Slocum and the High-Rails Heiress Read online

  Other than the swaying and steady clacking of the steel wheels on track joints as they labored along mile after slow mile, heading higher and deeper into the snowy mountains, Slocum thought that if there was a sound associated with a woman’s fuming, it was this one. He smiled as he dropped biscuits on the bubbling stew.

  “Gemstones.”

  Her voice startled Slocum, and he looked up from the stove at her in surprise. “What’s that you say?”

  “Gemstones. That’s what’s in the chest. A fortune in uncut gems from all over the world.”

  He nodded. “That wasn’t something you felt like you could tell me when we started this journey?” But inside he was wondering how the redheads could have known. “Someone in the family business must have spilled the beans, then.”

  She shook her head as if dismissing his logic. “It’s…it’s a complex scenario, Mr. Slocum.”

  “I guess it must be. Course, being a lowly employee, I don’t know as I could take all this in, you see.” He leaned toward her and, in a lowered voice, said, “I’d chalk it up to a difference in classes.”

  She sighed, a long, weary sound. “Am I really that transparent?”

  “Well, let’s just put it this way: I can honestly say I’ve never met anyone quite like you.” He finished the biscuits and set the cover back on the stewpot.

  “I don’t know how I should take that.”

  “Any way you like, ma’am. Any way you—” Before Slocum finished speaking, the train, which had leveled off and had been moving slowly but steadily in the past hour, slowed dramatically to a crawl. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  He pulled the towel from his shoulder and edged by the young woman to look out the drawing room window. Within seconds, the train churned to a halt. “Doesn’t look good either.” He let the velvet curtain drop back. The snow was a near-whiteout. “I have to go see what’s happened.”

  “But…what about…”

  Slocum kept his eyes on her as he slipped into his sheepskin coat and gloves.

  Her eyes took on that glinting toughness. “I forbid it, Mr. Slocum. And that’s all I’m going to say on the matter.”

  “Good. Now whatever you do, don’t open the door. I’m not going to use the same knock to let you know when I return.” He leaned close and whispered, “This will be the perfect opportunity for them to try to get in. I aim to catch them at it before they do. I believe someone’s been listening in—through the roof vent. And I aim to find out who and how. And forget the knocking. I’ll just use the key.” He headed to the kitchen.

  “What? But what do you mean, the roof?”

  “Shhh!” He held a leather-gloved finger to his lips.

  Slocum buttoned his coat’s collar up high against the vicious winds, jammed his hat down tight on his head, and once again, headed out of the car, double-checking the knob to make damn sure it was locked.

  9

  He reckoned he could spare a couple minutes of exploration before he returned. Miss Barr was once again locked in her car, and so far as he was led to believe, he had the only key outside of the car. He didn’t think there was a chance of anyone breaking into either of the car’s end doors, what with each being triple locked from the inside. And now that they were rolling again, albeit in fits ands starts, entrance through the windows seemed as unlikely as through the doors.

  Almost as soon as he entered the next car, rumbles rattled the length of the train and he knew what it was—the bucker plow at the front of the train’s doubled engines was ramming through a snowslide or drifts. All transport trains wore them in snow country to help keep their tracks clear.

  He guessed that the passes had been opened by an advance train consisting mostly of a half-dozen or more engines. He’d heard that in these very mountains, a dozen engines had been used at once to push a big old bucker through drifts as deep as thirty feet. It could be slow-going, but it beat no-going. He shook his head. Of all the places to build a railroad, he thought. Right through the Sierra and in the middle of winter, too.

  The passengers had begun cramming forward in the car, crushing against each other. What are they doing? He wondered. Then he heard someone say, “Snowslide.” He heard the word before he’d even gotten himself entirely into the passenger compartment. He shut the door, and for a brief moment, everyone turned toward him, hoping he was someone with answers. He nodded, said nothing.

  Someone from the front of the car said, “Snowslide? How bad?”

  Slocum moved forward, squeezing between portly men and prim ladies all craning their heads toward the front of the train, even though they wouldn’t be able to see a thing unless they were in one of the first few cars. He glanced down as he moved forward, saying “Excuse me” every few seconds, offering a tight smile to anyone who scowled at him as he pressed his way toward the front of the car.

  He looked down and saw the veiled woman, still in the same seat as before, but instead of looking out the window, as everyone else in the car was doing, she was staring at him. Or he guessed she was. Hard to tell with that damn veil covering her face.

  He glanced back and across the aisle, and sure enough, there was the big man, his silly derby hat looking ready to pop up off that knob of red hair. The man was staring back at him, his hands in his lap, probably inches from a pistol, thought Slocum.

  He was about to surprise the man, step right up to him, and demand to know who he was and what he was up to, when the man turned his face slightly to glance in the veiled woman’s direction. And when he did, Slocum saw the side of the man’s face, which earlier in the day had been a ruddy pink, whiskered thing was now a puckered white-gray mass. If he wasn’t mistaken, that was a bad case of frostbite.

  “What you want?”

  The man had seen him staring at him. Slocum pretended he didn’t know he’d been addressed, an entirely believable possibility, given the level of noise in the car. The passengers all about him were squawking like chickens at feeding time. Even though the dining car and the club car were north of them, he was amazed to see them all stay put in the passenger car. Weren’t any of them curious enough to leave the car and see what they were facing? Once again, Slocum weighed people against common sense and found people wanting.

  He pressed on through the throng and found the same knot of curious passengers at the head of each of the subsequent cars. He excused his way through the little crowds, and as he made his way to the front of the throng, Slocum felt the train pick up speed and churn its way forward, at first moving slower than a man could walk. But by the time he reached the middle of the club car, the engine’s lunging rumbles had increased and he could see that the snow had let up just enough so that he could again see the late-day landscape. And it looked cold and bleak.

  As he walked toward the front of the dining car, he felt the train slow, then stop once again. The few people in the car groaned and looked toward the front, as if that might provide an explanation. Slocum fancied he saw fear crowding out the concern on their faces. He pulled his collar tighter. God, I hope we don’t get stuck up here in the peaks.

  “Sir.”

  He turned to see the man he’d just passed. It was a porter.

  “Sir, I’ll ask you to please not proceed any further. This is the last car that passengers are allowed to use.”

  Slocum turned around. He had intended to talk with the engineer, see just what the problem was, see if there was any imminent danger. Maybe this man had answers. Slocum motioned for him to step closer, then crowded close. The man must have been used to this sort of thing, because while he wore a bored expression, he tilted his head to better hear what Slocum had to say.

  “I’m an employee of Miss Augusta Barr. You are aware of her father, no doubt? Mr. T. Augustus Barr?” He watched the man’s face lose its color.

  “Yes, sir. What may I help you with, sir?”

  Slocum smiled to put the man at ease, and patted his shoulder. “My employer is, shall we say, concerned about our lack of forward progress
these past few hours. Now with dark coming in fast, well, she’s wondering, as we all are, what is in store for us? Is it engine troubles?”

  “Engine? Oh, no no no, sir. Not the Central Sierra and Pacific Railroad. We pride ourselves on running the finest machinery on North American tracks.”

  “Well now, that’s mighty good to hear, because the rumors flying around these cars have been what you might call unflattering, to say the least.”

  The porter gasped, put a hand to his mouth. “That can’t be, can’t be. Why, it’s nothing more than a…” He stepped closer. “A snowslide. Nothing we can’t plow through, sir. But it might take a while.”

  “Okay, then. I was you—and I’m not the type to tell another man how to conduct his own job—I’d be tempted to let the passengers know. Keeping them in the dark—especially when the dark is coming—well, that could be a recipe for a headache, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, oh yes, sir. Yes, sir. As you say, sir.”

  “Good. Now I’m just going to continue on before it gets full dark, see what I can see so I can make a full report to Miss Barr. That’s my job, you see.”

  The porter looked terrified, as if Slocum had the power right then and there to fire him and have his ass tossed in a snowdrift. He had to choke back a chuckle as he opened the door that led to the next car, the first of two cargo-filled boxcars.

  He knew he had to hurry back, but he really did want to see what they were facing, and the best way to do that was to get to the front of the train. If they were going to be stuck for any length of time, he wanted to know how best to deal with the fact that there was at least one potentially murderous brute on the train, bent, at the very minimum, on stealing Miss Barr’s chest of precious gems.

  Why her father had decided on the middle of the winter to transport them—and his beloved daughter—across the High Sierra was something for which he could think of no good answer. Unless the old man was crazy or hated his child. Nah. Who could hate a creature like that? Slocum made his way through the second boxcar filled with all manner of tied, boxed, and tarp-covered freight.

  Despite light from small windows inset up high in each of the end doors, the boxcar was deeply shadowed. And the air was still and frigid. It felt like cold, dead hands working their way under his coat. His ears stung and the tip of his nose tingled and itched. He was halfway through the car when he heard a clunk. He stopped and held his breath.

  Whatever had made that noise, it must have been alive, because though the train had lurched into motion again but a few minutes earlier, he doubted it had been enough to knock anything loose. It was possible, and that would be his preference, but something told him he was wrong.

  There! Something dragged, off to his left. He tensed and froze in place, listening. A boot? Or a gloved hand on wood?

  It was back behind the mass of crates and tarpaulin-covered goods, lashed and wrapped tight like mummies. Slocum felt for his coat’s buttons, but his fingers were so numb he had to squint down at his hands to see what he was doing. As he parted his coat and reached for his pistol, he heard another noise, a slight gravelly sound that reminded him of…a rattler? Can’t be. It’d be deader than hell in this frigid box.

  Slocum stepped sideways once, twice, slow as midwinter molasses, placing his heel first, one hand on the corners of the nearest crates, smiling despite the situation at the neatly stenciled warning on a large crate before him that read, do not upend—and it was upside down. And with no warning, the train lurched forward again. He heard the cold steel hissing and screeching against more cold steel and felt the reassuring clunk and sway of the train getting slowly back up to operating speed.

  He decided that whatever he had heard would have to wait for tomorrow’s daylight for him to investigate. He slipped his pistol back into his holster and felt the bullet as he heard it. It sliced the air by his ear, and thwacked into the thick wood planking of the wall behind him. Any closer and he would be deaf—or dead.

  Even as he dropped and spun, pivoting on his left knee, he palmed his Colt and sent a round crashing at the distant door. Then…nothing. He waited long minutes, listening and watching swaying shadows.

  Sounds and smells assaulted him: the damnable sound of the train, rumbling and clackity-clacking, and the sooty smell always in the air from the smoke leeching in through cracks in the car’s walls. The slow but steady side-to-side lean of the train kept him off-balance. He would be glad to get off it and back out into the open, his Appaloosa under him, his belly full of strong, hot coffee and bacon and biscuits. His favorite trail food and favorite time of the day—early, just after a hot campfire breakfast.

  But all those fine thoughts would have to wait for the moment. Another round pocked wood just above his hat crown and forced him down even lower toward the floor. He crouched there, his ears perked for any odd sound above the rocking din of the storage car. He was almost ready to risk revealing his hiding spot so he might determine where the next shot had come from. He smelled the sharp stink of gunsmoke hanging in the air, saw its blue haze hovering and curling slowly over the crates.

  He moved, crouching low and stepping sure, keeping as much of his body hidden behind crates as possible, and worked his way toward where he’d first heard the sound, and from where he suspected the shots had come. It didn’t take much deciphering, as the car was only so big. He’d find whoever it was eventually. And then suddenly he saw it, there in the back corner, rising up from stacked and lashed barrels. A massive dark form inched up the wall toward the high ceiling.

  Were his eyes playing tricks on him? He didn’t think so, but what was that? A bear? Come on, Slocum, he told himself. You haven’t even had anything to drink today. Ain’t no bear riding this train. He’d come up against a grizz a time or two, and he knew they were way too smart to take a train trip like this.

  Slocum stepped out from behind the crate, his pistol held before him, trained on the creeping dark shape. The ladder! Of course, the thing was crawling up the ladder that led to the roof hatch. The outside of the car had the same type of steel ladder. It was what the brakemen used in order to climb up on the cars and twist the brake wheel by hand. So, was this a brakeman shooting at him out of fear or self-defense?

  Then the bearish thing—whatever it was—opened fire on him again, and in that flashing second, he knew it was no brakeman. Slocum barely dodged the shot, in part because the train rocked slightly as it continued to gain speed. He shot back, straight at the black form, and his shot found its mark. The big shape dropped backward with a strangled groan, bounced hard off the lashed barrels, and flopped to the floor.

  Slocum continued toward it, but with the care and slowness that marks a cautious man. Before him on the floor, a large boot poked from the darker shadows. He held his pistol out before him and toed the boot. Nothing moved, except the boot, which wagged in time with the train’s rocking motion. Slocum’s breath came in louder bursts, despite his efforts to slow it. He was cold and he might well get shot by the possum-playing fellow any second.

  A few moments more of cautious checking convinced him that the man had either died from the bullet Slocum sent into him or he had snapped something vital—like his neck—when he flopped backward off the barrels and to the floor. He kept his Colt cocked and aimed as he rummaged with frozen fingers in his coat pocket for a lucifer. He found one, snapped it alight on a front tooth, and held it low traveling up the girthy form.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Slocum, kneeling and holding the match low over the person. The man was indeed dead. He was also clad in a big ol’ buffalo coat. Slocum swallowed and continued on up to the man’s face. Just before the match reached his gloved fingers, sputtered, and died, Slocum saw a surprised look on a wide, jowly face crowned with a nest of unruly red hair.

  He heard a soft sound, as fabric might make rasping against something, a crate, perhaps. Had someone come through the door without him hearing? Either that or there had been a third person in the car with him and the sho
oter the entire time. As quick as the thought occurred to him, he felt a hand on his shoulder. Still on his knees, he spun, silently jamming the killing end of the Colt into the front of a…dress.

  In the dim light of the swaying car, he saw the veiled woman’s fine form in the half-light of the car. Long, black-gloved fingers clutched a two-shot purse pistol, cocked, and aimed. But as he spun, she recoiled as if she had just been slapped.

  “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

  She ignored his question and squinted, looking over his shoulder into the dark of the car behind him, toward the dead man in the shadows. Slocum took the opportunity to inspect this stunning woman close up, which was difficult in the darkened car. Despite the close, smoke-filled quarters of train travel, she smelled fresh, like soap and lavender.

  He watched the breath escape from her mouth behind the veil, and he imagined her slightly parted lips, full and rich as ripe cherries, steely blue eyes piercing the gloom beyond him, as if by sheer will alone.

  “Who was it?” Her voice, this close to his face, came as little more than a whisper, as if she were asking him a deep secret that no one else should hear.

  “What?” he said. “Who was who?”

  She gestured with her chin. The veil touched her face then, for a brief moment. But it was enough to reveal a smooth, clean jawline ending in high cheekbones, and a long, slender nose—then it was gone, the veil once again hung limp.

  “The one you shot…”

  Her chest rose and fell harder with each passing second, as if she’d just run the length of the train. Probably not far from the truth, he thought. But that was interesting. The very idea of a dead person, someone he’d just shot, bleeding in the shadows behind him, seemed to excite this odd woman. Beautiful woman, from what he could see, but odd. What was happening here?