The Wrecker

35

ISAAC BELL PLANTED MEN IN EVERY WORK GANG TO WATCH FOR sabotage.

Hennessy had told him that holing through was just the beginning. He intended to build as far across the bridge as he could before the first snow. Even the most cowardly Wall Street banker, the railroader boasted, would be assured by the proof that the Southern Pacific was primed to continue cutoff construction when it melted in the spring.

Bell directed horse patrols to guard the route that the railroad was surveying deep into the mountains. Then he asked Jethro Watt to take personal command of his railroad police. They walked the bridge and agreed to beef up the contingents guarding the piers below and the span above. Then they inspected the surrounding area on horseback, the giant Watt mounted on an enormous animal named Thunderbolt who kept trying to gnaw the police chief’s leg. Watt subdued the animal by swatting its head, but any judge of horse-flesh knew that Thunderbolt was merely biding his time.

By nightfall that first day of frenzied activity, carpenters had erected temporary shoring in Tunnel 13 and a timber rock shed around its freshly hewn portal. Masons were following close behind with stonework. And track gangs had laid rail from the tunnel to the edge of the gorge.

Osgood Hennessy’s red train streamed through the tunnel, pushing a string of heavily laden materials cars ahead of it and up to the closely guarded bridge. Track gangs unloaded rails and work continued by electric light. Ties supplied by a timber operation upstream in the mountains were already laid on the bridge. Spike mauls rang through the night. When the rails were secured, Hennessy’s locomotive pushed the heavy materials cars onto the span.

A thousand railroaders held their breath.

The only sounds were mechanical, the chuff of the locomotive, the dynamo powering the lights, and the grinding of cast iron on steel. As the lead car, heaped with rails, edged forward, all eyes shifted to Franklin Mowery. The elderly bridge builder was watching closely.

Isaac Bell overheard Eric, Mowery’s bespectacled assistant, boast, “Mr. Mowery was the same cool as a cucumber when he finished Mr. Hennessy’s Lucin Cutoff across the Great Salt Lake.”

“But,” said a grizzled surveyor, peering into the deep gorge, “that one was a lot nearer the water.”

Mowery leaned nonchalantly on his walking stick. No emotion showed on his round face, no worry rippled his sweeping jawline, or twitched his Vandyke beard. He had a cold, smokeless pipe firmly clamped in his broad, good-humored mouth.

Bell watched Mowery’s pipe. When the materials car reached the far side without mishap and the workmen greeted it with a cheer, Mowery removed his pipe from his mouth and picked splinters of crushed stem from his teeth.

“Caught me,” he grinned at Bell. “Bridges are strange critters, highly unpredictable.”

They double-tracked the bridge by noon.

In a long burst of action, they laid dozens of sidings. Soon, the remote plateau had been transformed into a combination railroad yard and construction staging arena. Hennessy’s red special steamed across the gorge and parked on an elevated sidetrack from which the president of the Southern Pacific could oversee the entire operation. A steady stream of materials trains began crossing the bridge. Telegraph wires followed, transmitting the good news back to Wall Street.

Hennessy’s telegrapher handed Bell a wad of encoded messages.

No telegraph operator on the continent had been more closely scrutinized than J. J. Meadows had been by the Van Dorn Agency. “Honest as the day is long and beholden to no man,” was the verdict. But with the memory still fresh of the Wrecker’s renegade telegraphers shooting it out with Texas Walt Hatfield, Bell was taking no chances. All his Van Dorn correspondence was encrypted. He locked the door to his private stateroom, two cars back on the special, and decoded them.

These were the first results of the background reports Bell had ordered to ferret out the spy in the railroad president’s inner circle. Nothing in the record of the Southern Pacific’s head engineer suggested he was less than respectable. He was loyal to the Southern Pacific, loyal to Osgood Hennessy, and loyal to the high standards of his profession.

The same was said for Franklin Mowery. The bridge builder’s life was an open book studded with professional accomplishment. His many charitable deeds included serving as a director of a Methodist orphanage.

Lillian Hennessy had been arrested a surprising number of times for such a young and privileged woman, but only while demonstrating for the right to vote. The charges had always been dismissed. Testament, Bell assumed, to overzealous policing or the power of a doting father who happened to be president of the nation’s biggest railroad.

Of the two bankers Hennessy had named who might have deduced his plans, one had been convicted of fraud, the other named as a correspondent in a divorce. One of the attorneys had been disbarred in Illinois, another had amassed a fortune in railroad stock by buying with foreknowledge of the railroads’ intentions. On closer examination, the Van Dorn investigators reported, both bankers had transgressed in their youth, while the disbarred attorney had subsequently been readmitted. But the holder of the fortune, Erastus Charney, drew Bell’s interest, as he was clearly a man who traded on the power of knowing ahead of time which way the wind blew. Bell wired to dig deep into Charney’s affairs.

Bell was not surprised that the lively Mrs. Comden had lived a colorful life even before she became consort to the railroad magnate. A child piano prodigy, she’d made her concert debut with the New York Philharmonic at age fourteen, performing Chopin’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in F Minor-“a bear to play at any age,” noted the Van Dorn operative. She had toured the United States and Europe, where she stayed to study in Leipzig. She had married a wealthy physician connected at the German court, who’d then divorced her when she ran off with a highborn officer of the First Guards Cavalry Brigade. They had lived together in Berlin until the officer’s scandalized family intervened. Emma then married a struggling portrait painter named Comden, only to be widowed within the year. Penniless, her concert-playing days behind her, the Widow Comden had landed in New York, drifted to New Orleans and San Francisco, and answered a newspaper ad to tutor Lillian Hennessy. Her nomadic ways continued on the luxurious special employed by the ever-moving Hennessy. On the rare occasions that the irascible Osgood appeared socially, the lovely Mrs. Comden was at his side. And woe, noted the Van Dorn operative, to the fortunes of the politician, banker, or industrialist whose wife dared snub her.

Charles Kincaid’s life had been far less colorful than Preston Whiteway’s newspapers led readers to believe. He had studied engineering briefly at West Point, switched to civil engineering at the University of West Virginia, done postgraduate work in civil engineering at the Technische Hochschule of Munich, and hired on with a German firm building the Baghdad Railway. The facts behind his “Hero Engineer” moniker were questionable. That Turkish revolutionaries had frightened American nurses and missionaries tending to Armenian refugees was likely. The Whiteway newspaper accounts of Kincaid’s role in their rescue were, the Van Dorn operative noted acerbically, “less so.”

Bell fired back two more queries: “Why did Kincaid leave West Point?” and “Who is Eric Soares?”

Franklin Mowery’s assistant was always at his side. Whatever special knowledge of Hennessy’s affairs that the bridge builder knew, young Eric would know, too.

Speaking of young assistants, what was taking James Dashwood so long to catch up with the blacksmith who had fashioned the hook that derailed the Coast Line Special? Isaac Bell reread Dashwood’s meticulously detailed reports. Then he wired the apprentice care of the Los Angeles office.BLACKSMITH STOPPED DRINKING.INQUIRE TEMPERANCE MEETINGS.

ISAAC BELL RECEIVED A report from the Kansas City office that Eric Soares was an orphan whom Franklin Mowery had sponsored through Cornell University and had taken on as his assistant. Soares was by some accounts a talented engineer, by others an upstart riding the coattails of a famously generous man.

Bell reflected upon the fact that Mowery did not have the physical stamina or agility to do fieldwork without help. Eric would perform duties that required physical activity, such as inspecting work done on the bridge. He telegraphed Kansas City to keep digging.

“Private wire, Mr. Bell.”

“Thank you, Mr. Meadows.”

Bell took the telegram to his stateroom, hoping it was from Marion. It was, and he exclaimed with pleasure when he read:DO NOT-REPEAT NOT-WISH TO JOIN PRESTONWHITEWAY CASCADE LODGE FOR PICTURE WORLDNEWSREELS. BUT ARE YOU STILL THERE? IF SO, WHAT DO YOU WISH?

Bell called on Lillian Hennessy. His schemes to extricate himself from the girl’s infatuation and rescue Archie Abbott from his mother seemed to be working. Since his return from New York, most of their conversations veered toward the subject of Abbott, and she tended now to treat Bell as an adored big brother or older cousin. After they spoke, he wired Marion back.COME! BE HENNESSY’S GUEST ABOARD SPECIAL.

While Bell pursued his investigation, and kept honing his efforts to protect the Cascade Canyon Bridge, the railroad forged ahead. Two days after the cutoff had crossed the canyon, the staging area on the far plateau had room and track to accommodate the endless strings of freight cars arriving with steel rail, spikes, ballast, and coal. A creosoting plant arrived in parts. It was assembled alongside the stockpiled crossties and was soon belching noxious black smoke as raw wood entered one end and floated out the other steeped in preservative.

Wagons that had delivered the ties down twisted mountain trails from the remote East Oregon Lumber Company now carried planks and beams. An entire trainload of carpenters hammered together tin-roofed roundhouses for the locomotives, powerhouses to shelter dynamos for electricity, blacksmith shops, kitchens, bunkhouses for the track gangs, stables for the mules and horses.

Holed through the last tunnel, connected to the bridge and linked by it to strategically positioned staging yards, Hennessy could now bring in men and material directly from California. The task of guarding the four-hundred-mile route as well as the bridge fell to Van Dorn detectives and Southern Pacific railway police. Isaac Bell urged Joseph Van Dorn to borrow U.S. Army troops to assist their thinly spread force.

EIGHT MILES UPSTREAM FROM the Cascade Canyon Bridge, the East Oregon Lumber Company’s forest rang from dawn to dark with the incessant bite of double-bladed axes. Modern high-lead winches snaked logs from the steepest slopes. “Steam donkeys,” powerful stationary steam engines, turned drums of wire rope that hauled logs to the mill on a corduroy skid road. Tie after tie was sawn and squared and sent down the terrible roads by wagon. When work stopped at night, the exhausted lumberjacks could hear the distant moan of locomotive whistles, a reminder even as they slept that the railroad craved more timber.

The miles between the bridge and the camp felt more like eighty than eight to the teamsters who delivered lumber to the cutoff staging yard. So rugged were the mountain roads that Gene Garret, the ambitious, greedy manager of the sawmill, was grateful for the Panic that had brought hard times. If the economy had been booming, the mill would be short of hands. The mule skinners would seek jobs elsewhere rather than climb the mountains for another load. And the lumberjacks who had shot the rapids down the river in dugout canoes to celebrate payday Saturday nights would not walk eight miles back to work on Sunday.

An enormous artificial lake was filling beside the remote lumber camp. Muddy water crept daily up the sides of a natural bowl that was formed where three mountain slopes converged at the Cascade River. The fourth side was a rough dam built of tumbled stones and logs. It towered fifty feet above the original masonry constructed years before for a millrace to power the saws. Now power came from the steam donkeys that the new owners of East Oregon Lumber had delivered in pieces by oxcart. The original millpond had vanished under the ever-deepening lake. The mule barns and the bunk- and cookhouses had been moved twice to escape the rising water.

The Wrecker was proud of that dam.

He had designed it on the principle of a beaver dam, which controlled water flow without stopping it entirely. His design employed giant tree trunks instead of sticks, man-size boulders instead of mud. The trick was to impound enough of the river flow to fill the lake while letting sufficient through so that downstream it appeared normal. If the river seemed a little lower than usual for late autumn as it tumbled through the town of Cascade, few residents took notice. And because the Cascade Canyon Bridge was newly built, there were no ancient high-water marks to compare to the river rushing by the stone piers.

Manager Garret would never question the purpose of the lake nor the enormous investment in an operation too remote to deliver enough timber to earn it back. The Wrecker’s shell corporation, which had secretly purchased the timber operation, paid the sawmill manager a fat bonus for every board and crosstie delivered to the railroad. All Garret cared about was squeezing as much work as humanly possible out of his lumberjacks before winter snows shut them down.

The lake kept rising as autumn rains swelled the countless streams and creeks that fed the river. With bitter humor, the Wrecker named it Lake Lillian for the headstrong girl who spurned him. He calculated that more than a million tons of water filled the deep gorge already. Lake Lillian was a million-ton insurance policy in case the flaws he had built into the Cascade Canyon Bridge didn’t cause it to collapse on its own.

He turned his horse and rode up the trail for a mile to a log cabin nestled in a clearing by a spring. Firewood was stacked nearby beneath a canvas lean-to. Smoke rose from a mud-and-stick chimney. A single window overlooked the road. Rifle slits on all four sides of the cabin commanded a 360-degree field of fire.

Philip Dow stepped out the door. He was a compact, self-possessed man in his forties, clean-shaven, with a thick head of curly black hair. Originally from Chicago, he was dressed incongruously for his cabin in a dark suit and derby.

His sharp eyes and impassive face could belong to a veteran cop, or an Army sniper, or an assassin. He was the latter, with a ten-thousand-dollar dead-or-alive reward on his head posted by the Mine Owners’ Association. Through sixteen years of bitter Coeur d‘Alene strikes, Philip Dow had murdered, in his own words, “plutocrats, aristocrats, and all the other rats.”

A cool head, a talent for leadership, and a rigid code of personal honor that set loyalty above all made Dow a rare exception to Charles Kincaid’s rule that no accomplice survived who had seen his face much less knew his true identity. Kincaid had offered shelter when the murder of Governor Steunenberg had made the northern Idaho panhandle too hot for Dow to stick around. The deadly master of sap, knife, gun, and explosive was safe in his cabin in the Wrecker’s lumber camp, touchingly grateful and absolutely loyal.

“Isaac Bell is coming down to the lodge for the banquet tonight. I’ve worked up a scheme for an ambush.”

“Van Dorn dicks don’t kill easy,” Dow replied. It was a statement of fact, not a complaint.

“Are any of your boys up to pulling it off?”

Dow’s “boys” were a bunch of hard-bitten lumberjacks he had whipped into a powerful gang. Many were on the run from the law, hence the appeal of East Oregon Lumber’s remote site. Most would rather commit murder for money than break their backs cutting timber. Charles Kincaid never dealt with them directly-none knew his connection-but, under Dow’s command, they extended the Wrecker’s reach, whether to set up an attack on the railroad or terrorize his paid but at times tentative accomplices. He had dispatched a pair to kill the Santa Monica blacksmith who had seen his face. But the blacksmith had disappeared and the lumberjacks fled. Thinly treed, sun-drenched southern California was not safe for brawny, handlebar-mustachioed, wool-clad woodsmen with prices on their heads.

“I’ll do it myself,” Dow said.

“His woman is coming,” the Wrecker told him. “In theory, he’ll be distracted. That should make it easier for them to catch Bell off balance.”

“I’ll still do it myself, Senator. It’s the least I can do you.”

“I appreciate your kindness, Philip,” said Kincaid, aware that Dow’s code required a certain archaic formality of expression.

“What does Bell look like? I’ve heard about him but never set eyes on him.”

“Isaac Bell is about my height … Actually, a hair taller. A build like mine, though perhaps a little leaner. Stern face, like you’ve seen on lawmen. Yellow hair and mustache. And, of course, he’ll be wearing fancy clothes for the banquet. Here, I’ll show you the scheme. The woman is staying on Hennessy’s train. The time to do it is late, after they come back from the banquet. Hennessy has trouble sleeping. He always invites his guests for a nightcap …”

They went into the cabin, which Dow kept spotless. On the oilcloth-covered table, the Wrecker spread a chart that depicted the layout of Hennessy’s special.

“Working back from the locomotive and tender, N1 is Hennessy’s own car, as is N2. Next is the baggage car, with a passage through it. The stateroom cars, Car 3 and Car 4, are behind it, then the diner, Pullman sleepers, lounge. The baggage car is the divider. No one goes forward of it without an invitation. Bell’s fiancee will be in Car 4, Stateroom 4, the rearmost. Bell is in Car 4, Stateroom 1. She will go to bed first. He will linger for appearances.”

“Why?”

“They’re not married yet.”

Philip Dow looked baffled.

“Am I missing something here?”

“Same as a weekend in the country except it’s a train,” Kincaid explained. “An agreeable host arranges bedrooms to serve the guests’ liaisons so no one has to tiptoe too far down the hall. Everyone knows, of course, but it’s not ‘public knowledge,’ if you understand my meaning.”

Dow shrugged as if to say it was more important to kill aristocrats than understand them.

“Bell will enter Car 4 from the head end, walking back from Hennessy’s parlor. He will pass to the rear and knock on her door. As she opens it to let him enter, you will emerge from this alcove-the porter’s station. I recommend your sap since it is quiet, but, of course, I leave such details to you.”

Philip Dow traced the route with a manicured finger, thinking it through. To the extent that he could feel affection for anyone, he liked the Senator. He would never forget that the man had gone to bat for him when anybody else would have turned him in for the reward. Plus, Kincaid knew how things worked. It was a pretty good scheme, clean and simple. Although the woman could be trouble. With the hangman waiting for him in Idaho, he could not afford to get caught. He would have to kill her too before she screamed.

The sap made sense. Guns, of course, were noisy, while the slightest mistake with a knife could set off loud howling. Besides, from what he could remember of his bloody lifelong rampage, he had killed more enemies with a sap than guns, knives, and explosives combined. The concentrated weight of loosely bagged lead shot shaped itself to a man’s temple so tightly that it usually shattered bone and always blew out brains.

“Let me ask you something, Senator.”

“What?”

“You’re out to destroy Osgood Hennessy, aren’t you?”

Kincaid looked away so that Dow could not see in Kincaid’s eyes that Dow was only an instant from having his skull smashed in with the poker on the hearth.

“Why do you ask?” Kincaid asked.

“I could kill him for you.”

“Oh.” Kincaid smiled. Dow was only trying to help. “Thank you, Philip. But I prefer to keep him alive.”

“Revenge,” Dow nodded. “You want him to know what you’re doing to him.”

“Correct,” the Wrecker lied. Revenge was for fools. Even for a thousand insults, revenge was not worth the trouble. Osgood Hennessy’s untimely death would throw all his plans into a cocked hat. Lillian, heir to his fortune, was only twenty. Hennessy’s bankers would bribe a probate judge to appoint a guardian to protect their interests. J. P. Morgan himself would seize that opportunity to control the Southern Pacific by making Lillian Hennessy his ward. None of this would serve Charles Kincaid’s scheme to be first among the “favored few.”

Philip Dow had turned his attention back to the chart. He foresaw another problem. “What if the porter is in his station?”

“He’s not likely to be at that hour. If he is, how you deal with him is up to you.”

Philip Dow shook his head. “I don’t kill workingmen. Unless I have no choice.”

The Wrecker looked at him, inquiringly. “He’s only a porter. It’s not like he’s white.”

Dow stood back, expression darkening, eyes hard as anthracite. “The worst job on the train is the best job their people can get. Everyone is the Pullman porter’s boss. That makes him workingman enough for me.”

The Wrecker had never met a unionist who welcomed blacks to the labor movement. He hurried to assuage the angry assassin. “Here, take this.”

He gave Dow a six-pointed sterling silver star.

“If in your judgment, Philip, you would be safe merely ordering the porter off the train, show him this.”

Dow hefted the badge in his hand and read the inscription.

“Captain of the Southern Pacific Railway police?” He smiled, clearly relieved that he would not have to kill the porter. “The poor porter won’t stop running until he hits Sacramento.”