Nothing changed. We might have been standing still while the trees rolled by on our left and the foothills fell behind on our right, propelled by some cranking mechanism of their own. Even the birds flying from one high branch to the next might have been jerked on invisible wires, their cries made by wooden blocks scraping against each other. The motion of the wheels and the swaying of the locomotive were the only stability I knew; if the train were to stop and I to alight from it, I’d walk with a rolling gait as if the earth itself were in motion, like a sailor cast ashore after months at sea. The Ghost was reality, solid ground the phantom. Nothing was unexpected; not even the lump of white-hot lead that sparked off the cab’s frame, so close to my face I thought a match had been struck off the tip of my nose.
We’d slowed for a sharp curve, our bodies leaning instinctively toward the mountains, as if our combined weight would have any effect on the pressures pulling tons of iron out into space; whoever had fired the shot had been waiting for that, had probably picked the spot knowing we’d have to reduce speed to make the bend.
Joseph was first to react. He shouted something in a language I’ll never know and hurled his upper body out the opening opposite the source of the bullet, placing as much steel between it and himself as he could within the cramped space we shared. I was more sluggish, lulled into a standing doze by the monotonous movement the way I’d slept in the saddle during long drives; but I came around after a beat, snatched up the Whitney rifle, and sent a slug flying into the dense growth. I had no target, only the desperate need to announce to whoever it was we were more than sitting fowl.
Hell came after.
I thought at first we’d hit a section of rough track and were rattling over a series of sharp joints. We were speeding up, trying to outrun the attack, and the chopping noise kept pace. Then a piece of the wooden post holding up the roof came apart and something stung my hand and when I looked at it blood was spreading from a ragged hole shorn through the leather. I’d been grazed by a sliver of iron from the firebox or a shard of shattered lead ricocheting off it. The broken edge of the roof looked as if it had been chewed up by a sawmill blade. A ribbon of shining chips was stitched across the stoveblack surface of the panel where the gauges were mounted; one of the thick glass lenses was starred.
I knew then I’d lost another piece of my innocence. As often as I’d been shot at, this was the first time I’d stood in front of a Gatling gun in operation.
I dove for the floor, snatching hold of Joseph’s sleeve and jerking him down alongside me. His face registered surprise and rage, but when he looked down at the offending hand and the dark stuff that was staining his sleeve, he nodded jerkily and rammed the throttle all the way forward. Gifted natural engineer that he was, he hadn’t let go of it. The locomotive pounced like a big cat. Hot wind boomed past my ear and the panting of the engine mixed with the chopping sound of the revolving barrels, swallowing it as the reports receded into the distance.
“Bandits!” he shouted.
“Bandits travel light. Would you lug heavy weaponry through the jungle with the authorities on your heels?”
“Who, then?”
I shook my head; but I knew the answer.
The part that concerns me the most is the arms he’s supposed to have stockpiled: Gatlings, Napoleons, and a dozen cases of carbines. Judge Blackthorne’s words about Oscar Childress, delivered between sips of his quality whisky back in Helena.
We charged full speed for ten more miles before we thought it safe to stop. I’d wound my bandanna around my bleeding hand, and put the throbbing out of my mind as I scouted down the tracks with the rifle to make sure whoever had set up the ambush hadn’t stationed more of the same ahead. Back in the coach, Joseph splashed on alcohol from the medical supplies, working so swiftly I was still gasping from the burn when he bound it and tied off the gauze. “There were no doctors in the village where I grew up,” he said when I admired the result. “We learned either to tend to ourselves or die from the corruption of the blood.”
“Don’t forget the pumas.”
“I would sooner be eaten by one than by my own rotting flesh.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
He slid the bottle of alcohol and roll of gauze into the bib of his overalls. “We must sleep in the engine, not here. And one of us must be awake at all times, to mind the gauges and to keep watch.” He was silent for a moment. “You are certain about the gun?”
“You saw what it did to the cab.”
“Several men with rifles could have done the same.”
“On an open firing range. That dense growth would have deflected ordinary rifle rounds. I watched a Gatling demonstration in Fort Benton. Those fifty-caliber slugs took a piece the size of your head out of the stockade wall.”
“How could Childress know so soon we were coming?”
“Our friends in Alamos. If what I was told is true, there’s no wire service to his plantation. Even if lawyer Bonaparte or Chief Férreo got word to Cabo Falso, no horse and rider could make it back this far in so short an amount a time. One or the other of them must have sent a messenger directly to wherever this band was camped. Is this whole country in cahoots with Childress?”
I tried to open a bottle of Scotch, but I couldn’t get a grip with my injured hand. He made a sound of impatience, took the bottle from me, smashed off the neck against the brake handle, and took a swig. Wiping the back of his hand across his lips, he passed it over.
“He is not El Presidente Diaz’s only enemy. Are you still so interested to hear what this man has to say?”
I drank, swallowed. The spirits crawled up my spine, down my arm, and into the torn heel of my hand, numbing the pain. Up ahead the Ghost conserved its strength, its iron heart pumping in measured beats like a lion at rest. “The fire behind, the plague, too, and now a blizzard of bullets. What’s a little quiet conversation compared to that?”
He grunted and fisted the bottle. “Here, a man need not burden himself wondering what to do next. The country decides.”
* * *
We had another bracer apiece, then put the spirits away and got up to leave the coach. It was a relief to get to my feet without dizziness; my strength was back at last, if made a bit more buoyant by alcohol. We filled the canteen from a cask of water, pocketed some tins of food, and requisitioned extra belts of ammunition from the arsenal.
Just before stepping down I turned back and laced my arms through the bails of two buckets of coal oil, and gestured to him to do the same. He did so without question.
We put in another fifteen miles before sundown and pulled onto a siding in a notch that had been blasted into the mountainside to rest. Travel at night was risky, especially with the threat of a tree or a boulder blocking the tracks, either by natural or human design, and Joseph said the line wasn’t exclusive to the Ghost, for all its loneliness: “The weekly express from Guadalajara is due any month.”
Like a garment soaked with sweat in the heat of day, the jungle damp turned clammy after dark. We were warm enough in the blankets we’d brought from the coach, but the cramped quarters of the cab stiffened our muscles and we stirred often, Joseph muttering half-awake oaths in a combination of Spanish and Indian, I more often bumping against something hard and protruding, bruising my scalp, cracking that inconveniently placed knob of bone on the inside of the elbow and sending a wave of pain and nausea all the way up my arm. More than once I thought of stepping down and sleeping on the ground, but I had a horror of cockroaches, so much a part of that country the revolutionists had written them into their anthem. It was no idle fear: When my groin itched I reached down to scratch it, blaming too many days and nights spent in the same clothes, and something the size of a ground squirrel crawled onto the back of my hand. I leapt to my feet, shouting and cracking my skull on the roof of the cab, and shook the thing out into the night.
Joseph opened one eye, the white glistening in ragged moonlight. I told him what had happened.
“You should have waited. He was only looking for a warm place to curl up.”
“I’m not in the business of providing shelter for vermin.”
“You must learn to accept this country for what it is, and not wish it could be what it is not. Men have gone mad wishing.” He turned over and resumed snoring, in that steady, half-pleasant way of the native tribes.
I inspected myself and the blanket for more intruders, gave the blanket a vigorous shake just in case, and lay back down. I didn’t know I’d fallen back asleep until I dreamed again of Lefty Dugan. He doffed his hat and bowed his head to show me the hole I’d opened there, shiny as a shotgun bore.
I should of left you to drown in that river, Page.
He wasn’t speaking so much as willing the words into my head, where they dropped and lay like dead ash from spent kindling.
My eyes popped open. I’d have slept easier with the roach. I slid out from under the blanket and stepped down, carrying the Whitney rifle. I’d traded the ticking-cap for my hat; the sweatband felt like snail-slime against my forehead. I walked alongside the tracks, paying no attention to things that crunched under my boots. On a cloudless night in the mountains, the stars were as big as Christmas balls, the quarter-moon hanging so close to the earth I could grab its bottom horn with both hands and pull myself up to my chin.
The hours of darkness belonged to the lesser creatures. The din of crickets and tree-frogs was as loud as the Barbary Coast at midnight, with the empty-barrel gulp of the odd bullfrog coming in at intervals so irregular they were impossible to predict; it had waked me every time. In the distance—it might have been my imagination, caused by all our talk—the cry of a hunting cat shredded the heavy overlay of sound like someone tearing canvas.
I don’t know how much time I spent walking, but when I stopped and turned back, the train was almost out of sight, its black prow visible only as the silver-blue steam drifted through the slots in the cowcatcher like a phantom passing through solid matter. I trudged back, hoisted myself up by the grab-rail, and wound myself back into the blanket, clutching the rifle as if it would stand off nightmares the way it did men and beasts. The rest of the night was as long as what had come before, and although I slept no more I was glad when first light came. I assumed men who were condemned to hang at dawn welcomed the end of that last night just as much.