As soon as he saw the train, the lookout gave the signal. She came around the bend past his hiding place and went into the cut like some great prehistoric beast, roaring, clanking, her carriages swaying, smoke bellowing as the two locomotives put their backs into taking her up the gradient of Sweetwater Cut. She was a big train, and very special, with those two gaudy UP locos up front. Heading her up was Engine Number 47, ‘Grizzly Bear’—one of Matthias Baldwin’s 4-4-0s—but Number 47, impressive though she was, couldn’t begin to compare with the huge ten-wheel ‘White Fox’ behind her. Great gleaming reflector lamps above her cow-catcher, bright brass-work shining all around the cabin with its comfortably padded driving seats, ‘White Fox’ was one of the showpieces of the Union Pacific stable and nobody was more proud of her than her engineer, Patrick Grady. Inside the cabin, he gave the Fox a quarter-turn more throttle, then leaned out of his window and checked back along the length of the train.
Immediately behind his tender, Grady could see the 45-foot express car, with the armed guards on the platform at both ends, riot guns slung from their shoulders on leather loops. Behind the express car were two ornate Silver Palace Pullman carriages, each of them a good sixty feet long; and behind these was a smoking car equally as long. Five ordinary—at least from the outside—passenger coaches made up the rest of the train’s length. She took the best part of ten minutes to pass the hiding place of the lookout on the bluff above the entrance to the Cut. He watched her go up the slight incline with the furling smoke laid back across the tops of the carriages like a fur collar. He smiled—not with pleasure—and gave the second signal.
Engineer Pat Grady nodded as he pulled his head inside the cabin: all well. He laid his gnarled hand on the whistle cord and gave it a long, considered pull, grinning as the sudden screech of the whistle bounced off the rocky face of the cut alongside the train and startled wood pigeons burst out of the trees below in a panicking blur of gray and white. He fished his big gold turnip watch out of a vest pocket—a presentation from the president of the Union Pacific Railroad himself—and checked the time: 2:33. On time, he thought with satisfaction. It was a matter of pride with him, and indeed every engineer on the road, to keep to the schedule no matter what. Grady was an old sweat. He’d been with UP since the beginning, starting as a wiper swabbing caked oil from the engines back in the roundhouse in Kansas City, working his way up the ladder to the lofty position of engineer, perversely proud of being half-homeless (a man never knew on Monday where he’d be sleeping on Wednesday night, they used to say). One of his most valued possessions was a photograph of the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, the day the UP and the CP lines had met to complete the transcontinental railroad—May 10, 1869—and the president of the UP, Leland Stanford, there to drive the last spike. Even if he’d missed the first time, it was a wonderful day. Grady had found himself a good spot on the side of Engine Number 119 just abaft the smokestack, and he’d stood there in his high boots, his flat peaked cap at a jaunty angle and his hand on his hip to keep him steady while the photographer shouted out the long seconds. Everyone always said what a fine portrait of him it was. It was such a career that finally brought a man like Grady to where he was now: being in charge of this Special was the most important job he’d ever had or was ever likely to have. And he meant to see that there were no slip-ups, none at all. He slid a sideways glance at his fireman, Harry Owney, a thick-set, red-faced, long-armed man, whose very expression proclaimed the nationality that was evident in his brogue when he spoke.
‘Right on time,’ Grady shouted above the engine noise.
Owney nodded.
‘We’ll be in Cheyenne by four,’ he observed.
‘Aye,’ Grady said, nodding as though pleased—which he was. They would make Cheyenne, Wyoming, comfortably by four in the afternoon, right on schedule. He was looking forward to the welcome they would receive, as they had been welcomed in other towns and cities across the country: after all, this was no ordinary train. He wondered if they had a brass band in Cheyenne. Very fond of a bit of brass band music, Grady was.
‘I wonder if they’ll have a brass band, then?’ he shouted to Owney.
‘Sure and they ought to,’ Owney yelled back. ‘At the very least.’
Right, Grady thought, they should indeed, for such a train as the Freedom Train was so out of the ordinary as to beggar comparisons. She wasn’t just a Special, she was unique, the Special of Specials, the once-in-a-lifetime train. Every man on the crew—engineers, firemen, brake-men, and conductor (although there wasn’t a man aboard with a ticket for him to punch)—had fought, competed for the honor of being aboard. She was the Freedom Train and she was worth a hundred million dollars, if there was such a thing as a price for the cargo she carried.
America had planned two enormous, spectacular events to mark this year of 1876, the centennial of her independence. One of the projects was the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, opened the preceding May by President Ulysses S. Grant. It was planned to be, and had become, the largest, most spectacular, most successful exposition ever staged anywhere in the entire world. It was said that by the time the exposition closed on November 10, about a month from now, nearly ten million people would have paid to see it, which wasn’t too bad for a country whose total population wasn’t much over forty million.
The second project was the Freedom Train thundering now through the Sweetwater Cut en route to Cheyenne, Wyoming. It was one more stop in a whole roster of stops which had taken the Freedom Train all over the country as part of a tour often thousand miles and more. It stretched from Seattle and Portland to San Francisco and Sacramento and from there to Salt Lake City and Denver and Fort Worth—all across the length and breadth of these United States. She had set out in April, and now, as the nights of early October drew in, she was on the homeward run toward Kansas City and Omaha and St. Louis. The Freedom Train was an inspired idea, and it had enabled many hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise never have had the chance to share in the celebration of the centennial by seeing an exhibition of the republic’s most treasured artifacts. Packed carefully in specially constructed crates in the express car, under the frowning guard of a dozen handpicked honor cadets from the Military Academy of West Point, was a complete exhibition of one hundred years of American history.
At each of the scheduled stops along the route, the whole train became a walk-through exhibition. The passenger cars and the Pullman carriages had been gutted and then refitted especially for this purpose.
The rearmost passenger carriage and the caboose served as quarters and dormitory for the soldier boys, as Grady called them (to their infinite disgust). At the end of each layover, the cadets would lend a hand as the two experts from the Smithsonian Institution, who were aboard to answer questions from the public and to care-take the exhibits, dismantled the exhibition and packed everything carefully into the velvet-lined packing cases. Then the express car would be locked and shuttered from the inside and the guards posted on the platforms at both ends. Grady and Pat O’Connor, the engineer on Number 47, would get up steam and move her out to her next destination.
The Freedom Train was a brainchild of the president’s Special Committee for the Celebration of the Centennial, a clutch of formidable old biddies whose main qualification for the job was that they were either the wives of prominent members of the Republican administration or Washington freeloaders to whom Grant owed a favor. They had had at least four hundred ideas, but this was the only good one. It had quickly been recognized as such, and the idea—to send out America’s history for the people to see—had reached fruition very quickly. Thus it came about that rocking gently in their special containers in the express car were the original Declaration of Independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson; George Washington’s own copy of the Constitution; a holographic copy of the four-stanza poem by Francis Scott Key, which had been written following the bombardment of Fort McHenry, The Star Spangled Banner, a montage of flags that illustrated the development of the national flag; the glass-cased pillow, stained with the President’s blood, which had been on the bed in the Petersen house in Washington where Lincoln had died; the original manuscript of Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s famous novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Robert E. Lee’s sword, surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse; the bill of sale for the Louisiana Purchase of 1803; the tattered flag from the Alamo; the first clock made in the United States (Eli Terry, 1800); and much, much more: early revolvers; Whitney’s drawings for the cotton gin; Fulton’s 1807 designs for the paddle-steamer Clermont, Linus Yale’s cylinder lock; Gliddon’s typewriting machine; the first Bible printed in America; a letter in Lincoln’s handwriting to Grace Bedell dated October 19, 1860. The organizers had done everything they could to present all the aspects of the country’s history, while avoiding areas that might arouse contention or dispute. The estimated value of the contents of the train—estimated because no insurance company in the world, not even Lloyds of London, would go so far as to commit itself to an appraisal of the worth of these priceless, irreplaceable artifacts—was one hundred million dollars. But money could never substitute for the loss of such treasures. Not, for a moment, that anyone expected that.
Engineer Grady eased on his brake at the crest of the gradient, ready to hold the huge train on the downhill run to Cheyenne. He leaned out of the cabin to flag O’Connor a signal to do the same thing, and as he did, Willowfield sprung his trap.
Gil Curtis had planted dynamite carefully in the rock walls of the Sweetwater Cut at two marks about half a mile apart. They went off now with a cracking boom and Grady, quite instinctively, grabbed at the huge brake lever, throwing his full weight against it as he saw the rock wall of the Cut ahead bulge out, lean over, as if in some strange slow, arrested motion, then roar down on to the track perhaps three hundred yards ahead of the train.
The locked wheels gouged into the metal tracks, making huge showers of sparks which arced outward from beneath the locomotive as it yawed and screeched and rocked and squealed, slowing and shuddering slower until it came to a panting halt not fifty yards away from where the clattering pile of boulders, with its corona of sifting rock dust, lay like a manmade mountain across the right of way. Before they even had a chance to regain their balance properly, before the train had come to a final steaming stop, Willowfield’s men had shot the two guards off the platforms of the express car.
‘What in the name of all the saints is goin’ on out there?’ roared Grady. He swung down from his cabin on to the oily graveled right of way and glared up at the lip of the defile above him as if it had personally insulted him. His gaze shuttled toward the sprawled figures of the dead guards and then up in puzzlement at Owney, who had come to the footstep of the engine, eyes searching up, down, right, left, fear in them. Down behind them, dust rose against the clear sky. The dull boom of the twin explosions seemed still to be reverberating against the walls of the cutting. The dead guards looked like discarded dolls.
Nothing moved anywhere.
Two of the West Point cadets were coming nervously out of the express car, Springfield bolt-action rifles ported across their bodies in the regulation manner, scanning the lip of the defile with frightened determination.
‘Get back there!’ Grady yelled. ‘Get back inside! Can’t you see it’s a—’
He never got the word ‘holdup’ out. A fusillade of rifle shots thundered out from the lip of the defile, and Grady was spun off his feet by the ambushers’ bullets, dead before he stopped rolling down the banked incline alongside the right of way. The two cadets who had emerged from the express car recoiled in panic, scrambling for the safety of the steel-lined doorway. One of them made it. The other threw up his hands as if in despair as someone on the rim shot the top of his head off. The Springfield rifle made a tinny scrabble on the gravel as it slid down beside his body, and then there was an enormous silence, broken only by the hiss of escaping steam beneath the big wood-burners and the steady monotone of Harry Owney’s curses from the dubious safety of the cabin of his locomotive.
The cadets in the express car slammed the doors, bolting and barring them, taking their positions alongside the specially constructed steel flaps through which they, like the archers in medieval castles, had a field of vision through a vertical slot with fluted sides on the inside. They looked at the young officer standing in the center of the express car, sweat beading his upper lip, awaiting his orders.
Outside, nothing moved that anyone on the train could see. Willowfield sent just one man down, one man who sneaked up to the rear of the train and wormed beneath it, working his way on hands and knees over the oily ties, dragging a canvas bag. When he reached the express car he withdrew bundled sticks of dynamite from the bag, and then carefully and precisely wired them first to the front wheel bogie and then to the rear. Each bundle was of eight sticks, and he used three bundles for each bogie. Then he attached the detonator caps and wires, and wormed back down the length of the train, paying out wire behind him like a silkworm. When he reached the end of the train he slid down the incline and ran for the rim above where the end of the wire connected to the plunger was lying. Connecting them quickly, he stood clear and gave his signal.
Up on the rim, Willowfield acknowledged the signal.
He nodded with satisfaction; everything was going according to plan. He was a man of no more than medium height but he was gross, jowly, clumsy, bathed in sweat as the glancing sun boiled off the gargantuan rocks around him. He weighed almost three hundred pounds, but nobody who had ever had any truck with him would have said that he was soft. Just one look into his reptilian eyes, eyes which hardly ever blinked, would have immediately dispelled any such notion. His mouth was like a knife wound, his nose as imperious and hooked as that of any Roman emperor. He looked like what he was, a degenerate voluptuary who would sacrifice any man or anything on the altar of his own ambitions.
‘You down there!’ he shouted from the edge of the cut. His voice was harsh and impatient because he made it so. Normally he spoke very softly. He believed you caught more flies with honey than with vinegar.
‘You down there!’ he yelled again. ‘Do you hear me?’ His voice bounced off the rocky walls of the Sweetwater Cut, echoing into infinity. A buzzard flapped squawking in panic out of the pines below.
In the express car, Captain Benedict Nicolson looked at the cadets standing to at their loopholes, waiting for his command, waiting for his reaction to Willowfield’s shout. They were all staring at him and he did not know what to do. He could feel sweat trickling down his body underneath the tailored uniform. He felt tricked, betrayed. After all, this was supposed to have been an honor guard, not a combat unit. He had been specially selected, and so had the cadets, not for military duty, but for smartness, education, for—well, admit it, for class. There had been no indication that anything like this was going to happen and it wasn’t fair. They had promised him a minor decoration at the conclusion of the tour. Now … ? Master Sergeant Alex Wells looked at the young officer and grimaced. As was always the case, the army had sent boys on men’s work. This young captain, now: he looks as if he was going to wet his beautifully cut infantry grays any moment, while these boy-soldiers probably already have. Still, he thought, ’tis not the captain’s fault he’s the son-in-law of the brigadier commanding the adjutant-general’s department in Chicago. Nor could you blame him for grabbing a featherbed number like the Freedom Train, seeing the country at the country’s expense. After all, wasn’t every man on the train doing the same? Not a one of them a fighting man, himself—alas—now included. It was a dozen years since he’d heard the buzz of bullets at Gettysburg, and a dozen years was a long time between fights. These boy-soldiers, now: they could probably load and aim those Springfields they were holding on to so grimly, but whether in a real fight they’d be able to do much more than use up ammunition he wouldn’t want to say. Commanded as they were by this whey-faced popinjay who’d obviously never heard a shot fired in anger, he didn’t rate their chances highly at all. None of what he was thinking showed on his face when he spoke.
‘Sir,’ he said, prompting Nicolson. ‘Sir?’
‘Yes,’ said the captain. ‘Yes.’ Then, as if waking from a reverie, he drew himself erect. ‘Tell them we hear them, Master Sa’rnt,’ he said crisply. ‘Ask them—’
Wells was already elbowing one of the cadets away from the slot nearest him. Putting his mouth to the aperture, he pulled in a deep breath and then bellowed ‘You up there!’
‘We hear you!’ came the reply.
‘Who are you?’ Wells shouted. ‘What do you want?’
Willowfield told them.
He told them that he had a hundred men behind him, which was a considerable exaggeration they were in no position to challenge. He told them he was giving them a five-minute truce in which to send a man to check his statement that there was enough dynamite beneath the express car to blow it the rest of the way to Cheyenne. After that, he told them, they had two more minutes in which to throw their weapons out of the express car, and come out with their hands on their heads. Then he waited while Master-Sergeant Wells swung down from the express car, ducked beneath it, and returned to report his findings to Captain Nicolson.
‘It,’ Captain Nicolson said. ‘He. It can’t be. True, I mean. He couldn’t. Won’t. Sergeant, you don’t think he’d blow the train up do you?’
He was thinking of the priceless treasures which were, at least nominally, his responsibility, and about what their loss would mean to his career. These bandits obviously intended to steal them. There was little choice: he must die heroically defending them. He drew himself erect again.
‘I’ll go out there,’ he said, pulling his tunic down. ‘I’ll talk—’
‘Begging the captain’s pardon,’ Sergeant Wells said, sharply. He knew better than to actually lay a hand on the officer, but he also knew that if he had to, he’d knock the silly bastard unconscious before he let him step outside the car.
‘Meaning no disrespect, sir,’ he said quickly as Nicolson paused. ‘But those bas—those people out there have already killed three men. We’ll prove nothing by letting them have you for a target.’
Nicolson blanched. It hadn’t occurred to him that they would quite likely kill him out of hand.
He probably thinks they wouldn’t dare, Wells thought, him being the brigadier’s son.
‘Well,’ Nicolson said, as though considering every aspect of what Wells had just said. ‘Well, then. I think we may just let them sweat it out.’
‘Sir?’ Wells said, aghast. What was the stupid bastard up to now?
‘Sergeant,’ Nicolson said, patiently, using the tone that a grownup uses to explain a concept to a small child. ‘They want what is in this baggage car. They cannot get it with us in here.’
‘Sir,’ Wells said, carefully. ‘The dynamite … ’
‘They’d never set it off,’ Nicolson said, confidently. ‘Destroying the contents of the express car would negate the purpose of the holdup.’
He looked defiantly at the cadets. Not one of them would meet his eye. He was about to open his mouth again when Willowfield shouted once more.
‘You have exactly one minute left!’ he yelled.
Nicolson heard the words and broke like a reed. ‘Oh, my God,’ he groaned. ‘Sergeant ... ’ Master-Sergeant Wells was already wrestling with the bolts of the express car door.
By the time Willowfleld came down from the rim with five heavily armed men to back him up, the cadets were on the track, their weapons at their feet, hands on their heads. Willowfield surveyed them with satisfaction, and their officer with undisguised contempt. Leaving them to stand beneath the cold regard of his men, he climbed awkwardly into the express car, and surveyed the contents with a small smile playing on his face. No triumph: not yet. There was still a very great deal to do. Yet he was strangely elated. George Willowfield, he thought, you have come a long way. A long way from the parade ground at Salisbury where they had drummed him out of the Queen’s Own 17th Lancers, a long way from the canebreaks of Missouri where he’d ridden on the coat-tails of Quantrill’s cutthroats. What he had done here today would make Jesse and Frank James look like the country louts they had always been. George Willowfield had done the impossible.
The Freedom Train was his.