Somewhere between the fringes of the Nevada desert and the Sierra Nevada mountains of eastern California, the painful scraping of metal on metal sent a shock through the train. People crowded to the windows to see what the trouble was. Outside, the surrounding trees and hills dribbled to a slow crawl before the train ground to a complete stop.
The engineer jumped down from the engine and walked along the side of the track toward the back of the train. Dozens of passengers called out to him as he passed. “What’s going on? Why have we stopped?”
At first, the engineer growled under his breath but pretty soon, he bowed to the inevitable and answered the passengers. “We’re broke down.”
“What!” the passengers shouted back in rising alarm. “How?”
Apparently, the engineer possessed no answer sufficiently convincing to explain the situation, so he simply ordered them all out of the train. “Take only what you want to carry. Come on down.”
“But where are we going?” the passengers asked.
“The Truckee station isn’t more than twenty miles up the track.” The engineer pointed westward. “We can walk the rest of the way there. We’ll send someone out from town to fix the train.”
Gasps of shock rippled up and down the cars. “But we can’t walk all that way!”
“You can wait here, if you prefer,” the engineer answered back. “I don’t know how long it will be before anyone comes out to get you, but you’re welcome to stay if you want.”
“But what about our luggage!” a woman cried.
“Leave it here,” the engineer instructed. “Don’t take anything you can’t carry for a good long while. Your luggage will be perfectly safe here. Now, come on. Let’s go.”
The most venturesome passengers stepped down. Once the first people started moving up the railroad line away from the train, others followed, until a steady stream of people walked, some gingerly, some with difficulty, along the line into the western mountains. The morning sun brightened the tips of the mountain peaks, and the passengers trembled in chilly morning air.
Jesse offered Alice his hand to help her down the step to the ground. Sharp stones lined the tracks, and she found her thin shoes particularly ill-suited to walking on them. Within a few steps, her feet smarted with the strain, and she had to place each step carefully to avoid twisting her ankles. As it was, the cruel rocks poked through the leather soles of the shoes, making every step a torture.
Alice took her hand bag with her, but other passengers, mostly women, couldn’t bear to leave their possessions. They lugged heavy valises and carpet bags, struggling at every step. One by one, their owners discarded these bags by the side of the tracks with many tears. Bitter arguments broke out between those encouraging the owners to abandon the bags and those who couldn’t bear to part with them.
Only once, just after the passengers deserted their stricken train, one of the conductors strode through the crowd still bunched in clusters near the track. He answered those questions asked of him and offered additional assurance that the Truckee station wasn’t too far off. They would reach it easily by walking, and then someone would come back, fetch the train, and carry them on to their destination. In the meantime, he suggested, they should enjoy their walk through the beautiful countryside of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Some people, he told them, travel all the way across the country just to see them. They should count themselves lucky to experience them now.
Alice panted as she walked, fighting for breath. “The mountains really are beautiful,” she puffed. “I don’t think anyone back East who hasn’t see them first hand can imagine them.”
Jesse followed her gaze up to the tops of the peaks. “Yes. It makes up for all the hardship of the journey. I’m glad I left Greensborough.”
Alice eyed him. “You are?”
Jesse nodded up toward the towering mountains and the clear sky. “I wouldn’t want to live my whole life without seeing this. When I was back East, I thought the West was an empty waste with nothing to recommend it. Now I see how much potential it has. It only wants a few good men and women to grasp hold of it to make it as good as the East or better. It makes you want to roll up your shirt sleeves and get to work.”
Alice marveled at his intensity. “I didn’t realize before this trip that you knew so much about so many things and were so competent in so many diverse situations. You’ve mastered every obstacle this trip has thrown in our way.”
Jesse kept his eyes on the ground in front of his feet, lost in thought. “This trip has changed me somehow. I know now that I can handle any situation I encounter.” He glanced briefly at the well-dressed men toiling over the stones alongside the railroad tracks. “I know I can handle a lot more than most people can. I will accomplish anything I set my mind to.”
Alice hooked her arm through the hook in his elbow. “You surely will. People will depend on you and gravitate toward you. You have a kind of magnetism that captivates people. I’ve seen it in you ever since we left Greensborough. Maybe that’s why it’s taken me so long to recognize you for who you really are—here and now.”
He grinned sideways at her. “All I really need is a good woman to face life with me. I need a woman who will roll up her sleeves and get to work along with me.”
She grinned back. “You mean someone like me?”
“I don’t know,” Jesse countered. “Are you ready to roll up your sleeves?”
“I could be,” she answered. “if I was doing it for you.”
The hours ticked past, and the passengers labored up the hill toward a high pass between the mountains, where the railroad tracks crossed into the next valley. Couples and small groups occasionally stopped to rest along the way, sometimes for quite a long time, and so the procession stretched out to a long line of stragglers.
At one point, they walked by an elderly couple slumped on a fallen log. The woman’s carpet bag lay in a heap at her feet, and the two poor souls didn’t raise their grey heads to acknowledge Alice and Jesse as they passed. The image of utter destitution presented by the old couple reminded Alice of her aching joints and overwhelmed her with fatigue. “Let’s stop for a minute,” she suggested to Jesse. “I don’t think I can take another step.” She gravitated toward the edge of the track, searching the ground with her eyes for a place to sit down.
But Jesse held her back. “We have to keep going.”
“I’m exhausted!” Alice complained.
“I know you’re tired,” Jesse replied. “I’m tired, too. But we have to keep going until we get to Truckee. The longer we sit here, the longer it will take, and we’ll never get there. We don’t want to spend the night out here. It could get mighty cold, and we don’t have a single blanket between the whole pack of us. We could freeze to death.”
“I don’t think I can go any further,” Alice moaned. “I have to rest.”
“You can do it,” Jesse commanded. “Come on. Take my hand. I’ll do it with you. Come on. We’ll do it together.”
Bit by bit, step by step, he induced her to keep walking. The steady pressure of his hand gripping her fingers strengthened her resolve to keep going. Jesse himself joined his step with a pair of cowboys, whose stout boots carried them over the rocky terrain more easily than the traveling shoes of the other passengers. Jesse matched their pace, thereby compelling himself to move faster, and towed Alice along with her.
He interrogated the cowboys about life in the West. His questions principally revolved around the character and make up of the average small town, where they and their associates bought their clothes and took them for repair, and how the towns on the frontier grew with the arrival of different trades and services. They confirmed the intelligence Alice received from Maggie. The growth of the towns and the comfort and lifestyle of the population depended entirely in the influx of skilled trades of people selling their services. Until they arrived and settled permanently in any given area, the frontier remained an wasteland. Jesse noted their comments with keen interest. Alice listened and tried to pay attention, if for no other reason than to take her mind off the agony of her feet.
The summit of the pass crept slowly closer, as the line of passengers extended farther and farther behind them as one party after another dropped off to the side. As Alice and Jesse approached the crest of the hill, the tracks passed a rivulet of water rushing through the trees. The cowboys stopped here to wet their faces and take a drink of the foaming water, and Alice and Jesse joined them. Alice formed a bowl by cupping her hands together, bathed her flushed cheeks, and quenched her thirst. When she stood up, she looked back down the hill in the direction they came.
The train sat on the tracks in the distance like a toy, while the line of passengers inched along the track like so many ants marching toward their hole. At the very end of the line, in the same place Alice remembered passing them before, sat the elderly couple on their log with their carpet bag between the old lady’s feet. They hadn’t moved since Alice suggested she and Jesse rest there with them.
Jesse looked down the hill with her, but he mistook the meaning of her gaze. “You see?” he pointed out. “We’re almost there. If we just keep going, we’ll be in Truckee soon enough.”
“Look, Jesse,” Alice pointed to the elderly couple. “Those people. They’re still in the same place. They look like they’re in trouble.”
Jesse saw them, but still failed to understand. “And to think we would still be there if I let you stop to rest. Aren’t you glad we’re here, nearly at the top of the pass, and not down there, with the whole climb ahead of us?”
Alice dried her hands on the skirts of her dress. “I’m going back. They might need help.”
“What are you going to do that for?” Jesse exclaimed. “You’ll have to walk all the way back up that hill, if you do.”
“I’d rather walk all the way down there and all the way back up here and all the way on to Truckee than to leave them behind,” Alice declared. “They’re old. They could be in trouble. I’m going back.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” Jesse grumbled. He shot a glance at the two cowboys, who listened curiously to their exchange.
“I don’t know what you’re supposed to do,” Alice replied. “You can wait here if you want, or you can go on to Truckee and I’ll catch up later. I won’t leave them behind. I can’t leave them. Like you just said, it could just as easily have been us down there.”
Jesse scowled at her, considering what to do. “I’ll go on to Truckee. Come on, you fellas. Once we get there, we’ll send out some wagons to pick up the stragglers. Once we reach the top of the pass, we’ll make better time going downhill.” He dropped Alice a curt nod. “I’ll see you later.”