The Wrecker

“What do you think, Mr. Mowery?” asked Bell. “Was it an accident?”

“Hard to say, son. Ties smashed like kindling, no piece large enough to register tool marks. Spikes bent or snapped in two. Reminds me of a derailment I saw back in ‘83. String of passenger cars descending the High Sierra, the rear cars telescoping into one another like that caboose over there rammed inside that boxcar.”

The tall detective and the two engineers cast sober eyes on the caboose stuffed into the boxcar like a hastily packed suitcase.

“What will you report to Mr. He

Mowery nudged Eric Soares. “What should we tell him, Eric?”

Soares removed his glasses, glanced about myopically, then dropped to his knees and closely examined a crosstie severed by a locomotive drive wheel.

“As you say, Mr. Mowery,” he said, “if they did pull spikes, no tool marks survived.”

“But,” Mowery said, “I’d venture the old man is not going to want to hear that slack maintenance was the culprit, is he, Eric?”

“No, Mr. Mowery,” Eric answered with another of his sly smiles. Their friendship, Bell noticed, seemed based on Mowery acting like an uncle and Soares the favorite nephew.

“Nor will he welcome speculation that hasty construction could have resulted in a weakness exploited by the fast-moving heavy locomotive, will he, Eric?”

“No, Mr. Mowery.”

“Compromise, Mr. Bell, is the essence of engineering. We surrender one thing to get another. Build too fast, we get shabby construction. Build too scrupulously, we never get the job done.”

Eric stood up, hooked his glasses around his ears again, and took up the older’s chant.

“Build it so strong that it will never fail, we risk building too heavy. Build it light, we might build it too weak.”

“Eric’s a metallurgist,” Mowery said, chuckling. “Speaking of essence. He knows forty types of steel that didn’t even exist in my day.”

Bell was still studying the telescoped wreckage of the caboose stuffed inside the boxcar when an intriguing idea struck him. These men were engineers. They understood how things were made.

“Could you make a sword that starts short and gets longer?” he asked.

“Beg your pardon?”

“You were talking about telescoping and steel, and I was wondering whether the blade of a sword could be hidden inside itself then extended to make it long.”

“Like a collapsible stage sword?” asked Mowery. “Where the actor appears to be run through but the blade actually retracts into itself?”

“Only this one would not retract. It would run you through.”

“What do you say, Eric? You studied metallurgy at Cornell. Could you make such a sword?”

“You can make anything, if you’ve got the money,” Eric answered. “But it would be difficult to make it strong.”

“Strong enough to run a man through?”

“Easily strong enough to thrust. Strong enough to pierce flesh. But it could not endure lateral impact.”

“Lateral impact?”

Mowery explained. “Eric means that it would not stand up to whacking it sideways in a real sword fight against a real sword.”

“The beat,” said Bell. “A sharp blow to push your opponent’s blade aside.”

“You compromise strength in the interest of compactness. Two or three short lengths of steel joined ca

“I was curious what it would be like to make a knife turn into a sword,” said Bell.

“Surprising,” Mowery said drily, “to the fellow on the business end.”

The bridge builder took a final look around and steadied himself on Eric’s arm.

“Let’s go, Eric. No putting it off any longer. I’ve got to report to the old man exactly what Mr. Bell reported, which is exactly what the old man doesn’t want to hear. Who the heck knows what happened. But we found no evidence of sabotage.”

When Mowery did make his report, an angry Osgood He

“Barely a scratch. He must be the luckiest locomotive driver alive.”

“Fire him! If it wasn’t radical sabotage, then excessive speed caused that wreck. That’ll show the hands I don’t tolerate reckless engineers risking their lives.”

But firing the engineer did nothing to calm the terrified workmen employed to finish the Cascades Cutoff. Whether the wreck had been an accident or the work of a saboteur, they didn’t care. Although they were inclined to believe that the Wrecker had struck again. Police spies reported that there was talk in the camp of a strike.

“Strike!” echoed the apoplectic He

“They want to go home,” Isaac Bell explained. He was keeping close track of the men’s mood by polling his covert operatives in the cookhouses and saloons and visiting personally to gauge the effect of the Wrecker’s attacks on the Southern Pacific labor force. “They’re afraid to ride the work train.”

“That’s insane. I’m about to hole through the last tu

“They say that the cutoff has become the most dangerous line in the West.”

Ironically, Bell admitted, the Wrecker had won this round, whether he intended to or not.

The old man dropped his head in his hands. “God in Heaven, where am I going to get a thousand men with winter coming?” He looked up angrily. “Round up their ringleaders. Clap a bunch in jail. The rest’ll come around.”

“May I suggest,” said Bell, “a more productive course?”

“No! I know how to crush a strike.” He turned to Lillian, who was watching him intently. “Get me Jethro Watt. And wire the Governor. I want troops here by morning.”

“Sir,” said Bell. “I’ve just come back from the camp. It’s gripped with fear. Watt’s police will, at best, provoke a riot and, at worst, cause vast numbers to drift away. Troops will make it even worse. You can’t force decent work out of frightened men. But you can attempt to alleviate their fright.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bring in Jethro Watt. Bring five hundred officers with him. But put them to work patrolling the line. Blanket it until it is apparent that you, not the Wrecker, control every inch of track between here and Tu

“That’ll never work,” said He

Lillian spoke up at last.

“Try it, Father.”

And so the old man did.

Within a day, every mile of track was guarded and every mile scoured for loose rails and buried explosives. Just as had happened in Jersey City, where Van Dorn operatives had arrested various criminals swept up in the search for the Wrecker’s accomplices, here, in the course of hunting for signs of sabotage, track crews discovered several weaknesses in the track and repaired them.

Bell mounted a horse and rode the twenty-mile line. He returned by locomotive, satisfied that this newest stretch of the cutoff had been transformed from the most dangerous in the West to the best maintained. And the best guarded.

THE WRECKER DROVE A trader’s wagon pulled by two strong mules. It had a patched and faded canvas top stretched over seven hoops. Under the canvas were pots and pans and woolen cloth, salt, a barrel of lard, another that held china dishes packed in straw. Hidden under the trader’s cargo was an eight-foot-long, ten-by-twelve-inch freshly milled mountain hemlock railroad tie.

The trader was dead, stripped naked and tossed off a hillside. He was nearly as tall as the Wrecker, and his clothes fit the Wrecker reasonably well. A hole bored the length of the squared timber was stuffed with dynamite.

The Wrecker followed a buggy road that likely had started out as an Indian trail long before the railroad was built and a mule-deer track before then. While steep and narrow, the road unerringly found the gentlest slopes in a land that was harsh. Most of the remote settlements it touched upon were abandoned. Those that weren‘t, he avoided. Their hardscrabble residents might recognize the wagon and wonder what had happened to its owner.