Thundering out of the night, drivers pounding, headlight gleaming yellow, smokestack pluming sparks, the big Baldwin locomotive whistled, the sound keening off across the prairie like the cry of a lost soul trying to find its way back from Hell. Fargo, crouched low beside an outside curve of track, a horseshoe bend, waited. Slinging around the curve, the freight train slowed. Its boxcars and cattle cars were a roaring shaking wall above Fargo’s head. The iron wheels seemed to devour the rails. His mouth was dry, every muscle tense. He knew what would happen to him if he missed his grip. Then he thought: Now! He leaped up, out of the darkness beside the roadbed, strong and smooth as a panther’s spring.
Even so, in the night and at that speed, he almost missed. His right hand seized a grab-iron, one of the lines of rungs mounting up the boxcar’s flank, but his scrabbling foot missed its hold; so did his left hand. The momentum of the rushing freight snapped him out like a whiplash, threw him against the boxcar’s flank. Only the steel grip of his right hand on the grab-iron saved him. Without it, he’d have been sucked beneath those relentless wheels as he fell and chopped to rags.
Like a pendulum, his body swung back, the arm feeling as if it were pulled loose from its socket. His left hand clawed, found a grip; so did the scrabbling toe of his booted foot. Panting, he clung to the side of the car a moment; then he began to climb.
Presently he reached the roof, managed to pull himself up and over, and then he lay flat on the boxcar’s catwalk, breathing hard, flexing his cramped fingers, stiff from maintaining that life-or-death grip on the irons.
He was a big man, better than six feet tall, wide in the shoulders, his narrow hips and long legs those of a horseman born and bred. His hair, close-cropped, was snow-white, prematurely so, for he was only in his middle thirties. His face was battered, scarred, weathered and so remarkably ugly that it was nearly handsome—a face that drew helplessly admiring second looks from women and cautious, wary ones from men who recognized danger when they saw it. He was by trade a fighting man, a soldier of fortune, guns and skill for hire to the highest bidder, and danger was, after all, his business.
He lay there on the catwalk a moment longer: hard gray eyes squinted against the black smoke rolling back from the engine as the train once more straightened out. He touched the holster on his hip to make sure the .38 Colt was still in place; then his hand sought the sheathed knife behind it. It was there, too, in its strange scabbard. All right. Fargo got to his knees, then to his feet, catching the rhythm of the train, feet wide-braced. The wind plastered khaki shirt and dusty canvas pants to his powerful body as he moved gracefully, yet cautiously, along the catwalk of the swaying car.
When he reached its end, he made a long, accurate jump to the roof of the car behind it, landing bent-legged. Then, crouching slightly, he ran as far as he could go along that car. Beyond it, there was nothing: yawning space and darkness. He was on the caboose, the last car on the freight.
He checked the gun again to make sure it was tightly seated in its holster, dropped to his knees and found the grab-irons. Like a monkey, he went down, swung his lean frame easily onto the rear platform. Through the door of the caboose he could see the freight conductor at a table, leafing through bills of lading. A brakeman was pouring coffee from a pot on the stove, his back to Fargo.
Fargo’s hand swung near to his Colt. He shoved open the door of the caboose and entered. “Evening, gentlemen,” he said, deep voiced. “You got room for a passenger?”
The brakeman whirled, coffee sloshing from his cup, his eyes wide. The conductor scraped back his chair, turned, and his hand went instinctively toward his back pocket. But he froze at the sight of Fargo’s fingers spread near the butt of the .38, the cartridges in Fargo’s gunbelt glittering in the yellow lantern light. A hard-faced man in his fifties, the conductor knew a gunman when he saw one. “There’s no express car on this train,” he said.
“Suits me all right,” Fargo said. “All I want’s a ride to Junction Flats, and I aim to pay my way.” His left hand dug in his pocket, brought out a twenty-dollar gold-piece ... his last. “I was comin’ down from the high country and my horse stumbled, popped its cannon bone. Had to shoot it, and I’ve put in about twenty miles on foot across the desert before I struck this line. Knew you wouldn’t stop if I flagged you, so I just grabbed a boxcar and swung aboard. Figured I’d better introduce myself slow and easy, so you didn’t take me for a hold-up man or a bum and do me a meanness. Now, what’ll you charge for here to Junction Flats?”
The conductor licked his lips. “Mister, you can’t ride this train to Junction Flats.”
Fargo’s eyes narrowed. “The hell you say.”
“That’s the size of it. Company rules say no passengers on a freight, no deadheads, no bums. Nobody rides a Continental-Western string but the crew.”
Fargo grinned, but it was more like the snarl of a hungry wolf. “Do tell. So I’m supposed to walk thirty miles across Idaho to Junction Flats?”
“How you git there ain’t my problem. My problem is to see you don’t git there on this train.”
“No,” the man named Fargo said. “Your problem is how to put me off without somebody gittin’ hurt. And if somebody does, it won’t be me.” His voice was soft, even. “I just said I’m not a bum or a hobo. I’ve showed you my money. You can take it or not, as you please. But I figure to stay on this train ’til I get where I’m going.”
“All right,” the conductor said. “But you’ll sure as hell do time in stony lonesome when you get there. You’ll—” The blast of the whistle almost drowned his words. At the same instant, his eyes raised, shifted, lit slightly, and the brakeman with the coffee cup turned his head, mouth opening. Fargo reacted instinctively. He pivoted, stepped aside, turned, and the gun was in his hand. As he wheeled something sliced through the space where, half a second before, he had stood. Fargo lashed out with the pistol and felt the impact run up his arm as it smashed hard against bone. Then the giant of a man in railroad overalls who had come in the caboose behind him and had been about to brain him with the short, steel pinch bar was cursing furiously, holding his right wrist, and the deadly hunk of steel with its hooked end had clattered to the floor.
“God damn you,” Fargo said furiously, “I hope I broke it.” The gun barrel moved like the head of a snake about to strike, covering all three of them in turn. “All right, that’s it with the three of you. First one breaks bad, now, I’m gonna punch a bullet in ’im. And you better know this gun’s loaded with hollow-points. I don’t have to kill you to ruin you for life. No matter where they hit, these things’ll blow a hole in you that you could drive this engine through.” He jerked his head at the conductor. “Take that bulldog outa your hip pocket, slow and easy. Then hand it over grip first, and not a trick, unless you want this company to build a monument to you.”
Reluctantly, the man obeyed. When Fargo had the pistol, he turned his attention to the brakemen. The man with the coffee cup was skinny, slope-chinned; Fargo judged him fairly harmless. It was the other man, the one who’d tried to crush his skull from behind with steel, who he raked carefully with his eyes and covered with the muzzle of his gun.
~*~
If, Neal Fargo thought, you had picked a grizzly bear out of the Idaho Mountains, dressed him in bib overalls and a railroader’s cap, he might have been the twin of the man who stood there with his back against the wall of the swaying caboose, still rubbing one thick wrist.
At about six and a half feet, he stood at least two inches taller than Neal Fargo, was twice as wide across the shoulders and half again as thick through the chest. His eyes were little reddish buttons beneath bushy black brows. His face was like a slab of granite with a nose, his mouth short, almost lipless with yellow teeth, one front one rotted clean away. Fargo could feel the hatred radiating from this greasy, overalled giant like warmth from a depot stove in winter. “You,” Fargo rasped. “What’s your name?”
The giant started not to answer, met Fargo’s cold gray eyes, thought better of it. “Bly,” he said. “Landslide Bly, they call me.” Fargo’s mouth quirked. “Landslide? Why?”
“Time comes, maybe you’ll find out.”
“Maybe,” Fargo said. “Right now, shake yourself down. Pockets inside out, everything clean. Do it easy.”
Bly hesitated, eyes narrowing. Fargo said, “You just tried to kill me, Bly. No questions asked, no why, if, or by your leave. Murder me from behind, bash my head in with that crowbar. We got thirty miles to roll, maybe an hour together in the caboose. I don’t aim to have you try it again. Now, do what I say or I’ll use one hollow-point in your shoulder. If it don’t take your arm clean off, you’ll still never use it again and one-armed brakemen ain’t, I’d guess, in big demand. So move!”
Bly bit his lip, but slowly, carefully, he complied. Fargo snorted as the contents of his pockets fell to the floor—coins, dirty rags ... and a switchblade knife and a pair of brass knuckles with spikes on each outside curve. “You’re a bad man, ain’t you, Landslide?” His voice was biting. “How many bums and hobos you chalked up with that stuff and your crowbar? All right, kick it over here.”
Bly did. Carefully, Fargo scooped up the weapons, opened the door of the cast-iron stove that heated the caboose. He threw the knife and brass knuckles on the glowing coals. “Now,” he said. “You’ll have to be tougher than I think you are to use ’em for a spell.” His eyes shuttled to the other brakeman. “You?”
“I’m clean.” When he emptied his pockets he was.
Fargo let out a breath. He dropped the conductor’s bulldog in his pocket, then, deftly, with his left hand, poured himself a cup of coffee. Seeing the conductor’s eyes follow his motions, he grinned. “That’s right. I’m what they call ambidextrous. Can use the left hand as good as I can the right. Remember that, in case you get any notions.” Then, satisfied with the situation, he dropped onto the bench along one side of the caboose, stretched out legs shod in dusty cavalry boots and gulped the coffee greedily. When the cup was empty he set it aside. No one in the caboose had moved as the train roared on through the night.
Fargo fumbled with the buttons of his shirt, reached inside, drew out a wadded something that proved, when punched into shape, to be a wide-brimmed, peak-crowned cavalry hat, old, battered, nipped with holes that could only have been made by bullets. He perched it jauntily on his white brush of hair. “Now,” he said. “Me, I’m curious. I’ve seen plenty of railroads that are hard on bums and hobos, free riders. But I never seen one before wouldn’t sell a passage to a man stranded in the desert when he had the money in his hand. How come that?”
“I told you,” the conductor said. “Company rules.”
“But why?”
“Mister, I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Hawk Morrison. He’s the brass hat that runs this division. It’s his say-so, not mine. All I know is, we got orders. Anybody unauthorized gets on, payin’ or not, we pitch him off. Either that, or it’s our butts ... and our jobs.”
“Pitch him off,” Fargo said. “At what, forty, fifty miles an hour?”
“That’s his tough luck,” Bly growled. “You don’t stop a hotshot freight for nothin’!”
Fargo let out a breath. “Well, it’s a hell of a way to run a railroad. Me, it sort of gets my short hairs up. I wasn’t feeling too good about things anyhow. Not after I lost a good horse, had to cache my gear, leg it a whole day on the damn desert. I’ll tell you what. Your Mr. Hawk Morrison gives you any noise, you send him to me. The name’s Neal Fargo and I’ll be in Junction Flats for a while.”
The conductor sat up straight. “Fargo? Neal Fargo?” He turned to Bly. “Jesus, Landslide, you got off lucky!”
When Bly only grunted, the man went on. “Before I come with Continental-Western, I used to be a hogger down in Mexico, pushin’ one of those old cold-water Brooks hogs from Presidio to Chihuahua.”
Fargo looked at him keenly. “You were an engineer on that line?”
“Was until the Revolution down there got so bad I had to hightail it—Pancho Villa against Carranza and Obregon and all the rest, everybody shootin’ everybody. And Neal Fargo right in the middle of it, Villa’s right hand man, runnin’ guns and ammo across the border, commandin’ Pancho’s machine gun detachment, doin’ God knows what all, as long as there was money in it ... You stole a goddamn train I was drivin’!”
Fargo grinned at him. “Did I now?”
“Slick as a whistle, full of guns and ammo for the Federal troops! We stopped for water at a place called Las Piedras, and your outfit hit the government guard on the train.” His eyes were awed. “I saw you in action with a damn sawed-off shotgun. Like a one-man army: anything in the way of that buckshot, it was finished. Then your men were in the cab, had me covered, and you were hightailin’ it off on horseback on down the line.” He paused. “They used to say that riot gun was your favorite weapon. But you ain’t carryin’ it now.”
“I’ve still got it,” Fargo said. “It’s cached. Didn’t want to risk banging it up when I hopped this rattler. Don’t worry, I’ll get it back.”
The conductor nodded. “And now here you are in Idaho. What happened? Revolution get too hot for you, too?”
“No,” Fargo said. “It petered out on me. The money got scarce and the number of people itchin’ to ’dobe-wall me multiplied. I figured Mexico could do without me for a while.” Fishing in his pocket with his left hand, he brought out a thin, black cigar, clamped it between good white teeth, snapped a match into flame and lit it. “How long to Junction Flats?”
The conductor cautiously hauled out his watch. “Twenty-eight minutes more. We’ll hit it on the nail.”
“All right,” said Fargo. “Make yourself comfortable.” He gestured to the bench on the other wall. “Time comes when you got work to do, you go right ahead. Meanwhile, you stay put. Any more people on this string besides the engineer and fireman?”
“This is all,” the conductor said. “Me, the two shacks—that’s brakemen—and the hogger and the fireman, that’s the crew.”
Fargo nodded, tossed the twenty-dollar gold piece at the conductor, who caught it deftly. “You’ll give me a receipt for that. Nobody tags me for a bum when I get off at Junction Flats.”
“It’ll git me fired,” the conductor said. “Hawk Morrison won’t stand for it.”
“You give me the receipt,” Fargo said. Reluctantly the conductor scribbled out a slip, gave it to him. Fargo glanced briefly at it, without ever quite taking his eyes off of Landslide Bly, who had settled, glowering, still rubbing his wrist, on the bench opposite.
“Good enough,” he said. “Now, let’s all have another cup of coffee and wait it out ’til Junction Flats.”
The freight train roared on through the night, its whistle howling from time to time. Fargo sat outwardly relaxed, yet totally alert, and sipped his third cup of coffee. The conductor and the chinless brakeman no longer worried him; Landslide Bly did. The giant, Fargo guessed, lacked in brains what he made up in muscle, and he did not need a crowbar or brass knucks to kill a man. Those enormous scarred fists of his could do the job alone, powered by that huge body. He might be fool enough to take a chance against the gun.
The gun. Fargo was disgusted and enraged that it had even come to this. The senseless policy of the railroad was, for him, the last straw, after a time in which nothing had gone right.
As he’d told the trainman, the Mexican Revolution had dwindled out on him. Villa was whipped, pursued by American soldiers under the leadership of General Pershing. Fargo would sell him no more guns, lead no more of Villa’s troops into battle for high pay. Neither were there any other small wars going on just now. Of course, the biggest one of all was booming along in Europe, but now, in 1916, the United States was still clear of that. Fargo had a hunch that it would not be for long. But meanwhile, he’d stay clear of the fighting overseas.
Anyhow, he was having trouble finding the kind of jobs that paid the sort of money he had to have—big money, ten, fifteen, twenty thousand at a whack: the kind of work no ordinary gunman could do, the kind that paid off in percentages. The West was strangely quiet and tame just now. Maybe, at last, it was getting civilized. Maybe the border troubles had been the last sputter of the old brutal West in which he’d grown up. Maybe, it had occurred to Fargo, he was obsolete. There was so damned much law and order everywhere right now it was about to bankrupt him.
He had been fighting for a living, one way or another, ever since he could remember. Geronimo’s Apaches, in their last bitter foray, had killed his parents on their small New Mexican ranch, but had missed the hidden child. A neighboring couple had taken in the little boy, not out of pity, but as an extra ranch hand there was no need to pay, as a kind of slave. Fargo had endured that until he was twelve, and then he had run away. Since then, he’d never looked back, growing up in a hard school, painfully self-taught. He’d punched cattle, rough necked in the oil fields, fought in the prize ring. Once, down on his luck, he had even been a bouncer in a Louisiana cathouse. Then came the Spanish-American War, and as a member of the fabled Rough Riders, the volunteer regiment recruited by Theodore Roosevelt from among the cowboys, bronc busters, lawmen and hardcases of the West, he’d found his true calling—combat. He took to soldiering like a duck to water, following up the War in Cuba with a Cavalry hitch in the Philippines during the Insurrection there. After that, he’d gone into business for himself. He gradually built up a reputation so that men knew that Fargo would tackle anything on two conditions: the price had to be right and the job did not get his picture on a wanted poster in the post offices and sheriff’s offices across the country. Otherwise, he was not fussy, and he was efficient: satisfaction guaranteed. But if he should fail, nobody would get his money back, because, in Fargo’s case, failure would mean that he was dead …
That, he knew, was bound to happen sooner or later. You could only take the pitcher to the well so often. Then you ran up against somebody younger, faster on the draw, maybe smarter ... or just luckier. Nobody lived forever, and the bullet with his name on it might already be in the cylinder of someone’s gun. That was all right, too. Old was something he had no intention of getting. Life was for living, and danger, booze and women were the spices that flavored it. When he could no longer enjoy life seasoned to his taste, he’d cash in. One thing sure, he would not drag out his days like an old sick dog too toothless to bite if someone kicked' him. He’d seen other fighting men go out like that, good ones, and it turned his stomach.
So what he made, he gambled, drank, and wenched away, living high—go first class or don’t go at all was his motto; and when he was broke and sick of the fat easy life, he went out and found another war somewhere.
He was broke now, and there didn’t seem to be a thing in prospect. All at once, everything had gone sour. The cards had turned against him: he’d dropped five thousand at poker in as many days. Then he’d heard a rumor about a possible smuggling operation across the Canadian border and had drifted up there to check on it. It hadn’t panned out—too much risk for the profit. The Canadian Mounties, like the Texas Rangers, were bad people to get in trouble with. And then, heading back to Junction Flats, the horse went. He was dog-tired, in a rotten mood, and this penny-pinching railroad that apparently would rather kill a man than break its rules, had lit the last short end of his temper’s fuse. So if that bear of a brakeman made the least false move, he would use the gun.
But Landslide Bly only sat and glowered at him, and the train thundered through the night.
The whistle blasted. The conductor stirred and looked at Fargo as the train slowed. “We’re coming into Junction Flats. We’ve got to go to work.”
Fargo nodded. “Go ahead.”
“All right, Bly, get out there,” the conductor said.
Fargo watched the big man narrowly as Bly stood up, but Bly went straight to the door leading to the caboose’s forward platform. He halted there with hand on knob and turned his head. His voice was like the growl of a bear disturbed at its kill. “Feller, don’t think this is finished yet.” Then he went out, closing the door. Through its glass, Fargo saw him nimbly climb the ladder on the end of the car ahead.
The conductor traded places in the observation cupola of the caboose with the slack-chinned brakeman who’d occupied it for the past twenty minutes, and that brakeman went out, too, lugging a lantern. Alone in the caboose’s lower level, Fargo returned the conductor’s pistol, unloaded now, to the drawer of the table; he wanted nothing on him he could be accused of stealing. Then he went out on the rear platform of the caboose.
They were rolling into the vast railroad yards of Junction Flats. Here the mighty Continental-Western road had one of its division headquarters, a repair shop, loading pens for stock, sidetracks and make-up yards where trains were put together. Here also was where it made connections with smaller railroads feeding in from northern and southern points, like veins into an artery.
Though it was one o’clock in the morning, there was plenty of activity on this web of rails. At the water tower, a passenger train bound east took on water. Boxcars rumbled and clanked as switch engines shunted them back and forth. Like great black beasts, the locomotives chuffed and snorted at their labor. Headlights beamed; fireboxes glowed like hell’s red windows; sparks sprayed and drifted from high smokestacks; yardmen’s lanterns bobbed like fireflies; voices yelled and couplings clanged.
As the train eased into this confusion, Fargo poised; then, long before it stopped, he swung off the caboose’s platform. He landed easily on the cinder fill, ran a few steps to regain his balance, then loped off across the yards, dodging in and out of the shadows of parked boxcars. He knew all about yard bulls, the railroad detectives who patrolled such places only too eager to use their clubs and guns on tramps and hobos, always ready to prove how tough they were. Landslide Bly, if not the conductor, would certainly have alerted them, and they’d be waiting to take him when the train halted. Trouble with them would profit him nothing. He had no need to prove to himself or anyone else how tough he was, and he always avoided fights that promised no financial return.
He was like a shadow as he drifted across the yards, watching his footing carefully: he knew, too, about open switches and frogs in which a man could catch a foot as tightly as in a trap. Once he stopped, looking backwards, and saw men swarming around the caboose, which he could pick out by its lighted windows. He grinned tightly, wolfishly, then ran on.
Presently he reached the main street of Junction Flats. Because of the railroad, the town was built to last and was growing every day. At the street’s northern end, the buildings were solid, of brick, housing respectable businesses. But down here on the south end, near the yards, there were bars, honky-tonks and brothels, all the deadfalls that sprang up near railroad tracks. Fargo made for a bar called The End of Track. He had done a lot of drinking there, lost most of the rest of his stake at poker. He was known and he’d have credit. After what he’d been through, he was thirsty.
Even at this hour, The End of Track was wide-open, its customers mostly railroad men, but with a sprinkling of cowboys in from the range, a few sheepherders, some miners, and, of course, the local gamblers, toughs, and pimps. A few tired-eyed prostitutes circulated through the crowd, occasionally trudging upstairs with a customer.
Tom Whitlow, the owner, was behind the bar himself tonight, a hugely fat man in his late fifties, hair gray, expensive clothes, and with only the stubs of fingers on his right hand, the back of which was hideously scarred. He’d been a locomotive engineer until a wreck had pinned him in the cab and jetting steam had cooked one hand and most of his torso before he had worked free. He had, he said, never been on a train again since that day; yet, he could not free himself of his fascination with the “high iron,” as the railroaders called it, and had gone into business down here near the tracks and prospered.
Now, seeing Fargo, he smiled. “Neal—” Then the smile went away. “Jesus. What happened to you? Somebody jerk you through a knothole?”
Fargo’s eyes flickered to the mirror behind the bar. Desert alkali and railroad soot had smeared him from head to foot with a gray, ashy coating. “Just about. Gimme a bottle, Tom. But it’ll have to be on jawbone: I’m flat busted.”
Whitlow shrugged. “So what? With me, your word’s better’n most men’s greenbacks. Write your own ticket.”
Fargo laughed shortly. “I just tried that with Continental-Western and damned near got my head smashed.” He poured a drink, tossed it off, sighed as it hit bottom, then poured another. “Look, what the hell kind of railroad is Continental-Western and what kind of division does this Hawk Morrison run? I—” He broke off as he saw the expression that crossed Whitlow’s face.
“Neal,” Whitlow said hastily, “look, I got a big crowd here tonight. I’m busy, ain’t got time to talk. The bottle’s on me, anything you want. Only let me see to my customers.” Quickly he went down the bar, back turned to Fargo.
Fargo stared after him, frowning. Nobody down the bar was demanding service. And the expression on Tom Whitlow’s face at the mention of Continental-Western and Hawk Morrison had been one of plain and unmistakable fear.
Fargo shrugged. The hell with it. The hell with Continental-Western. He took the bottle and a glass and went to a vacant table in the corner, where his back would be to the wall: a measure of instinctive caution. He slumped into a chair and poured another drink. He had just raised it to his lips when the door of the saloon opened and Landslide Bly shambled in. And right behind him came a tall, saturnine man in a black suit and black broad-brimmed hat. He could have been, from his clothes and the lean, ascetic look of his thin face, a minister. But Fargo’s eyes did not miss the Colt .45 in the open-ended, low-cut holster slung low on his hip.