Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 2, March 19, 1938

Mercy, Hijacked by Dale Clark

A doctor diagnoses a stickup — and the patient dies.

Danny Lane muttered, “Now what the devil?” as the Flood Relief Special slowed clankingly to a dead halt. He peered through the night-blackened, rain-washed window of the smoker coach. Danny saw his own reflected face, nothing more than that.

A big, tropic-tanned, black mustached man came along the aisle. To the brakeman; who was adjusting the wick of his lantern, he said: “Where are we?”

“About twelve miles out of Riverside.”

The big browned man’s voice held a slight accent, probably Spanish. “What’s the trouble?”

“Must be a tree blowed onto the track,” the brakie said. “This-here’s the old quarry spur — it’s hardly been used for years.”

“Need any help?”

The brakeman said, “We’ll holler if we do,” and pushed through the vestibule door.

Shrugging, the tropic-skinned man turned to the water tap. He took a collapsible metal flask from its leather case, drained a thin vein of water into the flask.

It was very quiet in the smoking car. Grave-faced men spoke in low tones. They knew what lay ahead of the Special — there was suffering ahead, and destitution, and terrific threat of epidemic disease. There were a hundred thousand flood victims, some of them ill and more of them homeless — all deprived of sanitary sewage disposal, safe drinking water, milk for their children.

The worst flood in fifty years swung its five hundred mile scythe of destruction through the valley. Riverside lay isolated at the scythe’s tip. Tons of crashing water had smashed the city’s concrete highway outlets, boiled across the main railroad trackage and left the rusted quarry rails as a last link with the outside world. Thousands of lives depending on two threads.

Help from that outside world would come as the Red Cross and Army battalions fought through the destruction of half a dozen other cities up the river, as planes found landing sites on the rough hilltops.

The doctors in the smoking coach were volunteers, flocking in from the small towns of the state’s south-western tip. Bearded grandfathers called out of retirement sat side by side with young internes from the famous Randall sanitarium.

Dr. Randall himself was there — a tall man with a face that had once been ascetic, but was now fleshed out with success and good living. Sanitarium owner and race horse fancier, he was telling a weatherbeaten little country physician: “Now, my experience with typhoid has been—”

There was typhoid fever in Riverside, scourging those homeless folk huddled in the refugee camps.

“So I am lucky to see the new technique put to the test!” The speaker was Captain-Doctor Almonez, Randall’s guest. The public health director of a banana republic, Almonez was touring the United States; was specially interested in the oral vaccine technique perfected by Randall.

“He’s lucky?” thought Danny Lane. “What about the victims in Riverside—?”

Danny thought this, didn’t say it. Two years out of school, Danny was one of Randall’s glorified internes — “resident doctor,” so-called. The job didn’t pay much in money — paid mostly in experience. Danny, a dark-haired, clean-cut young chap, was building himself a future. But it wasn’t for him to rebuke Almonez’s callous expression. The man didn’t mean anything by the remark, anyway. People in those banana countries died like flies, anyway. Almonez was hardened to wholesale death.

Danny crushed his cigarette, walked out of the smoker. A few of the white-clad nurses in the coaches pored over magazines. Most of them were wise enough to doze in their seats knowing the sleepless, frantic hours of toil twelve miles ahead.

But one of them neither read nor dozed. Lucy Orr turned from trying to peer through the coach window. “Danny!”

Lucy Orr was one of the sanitarium nurses — blonde, pretty. Danny had a hunch she’d play a big part in that future of his.

He asked, “Well?” and put a lot of fondness into the single word.

“What can be holding us up here?” Lucy worried, her blue eyes deeply troubled. “Do you think this track could be washed out, too?”

Danny said, “Oh, the flood’s not this high. The brakeman said there might be something on the track.”

She tried vainly to see through the window again. “I thought I saw water out there, right beside the train—”

Danny knew the worry which gnawed in Lucy Orr’s mind. Her folks lived in Riverside, and not on a hilltop, either. Her invalided mother would have had to be carried out on a stretcher, if she got out at all. And there were kid brothers and sisters. Kids who could only be inoculated against the dread typhoid when the Special got through.

“I’ll look, Lucy,” he said quickly. “I’ll find out what’s the matter.”

Danny Lane walked out into the vestibule and hopped off into the darkness.

He trudged up the track. There was water out there, a dark sheet of it glimmering evilly in the light from the coach windows. Weeds thrusting up beside the sleepers took wet slaps at the interne’s ankles. The quarry spur certainly had been neglected in recent years. But Danny speedily forgot about the weeds.

His feet crunched the cinders faster. Something wrong ahead! That knot of men working beside the slowly puffing locomotive — no, beside the baggage car. They were... they were what?

Danny’s stare focused on the yellow glow of lanterns beside the track. Good heavens, it looked as if—

Yeah, no doubt about it. They were unloading the baggage car. The medical supplies, those gelatine cells of heat-killed typhoid bacilli mixed with starch, coming out of the car and going down into a scow moored where the water lapped against the embankment.

This couldn’t be right. Must be some mistake here. Why the devil unload twelve miles from the track end? Unless there was a washout ahead—

Danny Lane froze in his tracks. That was when he saw the metallic glitter of drawn guns, the train crew lined up beside the tender, hands in the air.

Robbery?

Danny Lane couldn’t believe his eyes, couldn’t realize anyone would be low enough, contemptible enough, to hijack the relief train.

It was happening though. The realization burst like a bombshell in the interne’s bewildered brain. Realization — and fear. Fear because he knew the supply of new type vaccine was so terribly limited — it wouldn’t be easy to get more — and it gave maximum protection two weeks sooner than doctors could obtain it with the old subcutaneous vaccines...

A yell of warning pushed into the interne’s throat as he thought of that. A yell that ended, suddenly, in a choked grunt. There was no warning for Danny Lane. He never saw the stealthy shadow behind him. The gun butt descended silently, crunched against his skull with sickening force.

Danny crumpled.

A toe prodded his ribs, turned him over. He rolled limply down the embankment. Slowly at first, then faster. A dull splash followed...

A few minutes later, its terrorized crew huddled in the locomotive cab, the Special chuffed slowly up the quarry spur, gathering speed. Lucy Orr sighed her relief at the click-clack on the rails, turned her cheek to the plush cushion, squeezed shut her eyes.

In the smoker Dr. Randall consulted his strap-watch, said, “Lost ten minutes here.”

Captain-Doctor Almonez murmured, “Torres, break out the brandy — eh? Where’d that man of mine go?”

The big, tropic-skinned man had disappeared.

The shock of the ice cold floodwater aroused Danny Lane to semi-consciousness, congealed the agony in his skull to a dull, intolerable ache. But it congealed the strength in his limbs, too. He struck out feebly but his garments prisoned him in a freezing straitjacket of waterlogged cloth, prisoned and dragged him down. The pull of the current swept him out into mid-flood.

Then his fingers locked spasmodically on a wet-slicked length of board. Somehow Danny got his chin out of the water. A blacker outline showed above him against the blackness of the night. He was clinging to the scow’s stern.

Voices came to him as from an infinitely great distance. The words might have been uttered in a foreign language for all the sense he could make of them. Danny did not cry out for help for he knew that none would help him. These men had tried once already to murder him. He concentrated, trying to cling to the scow. It wasn’t easy, he had to keep pushing off. The current, moving faster than the scow, tended to push his legs under the craft.

And gradually it did so. Now the least slip of his numbed hands meant death, for once drawn under the scow he would certainly drown. And he was already under it, up to his hands and head.

This could not have lasted long, though it seemed for hours. Could not, because his strength was measured in minutes.

Then the current changed, sharply. Danny heard the grate of poles going over the scow’s side. His own body shot out to arm’s length behind the craft. One hand was torn loose from its grip.

The scow moved slowly, jerkily. Suddenly it struck with a jolt that ran its whole length. The impact knocked Danny Lane’s other hand away. He had an instant’s vision of a bridge, a skeleton shape in the night, then the water rushed over his head, blotting out everything.

He no longer felt the current trundling him along, or the weight of his watersoaked clothes. He went spinning into a black void...

In reality, he lay unconscious — half of him in the water, half of him cast upon the weedy bank — a dozen yards below the railroad bridge.

Half an hour later, Danny became fragmentarily aware of life in his being. That is to say, he became aware of pain. His body was a chilled huddle of quivering flesh. His skull, a queer and pulpy weight, was filled with a soggy ache.

Something in the night went ku-lunk, ku-lunk. Like a slowly beaten jungle drum. Ku-lunk, ku-lunk! Or did he imagine that? Was the drum inside his bruised head?

He passed out, cold. More time passed. Then a ray of light played eerily on the weeds over his head. A voice said: “Only place along the line they could get a boat that close to the rails.”

Another voice: “Yeah, that so?”

“I’m telling you. I know. We still roll a few boxcars up here.” Danny Lane had heard that voice somewhere before. It went on, “Farmers load a little hay on the siding here. It saves ’em the truck haul downtown—”

The voices were going away.

Danny Lane picked himself groggily out of the weeds, saw two silhouettes walking up the track. One of them carried a flashlight. He was saying, “Can’t track ’em across water. Might as well go back and—”

Danny Lane cried, “Hey!” feebly. The blood came storming into his head again, and he fell flat. The men walked away, not having heard him.

After a while, Danny Lane came staggering over the embankment onto the roadbed. The clouds had broken overhead and a full moon shed its cold light over the scene. There was no sign of the two men. Obviously they had come out to investigate the robbery and as obviously had found nothing to investigate.

Danny Lane looked around. Back of him there was nothing but floodwater, a mile-wide bay of it glittering ominously under the moon. The water extended under the bridge to his left, spread a lake on the farmland across the tracks there.

Danny peered up the siding. It had originally been a double-tracked section, permitting empties to pull off the line for loaded trains coming out of the quarry. That had been years ago. The siding was largely overgrown with weeds now. A little string of boxcars stood there; the door of one was open a bit, and the moonlight revealed the rectangular ends of hay bales inside.

The little strings of boxcars held no interest for the young interne. Danny looked on up the track. Twelve miles to Riverside he remembered the brakeman saying.

It might as well have been twelve hundred. Danny couldn’t walk it; not weak as he was, drenched and with chattering teeth, with a head which burst from smouldering pain into red agony at every step he took.

He turned, stumbled across the bridge. There was a dirt grade crossing with a cattleguard, beyond that a wooden gate crossing a clay-packed road. It wasn’t really a road, but a lane. At the end of the lane, Danny could see a little dark clump of farm buildings.

The farmer would have an automobile, a telephone, or at least a horse; some means of communicating with the city. He would also have dry clothing.

Danny stumbled up the clay road. He gasped with relief as he reached the farmhouse porch. The building was a small oblong of dingy gray, set in a muddy flat yard with barns and sheds at the rear. The sound of Danny’s knuckles on the door echoed across the yard; brought no other response.

He muttered, teeth clacking, “G-got to b-break in!”

But the door wasn’t locked. Danny pushed into the stale warmth of a kitchen. Moonlight at the uncurtained window showed a bare table, a stove, a cream separator. He went to the stove, hunted across its metal top until he found a box of matches.

An oil lamp rested in a bracket over the table. Danny fumbled it lit. Then he turned to the stove. There were cobs in a coal bucket, a packing box stuffed with chopped wood, a tin kerosene can with a potato on its snout.

Trembling with cold, the interne dumped fuel into the stove, spread kerosene liberally, dragged a match across the blacked lids. The flame was instant, bright, warming. It howled pleasantly into the pipe.

A coffee pot with some dark liquid in it stood on the back of the stove. It would be hot by the time he found some dry clothes.

Danny took down the lamp, pushed open the door at the other end of the kitchen, stopped short. “Holy—!”

A man lay on the floor just over the threshold. He wore rubber boots, denim overalls, and a denim jacket. An irregular red blotch, the size of a dinner plate, stained the overall bib. There was a good deal more, a lot more, red on the carpet about him. The man had been shot, not through the heart, but in the lung.

Danny Lane stood stock-still a long moment, his throat contracting as he stared. The man might have been fifty or seventy — there were no special characteristics identifying his time-worn face — or at least the interne observed none. After that moment, he turned away; climbed the stairs to the second story. When he returned, it was with an armful of clothes.

He dressed in the kitchen. A half-full bottle of whiskey stood on a window sill back of the cream separator. Danny drank a cup of mixed whiskey and bitter coffee. The stimulation from the rank medicinal dose coursed through his veins pleasantly. He felt wanned but still weak; his head swollen, charged with heavy internal pressure.

Danny paid no more attention to the dead man in the next room. It did not occur to him that the farmer’s death might in any way be linked with the train robbery. He was not one of those super-sleuths who can be knocked cold one moment and wake up the next with a perfect crime solution in mind. He was not a sleuth at all, just an exhausted youth, with one thought inside his battered skull; to get to Riverside and tell his story to the authorities.

Danny went outside. The eastern sky had brightened to a pale mauve which found reflection in the swollen pond covering the lower end of the farm. Fence lines marched down into the water, disappeared; the brown thatch of a haystack made a tiny island in the flood.

His stare stopped on a muddy ring perhaps forty feet in diameter, a few rods from the water and near another stack, sliced in two like a loaf of bread.

It held no particular meaning for him.

He looked across the barnyard. There were a good many footprints in the mud. Water stood in some; these were old, before the night’s rain. Others were fresher — and the makers’ feet had skidded, leaving furrows and grooves rather than identifiable prints.

The tracks led to the ramshackle barn. Danny followed them. He pushed the barn door open clumsily. A movement inside made his pulse leap, sent a crackle of agony through his bruised head. Then Danny grunted — it was only a rat scurrying along a manger timber. Three cows and a team were stabled in the stalls.

Danny’s lips twisted in perplexity. A salty rime of sweat traced the outlines of harness on the horses. Danny went in, mumbled, “Who-a-a, boy,” and touched one of the rumps. The horse was warm. The mud on its fetlocks looked fresh.

Danny Lane muttered, “Well I’ll be damned!”

For the first time, his fogged brain began to grip a meaning in all these circumstances. He came out of the barn, hurrying, and looked around again.

Back of the barn, the cattleyard was a straw-choked quagmire. Danny circled the hen house and implement shed, came abruptly onto a lip of the old quarry. It had been closed commercially for years; but some stone for local use had been coming out lately. A wagon track meandered down to the quarry floor. There was a wide expanse of bare rock across the quarry and beyond that a view of the railroad.

A long ways off, Danny could see a moving dot. He strained to focus his eyes on it. The dot took form — the form of an old-fashioned handcar. Danny could make out the tiny figure of a man pumping it along.

The interne started down the wagon trail into the pit. His jarring footfalls increased the torment in his head as he picked his way carefully. A thin orange-peel of sun slid over the horizon as he pushed through the bushes at the other end of the quarry and came out onto the track siding.

A frown tightened Danny’s tired face as he inspected the scene. The muddy road along the track was blandly smooth.

But nevertheless the door of the last boxcar of the string on the siding, was closed. It had been open during the night. And the rising sun discovered certain tiny marks on the rails — brighter bits visible where the rust was broken.

Danny lurched through the mud, got his hands onto that door. A surge of his body moved it only an inch. On the next try he got it six inches farther. Presently he had an opening wide enough to admit a man’s body.

He jumped weakly, succeeded in grasping the latch with one hand. Clawing desperately, he got the toe of a shoe braced onto the metal-stripped sill. He climbed shakily.

The boxcar was filled nearly to its roof. There was barely room for Danny to crawl across the tiers of baled hay. He peered at the bales. Each would weigh around a hundred pounds and was encircled by two wires.

Lacking a pincers, he struggled to break one of the wires. Bare hands couldn’t do it. Danny drove his heel into the bale, used all the strength in his leg, and the wire snapped.

The hay bulged out in accordion pleats. Danny muttered, “Yeah!” and drove his hands into the pleats. He twisted out a small wooden box and again muttered, “Yeah!”

He didn’t need to open the box. He knew what it contained. It held the bile capsules, administered as a preliminary to the oral vaccination.

Now, why should anyone hijack stuff like this? The oral vaccine was ideal for flood conditions — you didn’t need complicated equipment, your patients didn’t suffer the severe reactions. But still, it could be used only by a physician. No doctor or hospital would buy anything like that except through legitimate supply channels. What in the devil could the hijackers do with it? What was the purpose.

However, that problem wasn’t for Danny’s aching head to solve. Let the cops figure out the whys and wherefores.

He wriggled feet first out of the boxcar. The handcar was less than a hundred yards away. It slowed to a stop. The crew of one got off, stared at Dann Lane, walked slowly toward him.

Danny recognized the Special’s brakeman. A strapping big fellow, he carried a handful of metal seals and pasteboard cards. The recognition was one-sided, at first. Nothing in Danny’s overalled appearance suggested the neat interne of the preceding night.

“Hey, you!” the brakie said belligerently. “Can’t you damned hoboes stay out of — great guns!” He dropped the seals, came closer, stared. “Say! Ain’t you the guy they drowned last night?”

Danny Lane grinned feebly. “I’m the guy they almost drowned, but never mind about me. How fast could you get a message to Dr. Randall in Riverside?”

The brakeman’s broad face remained a map of astonishment. “Well, I’ll be a so-and-some-more!” he ejaculated, ignoring the interne’s question. “Is the other feller alive, too?”

“What other feller?”

“That foreign one,” the brakie said. “Torres. They don’t know if he was killed like you — like you’re supposed to be — or if he run off with the robbers. It was an inside job. The train stopped because somebody pulled the emergency cord, see? Huh. Where’d you get them overalls?”

“Farmhouse,” Danny replied laconically. “How about getting a message into the city?”

The man considered. “First I got to seal these cars and tag ’em. There’s a switch engine coming up from Merionville to clear this siding for the milk trains to come in.” He kept staring at the overalls. “What farmhouse, doc?”

“The closest one.”

The brakie said, “Oh. You mean Joe Barker’s place?” His tone held a nagging curiosity. It occurred to Danny Lane that the man might be suspicious of his sudden reappearance — especially if the robbery had been an inside job. It seemed so, for the brakeman continued warily: “Barker couldn’t help you any — getting your message into town?”

Danny spoke earnestly. “Listen. Barker’s dead — murdered, I think. Anyway there’s a dead man in the house up there.” He went on, put that part of the story in as few words as he could. “The hijackers killed him, I suppose. They used his horses and baling outfit. The stuff’s hidden inside the bales in this boxcar here. That’s the message we’ve got to get to Randall.”

He said this excitedly and the brakeman got excited, too. He exclaimed, “Sure! They musta figured nobody’d look inside them bales. This here hay was supposed to be loaded before the stickup—” He broke off, then: “You bet, doc. You leave it to me. I know this country here, see? Why, I helped shunt these empties onto the siding. That’s why they put me on the Special — on account of knowing the quarry spur and her switches. I’ll get that message through. The quickest way is for me to go down the spur. There’s a phone at the crossroads store, two miles down. You stay here and watch, huh?”

Danny nodded. “And... there’s a personal message. Tell Randall to let Miss Orr know I’m all right.”

“Miss Orr, huh? What address?”

“She’s one of the nurses. Randall will know.”

“Maybe you better write the name out, doc.” The brakie fumbled in his pocket, found a stub of indelible pencil. Danny picked up the pasteboard cards the man had dropped in his excitement at seeing a supposed dead man come to life, and wrote the name. He handed the card over.

“Okay, doc. I got it.”

The brakeman jumped aboard the handcar and started down the track.

“Hey!” Danny called. “You forgot—” But the man did not hear.

Danny bent over to pick up the rest of the seals and cards and stuff them into his pocket when a word caught his eye. A very familiar word to Danny Lane.

He grunted, stared hard at the card for this hay was consigned to the “Randall Farms” — the farm where Dr. Randall quartered his racing horses.

Danny Lane gasped, “Holy—” and sat down on a rock. His mind was more of a confused jumble than it had been a moment before but one aspect of the puzzle leaped startlingly clear. If it had not been for his almost miraculous discovery, this boxcar’s contraband cargo would have wound up in Dr. Randall’s stock barns. How did this tie up with Torres’ disappearance?

Danny shook his head slowly. Probit was all coincidence — just as much a matter of accident as the fact that he, Randall’s interne, had gotten off the train last night.

He stood up, thrust the cards into his overall pocket, turned to look after the handcar. It had already vanished around a curve below the bridge.

He leaned against the boxcar, stared thoughtfully up the barren track toward Riverside. Gradually his stare narrowed. There was something wrong about this scene. Only the rails, the weeds growing up to the trackside, and the gray waste of water beyond. But there was something wrong! Something missing!

Yet for the life of him, Danny couldn’t think what. Whatever it was, eluded his pain-numbed wits. He struggled to remember — and failed. Like having a name almost at the tip of your tongue, but only almost. Perhaps if he didn’t think about it for a moment, the correct answer would come—

Danny jerked around, warned too late by the sound of a footstep. The rising sun silhouetted a head and shoulders leaning around the end of the boxcar, cast a reddish glimmer along the rifle barrel aimed at the interne’s chest.

“Come along quiet,” the silhouette said. “We got you covered from both ways.”

True enough, they had both ends of the siding covered. Another man came up behind Danny, snouted a gun against his back, and said: “Walk a rail, kid. We ain’t leaving any footprints, see?”

They all walked the rails, Danny ahead of the others. Sometimes, his head swimming dizzily, the interne would stumble and be rewarded with a curse.

They headed him away from the quarry, down the track and across the cattleguard at the road, until they came to a cindered footpath leading back under the bridge.

“Down here, kid.”

The bridge stood on tall, creosote-treated timbers. Flood water had backed in, was within eight feet of the sleepers overhead. One of the men went ahead of Danny, up to the wall of planks at the lower end of the bridge. It was a retaining wall, built to keep the roadbed from landsliding into the creek bottom there. The man lifted two of the planks aside, said: “You crawl in.”

The two planks had concealed a length of concrete ditch tile. The tile was barely large enough for a man to crawl through. Danny could see a glow of white light at the other end.

The man with the rifle prodded Danny. “Now crawl!”

The interne crept into the tile.

He emerged into a cave hollowed under the railroad. It was shored up with boards, lighted by an electric lantern hung on a twisted copper tube. The tube was part of an old still. Clearly, the cave had been a bootlegger hideout during Prohibition.

There were already two men in the dugout. One of these was a pug-nosed fellow, slouch-hatted, with an air of authority about him. Much of the authority derived from the revolver in his fist.

Danny blinked. He’d never seen a gun like it before. An H&R .38, with three inches of knife steel protruding from the barrel end — an ugly little bayonet.

The other man crouched in a corner of the cave, almost hidden in shadow. Knees were drawn almost level with his tropic-skinned features.

Danny muttered, “Torres!”

The big brown man stared but said nothing.

Danny growled, “So it was an inside job!”

The pug-nosed one turned the lantern, aimed its beam squarely onto Danny. “Never mind him — I’ll do the talking for the outfit,” he said harshly. “Listen, young fella. You want to get out of here alive, don’t you?”

The question required no answer, and Danny gave none.

“Sure, you do,” Pug Nose said. “And you can — if you obey orders.”

He paused, while the other two came crawling into the dugout. Their bodies ringed Danny into an uncomfortably small space. Pug Nose drew a slip of yellow paper from his pocket, and a small pencil.

“You write what I tell you,” he said. “Put it in your own words. Just say that a gang has got the vaccine. We want twenty thousand for it. When they come across with the dough, we’ll turn you loose to tell them where the stuff is hidden. They’ll know it’s on the level, having your name signed on the note.”

Danny nodded, said, “Sure, I’ll do that.” Because, by this time the brakeman would be phoning in the message—

“In old five dollar bills,” Pug Nose said. “Tell ’em to send one man in a rowboat along the south shore until he sees a blue shirt waved on a stick. Tell ’em—”

Danny didn’t hear the rest. He was staring at the yellow slip of paper. A bank check, it had Mutual Savings & Trust printed in big letters across its face. At the stub side was pictured a tree; smaller letters said, Big Oaks from Tiny Acorns Grow.

Then Danny Lane knew what he’d been trying to remember. And the knowledge of it leaped like flame in his brain. A crazy flame, burning reason clean out of him. He forgot that he was one against four — and that the four were armed. Forgot that he was weakened by exposure, that his skull was a thing of torture.

Danny Lane snarled — and smashed his fist into the pug-nosed one’s face.

He didn’t knock the man flat. Far from it. The blow was only a gesture, no more hurtful than a woman’s slap.

But it brought them all down on him. Pug Nose’s backhanded punch knocked Danny to the wall. The rifle’s butt crashed into his groin as he staggered.

And Torres came plunging out of his corner of the cave.

Torres brought plenty of noise with him. There was baling wire around the big brown man’s waist, wire firmly twisted onto the boards at that end of the dug-out. Along with the noise, the big man brought the whole boarded-up wall, ripping the timbers right out of the earth.

A shower of dirt cascaded onto Danny Lane’s head. The dugout was full of falling dirt.

Danny heard a scream: “She’s a-cavin’!”

In fact, the whole roof tottered and groaned. A cloud of dust obscured the lantern. In the gray half-light, Danny saw the three hijackers simultaneously leap for the tile’s mouth.

What followed wasn’t pretty. There were two men wedged and struggling in the tile, screaming and cursing as they fought. And there was the pugnosed man standing over them, whipping that bayoneted revolver into the squirming flesh of his partners.

Torres stood watching, twisting his big arms out of the wire. He didn’t say a word.

This lasted perhaps fifteen seconds. And then Torres had his arms free. His hand shot out. caught the pug-nosed one by the neck. Shook him, as a terrier would shake a rat, and threw him aside. He reached down and dragged the other two out of the tile, one in each hand, and smashed their heads together. Then he threw them on top of Pug Nose.

A bad hombre. that Torres.

But, quite gently, he took Danny’s shoulder and pushed him to the hole’s opening. He still hadn’t said a word.

“Because he couldn’t say anything,” Danny Lane explained. This was later, of course. Danny rested on a cot in the refugee camp, with his head swathed in a great many bandages, and talked a good deal more to Lucy Orr than any nurse ought to let her patient talk.

“They had tape inside his mouth, across his teeth,” said Danny. “So he couldn’t warn me. You see, they’d wanted him to write the note and he wouldn’t — figured they’d kill him after they got the money, rather than leave a witness alive. He’d seen a lot too much. He got off the train just before it pulled away, and saw the last of the robbery. Being unarmed, he ran up to the Barker farmhouse to give the alarm.”

Lucy said, “But Barker was in it, too?”

“Not in the hold-up itself. He had a team hitched to the hay baler, so they could hide the loot. An old trick that gang had used. They used to ship out booze from Barker’s still that way. Anyhow, Barker saw Torres go up to the house. He followed with a gun. And stood guard over him. But Torres made a break, and in the fight over the gun, killed Barker. But when he came out of the house, the rest of the gang were there and had him covered.”

Danny thought a minute. “So they baled the vaccine into the hay. That was the ker-thunk sound I heard. Then, by the time I got to the farmhouse, they were loading those bales into the car. They ran the car down to the bridge and threw out part of the hay in it, and substituted the contraband. And used a trainman’s spud to push the boxcar back up the siding, leaving the marks on the rails I saw. That’s why there weren’t any footprints around the siding in the mud.”

Lucy frowned. “But if the car was being shipped to Randall’s farm—?”

“They knew it wouldn’t go in a hurry. Common freight like that would stand on a siding somewhere while the relief food trains came through. The car wouldn’t be opened for weeks,” said Danny, “no matter who’d bought the hay from Barker. Randall being in it was just coincidence.”

The blonde girl shook her head and said, “But what possessed you to try to fight all those men when you even thought Torres was one of the hijack gang?”

“I know,” muttered Danny, apologetically. “I didn’t have a chance. But I lost my head when I realized the brakeman was the gang’s inside man — that my message would never be delivered by him. Because he was the one who pulled the cord to stop the Special for the robbery — and tipped off the gang in the dugout to nab me this morning, too.”

Her blue eyes were surprised, dubious. “How could you know that?”

“The check reminded me. The picture of a tree on it. That’s what I was trying to remember,” said Danny. “The brakeman claimed to know the quarry spur so well. But when the Special stopped, I overheard him tell Torres there was probably a tree blown onto the track.”

A slow grin spread over most of Danny Lane’s face, the part of his face which wasn’t hidden in bandages.

“You see, honey, I had looked up and down that track both ways. There were plenty of weeds — but not one single tree in sight!”