the ropes tied on the loose rail, hit the brakes, and tried to reverse the engine. But that old 4-4-0 was going too fast. Trying to make up time. Damned shame. Pardo laughed.
One man leaped from the cab. The fireman, Pardo figured, and then Pardo saw nothing but dust, steam, black smoke, and black metal. The 4-4-0 leaped off the rails and slammed down the embankment, the tender toppling over and crashing down on the locomotive as it smashed a boulder and toppled onto its side, followed by a violent explosion that knocked Pardo off his feet and started his nosebleed again.
His ears rang, and the dust blinded him. Pardo swore, trying to find his Colt, but he had lost it. He shook his head, felt strong fingers on his shoulders, and he fought them off, but couldn’t, felt the fingers biting into him, shaking him. Then he heard the words:
“Son. Jim! Jim! It’s me. It’s your mother! Son! Are you all right?”
Another explosion.
He shook his head. Tried to answer his mother. Tell her he was fine.
Metal smashing metal, the splintering of wood, savage blasts, and that damned ringing in his ears. Pardo tasted blood again. He spit. Cursed. Felt his mother putting the Colt in his right hand, and he saw her old, weather-beaten face, those cold blue eyes, felt himself being helped to his feet. His hat, somehow, remained on his head. He pulled it off, waved at the dust, seemed to tell his mother he hadn’t been hurt, and wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his left hand.
The hellish noise ceased, as did the ringing in his ears, and he walked to the edge and looked down upon his handiwork.
Beside him, heavy sarcasm laced Wade Chaucer’s laugh.
“Is that the way Jesse James used to do it, Pardo?” Chaucer asked.
A piercing scream sounded below. Ignoring Chaucer, Pardo looked at the tracks. The bay gelding his mother had given Duke was a gory mess, but Duke seemed to be all right. So was Soledad. He couldn’t say the same about Soledad’s brother, who lay writhing on the ground like a dying snake. Soledad tried to hold him down. Duke stared, gagging, at Rafael’s bloody body.
Pardo spit and looked down at carnage that had once been a Southern Pacific train.
The tender, smashed to pieces, lay atop the locomotive, which had been turned into nothing more than a pile of twisted black metal that looked as if it had been blown apart by ten howitzers. The express car and two passenger cars had slid off the rails and fallen onto their sides before the caboose had flown over the rails, splintering the last coach.
“Which one’s got the money, Cap’n?” Harrah asked.
“Express car.” Chaucer answered for Pardo. “The one that’s burning like hell.”
Pardo’s eyes smarted. Damned car was going up like a tinderbox. Wood crackled, and Rafael screamed for mercy.
“The money,” Harrah said. “The Army money. It’s burning—”
“Check on Lacy and the horses, Ma.” Pardo’s voice was soft. He wet his lips, shoved the Colt bitterly into the holster. “Tell Phil we won’t have need of the buckboard.”
Chaucer snorted again.
“One more snigger, and I’ll bury you here, too.” Pardo spit again, before turning to Harrah. “All right, boys. Might as well go check out the passenger coaches before they go up in smoke, too. Salvage something out of this mess.”
He slid down the hill and made a beeline for Soledad, Duke, and what once had been Rafael. When the engine’s boiler blew, it had sprayed slivers of wood and steel like grapeshot. The bay gelding had caught most of the blast. Rafael had gotten an unhealthy chunk. Only something short of a miracle had protected Duke, Soledad, and the other horse, not to mention Pardo, his mother, and those watching from the hilltop.
Blood poured from both corners of Rafael’s mouth, his nose, and what looked like a thousand holes in his body. His left arm was gone at the elbow, and a piece of metal three inches wide and two feet long stuck out of his groin like a saber. Pardo knelt beside him and slowly lifted his head to find Soledad.
Tears streamed down the tall Mexican’s face. He crossed himself, and made himself look at Pardo. He mouthed something in Spanish. Pardo didn’t know what he had said for sure, but he knew what he had to do.
Slowly, he drew the Colt, thumbed back the hammer, and shot Rafael in the head.
“Sorry, amigo,” he told Soledad, as he stood, shoving the revolver into the holster.
“Gracias.” Soledad wiped his eyes with a gloved hand. “With your permission, I will take my brother back to the home of my blessed mother.”
“Take your time.” That was proper. He liked the Mexican for that, for thinking of his mother. Family was important. The most important thing, maybe, next to money and dead Yankees. “We’ll see you in the Dragoons.”
Pardo was moving again. Seemed like he was always moving. He saw the fireman, half-buried in debris, his neck broken, and wondered if he’d find the engineer somewhere beneath the rubble, probably his hands still pulling on the brake. The engineer had died game, which is more than he could say about the fireman. Or Rafael. Or Ma’s bay gelding.
He slid down with an avalanche of stones, dirt, and pieces from the train, feeling the heat from the roaring fire, put his hand on the smashed wood of the second passenger coach, or maybe it was the caboose. Hard to tell amid all this ruin. A fire had started licking its way down the smashed wood. Behind him, The Greek was riding his dun horse down the butte, letting the horse pick its own path downhill, keeping his Sharps cradled across his saddle. Harrah and Chaucer were checking the first passenger coach. Mostly Harrah. Chaucer had kept his distance from the wreck. Now Duke ran over to help.
Pardo swallowed and looked into what once had been a window of the second coach. He saw a dead man’s face, and walked on, then stopped, frozen.
Harrah had climbed out of the ruins of the first coach, stopping to mop sweat off his face with a calico bandana. Behind him rose a small arm, so white, so stained with blood. The scene completely mesmerized Pardo.
The fingers stretched out, fell on Harrah’s shoulder, and Harrah screamed.
CHAPTER TWO
Charleston’s whores came out that morning to serenade the Kraft brothers.
A couple of strumpets, Deputy U.S. Marshal Reilly McGivern decided, could actually sing, so well that he found himself humming a few bars of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” when deputies Gus Henderson and Frank Denton led L.J. and W.W. Kraft, arms and legs chained, out of the jail and toward the black-barred prison wagon waiting for them at the corner of Stove and Second streets. Deputy Slim Chisum, who was the definition of the word cautious, climbed into the wagon’s driver’s box and thumbed back the hammers of his sawed-off twelve-gauge.
Reilly pulled open the door at the back of the wagon and waited.
Next, the whores started “Oh, My Darling, Clementine,” which everyone seemed to be singing that year. Reilly hated that stupid song and tried to hum “Lorena” instead, but he couldn’t keep it up because of the whores, who crowded Charleston’s streets while other residents, the kinds usually seen on the streets in the daylight, gathered along the
