If I’d harbored any hope that the guards Férreo stationed to watch the Ghost were local amateurs pressed into service, it washed away when I alighted and saw them, one in front, one in the rear, and one on either side of the coach: slit-eyed Yaqui half-breeds with brown gnurled faces, carrying Mexican Winchesters at parade rest, bone-handled pistols in holsters with the flaps cut off attached to Sam Browne belts, short-bladed machetes balancing them out on the other side. A series of civil wars had provided them with surplus uniforms: riding breeches, knee-high boots and epaulets. They held their heads at the same ten-degree tilt to keep the smoke of their smoldering cheroots from collecting under the brims of their sombreros. They might all have been related, which was more than just a possibility: There were villages throughout that peninsula whose populations had bred among themselves for centuries, normally a recipe for weakness, but not in this case. Each generation appeared to have doubled the hardness of the last, like lichens forming additional inches to shelves growing on rock.
“Veterans of the revolution.” Joseph spat and rubbed his spittle into the rug at his feet. “Bandits. Tio Benito could hardly pick and choose when killers were required.” I couldn’t tell if the avuncular reference to Juarez was genuine or marinated in sarcasm.
“My horse needs exercise.” I shook my head when he stirred himself. “As do I.”
He noted the wobble when I rose from the chair where I’d been resting, excused himself, and returned to the car a moment later carrying a crooked stick. “I was told to tap the wheels with it whenever we stop.”
“Why?”
“Quien sabe? Cansado I think did not know either.”
I took the stick. “What was the tribal remedy you treated me with?”
“The powder of the cinchona bark. This area is rich in the tree.”
“I did you a disservice. Cansado said I couldn’t trust you and I believed him.”
“I trusted neither of you until he showed his hand. I am Aztec, after all, born with the earned wisdom of those who passed before. One traitor is to be expected. Two, they—” He faltered, made a gesture with his fists together, the thumbs turned away from each other.
“Cancel each other out.”
“Sí. A double betrayal leads to faith.”
The statement made as much sense to me as that entire business. I never did trust him entirely. It was like taking up with the woman who’d thrown one man over to take up with you.
The guards stood motionless, their eyes alone following me as I led the bay by its bit, as long as my steps took me no closer to the locomotive. Neither Joseph nor I was a prisoner, but their orders would be to prevent us from moving the train at any cost. Pressure was up; the fireman had seen to that while he nursed me, but every moment he stayed away from the tender was a loss of steam. Soon, keeping the train where it was would be no more than a formality. Without fire and water it was so much dead metal.
I walked alongside the tracks toward the caboose, then back, as much to restore strength to my muscles as to stretch the horse’s sinews, supporting myself on the stick. Just for diversion I tapped a couple of wheels with the end, but if there was a crack in one it didn’t sing out. In time that stick came to sum up the whole of my use to the federal court in Montana Territory. Judge Blackthorne abhorred the thought of any of his pistoleers lying idle. If not a Childress, then something else would have had to be trumped up to justify my time. The whole Mexican affair was nothing more than tapping a stick against an endless succession of wheels.
“Why not?” I said aloud.
“Senor?” The guard nearest me sent a blank expression my way.
“When was the last time you ate?” I asked.
“Que?”
I made a scooping motion toward my mouth. He shrugged. In all the years since I left Mexico I’ve never tried to imitate that gesture. Mexicans alone are educated in communicating through body movements; the roll of a shoulder, the lifting of an eyebrow, can out-debate William Jennings Bryan in the full cry of his eloquence.
I jerked my chin toward the parlor car. Not a muscle moved in his face, but after a glance forward and back he took a step that direction. I hung back to let him board first, but he planted his boots in the cinderbed and motioned with his carbine’s barrel. I mounted the steps and turned to clear the doorway. He had one foot on the plush rug when something moved in a swift blur. There was a thump and the guard teetered backward, falling away from his sombrero. Moving from instinct I caught him before he fell outside the train, swiveled my hips, and let him slide to the floor, snatching hold of the Winchester on the way.
Joseph stood on the other side of the open door, still holding the Springfield shotgun, butt foremost. The curtains across from me were drawn, blocking the view from the guard posted on that side. The Indian read my expression.
“This was your intention, no?”
“I was going to get him drunk, but I guess this is faster. What now?”
“I at least thought beyond the moment. The man who stands at the front of the train has a bladder the size of a cucaracha’s, but has trouble emptying it. He steps to the side every ten minutes and spends five minutes in the effort.”
“How do you know?”
He reversed ends on the shotgun. My tin shaving mirror was lashed to the barrel with a bootlace. “I thought it best not to lean out the window.”
“When did he make the trip last?”
“I cannot say. I was involved in waiting for this man.” He gave him a stiff kick in the ribs. The guard grunted without stirring.
I used our prisoner’s machete to cut the plush rope attached to one of the curtains and thrust it at him along with the crooked stick. “Tie him up and make sure he doesn’t sing out.”
He gave me the shotgun and looked wistfully at the Winchester, but I shook my head and leaned it in a corner. “I said keep him quiet, not silence him forever.” He accepted the stick with a sigh. The window nearest the front of the car on the left was open. I poked the barrel outside, turning it until the guard near the locomotive was visible in the mirror. He yawned once, patting his mouth with the back of a hand; apart from that he was as immobile as a carved chief in a tobacco shop.
“Ten minutes, you said?”
A shoulder moved. His eyes remained on the man tied up at his feet, holding the stick in both hands poised to swing. “Poco más o menos. I do not own a watch.”
“He seems to have cured himself since the last time. How long will that head of steam last?”
“Not long. I stoked the fire as hot as the gauge would stand to give me time to tend to you—as much and then some—but each moment lost—”
“Are you always this cheerful?”
He uncased two rows of tobacco-stained teeth in a ghastly grin.
The air was stifling; in that climate an open window brings no respite from the heat. The shotgun grew slippery in my grasp. I wiped one palm on my shirt, then the other. Steam drifting from the boiler condensed on the mirror in droplets that evaporated one by one before my eyes, and with them the life’s-blood that kept the locomotive alive. The man in the glass showed no more life than an image in a tintype. The man on the floor groaned again; clothing rustled as Joseph prepared to silence him with the stick. I was about to put down his report as a beggar’s wish when something rippled beneath the parched flesh of the man’s face, a distinct surge of discomfort. He lowered his weapon and slid out of the mirror’s range, walking rapidly with his toes turned inward, pigeon-fashion.
“Go!” I swept the mirror to the floor and traded the shotgun for the crooked stick. In a flash the Indian was out the door, feet crunching through the cinderbed as he made a dash for the engine.
Everything was against it, least of all the guard at the rear of the train stepping out far enough to see one of his charges making for the front. One well-placed shot and I’d be that most useless of creatures, a man with a contraption he didn’t know how to run. Try selling that to a man like Harlan A. Blackthorne.
The guard he’d struck opened his eyes, saw me standing over him, and dropped his jaw to cry out. I swung the stick, catching him along the temple. His eyes rolled over white and his head fell back to the floor.
In the next moment I nearly fell myself. The floor lurched forward, my ankles turned, and I flung my shoulder hard against the wall, dropping my stick. Then as the train continued to pull, the floor slid the other way, resisting the pull of the hitch, but by then I had a grip on the frame of the door Joseph had left open and kept my footing. I snatched my hand away just as the door swung shut, sparing my fingers. The boiler chuffed steam, a live cinder from the stack flew through the open window, sizzling when it landed on a rug. I stepped over to crush it out with the toe of a boot, then went back to grasp the senseless guard by the collar, swing the door back open, and heave him outside before we reached lethal speed. At that he struck on his hip and shoulder and rolled three times.
As I pulled the door shut, something split the air by my left ear and knocked a piece out of the mahogany molding near the ceiling in the far corner, exposing raw yellow wood. I heard the report a quarter-second later, a shallow pop in the open air. Another slug starred a window, but had been fired at too shallow an angle to penetrate the glass. Through another window I saw Vigía Férreo running our way from the direction of town. He stopped, watching the train pick up speed. The face under the neat straw hat showed no emotion. The mathematics tutor–turned-policeman might have been calculating our rate of travel.
There was a thud overhead. I followed the sound to the window Joseph had left open, but laid aside the shotgun in favor of the machete I’d confiscated from the guard he’d struck. I waited with it raised, staring at the opening.
It took a week for a bone-handled Colt to come through it, clenched in the brown corded hand belonging to the man on the roof. I curled both hands around the machete’s handle, hesitated to make sure of my grip, and swung it down with the force of an axe. Something hot splashed my cheek. Someone screamed hoarsely. The revolver, still attached to the hand, fell to the floor and slid across it, spraying blood from the stump of the wrist. The trigger finger tensed. The report was deafening in the enclosed space, but the bullet plowed a harmless path across the rug, burrowing like a mole. A moment later something flashed past the window: the rest of the guard I’d crippled, falling to the earth.
The adobe buildings sped past in a brown swipe. Just then the whistle brayed: a long and a short, followed by two longs, an impudent farewell. I thought that unnecessary. Adding train robbery to my employment history seemed enough without Joseph rubbing salt into an open wound. We were manufacturing enemies the way they cranked out machine parts in Chicago, and we hadn’t even begun the climb into the Sierras.