Clive Cussler - The Chase

“What are you saying?”

“Listen,” he ordered her. “Listen.”

Then she heard it, the unmistakable sound of a train’s steam whistle, barely perceptible, but it was there.

Margaret rushed to the rear window and peered down the track. It was as if a fist had struck her in the stomach. She could see a stream of black smoke rising beyond a curve above a windbreak of small trees.

“You must tell Abner!” she screamed.

Cromwell had anticipated her and climbed a ladder to the vent opening in the roof of the boxcar. He pushed aside the lid to the vent, stood above the roof, and shot off his revolver to get Abner’s attention over the clamor of the locomotive. Abner heard and hurried over the top of the tender, until he was only a dozen feet away from Cromwell.

“There is a train coming up behind us,” Cromwell shouted.

Abner braced his feet apart against the pitch and roll of the tender and gazed over the roof of the boxcar. The onrushing train had come around the curve now and was visible in the distance. It looked to be a locomotive and its tender, pulling no cars. It was coming, and coming on fast, as evident from the smoke exploding from its stack and laid flat by the headwind.

Now the two trains were in sight and sound of each other, with the ferry dock at Woods Bay on Flathead Lake only twenty miles away.

IT WAS AS IF ADELINE WAS A COME-FROM-BEHIND THOROUGHBRED pounding around the far turn into the back stretch, flying through the herd and vying for the lead. Her connecting rods were a blur as they whipped the massive drive wheels over the rails. No locomotive ever worked harder. From the Oakland railyard to the wilds of Montana, she had covered more distance faster than any locomotive in history. No one timed her speeds, but none on board her cab or those who had seen her hurtle past ever doubted that she had surpassed ninety miles an hour on straight and level stretches of track.

Jongewaard had the throttle against its stop, throwing Adeline over tracks that were never meant for such speeds. Both engineers sat in the cab seats, their eyes fixed on the track ahead. Bell and Long shoveled while Shea systematically banked the fire to keep it burning evenly for the maximum amount of heat for proper combustion.

The chugging sound of the steam exhaust became one continuous hiss and the smoke poured from the stack in an ever-growing cloud. Bell stopped shoveling every so often to stare at the train ahead, growing larger by the minute. There was no effort to sneak up on Cromwell now; he pulled the cord and gave the whistle a long shriek that cut through the breeze beginning to blow in over the lake. Bell’s lips were spread in a tight smile. He hoped Cromwell sensed that it was he who was charging down his throat.

Bell turned, looked up to the sky, and saw it had changed from a blue sea to a gray shroud from the chinook wind that howled out of the Rocky Mountains to the east. Great swirls of dust, leaves, and small debris were thrown like wheat chaff through a threshing machine. The water of Flathead Lake had gone from a dead calm to a turbulent mass in less than twenty minutes.

Then, suddenly, both Jongewaard and Lofgren shouted at once: “Wagon on the track!”

Every eye swung and stared at the track ahead.

A farmer with a hay wagon pulled by a team of horses was on a road crossing the tracks. He must have heard the engine’s whistle, Bell thought, but the farmer had badly misjudged the speed of the train, believing he could cross the tracks in plenty of time. Jongewaard heaved back the reverser Johnson bar, slowing the drive wheels until they stopped and spun backward in reverse, braking the speeding locomotive.

When the farmer realized the iron monster was only a hundred yards away, he whipped his horses in a frenzied attempt to drive them out of the path of onrushing death. By then, it was too late.

Adeline plowed into the wagon in an explosion of hay, wooden planks, splinters, and shattered wheels. The men in the cab instinctively ducked behind the protection of the boiler as debris clattered along the sides of the engine and flew over the roof onto the tender.

Miraculously, the horses had jumped forward and escaped without harm. Bell and the others did not witness the farmer’s fate. As soon as Jongewaard brought Adeline to a halt a hundred yards down the track, Bell and crew leaped from the cab and ran back to the crossing.

They were all vastly relieved to find the farmer lying no more than five feet from the rails with all his hands and feet intact. He had pushed himself to a sitting position and was looking around, befuddled at the demolished wreckage of his wagon.

“Are you injured?” asked Bell anxiously.

The farmer surveyed his arms and legs while feeling a rising bump on the head. “A rash of bumps and bruises,” he muttered. “But, wonder of wonders, I’m still in one piece, praise the Lord.”

“Your horses also survived without injury.”

Shea and Long helped the farmer to his feet. And led him to the horses that had seemingly forgotten their narrow brush with death and were eating the grass beside the road. He was glad to see his horses in sound shape but angered that his wagon was scattered over the landscape in a hundred pieces.

Bell read his mind and gave him a Van Dorn card. “Contact my detective agency,” he instructed. “They will compensate you for the loss of your wagon.”

“Not the railroad?” the farmer asked, confused.

“It wasn’t the railroad’s fault. A long story you’ll read about in the newspapers.” Bell turned and gazed in frustration down the tracks at the fading smoke from Cromwell’s locomotive. He refused to believe he had failed so close to his goal. But all was not lost. Already, Jongewaard had backed up Adeline to pick up Bell and the crew.

Seeing the farmer able to fend for himself, Jongewaard yelled to Bell. “Hop aboard. We’ve got time to make up.”

Bell, Lofgren, and the fireman had barely climbed back into the cabin when Jongewaard had Adeline barreling down the rails once again in hot pursuit of the bandit’s train. The chinook was upon them now. The wind blew the dust and loose foliage like foam flying from surf plunging onto a beach. Visibility had been cut to no more than two hundred yards.

Jongewaard could no longer peer out the side of the cab or his squinting eyes would have filled with the dust. Instead, he stared though the cab’s forward window, having no choice but to cut Adeline’s speed from seventy-five miles an hour down to forty-five.

He saw a semaphore beside the track with its flag in the horizontal position, signaling the locomotive to stop, but he ignored it. Next came a sign proclaiming the outer town limits of Woods Bay. Not knowing the exact distance to the ferry landing, he slowed down even more until Adeline was creeping along at twenty-five miles an hour.

Jongewaard turned to Bell. “Sorry about the slowdown, but I can’t see if the town docks are five hundred yards or five miles away. I’ve got to lower the speed in case we come upon the bandit’s freight car, or flatcars with logs, sitting on the main track.”

“How much time do you figure we lost?” asked Bell.

“Twelve minutes, by my watch.”

“We’ll catch them,” said Bell with measured confidence. “Not likely the ferry crew will risk crossing the lake in this weather.”

Bell was right about the ferry not normally running across the lake in rough water, but he missed the boat by underestimating Cromwell. The Butcher Bandit and his sister had not come this far to surrender meekly.

Cromwell and Margaret were not to be stopped. Already, their train was rolling across the dock onto the ferry.

THE RAILCAR FERRY WAS WAITING AT THE DOCK WHEN Cromwell’s train arrived. The locomotive was switched onto the track that led across the wooden dock onto the ferry. But that was as far as it would go. The three-man crew had decided it wasn’t safe to attempt a crossing until the chinook passed and the lake’s surface settled down. They were sitting in the small galley drinking coffee and reading newspapers and did not bother to get up when Cromwell’s train rolled on board.