Mortified, Lamar began, “Miss, I only meant to offer—”
“Be off,” Bart Stopper said, smacking the deck and the apple back into Lamar’s tray. Miss Stopper covered her face with her lace mitts and choked and gagged as though she’d encountered something unspeakable.
“Now, now, Lucy, that’s all right,” Mrs. Stopper said to the inconsolable girl. Is it my skin? Lamar wondered. He was going through the usual adolescent eruptions.
“You can’t expect anything else,” Stopper said with a dismissive glance at Lamar, who was standing in the aisle with color mounting in his cheeks and his mortification rapidly changing to anger. “You’ve got to remember, this part of America still isn’t civilized. You can’t trust Westerners to behave intelligently in any situation”
Oh, yes? thought Lamar, by now a proud Westerner. I’ll show you. He had no notion of how to do it.
“Papa, he’s still staring at me!” Miss Stopper shrieked.
“Son, you’d better move along or I’ll report you.”
I sure-God hope I never get famous if that’s what it does to a person, Lamar thought, moving along.
A few passengers snickered at his humiliation. Most paid no attention. The express swayed and rattled. Several windows were open in the car, blowing in that hell’s breath, and bits of cinder and specks of soot besides. Lamar glanced out the window to the north. Saw the Platte veering off from the right-of-way out there beyond the flat, tilled fields. They’d left North Platte twenty minutes ago, on their way to Paxton.
“Young man, may we see your wares?” said a kindly looking gentleman in the next seat. He’d witnessed Detective Stopper’s display of arrogance and provincialism and felt bad for the boy who was its victim. The gentleman, in clerical black, was the Reverend Bannis Beechley, a widower, a Unitarian minister from Boston. He too was on a sight-seeing journey with his daughter. Their destination was California.
Unlike Miss Stopper, this girl beamed at Lamar. She was his age, with yellow hair and eyes as pretty as a bluejay’s crest. She blushed when she made eye contact with Lamar. Reverend Beechley scrutinized Lamar’s tray.
“Do you have any uplifting reading material that my daughter, Belle, might enjoy?”
Flustered, Lamar grabbed the first thing he could. “This is a dandy.” A five-cent novel: Jesse James The Valiant!—or—Fighting the Desperadoes in the Valley of Whistling Death. The bright-colored cover illustrated Jesse bravely ventilating some stereotypical evil Mexicans with bullets from his blazing revolvers.
“Well …” Reverend Beechley began, then hesitated.
“It looks perfect,” his daughter sighed, taking it from the peanut butcher and accidentally brushing his tanned hand with her soft white one.
Lamar was electrified. He fell in love instantly.
Reality intruded as the train stopped suddenly, nearly hurling Lamar on his face. “What in blue hell?” he said. Belle Beechley gasped at his worldly vocabulary.
“Is this a regular stop?” a passenger asked.
“No, sir, absolutely not,” said Lamar. “I’ll go see what’s wrong.” He rushed down the aisle toward the nearest door. This took him past the Stoppers. The girl stuck out her tongue at him. He caught a glimpse of Bart Stopper’s silver-plated revolver, revealed in its shoulder rig when the detective stood up. Stopper patted his wife. “If there’s trouble, I’m prepared.”
Lamar dashed past a worried Xerxes Johnson to the platform. Redbird was already on the ground. In a farmer’s field directly north of the right-of-way—a large field of unusual triangular shape—a motionless man in a straw hat stood with one hand on the flank of his plow horse. The man was a stark, black shape against the white sky. Like the Reaper himself, he frightened Lamar somehow.
Redbird and Lamar rushed to the head of the train, where Swanny, the engineer, and Weathers, the fireman, were already down from the cab, scratching their heads. Spikes had been pried up. A rail dislodged and pulled sideways. It was bent out and away from the next rail for a foot or more.
“Old Injun trick,” the engineer said, mystified.
“The Indians are pacified,” Redbird said ominously.
Lamar pointed to the disturbed earth near the roadbed. “Look, there was a shod horse there.”
“Sure, had to be a horse, and a damn strong one,” Redbird said. “A man couldn’t do this by himself.”
“But who would?” asked Lamar.
Weathers grabbed Redbird’s braided sleeve and pointed. In the triangular field, the man was moving with slow deliberate steps away from his massive plow horse, toward a farm wagon parked at the edge of the field. It was a stark, somehow sinister image: that solitary black figure walking across the land. The only thing moving in the immensity of prairie and sky.
“What a fix,” Weathers groaned.
“Any trains due?” asked Lamar.
Redbird consulted his big silver turnip. “Not for an hour and nine minutes.”
The engineer said, “Weathers, you’ll have to ride shank’s mare into Paxton, inform the dispatcher of our predicament so he can alert the other traffic on the line, and then bring a handcar crew to repair this. Going to put us a good three, four hours behind schedule, but it can’t be helped.”
“I don’t like this,” Redbird muttered. “Why don’t I like this?”
Nobody answered him. Lamar didn’t like it either. He heard the sound of passengers clattering off the train, anxiously asking questions and complaining. Xerxes manfully did his best to placate and console them. Lamar watched the distant figure continue its slow-paced walk to the wagon. His youthful scalp began to crawl. Why, why with the farmer so far away that he was a mere toy figure, did Lamar have the feeling the man was watching them?
The farmer reached his wagon and took something long and stick-like from the seat. He put it to his shoulder. “That sucker’s got a gun,” Redbird cried, spewing spirits from the bottle still at his mouth.
The rifle’s boom was followed by the cry of Weathers, who clutched his breast and fell face down, dead.
Carl Lukendorf’s hands trembled, reveling in the feel of the avenging weapon. It was his pride: a .44-40 Winchester, ’73 model, with a fifteen-round magazine. He said a prayer in German, asking that his next shot fly as true as the first. This time he intended to fire from a much closer range.
He began to walk toward the stalled train. The passengers were scrambling back aboard.
Lukendorf was short, with an old man’s paunch and a cast in one blue eye. He and his wife had come over to America and homesteaded in Nebraska, full of hope for a fine new life with a large, joy-filled family. After several years the couple reluctantly decided that Nathalie would never bear children, for whatever cruel and capricious reason they could not fathom. All right, at least they had each other.
In addition to their farm, the Lukendorfs operated a prosperous little inn and way station on the Platte River coach road. They were industrious people, working eighteen or twenty hours a day, first to tend the farm, then to cook and clean for their guests of the night.
When the Union Pacific—the unfeeling, uncaring, monster corporation—built west in the late 1860s, the line surveyors—terrible, heartless men—swung the route south of the river, starting at North Platte. The old stage and wagon road was quickly rendered obsolete. Business dropped off, and instead of making a tiny amount of money from their inn, the Lukendorfs rapidly lost money. They’d closed the inn three years ago.
Further, the U.P. surveyors, armed with legal documents establishing their land grants, had run their route diagonally across a large portion of Lukendorf’s farm. This created triangular parcels, with short furrows that were ungodly hard to plow because of the need to make frequent turns. Lukendorf could do nothing about it, except to perform the grueling work year after year.
Yesterday, at nightfall, Doc Viquesny had drawn Carl Lukendorf into the doorway and struck the final, back-breaking blow.
“Carl, this is bitter to say, but I can
’t help Nathalie. No one can reverse a cancer of the mouth and tongue. The same disease is killing President Grant back East. You’ll have to resign yourself to losing your wife, probably within a year.”
Lukendorf, not a soft man, wept openly. The doctor was attempting to console him when Lukendorf’s tears abruptly dried up, and the farmer turned on him with his good eye rolling madly.
“I know who did this to me.”
“Carl, no one’s responsible for—”
“God did this to me. God and the railroad.”
After Nathalie fell into a restless sleep, he took the oiled cloth wrapping off of his Winchester Model ’73.
They dragged Weathers’ body behind the locomotive. The engineer looked undone. Redbird kept swigging from his bottle. Five minutes passed. Lamar was a helpless observer.
“Who is that crazy man out there?” Swanny asked rhetorically.
“I don’t know,” Redbird said. “But he’s sure as hell intent on hurting somebody.”
Lamar and the others swung around at the sound of shoes crunching along the roadbed. Here came Stopper, natty derby tilted down over his snapping eyes at a challenging angle. His shoe tips shone like black mirrors. As he walked, he twirled the cylinder of his revolver, an ostentatious .44 American from S&W, silver-plated, elaborately engraved with scrolls and whirls, and fitted with custom ivory grips. Truly a deluxe piece.
Stopper confronted them. “I demand to know what’s going on.”
“If we knew, we’d tell you,” Swanny said in a miserable tone.
“Somebody tore up a piece of track. We can’t get by,” Redbird said.
“We could back up,” Lamar said.
Redbird and the engineer looked at Lamar as if he were Jehovah and had just handed down a surprising new commandment. “Let me relieve myself, and we’ll go,” Swanny exclaimed, breaking out in smiles.
Stopper nudged Weathers’ body with a black-mirrored toe. “This man’s dead.”
“That’s about right,” Redbird agreed, untying his bandanna and wiping his face, which was now darker than the cloth.
“It’s my duty to arrest the murderer.”
“Oh, why take any chances?” Redbird said. “We’ve got women and children to think about.” Lamar heard water trickling behind him, but he was mesmerized by the hot-eyed detective.
“Because I’m a lawman. You let me handle this.”
With a swaggering air of confidence, Stopper flipped up his S&W and gave the cylinder another ominous, clicking twirl. Then he stepped past the cowcatcher, raising the pistol chest high. He crossed the track, staring intently at the field. He halted suddenly.
“Where the hell is he?” Stopper asked, his eyes searching the prairie. Lamar peeked around and saw the plow, the plow horse, the wagon, all in silhouette against the white sky. The man was gone. Heat lightning flickered up Canada way.
Lamar screwed up his nerve and walked around the cowcatcher. Someone in one of the cars exclaimed in alarm. Lamar whirled and saw a hunched-over figure near the train, moving in a crab-like run. The farmer. He flung up his rifle.
Stopper struck a pose and whipped his silver-plated .44 forward at arm’s length, shoulder high.
“You’re under arrest.”
Lukendorf dropped to one knee and shot him.
Stopper squealed, blown back onto the tracks when the bullet found his shoulder. His derby flew off and he lay supine, his pistol resting on his chest like a silver lily.
Lukendorf whipped the rifle around and fired a shot at the train, and another, and another. Glass shattered. Fat splinters of wood flew every which way. Women shrieked. Men yelled. Kneeling there on the prairie, a clear target, unharmed, Lukendorf kept on firing. Petrified, Lamar ran back across the track to the others.
Swanny, no longer smiling, relieved himself again, this time unintentionally. Even Redbird, always the master of situations, looked peaked. “Jesus Christ, he is crazy,” he said.
And then, from nowhere, it fell into Lamar Tisdale’s thoughts: This is my snakehead!
He didn’t want the burden. But everyone else seemed totally confused and helpless, exhibiting none of the courage or quick wits of the heroes in the Beadle novels he hawked in the cars. The sight of Stopper prodded him too. Stopper had insulted Westerners. Stopper had said they didn’t know how to behave intelligently in any situation.
A hoarse voice called from the train. “There’s a man down in here!”
“If that madman has enough bullets, we’ll all die,” Swanny cried. “Somebody stop him!”
“Who?” Redbird shouted. “Who?”
“Mr. Seelbinder.” Lamar yanked the braided sleeve. “Mr. Seelbinder, I’m going to try something.”
“What, run for help?” Redbird belched, weaving on his feet. He clutched one of the great engine drivers for support. He’d fortified himself too liberally.
“No, sir, something else. I’ve got a scheme.”
“Why, that’s the silliest, maddest—”
“Mr. Seelbinder, you’re drunk,” Lamar exclaimed, prodded to anger by his despair. “Nobody else is doing anything—”
“Because we’re whipped,” Swanny said.
“We are if we say we are,” Lamar protested. Redbird paid no attention. He tilted his bottle and guzzled. “Oh, hell,” Lamar cried. He snatched the bottle, leaped on the cowcatcher, and jumped down on the other side.
It took Redbird a moment to realize that his hand no longer contained a bottle. The terror of deprivation infused him with courage. “Come here, you give me that!” He lunged past the cowcatcher in pursuit of Lamar, who now stood in the open, all watery in the knees.
“Give that back, you crazy rapscallion,” cried Redbird in quavering tones.
Lamar didn’t dare look toward the farmer. If he did, he’d fall apart with fright. He commenced dancing around, kicking up his heels and rolling his head from side to side in a lunatic way. He uttered nonsense words, roughly approximating yiii-yiii-yiii, with maximum lung power.
Redbird was agog, staring at the caterwauling youngster dancing around beside the cowcatcher.
Suddenly Lamar flung the bottle away into the field and hopped backwards, thumbing his nose. “Yah, yah!” he cried, windmilling his arms and then turning a somersault. As he flipped over, he had a weird, upside-down view of the farmer standing near the train, the faintly smoking rifle in his hands.
The farmer observed Lamar and the conductor, and raised the rifle. With a cry, Redbird loped for cover. “Dern boy’s lost his mind. Must be scared. Thought he was made solider than that. …”
His heart hammering like a sinner’s before the Judgment Throne, Lamar went skipping through the weeds toward the farmer.
He’d never been so frightened in all his days. He flapped his arms and lolled his tongue and rolled his eyes around. He jiggled his head back and forth like a scarecrow in a cyclone, and soon he came within thirty feet of the terrible stout man with the wild blue eye.
Lukendorf brought the rifle up and levered another shell into the chamber.
“You, boy, stop right there.”
Twenty feet away, Lamar danced and chanted madly. He spun like a dervish. He spit out everything in his mouth, hoping it bore some resemblance to foam.
Ten feet—
“Boy, you keep coming at me, I’ll shoot you.”
Lamar kept coming. He gnashed his teeth and yanked his hair.
“What’s happening, Papa?” That was Belle Beechley, inside the train.
“I don’t know, Belle. The poor lad’s apparently having some kind of fit.”
Five feet—
Lukendorf stepped back a pace, uncertain. He shouldered the Winchester and aimed at Lamar.
Lamar sprang in the air, fell back, landed hard and painfully on his spine, knocked nearly dizzy. Don’t pass out, don’t pass out, he said to himself. He thrashed wildly on the ground, moaning, beating his head from side to side.
Suddenly he arched his back. He beat his heels on the
ground and bit his lips and uttered a long, piercing wail. He flopped down again and shut his eyes and lay motionless, his chest heaving.
He listened.
Silence. Absolute silence.
Then crunching footsteps. Oh God, he’s going to put a shell in my head.
The footsteps stopped. Lamar squinted his eyes open. Saw the farmer towering over him, a queer expression on his face. He no longer looked wrathful, merely old and worn out.
“Boy?” Carl Lukendorf said. “What’s the matter with you?”
The rifle hung at the farmer’s side. Lamar let out a light, fluttery moan.
“Are you sick? You need a sawbones?”
Lamar rolled over and slapped both hands on the hot metal barrel. Lukendorf swore in German and kicked at Lamar’s head. But the farmer didn’t have a tight grasp on the piece, and Lamar got it away with one stout yank. He dodged the German’s dung-caked plow shoe, panting, and whirled around and around and sailed the rifle high up into the air, away on the other side of the steaming, hissing locomotive.
“Mr. Seelbinder! Pick up Stopper’s gun and get him,” Lamar yelled.
Lukendorf turned and ran across the triangular field. But it was a lumbering, shambling, tired old run, as if he knew it was all up.
They had him behind bars in Paxton two hours later. The sentencing judge gave him life imprisonment by reason of insanity.
The exciting, not to say blood-freezing, events of that morning in Nebraska changed Lamar Tisdale’s life forever. He decided that he was cut out for bolder things than peanut butchering. Although he had instantly conceived a dislike of Bart Stopper, the man’s profession intrigued him. Many years later, in San Francisco, Lamar was the highly successful and affluent operator of the Golden Gate Police Detective Agency, which employed one hundred nineteen operatives throughout California and the Southwest. He paid for C. O. Seelbinder’s care at a decent old folks’ home in Berkeley until the old conductor died at ninety-three.
One day Lamar had a rare opportunity for revenge. Stopper, now an aging derelict discharged by Pinkerton’s for insobriety and general ineptitude, turned up in Lamar’s office begging for work. Stopper didn’t recognize the agency’s owner. Lamar wanted to rebuff him by saying something like, “Sorry, Stopper, we hire only Westerners; they can deal intelligently with any situation.”