Алистер Маклин - Breakheart Pass

He emerged on to the rear platform and was almost immediately thrown off by the combination of a wind which had now reached near-hurricane force and an exceptionally violent lurch of the coach. To save himself he had to grab desperately at the rail with both hands. His Colt had been in his right hand: now it went spinning over the side.

Bellew took a suicidal chance, but between sudden death by suicide and sudden death through external causes there lies no difference. He flung himself towards the front platform on the brake van, caught the rail, dragged himself to temporary safety and seized the door of the brake van. This he twisted, pulled and pushed with a close to fear-crazed violence, but this door, by now predictably, was also locked. Bellew flattened his face against the glass panel to the side of the door and peered inside; his eyes widened and his face became masked in the total and final despair of a knowledge that comes too late.

The big brake wheel was at the end of the van but there was no hand on this wheel. Instead, the hand clutched a Bible, which was opened, face down, on the floor of the van. Devlin himself, also face down, lay beside his makeshift bed; between the thin shoulders protruded the hilt of a knife.

Bellew turned his stricken face sideways and stared, almost uncomprehendingly, at the snow-laden pines lining the track-side stream whizzing by in a hundred-mile-an-hour blur. Bellew crossed himself, something he hadn’t done since boyhood, and now the fear was gone from his face. In its place there was only resignation, the acceptance of the inevitability of death.

In the day compartment the seven horrified watchers were without speech for there was no longer anything to say. Like Bellew, although with a vastly different outlook, they too had dumbly accepted the inevitability of death.

The runaway coaches, two miles away now and still somehow miraculously remaining on the track, were hurtling towards the final curve leading to the bridge. Marica jerked convulsively away from the window and buried her face in her hands as the runaways failed to negotiate the last bend. They shot off the track – whether they ripped the track off with them or not it was impossible to tell at that distance – toppled sideways as they then sailed out across the void of the gorge, turning over almost lazily in mid-air until the three coaches, still locked together, had assumed a vertical position, a position they still occupied when all three smashed simultaneously into the precipitous far cliff-side of the gorge with the explosive thunderclap of sound of a detonating ammunition dump. Unquestionably, for every man aboard those coaches death must have supervened instantaneously. For a long second of time the flattened, mangled coaches remained in that position, seemingly pinned against the canyon wall as if unwilling to move, then, with a deliberation and slowness in grotesque contrast to their speed at the moment of impact, dropped reluctantly off and tumbled lazily into the unseen depths below.

The eleven survivors of the original trainload from Reese City, most of them shivering violently, were gathered round the rear end of the second horse wagon – now, in effect, the end of the train – examining the coupling, the free end of which had formerly been bolted to the front of the leading troop wagon. Three of the four massive securing bolts were still loosely in place in the plate. Claremont stared unbelievingly at the plate and the bolts.

‘But how, how, how could it have happened? Look at the size of those bolts!’

O’Brien said: ‘Not that I have any intention of going down into that ravine to investigate – even although all the evidence is smashed to pieces anyway – but what I’d have liked to see was the condition of the timber to which those bolts were attached.’

‘But I thought I heard a report–’

‘Or,’ Deakin suggested, ‘a baulk of heavy timber snapping in half.’

‘Of course.’ Claremont dropped the chain and plate. ‘Of course. That’s what it must have been. But why should it – Banlon, you’re the engineer. In fact, you’re the only trainman we have left.’

‘Before God, I’ve no idea. The wood may have rotted – it can happen without showing any signs – and this is the steepest climb in the mountains. But I’m only guessing. What I can’t understand is why Devlin did nothing about it.’

Claremont was sombre in both face and voice. ‘Some answers we’ll never know. What’s past is past. First thing is to have another try to contact Reese City or Ogden – we must have replacements for those poor devils at once, God rest their souls. What a way to die! The only way for a cavalryman to die is in the face of the enemy’ Claremont wasn’t quite as pragmatic as he would have liked to sound and he had to make a conscious effort to return himself to the realities of the present. ‘At least, thank God, we didn’t lose those medical supplies.’

Deakin was clearly in no mood to commiserate with Claremont. ‘Wouldn’t have made any difference if you had.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Medical supplies aren’t much good without a doctor to administer them.’

Claremont paused for a few seconds. ‘You’re a doctor.’

‘Not any more I’m not.’

They had a close circle of listeners. Even a trace of interest was beginning to show in Marica’s still rather shocked face.

Claremont was becoming heated. ‘But, damn it all, Deakin, that’s cholera they have up there. Your fellow man–’

‘My fellow man’s going to hang me. Probably, in spite of Pearce’s protestations, from the nearest cottonwood tree. The hell with my fellow man. Besides, as you say, that’s cholera they’ve got up there.’

Claremont showed as much contempt as it is possible for a man to do without actually sneering. ‘And that’s your real reason?’

‘I think it’s a very good reason.’

Claremont turned away in disgust and looked around the shivering company. ‘Morse I’ve never learnt. Can anyone–’

‘I’m no Ferguson,’ O’Brien said. ‘But if you give me time–’

‘Thank you, Major. Henry, you’ll find the set in the front of the supply wagon, under a tarpaulin. Bring it through to the day compartment, will you?’ He turned to Banlon, his mouth bitter. ‘I suppose the only good point about this ghastly business is that we’ll be able to make better time to the Fort. With those wagons gone–’

Banlon said heavily: ‘We won’t make better time. Devlin was the only other person aboard who could drive this train – and I’ve got to have sleep some time.’

‘My God, I’d quite forgotten. Now?’

‘I can make twice the speed in the day that I can by night. I’ll try to hang on to nightfall. By that time–’ he nodded to his fireman soldier standing by ‘–Rafferty and I are going to be pretty bushed, Colonel.’

‘I understand.’ He looked at the dangling chain and the plate on the ground. ‘And how about the safety factor, Banlon?’

Banlon spent quite some time rubbing the white bristles on his wizened face, then said: ‘I can’t see it, Colonel. Any problem, that is. Four things. This has been a million to one chance – I’ve never heard of it before – and it’s one to a million that it will happen again. I’ve got a lot less weight to pull so the strain on the couplings is going to be that much less. This is the steepest gradient on the line and once we’re over the top it’s going to be that much easier.’

‘You said four things. That’s three.’

‘Sorry, sir.’ Banlon rubbed his eyes. ‘Tired, that’s all. What I’m going to do now is to get a spike and hammer and test the woodwork around each coupling plate. Only sure way to test for rot, Colonel.’