Алистер Маклин - Breakheart Pass

Deakin pressed back against the coach, drew a deep breath of relief, pulled his sleeve across his forehead in another gesture of relief, silently retraced his steps for several paces, then moved directly out from the train and came curving back in a semicircle which took him to a point just to the rear of the supply wagon. This time his approach was a great deal more cautious. He dropped to his hands and knees, crawled cautiously forward and glanced upward. A second man was on guard at the rear of the supply wagon; there was no mistaking the black moonface of Carlos even although the gleaming smile was in noticeable and understandable abeyance.

Deakin repeated the circling tactic and brought up at the rear end of the first horse wagon. He mounted the platform, effected a prudently stealthy entrance and closed the door behind him. As he moved towards the front of the wagon a horse whinnied nervously. Deakin immediately moved towards the horse, stroked its neck and murmured reassuring words; the horse nuzzled his face and fell quiet. If Carlos had heard the sound he paid no attention; apart from the fact that it was a sound that one would naturally expect to hear from a horse wagon, it wasn’t much of a night for paying attention.

Arrived at the front end of the wagon, Deakin peered through a crack in the door. Carlos, only a few feet away, appeared to be gloomily contemplating what must have been his very chilly feet indeed. Deakin turned away to the slatted haybox to his left. With great care and in complete silence he removed a few of the top bars and an armful of hay, recovered the telegraph transmitter, replaced the hay and the bars as he had found them, and moved off with the transmitter to the rear of the wagon where he descended the steps, looked quickly to the front and the rear – visibility was still almost nil – stepped down silently into the snow and made his way quickly towards the rear of the train.

A convenient fifty yards from the rear of the train Deakin located a telegraph pole. He unwound the trailing lead from the transmitter and secured one end to his belt. Then he began to climb the telegraph pole.

‘Began’ was the operative word. He managed to get about three feet off the ground, then helplessly remained there, unable to make another inch. The effects of snow, high winds and freezing temperatures had combined to encase the pole in an impenetrable sheath of ice which offered a zero friction coefficient, an entire lack of grip which rendered further progress quite impossible. Deakin returned to earth, stood there for a moment in thought, then tore a quantity of material from his shirt and ripped it into two pieces.

He made for the nearest angled guy wire, wrapped his legs around it, and, using them and the two improvised gloves from his shirt to afford a friction grip, started to climb again. It was a fairly difficult climb and, in the light of what he had recently been through, a most exhausting one, but by no means impossible; by the time he’d reached the top and straddled the crossbar the matter that concerned him most was that his frozen hands felt as if they no longer belonged to him. At that moment frostbite was the very last thing he wanted.

Two minutes of rubbing and kneading his hands and the pain that steadily accompanied this as the circulation returned convinced him that this misfortune had not indeed befallen him. He detached the end of the trailing lead from his belt, secured it firmly to a telegraph wire and returned to earth the way he had come and so swiftly that by the time he arrived there the hands that had so lately felt frozen now felt as if they had been badly burned. He uncovered the transmitter set and bent over it, shielding it as best he could from the snow, and began to transmit.

At Fort Humboldt, where the weather was no better and no worse than it was where Deakin was crouched, Sepp Calhoun, White Hand and two other white men were sitting in the Commandant’s office. Calhoun, as usual, was using his boots to make free of Colonel Fairchild’s desk, while both hands were occupied in similarly making free of the Colonel’s whisky and cigars. White Hand was sitting erect in a hard-backed chair, carefully not touching the glass before him. The door opened and a man entered, his face conveying as high a degree of urgency as is possible for one whose bewhiskered and bearded face is liberally covered in snow.

Calhoun and White Hand looked at each other, then moved swiftly towards the door. Even as they reached the telegraph office Carter was transcribing a message. Calhoun glanced briefly at him and Simpson, the other captive telegraph operator. nodded briefly at the two guards and took up his customary position behind the desk. White Hand remained standing. Carter ceased writing and handed a slip of paper to Calhoun, whose face immediately assumed a thunderous expression of frustrated anger.

‘Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!’

White Hand said in a quiet voice: ‘Trouble, Sepp Calhoun? Trouble for White Hand?’

‘Trouble for White Hand. Listen. “Attempt on troop wagons failed. Heavy armed guard on all coaches. Advise.” How in God’s name did the damned idiots not–’

‘Such talk will not help, Calhoun.’ Calhoun looked at him without expression. ‘My men and I will help.’

‘It’s a bad night.’ Calhoun went to the door, opened it and passed outside. White Hand followed, closing the door behind him. Within moments the figures of the two men whitened in the heavy driving snow.

Calhoun said: ‘A very bad night, White Hand.’

‘The rewards are great. Your words, Sepp Calhoun.’

‘You can do it? Even on a night like this?’ White Hand nodded. ‘Very well. The entrance to Breakheart Pass. A cliff on one side, steep slope with plenty of rock cover for you and your men on the other. You can leave your horses half a mile–’

‘White Hand knows what to do.’

‘Sorry. Come on. Let’s tell them to instruct Banlon to stop the train there. You’ll never have an easier job, White Hand.’

‘I know, I do not like it. I am a warrior and I live to fight. But massacre I do not like.’

‘The rewards are great.’

White Hand nodded in silence. Both men reentered the telegraph room where Carter was tapping out a message. Calhoun waved him into stillness, sat at his purloined desk, wrote a brief message, handed it to one of the guards to give to Carter and said to Simpson: ‘Listen good, friend.’

Carter sent out the communication while Simpson wrote. At the end of the transmission Calhoun said: ‘Well, Simpson?’

‘ “Instruct Banlon halt train two hundred yards inside east entrance to Breakheart Pass.”

Calhoun nodded approvingly towards Carter. ‘You may yet live to be an old man.’ As he finished speaking another message in Morse came in over the headphones. It was very brief and Carter read it out without waiting for the usual confirmation from Simpson.

“Affirmative. Signing off.”

Calhoun smiled in as benign a fashion as he was capable of and said: ‘We have them, White Hand.’

Judging from the barely perceptible expression on his face, Deakin was not quite of the same opinion. He removed his headphones, with a strong tug pulled the telegraph lead clear from overhead, then gave the telegraph set a shove which sent it tumbling down a steep slope to vanish in the darkness below. He walked away quickly, gave the train a wide berth, arrived at the cab’s footplate, brushed the snow from his face, then peered at the steam-gauge.

The needle had fallen dangerously below the blue line. Deakin opened the fire-box, looked at the very dully glowing embers and began to feed cordwood into the fire-box. This time, either through tiredness or concern, he seemed to be in no hurry to go. Instead, he watched the gauge in an almost proprietorial fashion and waited patiently until the needle had climbed up from below the blue line to fractionally above the red one. Banlon had intimated that this was the danger area, but Deakin didn’t seem to care. He closed the door on the now fiercely-burning firebox, took an oil-can and two railroad spikes from Banlon’s tool-box, turned up his sheepskin collar and dropped down to the track-side.