The Sky Walker

CHAPTER XIV Murder Rides The Rails!

Looking demure and lovely and helpless, Nellie Gray sat on the train going north along the lake to Ludlow, a town about ninety miles from Chicago on the east shore. Nellie did not have to pretend to be a wealthy girl. She was extremely wealthy. With all the gold of the Aztecs hidden in Mexico in a cache known only to Benson and his aides, Nellie, as well as each of the others, was fantastically rich. But no one of the little group had any desire to just sit back and have a good time on that wealth. Each wanted to fight crime; since each had suffered greatly from criminals.

Sitting beside Nellie, the perfect picture of a lady’s maid, was Rosabel. Actually, the two girls were co-workers and friends. But you wouldn’t guess it to look at them. The picture was of a spoiled rich girl and a patient servant.

“What time is it, Rosabel?” Nellie said, making her voice petulant.

“Quarter of four, Miss Gray,” Rosabel said.

“And this smelly old train won’t get to Ludlow till half-past four?”

“Tha’s right, Miss Gray.”

“I’ve never been on such a train!” Nellie fumed, for the benefit of listeners. “It stops at every farmer’s back door. I’m quite sure they deliver newspapers and laundry from the engine.”

Her words weren’t much exaggerated. There was no such thing as express service on the Catawbi line. It existed only to serve the dwellers in towns along its tracks; so it stopped at each and every one of those towns.

In the middle of the afternoon, there were few on the train. Some tired-looking women, commuters’ wives who had gone into the city to shop. A few men coming home from the office early.

At each stop, some of these got off. The train kept getting emptier and emptier.

Nellie and Rosabel both heard the beginning of the talk. It was between two men in the seat behind them, and the conductor.

“Bill,” one of the men said to the conductor, “what happened to that old car ferry that was stranded on the beach a couple miles back from here?”

The two girls held their breaths to listen, meanwhile staring out the window as if not hearing at all.

“I don’t know,” the conductor replied. “I noticed this morning it wasn’t there. That’s all I can say.”

“Must have floated away during the night,” said the second man.

“But why?” objected the first. “There wasn’t any storm. A little wind, maybe, but not enough to float the ferry free. It’s been there for years.”

“You can’t tell how much wind it would take, from the length of time it’s been there,” the conductor argued. “Maybe the sand’s been washed away from under it all these years till finally, last night, it just naturally floated off again. But it don’t make much difference. A thing as big at that is bound to be located about as soon as it’s beached again.”

The conductor went on down the aisle. And Nellie and Rosabel turned their gaze from the window — to see a man just sitting down in the seat opposite them. They’d been so interested in the talk about the ferry that they hadn’t noticed him walking up the aisle from another car.

The man had his head down a little so that they could not see his face because of the down-turned brim of his hat. There was a newspaper in his hands. He spread that out, as if to read, but instead raised his head and stared squarely at the girls.

With a sort of electric shock running through her, Nellie saw that it was the smooth, blond-haired young fellow she had met once before under the name of Carlisle.

Her hand — and Rosabel’s, too — was reaching stealthily for a gun. Hers in her purse, Rosabel’s somewhere under her discreet black servant’s dress.

“Don’t,” advised Carlisle, sunny eyes crinkling as if to a good joke.

Both girls saw his right hand, under the extended newspaper. There was a revolver in that hand! The revolver had a silencer on it. No one else could see the silenced gun because of the clever way Carlisle held the paper. But the girls could see it, all right!

Nellie stared out the window. At this point, a road went parallel with the track for a few miles. On the road, pacing the train, was a gray-blue sedan.

Carlisle could kill them both with the silenced gun, get off the train, and escape in that car which was keeping pace with the train before other passengers, unwarned by the sound of the muffled shots which would be drowned by the noise of the train, could figure out what had happened.

That Carlisle would kill them if they tried to cry out, neither girl doubted for a moment. The smiling murder in his sunny blue eyes was too apparent.

“What do you want of us?” Nellie said, tone pitched low so that the men in the seat behind wouldn’t be warned of trouble and try, with well-intentioned clumsiness, to interfere.

“I just want to ride a little way with a charming girl,” Carlisle smirked.

“How far is a little way?” said Nellie.

“To the last stop this side of Ludlow,” Carlisle said.

The road beside the tracks swerved off inland. The sedan, which had been keeping pace with the train, went out of sight. But that didn’t cheer Nellie up any. The road, she knew, was nowhere farther than a mile from the track, from here into Ludlow. So at any point Carlisle could flip off the train after murder, and be sure of a quick getaway.

“Why do you want to ride there with us?” Nellie said.

The gun under the spread newspaper was very steady. So was Carlisle’s voice. Steady, and yet almost amused.

“Because,” he said, “we’re going in for a kind of roundup. The last roundup, you could call it. You and the dead-pan guy you’re working for, and the big ox called Smitty, and the others, have gotten in our way too much. So the lot of you are going to be collected in one spot, and then finished off.”

“If we’re going to die anyway,” Nellie said, “we might as well have something to show for it. I don’t believe you could get us both before one of us got you—”

The hidden gun jabbed forward a little under the newspaper. For an instant there was more murder and less smile in Carlisle’s sunny blue eyes.

“You know very well I could get you both before you could make an effective move,” he said quietly. “I will, too, if you try anything. So you can die now, or live a few hours longer by sitting still like good little girls. Take your choice.”

Nellie and Rosabel relaxed, with the hidden gun covering them.

Smitty and Mac, by the time four o’clock approached, had gone once more over the stretch of the Catawbi right-of-way where two miles of rails had disappeared. They had questioned farmers, as Benson ordered. They had picked up no additional information that — as far as they could see — had any value.

Two other farmers had heard the noise in the sky before the track vanished. They had seen nothing up there. The one with the extra-good eyes was the only one who had seen the man “walking” up there.

There was still no trace of the vanished rails anywhere around the countryside.

“We’re licked,” Mac said gloomily. “The man behind this is too clever for us. Not one trace has been left as to how he has done these things. Indeed, we don’t even know yet just what he has done.”

“You should have been an undertaker,” said Smitty.

“And why do ye say that, ye overgrown clown?”

“Because it’s the only place I can think of where such pessimism would be a business asset,” Smitty grinned. “Licked, are we? I’m betting that the chief has this whole business in a neat pigeonhole, with nothing left to do but collar the man who thought it up.”

The two had rented a car in Gary, Indiana. They were rolling up the road beside the Catawbi tracks, now near it, now a mile or so away. They’d get to Ludlow soon, and meet the girls there.

“I wonder where the skurlies took the car ferry?” Mac mused. He was driving.

“Up north farther, as the chief guessed. They couldn’t tow it any closer to Chicago, because the beach gets so crowded that it would instantly be seen.”

“Twill be spotted soon enough wherever they take it. A thing as big as that.”

“Probably,” said Smitty, “the gang only wants to keep it away from public notice for another few days, while they finish up this thing — whatever it is — that they’ve begun. There are wooded patches along the beach where they’d have a good chance of camouflaging the ferry so it couldn’t be seen well from the air, and they could expect to be undisturbed for at least a little longer— What’s that?”

“What’s what?” said the Scot, inching the speed of the car down a little.

“The motor had a funny sound in it,” said Smitty, inclining his huge head toward the dash.

“I didn’t hear a funny sound. Ye’re hearin’ things.”

“It was a kind of a drone,” said Smitty.

The road was near the track, at this point. Far ahead, they saw the train due into Ludlow at four-thirty. What with its numerous stops, they were going faster in their rented car than the train was. They’d caught up with it. They saw it slowing in the distance for a small depot.

The depot was of the kind that had collapsed along here awhile before; used by so few passengers that there was no regular attendant in it, save during rush hours. The rest of the day it served only as a shelter from the weather for the few who boarded trains from this section.

The road swung from the tracks again, and Smitty and Mac lost sight of the train just before it stopped at the depot.

“There! You can hear the drone again,” said Smitty. “In the motor— No, it’s not in the motor!” He turned to the Scot. “Mac, slip the clutch, cut off the motor, coast! I want to listen!”

MacMurdie coasted in neutral, with the car motor shut off. And now, with only the whine of their tires to distract them, they both heard the other noise plainly.

A monotonous drone. From the sky!

“The skywalker!” Smitty said, great hands clenching into fists.

Mac, without a word, jammed his foot on the starter, got the motor going again, and crammed into high gear. Then he started down the road as fast as the rented car could take them.

“Hey! What’s the idea?” yelled the giant over the rush of wind.

“That train!” said Mac, through shut teeth.

“What about it?”

“Last time that noise sounded out here, there was a train wreck. Now the noise is soundin’ again — but they can’t hear it on the train because of their own noise. I want to catch up to the train and flag it to a stop — before it gets wrecked, too!”

But they were not to do that. There wasn’t the time.

They swung back on a long curve with the meandering road, and could see the train again. But it was a mile ahead, with no more stops now till Ludlow was reached. They’d have to drive the car at eighty or better to catch up with it.

Mac had the accelerator to the floor. He and Smitty could hear the weird noise from the sky even over the racing motor, now that their ears were tuned to it. Smitty was looking out the window and up. But there was nothing in the sky to be seen.

“If the skurlies take the rails again—”

But it was not a stretch of railless ties that was to doom this train.

From the speeding cars on the track beyond them, Mac and Smitty heard a sudden rhythmic, heavy pounding, like a giant’s hammer.

“Flat wheel,” said Mac, wetting his lips.

But both knew it was more than that. An ordinary flat wheel doesn’t develop as swiftly and exaggeratedly as that.

The train was about a half mile ahead of them, now. The track was a hundred yards from the road, there. They could see it fairly plainly.

And they wished, afterward, that they hadn’t been able to.

They heard the hammering swelled to a sudden chorus of similar pounding. Then the five-car train seemed suddenly to go all the pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle spilled on the floor.

The engine sank like a runner whose knees have buckled under him. Its nose plowed into ties and sand, caught; then the locomotive tried to turn a somersault. It was thrown down. Behind it, the car bodies were dragging along the rails with no wheels under them. They kept the engine from somersaulting, but the front car was lifted high with the leverage.

As in all such movements of extreme stress, action seemed to be slow — though you knew it was proceeding, really, with appalling speed.

Slowly, it seemed, the five cars of the train looped to right and left off the tracks, and hurled themselves like five mad beasts on the wounded locomotive. Slowly the cars and engine piled over each other like jackstraws. Slowly the whole dreadful mess came to a halt in a cloud of dust and splinters.

There was silence, in which the last remnants of the droning noise in the empty sky sounded out. Then that, too, was gone, and a chorus of screams and of hissing steam rose from the wreckage ahead.

Mac and Smitty skidded to a stop on the road beside the wreck, and ran across sandy waste from road to track.

“The murrrderin’ skurlies!” Mac ground out, as he saw a man crawl from the wreckage, stare blankly around, and then collapse. The bitter-eyed Scot shook his fist at the empty sky, from which had come the noise. “They’re fiends, no less, to do these things!”

He began hauling debris aside in a feverish search for passengers who might still be alive. Beside him Smitty, with the strength of a bull elephant, did the same.

But both, in the midst of the work, could see at a glance, all too clearly, what had caused the wreck.

The car wheels had caved under the cars and locomotive.

Every wheel they saw was cracked and flawed and broken like brittle glass that has been dropped on hard tile. The wheels had simply pounded to pieces under the speeding train, dropping cars and engine and all to slide wheelless along the track till the snout of the locomotive caught in the ties and telescoped the whole mess together.