The Railroad War (13 page)

Garvey looked at the stack of money, and then down at his wife. She shook her head. He said, “You got your answer, Mr. Prosser. Now just go away and let us be, will you?”

“You don't seem to understand,” Prosser insisted. “I'm offering you a good price for a few acres of farmland and a burned-down shell of a house!”

“You're trying to get hold of our land so your pick-and-shovel crews can rip it up and put down railroad tracks!” Garvey broke in. “You're not pulling any wool over our eyes.”

Prosser shook his head sadly. “You folks have just been listening to a lot of ugly lies.” He paused for a moment, then went on, “I'll tell you what I'll do, Mr. Garvey.” Groping in his coat pocket, he produced two more sheaves of bills. “I'll raise my last offer by two thousand dollars. That's more than this place of yours was worth with your house still standing.”

Garvey bent over his wife's shoulder and asked her, “Does that sound any better to you, Rose?”

She shook her head. “I feel just the same as I did when we were talking before Mr. Prosser got here, Jethro. We'll go ahead and move our stuff into the barn and live there while we're building a new house.”

Straightening up, Garvey faced the railroad agent again. “I guess you heard what she said, Mr. Prosser. We won't be taking your offer.”

“All right!” Prosser snapped. “But I warn you right now, you'll live to regret this!”

Cramming his derby down on his head, Prosser pushed rudely through the crowd, and while all eyes turned to watch his departure, he found his buggy and drove away.

“Well, he won't bother you anymore for a while,” Captain Tinker observed. “And don't worry too much. Things will work out all right.”

“We know they will, Captain,” Garvey said. “We've had all the furniture we'll need offered to us already, so we can move into the barn right away and be real comfortable.”

“And whatever else you need, let me know,” Tinker told him. “I'll see that you get it.”

“That goes for us too,” a fresh voice said behind Jessie.

She and the Captain turned. Jed Clemson and an older couple had moved through the dispersing crowd.

“Jessie, I'd like you to meet my folks,” Jed said. “My mother and father. I've been telling them about you.”

“I'm Henry Clemson, and this is Alice,” Jed's father said. “Both of us feel like we know the Starbuck family as well as we do our own kin, after hearing Bob talk about your father for all these years.”

“You'll have to come for supper, when you've got time,” Alice Clemson said. “You tell Jed when, and I'll fix you up a real Hidden Valley meal. We don't live too far from here, right over that way.”

As she spoke, Mrs. Clemson half-turned and extended her hand to point in the direction of their home. Jessie's eyes followed the pointing finger, and her gasp caused the other to look as well. A patch of red was beginning to color the sky where Alice Clemson was pointing.

“Oh, dear God, don't let it be our house!” Mrs. Clemson exclaimed. “We left Peony there by herself!”

“It is our house, Alice,” Clemson said. His voice was calm, but strained. “Or one of our barns. There's nothing else where that blaze is that would burn. But Peony's able to take care of herself.” He turned to Jed. “Bob will look after your mother, Jed. Let's go!”

Jed and Henry Clemson had come on saddle horses to the fire, leaving Mrs. Clemson to follow in a buggy. The departure of the Clemson men, and their shouts as they spurred past the departing firefighters, got help moving fast. Others, of course, had seen the slowly growing patch of red, and were whipping up their horses even before they heard the shouting. What had begun as a leisurely departure became a small stampede as the weary men who'd fought the Garvey fire rushed to quell the new blaze.

This time a series of circumstances combined to make the firefighters' job easier. They had their transportation ready; no time had to be spent in hitching up a buggy or wagon. Their horses were fresh after having rested for nearly two hours after galloping from town to the first fire, and the distance to the blaze was not quite two miles, instead of more than six.

Most importantly, the Clemson house was built of logs, not boards. The flames could not eat through the solid wood and ignite the walls inside the house, and the lessened intensity of the heat allowed the firefighters to get close, instead of forcing them to attack the flames from a distance. The house's major point of vulnerability was its roof, and the fire had not climbed to the eaves when most of the volunteers arrived.

Jed and Henry had gotten home several minutes ahead of the others leaving the Garvey house. When they'd arrived, they found fifteen-year-old Peony already attacking the blaze, scooping up shovelfuls of dirt from the dry soil a few feet from the house, and tossing the dirt on the wall. Some of the dirt fell to the ground before reaching the wall, but the remainder landed on the house and smothered an area as big as the span of a man's outspread hands. Jed and Henry had wasted no time in running to the barn for shovels and following Peony's example.

When the other men arrived and saw how effective the dirt was in smothering the creeping flames, they adopted the same method. Most of them carried a spade or shovel in their wagons, and many who had buckets used them to scoop up dirt. A solid line of men was soon working shoulder to shoulder along each side. Within less than a half-hour from the time the fire had started, it was being attacked by exhausted but still willing workers.

Where thin, creeping tongues of flame had reached the low eaves and kindled the vulnerable shakes that covered the roof, the men with buckets formed a line from the well to the house and doused the roof. Then the bucket brigade turned its attention to the walls. Thin tongues of smoke were trickling from the logs here and there, where some dormant sparks remained, but these vanished when a bucket of water was splashed on them. Though the flames had girdled almost the entire house when the volunteers arrived from the earlier blaze, the fire was extinguished with surprising speed.

Alice Clemson had been worried and anxious when Captain Tinker's buggy wheeled up and stopped in front of the house, but when she'd seen how quickly the fire was yielding, she said to Jessie, “That fire's not really going to hurt our house, is it?”

“No,” Jessie replied. “The log walls are going to save it.”

“Then as soon as we're sure it's safe, I'm going to go in and make coffee and see what I've got in the pantry that I can feed those poor men. They haven't had any rest for hours!”

“I think it's perfectly safe to go in now,” Jessie said. “You can see the fire's going to be completely out in just a few more minutes. I'll come along and help you.”

Between them, Alice and Jessie made coffee and, while it was brewing, sliced what had been left of a beef roast that had been the Clemsons' supper, and made sandwiches. When the firefighters found their job brought to such a quick and unexpected end, they stood around drinking coffee and eating and swapping stories of their experiences in fighting the two fires.

“Let's don't forget to give Peony credit for saving the house, though,” Henry Clemson reminded them. “She was so quick to figure out that dirt would put the fire out faster than water, that all the rest of us had to do was follow her example.”

“How'd you happen to think of shoveling dirt instead of using water, Peony?” Captain Tinker asked the girl.

“I just remembered when we had picnics and how Papa and Jed put out fire with dirt,” Peony replied. “I knew I wasn't strong enough to haul a lot of water up from the well.”

“You sure did the right thing, sis,” Jed said. “But how'd you know the house was on fire? Did you look out the window?”

“No. Well, I did, but I might not have if I hadn't heard somebody outside and looked to see if you and Mama and Papa were coming home.” She frowned and added, “I don't remember exactly what I heard, because that was when I saw the fire and got excited.”

“You didn't see anybody running away?” her father asked.

“No, sir.” Peony frowned. “There wasn't any fire when I first went to the window, either. It seemed like it started all at once, right about the time I looked out.”

“Well, if we had any doubt about the fire being deliberately set, that oughta settle it,” Henry said soberly.

Captain Tinker nodded. “It was set, all right.” He turned to Jessie and went on, “Pick up that lantern, Jessie, and let's walk around and take a close look at those walls.”

Any doubts they might have had vanished when the group fell in behind the Captain and Jessie and started walking around the house, inspecting the scars left by the fire. The pattern of the flames was marked clearly by the charred areas.

“Somebody walked along there with a bucket of coal oil and splashed it on the wall,” Captain Tinker said, pointing with his cane at the series of burned arcs that ran along the wall. “You men have seen what happens when you slosh a bucket of water on a wall. It makes a mark just like this, a curve where most of the water hits, and a wider streak where it spreads when it runs down. Only this wasn't water running down, it was coal oil.”

Jessie had been holding the lantern close to the logs at the top of one of the arcs. Now she said, “You can see something else, if you look closely. A normal fire burns hottest at the bottom, but these burned places are deeper at the top, where there was the most coal oil on the logs.”

“And there's not any question about it,” Jed said. He put his hand on his sister's shoulder. “Peony saved our house.”

“No doubt about that,” Tinker agreed. He turned to the others and went on, “I haven't had time until now to tell you men that whoever set the Garvey place on fire started that one with coal oil too. Jessie found proof of that, places where there were coal-oil smears on the flagstones of that path Jethro built back of his house.”

“It's that damned railroad outfit,” one of the volunteers said grimly. “What we oughta do is catch that son of a bitch Prosser and douse
him
with coal oil and touch a match to him.”

“That wouldn't do a bit of good.” Captain Tinker exchanged glances with Jessie, who still stood beside him, holding the lantern. Jessie understood the question in his look, and nodded. The Captain went on, “If we got rid of Prosser, the railroad would just send somebody else to take his place.”

“That might be,” growled the man who'd just spoken. “But Colt and Winchester can turn out cartridges quicker than the railroad can find rowdies and hire ‘em.”

“The Captain's right,” Jed Clemson said. “The railroad wants the land around the passes, and if Prosser can't buy it, they're ready to take it.”

“It'll be a cold day in hell before I sell ‘em any land of mine,” one of the others growled. “Prosser's been nosing around my place too, trying to buy me out, but I say let 'em put their damned tracks someplace else.”

“They quit offering to buy my place,” a third put in. “Now they're threatening to go to law and take it away from me because they claim I ain't got a deed to the land.”

“Can they do that, Captain Tinker?” asked the man who'd started the discussion.

“Maybe so and maybe not,” Tinker replied. “But every one of you men bought your land from me, and if you'll remember, I told you to be sure to take the deeds I gave you and file them at the courthouse. If you did that, the railroad couldn't touch you.”

“Deed or no deed,” the man grumbled, “it's a damned poor law that don't let a man keep what he's bought and paid for.”

“A man named Dickens wrote a book once where he said the law is a jackass, Ben,” Tinker said with a wry grin. “I suppose he was right about it, not that it helps us any right this minute.”

“What we'd better do up here is what the ranchers are doing at the south pass,” Jed said. “They've got men standing guard day and night to keep the railroad from setting foot on any land they haven't bought and paid for.”

“Now I'd go right along with that,” agreed the man who'd mentioned Colt and Winchester. He turned to Captain Tinker. “If you want to give us a hand, Cap‘n, you'd get a bunch of us set up in a posse that could do like the ranchers are.”

“It might come down to that in the end,” Tinker admitted. “But before we go that far, wouldn't it be smarter if we used the law to help us instead of trying to set up our own law?”

“Just how do you mean that?”

“You men haven't had a chance yet to meet this little lady here,” Tinker said, indicating Jessie. “Most of you know where I got the land I sold you, there's not many who haven't heard me talk about Alex Starbuck. This is Miss Jessie Starbuck, and she's come to Nevada Territory all the way from Texas to help me prove that by law I had a right to sell your land to you.”