Ironhorse

79

Sam stood on the depot porch next to Charlie as Virgil and I stepped up onto the Ironhorse with Uncle Ted and Berkeley. Berkeley was sweating. He was already dirty with soot from coaling up the Ironhorse to traverse out of the switchyard and onto the main track.

Virgil and I had been introduced to Uncle Ted from afar, but this was my first up-close-and-personal look at him.

“Here we go,” Uncle Ted said.

Uncle Ted grinned. He was a big man. His arms and neck were covered with curly grayish red hairs, and he had a thick gray-and-red beard, but when he took off his cap and scratched his head there wasn’t one hair, red or gray, on top of his scalp. Even though he had a permanent smile on his face and exuded friendliness, Uncle Ted looked and smelled just as Sam said, as though he had not bathed in six or seven years. If it weren’t for the fact we needed to be alert, and to some degree cautious, I would be in the stalls with the horses. But the fact remained: we were on a mission with peculiar and dangerous circumstances, and readiness was important.

Virgil stayed on the Ironhorse step and looked back to Sam.

“What time will we get up there, you figure?” Virgil asked.

Sam looked at her conductor’s watch.

“Well, like I tol’ Uncle Ted, you have to take the pass between here and Standley Station for the Southbound Express by five. Once they pass, and you stay a steady pace, make all the drops, you should get to Crystal Creek, by, oh, daylight,” Sam said. “There is a turnaround wye there on the north side of Crystal Creek. You get to that wye and switch off there. Give you plenty of time to get your horses unloaded and ride up to the pass south of Tall Water Falls.”

“The other engine with the car that got stopped and ran dry, past Crystal Creek,” Virgil said. “Where did that end up when it was removed from the track?”

“Good question. I don’t know for sure; the wire didn’t say. I would hope, and I would figure, they got it to the yard and did not leave it sitting on the wye. If the engine and car are left on the wye, Uncle Ted will just have to maneuver them off the track until he gets the Ironhorse around.”

“I reckon we will cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“That’s right, best you can do is do what you have to do,” Sam said. “Worst case is you can’t get the engine and car off the wye for some reason, and in that case, you’d have to back out of there.”

“There are worst cases,” Virgil said. “There always are, just got to be prepared.”

“Sure, anyways, I tol’ Uncle Ted what to do.”

“She tells me everything to do,” Uncle Ted said. “Stop, go, pass, sit, you name it. Hell, I can’t remember the last time I even did something on my own.”

“Main damn thing is, you make the pass like I say, Uncle Ted, or you’ll blow ol’ Ironhorse here and all y’all to smithereens.”

“Goddamn, child, I got schedules running in my blood. I was runnin’ comin’s ’n goin’s for Robert E. Lee before you was off the teat!”

“Yeah, and look where you ended up, lost the war and puttering around on a Yard Goat in Half Moon Junction,” Sam said. “Just get off the track by five, then, once you get up to the Crystal Creek depot to the wye, you’ll be good to go.”

“See what I told ya?” Uncle Ted said.

Virgil looked north and nodded as if he could actually see Crystal Creek.

“All right, then,” Virgil said. “Let’s get going.”

“Good luck, Marshal,” Sam said.

I thought for sure Virgil would tell Sam the same thing he told the yard hand Whip and many others through the years, about how luck involved skill, but he just tipped his hat to Sam.

“Much obliged, Sam.”

I guess for once Virgil was thinking perhaps a little luck might not be such a bad thing.