“Roger, he’s here.”
“Is he aboard his boat for San Francisco?”
“Yes, the Chrysopolis.”
Two more days, and we were ready now, and all we could do was lie there and smoke these cigarrillos of hers, that I’d got in the habit of in the last few weeks, and hold each other close, and sometimes tremble a little. “Morina.”
“Yes, Roger?”
“I tell you one thing. If we get away with this, I’m going in the Confederate Army, and so are you. That’s one way we can prove we mean what we say we mean.”
“What can I do in the army?”
“Whatever they’ve got.”
“How about our mine?”
“It’ll have to wait.”
“Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“Then all right.”
The train ran out R Street, but didn’t pick up speed until it passed Seventeenth. She was to buy her ticket early, in the station at the foot of K Street, and keep out of sight until his boat was in and he was aboard the baggage car, which was the first car back of the engine, with the gold. Then she was to keep the station between herself and him, and board the front coach, by the rear end. Then she was to walk through it to a seat up front. She had on her same little traveling dress, with poke bonnet, but in the bonnet she had sewed a ruff, so it was hard to see her face. If anything went wrong, like he didn’t come after all, she was to go to the front platform at Thirteenth Street, take a sandwich out of the basket, unwrap the newspaper around it and throw that off the train, and eat the sandwich. Then she was to ride to Folsom and come back. But I, where I was posted at Seventeenth, would see the paper and keep off, and next day we’d start over.
But here came the train, coasting along easy with the bell ringing, and no newspaper. I looked around, and nobody was in sight. I stepped out from the Chinese laundry on the corner and walked over to the track. Neither the fireman nor the engineer could see me. The engineer hangs out of his cab on the right, where all his signals are, and the fireman doesn’t look anywhere but at his woodpile, as I knew better than anybody else. The locomotive was the Sacramento, and when it came even with me I turned and started to trot beside it up the track. I wasn’t so spry with it as I’d been when I practiced it on the George F. Bragg when Cap Nixon wasn’t looking, as I’d taken the horses up the day before, and had to foot it back, thirteen miles of it, early in the morning. But I had speed enough, and as she pulled ahead and the tender was going by I sprinted a few feet, caught the handhold with my left hand, and the rear tender step with my right foot. That was the hardest thing I had had to learn, I guess, to reverse the natural right-handed, left-footed grab when you’re boarding the left side of the train. But I had it down pat by now, and slammed up against the iron exactly right. I held on a few seconds to get steady, then leaned over to see if I could hear anything in the baggage car. In the compartment next the engine was the Wells, Fargo stuff, in the middle was United States mail, and on the other end was baggage. The partitions had doors in them, but they bolted on the side of the mail, and they stayed bolted, if the mail clerk did what he was supposed to do. In Wells, Fargo, if anybody was riding with the messenger, they generally played cards, and that meant they wouldn’t be noticing much up front, because they’d be below the level of the little window high up in the end door. I heard somebody count high, low, jack, and game, so that part was like I figured on.
Next, I raised up, to see what was going on in the cab. The train had picked up a little now, and if they ran this locomotive like Cap had run his, she was due for a little wood. But the fireman was just looking at the scenery and wasn’t doing anything about wood at all. It came to me, we generally had three times as many cars as this engine was hauling, and probably she didn’t need firing quite as quick. And there wasn’t a thing I could do, because before I could move, the drop gate had to be up, to screen me. The tender has tanks on the sides and at the back, but in the middle is a narrow place filled with wood stacked crosswise, and to keep it from sliding all over the cab there’s a drop gate, an iron plate that runs in grooves between the tanks and that raises with a bar. When you fire, you up with the gate, and I had to have it up, because unless it was, the tips of my fingers, where I’d be sliding along the outside of the tender, could be seen from the cab. And unless it was up, I couldn’t be sure the fireman would be stooped over, pitching chunks into his firebox.
I began to get nervous somebody would see me, from out in a field, and I changed my position, so I’d look like one of the train crew that just happened to be riding there, for some reason. I kept peeping, and then began to wonder what I’d do if we overshot the horses and still I couldn’t move.
Then all of a sudden I heard a squeak, and it was up. I hooked my fingers over the top of the tender, kept my head down, and slid out on the flange that runs around the bottom of the tender body, like a little catwalk. I had practiced it forty times, and I knew exactly how long it would take me to get to the handhold and the step at the front of the tender, just behind the cab. It would be six seconds. This time, though, it took a little longer. I kept worrying about people seeing me from the field, and stopped two or three times to look around, and that slowed me. So far as I could see, I wasn’t seen. It was open country, with nobody around.
When I got my foot on the step and caught the handhold, the fireman was still pitching wood. I had expected to throw down on him, from my coat pocket where I had shifted the gun so I could use it with my left hand, and wigwag him to jump without hollering at the engine driver, because if that hombre threw his reverse bar and shot his steam, I’d be out there in the middle, with a stalled locomotive and five hundred passengers swarming over me and nothing to look forward to but a necktie party that wouldn’t do Jeff Davis any good at all. But when I started to draw I changed my mind. Because when the fireman finished pitching and kicked shut his firebox door, he did what I’d done a thousand times. He stood there gawping at his gauge, hoping for a little rise. His back was to me and I reached for the back collar of his shirt. I grabbed, jerked, and pitched, and out he went on his head, and didn’t move, that I could see, after he hit the dirt. The engineer never noticed a thing, and we kept rolling along, him leaning out of his window, looking straight ahead. I stepped inside, threw down, and touched him on the shoulder. “Jump, pardner, jump.”
He rolled down the other bank, and at last I had my train. But before I could even reach for the throttle, which was still on the notch he had given it, or sound the three shorts on the whistle she was waiting for, there came this jerk that threw me up against the tender, the signal gong snapped once, and there went the cord, whistling over the tender and to hell and gone through the eyehole in the baggage car. That was the first thing I figured out wrong. I don’t know why, but I had been picturing it that if we cut the train back of the baggage car, that’s where the signal cord would part too, and we were ready for what we thought would happen on that basis, because first off we thought all attention, for a minute or two anyway, would be centered behind. But it never occurred to me the cord would break at its weakest point, which of course was the frazzled part next to the gong in the cab. So of course that meant eyes front. So of course that meant Caskie recognizing me where my bandanna slipped off, and opening up without waiting to hear any more.
But that was only the first thing that went wrong. On her end of it, at the wrecked Conestoga wagon she came out on the platform of the first passenger car like she was supposed to, to wait for my whistle signal that would tell her I was cutting the steam so the car would run up and make slack in the coupling, then step across to the baggage car platform, lift the pin, and throw her steel. Then she had things to do with the baggage man when he came running out, if he did. But, like I said, I couldn’t take care of my end of it as soon as I had figured on. And that left her standing there. And the baggage man, when he saw a pretty girl out there, came out and started to chin. So she was afraid to be short with him, and that
put ideas in his head. He began inviting her in with the baggage, and by now she didn’t know what she was going to do about my signal, even if she got it. She had to do something, so she told him she’d come in with him if he’d go back in the car and get her valise, because if she’s in there with him she can’t watch it. So he went on back there. And that was when Mr. Fireman, that had lit on his head and been knocked out for a second, jumped up almost under her feet from where he was laying on the side of the track, and began yelling at the top of his lungs to the people in the passenger cars that train-robbers have stole the engine and they’re holding up the train. She didn’t wait then for any signal. She heaved her spike, and pretty near went head first off the baggage car when the first passenger car went up in the air, then banged down on the ties with a jerk that broke the coupling, then went slamming off to the ditch with the other three cars piling up behind it.
Then she made a mistake. If she had stayed outside where she was, maybe the mail clerk, what with the shooting, the cord, and all, would have figured the excitement was still up front. But she had it in her mind she was to get in with the baggage and lock the baggage man out if she could, and even if he was left behind in the wrecked passenger cars she still supposed that’s what she ought to do. But the mail clerk saw her through his peephole, and did something he wasn’t ever supposed to do. He came back there. “Young woman, what are you doing here?”
“They’re robbing the passengers back there! They’ve cut the train, and there’s a wreck. Can’t you hear the people screaming?”
“I asked you what you’re doing here.”
“I came to warn you.”
“Why didn’t you warn the conductor?”
“I thought he was up here.”
“Where’s the baggage man?”
“I don’t know.”
He took a quick look out back, then ran back in his compartment, opened the door in the forward partition, and hollered at Caskie. In a second he, the Wells, Fargo man, and Caskie were all back there, and of course when Caskie saw her he fitted it all together, like he had before. “Trying it again, hey?”
“Go to hell, Caskie.”
“The last time, though.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. And it’s not going to be any legal hanging either, with maybe a reprieve at the last minute. You’re going to get just what your deadshot friend up there gave George Brewer. You’re going to get it and he’s going to get it. You’ll be given your chance to run, and then when you do I’m going to shoot you both, and get commended by the grand jury for doing my duty, just like he was. That’s a little trick they got down in Mexico, and very good it is.”
“That’s what you think you’re going to do.”
“But first we need a little help.”
He slapped her all over to see if she had a gun, but she didn’t. I had figured these hombres were all fast on the draw, and for her to try to shoot with them was practically the same as suicide. So when he was satisfied, he turned her around so her back was to him, pinned her arms behind her, and began hiking her through the mail compartment up toward the front end door, the one he had opened for shooting purposes.
But me, up front in the cab, I didn’t know about any of that. When Caskie began to shoot, I ducked back of the drop gate, and I just caught one flash of the wreck, and heard some screaming, before I began to shoot back. And then there was some yelling back there in the baggage car, and Caskie ducked away, and the shooting stopped. I just had time to reload when I heard her scream, and then here they came, Caskie carrying her by her elbows, which he had bent behind her, and holding her in front, for a shield, so I couldn’t shoot, while she screamed and kicked and tried to bite. But it wasn’t himself he was screening. It was the mail clerk, who dropped on the floor out of range and began to screw down the brake. And to cover him the Wells, Fargo man got behind Caskie and began shooting at me over Morina’s shoulder.
I kept low and crawled around and closed the throttle. If they were going to stop me anyway I might as well save steam. We slowed down, and as we were coming to a stop, I kept out of sight near the tender and dropped to the ground. The Wells, Fargo man kept shooting, each shot banging against the drop gate like a chunk on a wash boiler. I kept close under, near the wheels, and when they came up even with me, instead of Morina being a screen I had a clear shot. The mail clerk was still screwing the brake, Caskie was too close to Morina, but the Wells, Fargo man, who was the only one shooting, was framed in the door. I dropped him with one shot. Caskie let go of Morina and reached for his gun and she tried to hold on to him. I told her to let go and she did and I drilled him through the heart. That left the mail clerk, but he was already flattened against the car with his hands up, hollering he’s not armed, he’s got no gun, for God’s sake don’t shoot because he can’t do anything. I let him have it in the head, and he toppled over frontwards against the brake and then down the steps to the ground.
“Christ, are you all right?”
“I think so.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Held me, that was all.”
“We got to hurry.”
After I threw the two dead men on the car to the ground beside the mail clerk, I took her with me up to the cab. But before I could move I had to throw on some wood, because the gauge was dropping bad. Then I ran on down to where the horses were, about a mile. They were in a willow grove beside the river, with packs, saddles, and everything ready for her, and she had practiced a hundred times what she had to do. Then I ran down to the ditch, filled my hat with mud, and climbed back in the car for what was next. I wasn’t going to try to lift that iron box full of gold. In my pocket I had powder, that she had sewed into a little silk bag, and a couple of feet of fuse, and some caps. I figured to bust it open and load the money into the saddle bags direct. So I began shaping my mud. But then I noticed two other boxes in there that might have something in them, but what to do with one charge of powder I didn’t know. But at a time like that your head goes like you were crazy. I dragged them over to Caskie’s box, and pushed the three of them together, so two of them were end to end and the other one jammed up to the joint, like you lay bricks. Then I mud-capped the T, so my shot would bear down on all three. I had just lit the fuse and jumped clear when here she came, with the horses. She hopped down, peeled down to the men’s overalls she had under her dress, changed to riding boots, and put on a man’s hat. She had just finished when she gave a scream. I wheeled with my gun out, but it wasn’t a man she was screaming about. It was the train, with our gold on it. It was moving. It was only then I remembered, they sometimes have two mail clerks, and all the time I’d been mud-capping, the second man must have dropped out his side door and crept up the track to the locomotive.
She got to the steps of the baggage car first, and that was when we had the one piece of luck we had all morning. He was too anxious, and when he opened full throttle, stead of going ahead he spun his wheels and the car ran up on the coupling. She lifted the pin and the engine shot ahead like a colt in a meadow, once the wheels took hold. But then she began to say my name in a way that made me turn cold all over. Because in pulling the pin she lost her balance, and there she was, hanging over the rail by one hand, with the car rolling up on her. I didn’t grab for her. If I dropped her she’d lose her legs. I ran up the steps and screwed down the brake, fast. The car stopped. She dropped to the ground and I caught her in my arms. And that was when my mud-cap went off.
Catching those horses, where they broke for the river when that powder went up with a roar, while from Sacramento by now a train must be coming with a posse to get us, and on its way to Folsom was our locomotive that would be coming back with another posse soon, that was one hell of a ten minutes. And yet I’ll remember that sight, of the baggage car spilling its inside out on the bank beside the track, the little time I’ve got left to live. Because the mud-cap busted the boxes all right, but it busted the car floor too, and ou
t on the dirt, in the morning sunshine, came a river of gold, as well as diamonds, sapphires, rubies, and pearls that were in the other two boxes I found. And I’ll never forget the sight of her, either, on her hands and knees clawing that stuff into the bags, with a look on her face like she was some harpy drinking blood. She was still on her hands and knees, and her fingernails were running blood, when I finally had the horses and was ready to go. I said something to her two or three times and she didn’t answer, just kept on digging. Then I stooped down and put my head on the rail. I could hear a hum. “Come on.”
“But there’s more in the ditch.”
“I said come on.”
“Oh! There’s a diamond!”
“Come on!”