Rebel Train: A Civil War Novel

Chapter 11

Greer dashed across the bridge and raced down the tracks after the Chesapeake.

“Come on!” he shouted over his shoulder at Frost and Schmidt, who were already falling behind. Schmidt’s huge belly flopped like a tub of raw sausages as he ran and Frost wasn’t much faster than the big German.

But someone was stealing his train, and blind rage was enough to propel Greer in a sprint down the tracks. The uneven railroad ties threatened to trip him at every stride and his leg ached from his old battle wound, but Greer stuck out his chin, pumped his arms, and ran for all he was worth.

Up ahead, he could just see the last car of the train, where two men stood on the platform. They were rapidly disappearing from sight.

Greer knew damn well that a man on foot couldn’t overtake a train. However, he was counting on the train stopping before long. It was one thing to get a locomotive rolling — with a little luck, almost anyone could do it if there was still a head of steam in the boiler — but it was another thing altogether to keep it moving. He was sure they would find the train around the next bend.

He took a quick look over his shoulder and saw Schmidt and Frost still lagging behind. Greer had hoped a few soldiers would join the chase, but so far only the engineer and fireman were in sight.

"Run!" he shouted at them. "We've got to catch that train!"

Inside the passenger car, Flynn saw that Benjamin still had his Colt at the ready, and the lad was keeping a close eye on the passengers. He looked pale, but the hand that held his revolver was steady enough. The passengers themselves were coping by various degrees. Some sat stone-faced, others cried, a couple of men looked angry enough to try something foolish, but Flynn decided they must be unarmed, or else they would have acted along with the two men he and Benjamin had been forced to shoot.

The blustery old couple, Alfred and Henrietta, looked indignant and rumpled, like hens caught in the rain. The image made Flynn smile, but his grin faded when he noticed the Baltimore tough and his woman. There was not the slightest hint of fear on their faces. Among all these hens, they had the look of foxes, Flynn thought. Cunning. The gunfight hadn't scared them a bit.

He touched Benjamin's arm. "Keep an eye on those two," he whispered. "They'll be the next to make a move."

"All right," the boy said.

He gave Benjamin's arm a squeeze. "You did good, lad," Flynn spoke quietly. "Those men didn't give us any choice."

"I know."

"If it comes to using your gun again, lad, don't hesitate," Flynn warned him. "If you do, you'll be the dead man next time. Shoot first, think later."

Benjamin nodded, as if he understood. Flynn hoped the boy did, because he was sure many more shots would be fired before the day was through.

Greer's arms were on fire and his legs felt heavy as logs, but he would be damned if someone was going to steal his train and get away with it. He kept running.

Slow as the train had started, it quickly gathered speed. The harder Greer ran, the further ahead the train seemed to get. Soon he watched it disappear around a bend, and he staggered to a halt, doubled over, and gasped for breath. Frost and Schmidt ran up behind him. They hadn't been running nearly as hard and weren't as winded, and they had brought along a young captain astride a chestnut mare. No other soldiers were in sight.

"Where were you five minutes ago?" Greer panted, glaring at the mounted officer. He hawked and spat, trying to catch his breath. "You could have caught them on that horse."

"What seems to be the trouble?" the captain asked. He was no more than twenty-one or two, young and arrogant.

"Deserters stole my train," Greer snapped, the captain's nonchalance beginning to gall him. "That's the trouble."

"What deserters?" the captain asked.

"From your regiment, most likely."

"We don't have any deserters that I know of."

Greer scowled, but the captain appeared not to notice. Greer started over from the beginning. In the distance, he could hear the sound of the train—his train — receding and finally being lost in the noise made by the nearby Patapsco as it gurgled over the rocky riverbed.

"Someone took our train," he said. "If you send ten men with me, I'm sure before long we'll find the train stopped down the tracks a mile or two from here, and your boys can arrest— "

The captain held up a gloved hand. "That train is your concern."

"But deserters— "

The captain wheeled his mare and started back toward the station. He called back over his shoulder: "Maybe deserters took your train, but they weren't ours. It's none of my concern."

Greer cursed as the captain rode off. He couldn't believe the officer wouldn't help. Someone had stolen the train, and the captain didn't give a damn. With officers like that, no wonder it was taking so long to win the war. He was just like all the rest of the fools back at First Bull Run who had gotten him wounded and then lost the battle.

"Come on," he growled at Frost and Schmidt. "We’ll find our own goddamn train."

Greer started off down the tracks at a jog. Frost and Schmidt were right behind him.

"This doesn’t look good," Schmidt said. "We let our train be stolen. If anything happens to the Chesapeake, we can say goodbye to our jobs on the railroad."

They ran a little faster.

Colonel Percy left the first passenger car and climbed toward the engine, sending Cook, Hazlett and Forbes back to join Captain Fletcher in keeping watch over the passengers. He didn't trust Fletcher on his own. None of the passengers in their car had given them any trouble when they announced the takeover of the train. Of course, the Colt revolvers in the raiders' hands had not encouraged the passengers to speak up.

Pettibone stayed to guard the engine. Percy climbed over the tender — an open car stacked high with wood — and onto the locomotive itself, where Cephas Wilson and Hank Cunningham worked like madmen to wring more speed out of the Chesapeake.

Wilson sat in the engineer's seat to the extreme right of the cab. He had the throttle wide open, but he was now working the Johnson bar back toward the neutral position.

"Give me a hand, Colonel," Wilson said by way of greeting. Because of all the steam pressure, the Johnson bar was incredibly difficult to move. Wilson had straddled the bar, with one foot on an iron stirrup and the other on a wooden chock. Both footholds had been put there to give an engineer leverage when wrestling the bar forward or backward. Percy grabbed hold, and the two men managed to work the bar back until it was nearly straight up and down.

"Don't you want this all the way forward?" Percy asked. The Johnson bar was basically a combination of gear shift and throttle. Pushed all the way forward, the locomotive went at its greatest speed, while the middle position left the engine virtually in neutral.

"We're rolling along pretty good now," Wilson explained. "With the reverse lever in that position we'll save wood and water and still make good time."

The engine had been slow getting out of Sykesville and Percy was concerned that unless they built up speed and put some distance between the town and themselves, cavalry might catch them if they slowed down for any reason.

"How is she running?" he shouted over the roaring engine.

Wilson answered with a wide grin. "She can roll, yes sir, she can. With the throttle wide open she'll maybe do sixty miles an hour on a level stretch."

"How fast are we going?" Percy shouted.

Wilson looked out the window at the ground. Any experienced engineer could tell within ten miles per hour how fast his train was going by how blurred the ground below looked.

"About forty," he said.

"Can we go faster?"

Wilson laughed and jerked his chin at the tracks ahead. The bright steel rails closely followed the river bed, twisting and turning with the narrow Patapsco.

"You want us to end up in the river? She won't stay on the tracks at sixty. Not here, anyway. I'll keep her at forty, Colonel. There's still not a horse that can catch us."

"All right," Percy agreed. He would have liked to run faster, but he had to admit that even forty seemed like a reckless speed as the gray, leafless trees flickered past.

"We'll open her up once we get beyond the Patapsco," Wilson said. "It's good, flat country up ahead."

Hank Cunningham shoved by with an armload of wood. His coat was off, his sleeves rolled up, and sweat stood out on his face as he threw open the door to the firebox and tossed a chunk of wood into the glowing red maw. He was careful to keep the wood in an even layer several inches deep so that it created an even heat inside the firebox.

Turning, Percy leaned out from the locomotive's cab as far as he dared and looked back at the tracks leading to Sykesville. There was no sign of pursuit. Of course, they were traveling so fast that no cavalry squadron could keep up, especially over the rough, uneven footing of the track bed. Still, Percy thought it was a good thing that it had been infantry, not cavalry, camped back in Sykesville.

"Wilson, we'll be crossing the Washington Road in about three miles," Percy said. "I want you to stop, and I'll have Willie Forbes shimmy up the telegraph poles to cut the wires. We can outrun cavalry, but we can't outrun the telegraph and we don't want the Yankees to put a barrier across the tracks somewhere ahead of us."

"Yes, sir," Wilson said. He eased the throttle open a notch wider, and they roared along the twisting tracks as quickly as they dared.

Greer found the first body lying face down across the tracks.

“Lord have mercy,” he said, stopping to flip the man over with the toe of his boot. From the man’s face, he recognized him as one of the passengers from the Chesapeake. There was an ugly purple bullet hole in the man’s temple.

He felt a wave of nausea wash over him. The sight of the bullet wound brought back memories of the terrible things he had seen on the battlefield at Bull Run. He forced himself to look away from the dead man.

A shout from Schmidt interrupted his thoughts. “Greer, up ahead!” Schmidt shouted.

Another body was sprawled alongside the tracks. Blood stained the front of the dead man’s shirt.

“They’re shooting the passengers,” Greer said in disbelief. The situation was even worse than he had imagined.

“Maybe these two tried to stop them,” Schmidt pointed out.

“If that’s what happened, then we’re dealing with murderers, not just train thieves,” Greer said. His horror at the sight of the dead men had turned to anger. He clenched and unclenched his fists. “Whoever is doing this needs to be brought to justice.”

“It ain’t right,” Frost agreed.

“Let’s go.”

Greer set off at a run down the tracks, cursing at his engineer and fireman to keep up the pace. Frost was young enough that he hardly broke a sweat as they moved through the dappled November sunshine. He was in good shape from hauling wood from tender to firebox. Greer decided Frost could most likely run all day long, but he only seemed to have one speed and it wasn’t fast enough.

Schmidt was another matter. He was fond of his German wife's cooking, and he washed down his schnitzel and sauerkraut with great quantities of beer from Baltimore's breweries. His huge belly bounced as he ran and his lungs chugged like the steam locomotive he normally operated on these same tracks.

"Mein Gott," he panted. "Let them have the damn train."

"Shut up and save your wind," Greer snapped. "We've got to catch these damn thieves."

"What will we do if we catch them?" Schmidt huffed. "They killed two passengers. What do you think they’ll do to us? We don’t even have a gun."

Before finding the bodies, it hadn't occurred to Greer that the train thieves probably had guns. Neither he, Schmidt nor Frost were armed. Well, he decided, they would worry about that when they found the train. With any luck, the thieves would abandon the train as soon as it ground to a halt.

Greer thought they would have found the Chesapeake by now. They were already three or four miles out of Sykesville. There might have been enough steam left in the boiler to get the train moving, but someone aboard knew something about running trains to get her this far.

He still believed that deserters had taken the train, even if the surly young captain back in Sykesville had claimed otherwise. Many men were making a career of signing on for the bonus money offered new recruits, then deserting and signing up yet again to collect more money. A train would be a handy means of escape for men like that. Deserters might also be desperate enough to commit murder, knowing that a hangman’s rope or a firing squad most likely awaited them if they were caught.

One of the deserters must have had some knowledge of trains to keep the Chesapeake running this far. Still, at any moment, Greer expected to come across the train stopped on the tracks. He braced himself to deal with the irate passengers who would be spilling out from the cars, wondering what had happened.

The train thieves would be long-gone, and Greer would have to back the Chesapeake the few miles into town to pick up the passengers left behind at Sykes's Hotel. The incident would be embarrassing, but not disastrous.

They ran another mile, but there was no train. Not even a sign of the Chesapeake. No screech ahead of wheels on iron rails. No plume of smoke above the treetops. The train had vanished.

"Bastards," Greer cursed the thieves. He was sure the owners of the B&O Railroad might just be inclined to fire a train crew who had allowed a locomotive and several cars to be stolen, all because they had stopped for breakfast. “Why would they take my train?”

“Payroll money,” panted Frost, struggling to keep up. “Must have been several thousand dollars in that baggage car.”

Greer dismissed the idea. “If thieves wanted the payroll money, it stands to reason they would have taken the money, not the entire train,” he said. “Besides, the baggage car had been well-guarded.”

It never occurred to any of them that the last car, mysteriously attached to the train during the night, had anything to do with the morning's events.

“Whatever the reason, the directors of the B&O Railroad aren’t going to be happy about what had happened,” he added.

Anger gave him new strength and he ran faster, determined to find the Chesapeake. He knew it was the only hope of redemption he, Schmidt and Frost had.

"Nobody steals my goddamn train," he panted.

"For pity's sake, Greer," Schmidt gasped, sounding close to collapse. "I can't keep this up much longer."

"Shut up and run," Greer growled.