

“It's a lot of money I'm offering you,” Prosser told him.

“They don't want your money, Prosser,” Captain Tinker said. “But I guess a man like you wouldn't understand how most folks feel about a place they've built with their own hands and lived in for twenty or so years.”

“Tinker, you stay out of this!” Prosser snapped.

“I'm in it up to my scuppers already, and I intend to stay in it!” the Captain shot back. “There's miles and miles of land around this Valley where you can put your railroad tracks down. Go someplace else, and leave these folks alone!”

“I'm not talking to you,” Prosser retorted. “If you'd stayed out of this from the beginning, Hidden Valley would be a lot better off!” He turned back to the Garveys. “Now I've made you folks a good offer. I know that right now you're both tired and upset, and I'm not going to press you to make up your minds tonight. I'll stop back tomorrow—”

“We won't be here,” Garvey said. “We've had offers from a lot of folks to stay with them tonight, and we'll take one of them as soon as we get a few minutes' peace.”

Jessie and Jed had worked their way to Captain Tinker's side while Prosser was talking to the Garveys. The old man looked at Jessie, and his thick white eyebrows went up questioningly. She nodded and moved still closer to his side. Tinker bent toward her.

“You were right, Captain,” Jessie whispered in his ear. “It was arson. Jed and I found traces of coal oil behind the house, just outside the back door.”

“I was pretty sure there'd be some signs, if we looked close enough,” he said. “But it won't do much good unless we can tie it to Prosser, or somebody else connected with the railroad.”

“Aren't you going to face Prosser with it?” she asked.

Tinker shook his head. “Not right now. We need a lot more to go on than we've got. You and Jed just keep quiet.”

Jessie nodded and returned her attention to the discussion between Prosser and the Garveys.

“I'm trying to do you people a favor,” Prosser said. “I'm ready to pay you hard cash, Mr. Garvey, right this minute!” He began taking bundles of banknotes from his coat pockets. Putting them in a thick stack, he waved them in Garvey's face. “Here. This is yours right now, if you take my offer!”