The Cutthroat

Scant moments behind it, the New York Central’s 20th Century Limited extra-fare passenger flyer was overtaking on the next track at eighty miles an hour. Like a cracking bullwhip, the caboose on the back of the wrecked train had been flung off its rails onto 20th’s track. The rocketing Limited’s engineer saw it in the beam of his electric headlamp. He slammed on his air brakes, threw his Johnson bar across its full arc to reverse his drivers, and prayed.

* * *

It was no coincidence that a top Van Dorn detective like white-haired Kansas City Eddie Edwards was riding in the express car on the 20th Century Limited. Isaac Bell had his best railroad specialists hunting a gang of train robbers, and Edwards was headed for points west, riding free. Van Dorns were welcome guests in the rolling fortresses when crack passenger trains carried fortunes in gold, jewels, bearer bonds, and banknotes. Amenities were sparse — a Thermos flask, a mail sack for a mattress, a canvas bag of hundred-dollar bills for a pillow — and sleep was interrupted to draw guns at station stops, but the famously tightfisted Mr. Van Dorn liked saving money on train fares. He also wanted his men rubbing shoulders with express agents, who had the latest information on criminals in the robbery line.

The instant the 20th Century Limited’s brakes and back-spinning drive wheels brought the speeding train to a grinding, clashing halt, Edwards grabbed a riot gun. The conductor pounded on the locked door. “Fast freight on the ground.”

Edwards piled out with the train crew to help, still gripping the riot gun in the event that thieves had caused the wreck. The veteran detective’s instincts were proved right by the sudden crackle of rifle and pistol fire. The express agent ran back to guard the 20th’s express car. Eddie Edwards ran toward muzzle flashes in the dark.

He established that three or four train robbers were raking the wrecked train with gunfire and that a single express agent was firing back from an overturned car. Then he leveled his pump-action weapon in the direction that would do the most good and opened up. The train robbers had the advantage of numbers and their rifles’ longer range. Detective Edwards had a rapid-firing weapon and ice water in his veins.

* * *

An all-roads rail pass personally endorsed by Osgood Hennessy, the president of the Southern Pacific, was among Isaac Bell’s most valued possessions. He was greeted warmly on a New York Central & Hudson night mail racing out of Grand Central, and he arrived at the Mohawk River crash as dawn was breaking.

A wreck train was lifting a caboose off the track with a crane. Freight cars lay half in the water. Crates and trunks were scattered on the riverbank. Hundreds of yards of track had been torn into heaps of twisted steel and splintered crossties. The entire site was littered with spilled clothing, paper, and shattered barrels spewing excelsior. Clumps of those thin poplar-wood shavings that had cushioned the barrels’ contents, tossed on the wind like miniature tumbleweeds.

Eddie Edwards greeted him with the lowdown.

“They chocked a switch frog with iron wedges. That shunted the fast freight onto that siding. As she was steaming at forty miles per hour, she jumped the tracks. And that’s just the first thing they did wrong.”

“What else did they do wrong?”

“Derailed the wrong train. They thought they were robbing the Twentieth Century, which was coming along next. She was doing eighty, and if they’d derailed her, she’d have flown across the river and halfway to Canada.”

“That makes no sense,” said Bell. “The bunch we’re tracking never made that kind of mistake.”

“They’re not ours,” said Edwards. “Just some amateurs who went drinking until it sounded like a good idea.”

“I wondered about them working so far east.”

“I got three of them chained to a tree. To call them criminals would be an insult to the outlaw classes. Sorry you came all the way up here.”

“Might as well have a look while I am,” said Bell.

Edwards showed him the switch frog jammed open with metal wedges. They worked their way across the torn-up siding and down the embankment. The wreck gang would have its work cut out for them, laying a new siding so they could position their crane to lift five express cars out of the river. There was paper everywhere. An empty steamer trunk floated, turning lazily on still water. Suddenly caught in an eddy, it drifted into the main current, sinking deeper and deeper. Barrels floated after it.

“What’s that white thing?”

“Looks like a mannequin. For a show window.”

“There’s another.”

A half dozen of the wax fashion display forms floated from a partly submerged railcar. “Like they’re going swimming,” said Edwards.

Isaac Bell peered intently at the debris along the riverbank and suddenly strode toward it. Edwards hurried after him. “What do you see? Is that another one?”

“It’s not a mannequin.”