On the Wrong Track Read online

  “That’s right, sir,” I managed to throw in. My hand was still held out to Lockhart, offering a shake he didn’t take, so I flipped the palm up and offered the man a chair instead. “It’d truly be an honor to wet your whistle.”

  Whether a simple apology would have done the trick, I don’t know. But an apology marinated in alcohol Lockhart was happy to accept.

  “Well … no harm done,” he said, dropping into the empty chair beside me. His smile returned, though it was smaller and more rueful now. “Who’d expect to see ol’ Burl Lockhart kitted out like this?”

  Indeed, with his rumpled dress clothes (not to mention his stubble-covered face and bleary eyes), Lockhart looked nothing like the gallant cowboy detective the newspapers and magazines made him out to be. But seeing as dime-novel sleuths are ever passing themselves off as salty peg-legged sea dogs or blind beggars or what have you, I figured he might be in the midst of some such masquerade himself.

  “Say, Mr. Lockhart.” I leaned close and dropped my voice down low. “Are you in disguise?”

  Lockhart cocked a wispy, salt-and-peppered eyebrow at me, apparently searching for any sign I was guying him again.

  “I suppose you could say I am,” he conceded with a bitter chuckle when he saw I was sincere. “We’re in a new age, boys. Gunpowder and nerve just ain’t enough anymore—not with all this pansy talk of ‘clues’ and ‘dee-deductions’ and what all. Nowadays, a proper dee-tective’s gotta have more tricks up his sleeve than a goddamn sideshow magician. Disguises, magnifilizin’ glasses, beakers and burners and all that Tom Edison crap. Ya gotta be ‘modern.’ Ya gotta be ‘scientific.’”

  Lockhart showed us what he thought of “modern,” “scientific” detectives by spitting on the floor.

  “Lavender-ass bullshit,” he said, just in case we needed a translation. “Now … where’s that drink?”

  Though I could practically see the steam from my brother’s boiling blood puffing out his ears, Old Red let the insult to Mr. Holmes slide by without a reply in kind.

  “What’ll you have?” he said.

  “Whiskey. With a whiskey chaser.”

  Gustav turned to me and nodded at the bar. “You heard the man.”

  Under normal circumstances, I might’ve leaned back, planted my heels on the table, and said, “I surely did … and I’ll have the same.” But seeing as the circumstances were neither normal nor particularly comfortable, I chose not to fan the flames with any sass.

  “Two whiskeys, comin’ up,” I announced cheerfully, hopping up and heading for the bar.

  The saloon’s sweaty, tub-gutted bartender was gawking at our table as I walked up, so after putting in my order I asked if I really was fetching drinks for the great Burl Lockhart.

  “That’s Lockhart, alright—though I can’t vouch for the ‘great.’” The bartender produced two dirty glasses and filled them with the peppery, brownish liquid he so shamelessly sold as “whiskey.” “First came in yesterday afternoon with two other Pinks. Local fellers. He would’ve spent the night here, too—on the floor—if they hadn’t dragged him out.”

  “He say what he was in town for?”

  The bartender shook his head. “Just said he’s working on something secret—though he don’t make no secret of who he is. At first, I figured he was sniffing around after Mike Barson and Augie Welsh, seeing as the bounty on ’em’s up to ten thousand a head now. They’ve hit four trains outta Ogden the last six months, so some folks think this’d be the place to start hunting.”

  “Some folks” included about every newspaper in the country. Barson and Welsh’s gang, the Give-’em-Hell Boys, had stopped so many Southern Pacific trains that spring they could probably join the conductors’ union, and already Old Red and I had run across dime novels like Barson and Welsh: Robin Hoods of the Rails when hunting for new Holmes tales. Coming from farming folk, we had no fondness for the railroads ourselves, so it hadn’t bothered us in the least that the Southern Pacific couldn’t pluck this particular thorn from its side. A part of me was rooting for the thorn.

  “Well, I don’t reckon the Give-’em-Hell Boys have much to worry about from Lockhart even if he does chase ’em down,” I said to the bartender.

  “Yeah. Just look at him.”

  We stole a peek at the pickled Pinkerton, who was jabbering away at my brother without bothering to look at him. Lockhart’s attention was focused entirely on the drinks resting on the countertop before me. The man was practically licking his lips.

  “Only chasin’ he’s interested in is the kind you do with a shot glass,” the bartender said.

  “I suppose I best let him get to it, too.” I slapped down a couple coins, swept up the glasses, and headed back to the table.

  As I walked up, Lockhart was rambling on about the Cross J, a Texas outfit Gustav and I worked a few years back. Apparently, Lockhart put in a season there himself before turning Pinkerton. While this shared history disposed him toward us warmly, it didn’t stop him from describing in excruciating detail elements of the ranch’s operations and geography we knew just as well as he, if not better. I put down his whiskeys, took a seat, and did my best to disguise the glazing over of my eyes.

  “Those were the days, boys,” Lockhart said after wrapping up a painfully thorough account of a cattle drive of the very type Old Red and I have worked over and over ourselves. “Before barbed wire. Before the railroads. It’s all changed now … and the changin’ just don’t stop.”

  Lockhart looked like he was about to spit again, but instead he chose to wash the bad taste out of his mouth by sucking down the last drops of his whiskey.

  “Christ,” he sighed, “even the goddamn changes keep changin’ on me.”

  “People gotta change, too,” Old Red said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Lockhart shot back, his booze-fuzzed voice suddenly utterly clear.

  I jumped in to explain Gustav’s remark before my brother could do any damage by explaining it (truthfully) himself.

  “That’s what we keep tellin’ ourselves, Mr. Lockhart. We gotta change. Like you did all those years ago. The big cattle drives are dryin’ up. Drovers on the drift like us—we ain’t got nowhere to drift to anymore. That’s why we thought we’d give the Pinkertons a try. If a top-rail cowhand like Burl Lockhart could make the switch, well, we kinda hoped we could, too.”

  Of course, Burl Lockhart had about as much to do with Old Red’s interest in detectiving as the hairs on my ass had to do with Sherman’s March. And it would’ve been easy for Lockhart to deduce as much if he’d noticed how my brother was glowering at me just then.

  Fortunately, the old Pinkerton had something else to look at—a slick-dressed fellow in a bowler hat who came toddling up to our table.

  “It’s time, Lockhart,” he said. “He’s here.”

  “Oh, he is, is he?” Lockhart snarled back. “Well, he can just wait a damn minute while I conclude my business with the boys here.” He began rummaging through his pockets, his face growing redder with each fistful of lint and crumbs he produced. “Somebody give me something to write with, damn it.”

  The dude in the bowler produced a scrap of paper and a stubby pencil from his vest pocket. Lockhart snatched them away with a muttered curse.

  “Yessir … ol’ Burl Lockhart’s still got himself a friend or two … ,” he mumbled as he wrote.

  He finished with a flourish—a series of hard, stabbing dots that jabbed at the table like knives. Then he thrust the paper at me and lurched to his feet.

  “There! Sorry I can’t help you with the Pinks. An old-fashioned, guts-and-guns lawman like myself don’t have no pull with the muckety-mucks no more. But believe you me—you don’t wanna sign on with them limp wrists anyhow.” He turned a glare on the fellow who’d come to fetch him, then pocketed the man’s pencil and stomped away.

  “Thanks, Mr. Lockhart!” I called after him, though as yet I had no idea what I was thanking him for.

  The dude lingered behind
with me and my brother, pushing up the brim of his bowler and regarding us coolly. “You two wanna be Pinkertons?”

  “That’s right,” Old Red said.

  The dude shook his head and snorted. “Stick to ‘dogies,’ cowboy.” Then he followed Lockhart toward the door.

  I was about to tell the man what he could stick to—or, more precisely, what he could stick where—but Gustav cut me off with an elbow to the ribs.

  “Well?” he grunted, pointing at Lockhart’s note.

  The old Pinkerton had folded the slip of paper, and I read out what he’d written on the front:

  Col. C. Kermit Crowe

  S.P.R.R.

  Union Station

  When I unfolded the paper, there was even less to see on the other side. Lockhart’s message consisted of just four letters.

  O.K.

  B.L.

  “Well, ain’t that just the way,” I sighed. “We finally get ourselves a lucky break … and it’s broke.”

  I was a half second from balling up Lockhart’s note and tossing it over my shoulder when my brother reached out and plucked it from my fingers.

  “Hold on there.”

  He stared down at the paper, even though Lockhart’s wobbly scrawling couldn’t have meant less to him if it’d been written in Chinese.

  “It’s obvious, ain’t it?” I said. “That’s the shortest letter of recommendation a man could write. And it’s to a railroad—the Southern Pacific to be specific. We wouldn’t have anything to do with them sons of bitches.” After a moment went by without a reply, I added, “Would we?”

  Old Red kept staring at the note. He was chewing something over, and he obviously didn’t like the taste of it. In the end, though, he didn’t spit it out.

  “I reckon we’ll cross that trestle when we come to it,” he said, and he stood and headed for the door.

  Three

  267 AND 268

  Or, We Learn We’re Just What the S.P. Isn’t Looking For

  My brothers and sisters and I didn’t hear much cussing when we were growing up. Mutter wouldn’t tolerate it, and even so mild a word as “heck” would get your tongue slathered with soap.

  Yet when our Vater or Uncle Franz cut loose on the railroads, a ton of lye wouldn’t have been enough to wash away all the obscenities. Even sweet old Mutter would join in from time to time (albeit auf Deutsch, thinking we wouldn’t understand). If that revealed a little streak of hypocrisy in a woman we all worshipped, it was easily overlooked. Farming’s a tough enough life without Eastern fat cats charging more to ship your crops than folks could ever pay to eat them.

  It had been nearly a decade since Gustav had spent any time behind a plow, yet when it came to the railroads, he apparently remained as bitter as any Granger. For proof, one need look no further than my butt—and the unheavenly host of saddle sores it sported. Old Red insisted that we do by horse and trail what anyone else would do by rail, and through all our wanderings he hadn’t allowed us to subsidize the railroads’ monopolizing, rate-gouging, land-stealing ways with the purchase of a single ticket.

  Which explains why the first words out of my mouth when I caught up to Gustav outside that saloon in Ogden would have had Mutter reaching for her soap.

  “Now, now—no need to get your bristles up,” my brother replied, leaning casually—almost too casually—against the post our horses were hitched to. “We gotta at least see what that note means, don’t we?”

  “And what if it means what it seems to mean?” I shot back. “Jobs.”

  “Then we think it over.”

  “You who’d steer us a thousand miles out of our way so as not to put a single penny in a robber baron’s pocket? You would think about workin’ for the Southern Pacific?”

  “I’m always willin’ to think … unlike some people,” Old Red replied—though there was something strangely halfhearted about his gibe.

  “If you’re so eager to think, why ain’t you thinkin’ about what Mutter and Vater used to rant about? Jacked-up freight rates keepin’ farmers poor, people dyin’ cuz the tycoons was too cheap to put proper brakes on their cars. You forget all that?”

  My brother gave me a slow, chagrined nod, the way a man does when he recognizes the wisdom of a friend’s advice while reserving the right to ignore it.

  “That was years ago,” he said.

  “Try tellin’ that to the Give-’em-Hell Boys—you know they’re all sodbusters just like our people was. The papers say they never would’ve turned outlaw if the Southern Pacific hadn’t grabbed their land for a new line last year.”

  “Well … it ain’t like we never worked for assholes before,” Old Red said limply. “They just owned cattle ’stead of cattle cars.”

  “Yeah, but when we work for an asshole cattleman, we’re cowboys. What the hell’s a railroad man gonna hire us to do? Yard bulls, that’s what they’d peg us for. Thugs to kick the shit out of hoboes.”

  Gustav shook his head. “I don’t think so. I reckon there’s a reason the S.P. would be on the lookout for fellers like us—and you said it yourself.”

  My brother’s usually not keen on “theorizing” without all the facts, as Mr. Holmes looked down his long nose on idle guesswork. But Gustav was willing to make an exception now to sway me—and perhaps himself.

  “The Give-’em-Hell Boys,” he said.

  “You think the railroad’s puttin’ together a special posse?”

  “They’d have to be, the way Barson and Welsh have been robbin’ ’em blind.”

  I thought it over a moment. It made sense—and it didn’t make a lick of difference.

  “The Give-’em-Hell gang’s a hole the S.P. dug for itself,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t see why we should hop down into the pit with it.”

  “It’d establish our bona fides as law enforcers,” Old Red said.

  “Enforcers, anyway,” I scoffed.

  “It wouldn’t be forever. We’d make the jump to real detectin’ sooner or later.”

  I let a raised eyebrow do all my scoffing this time.

  “Just look at it like this,” Gustav persisted. “The point of ridin’ on a train ain’t the train. It’s where the train takes you. Understand?”

  “What if you get on the wrong damn train?”

  I thought this was a pretty clever retort, actually, but Old Red had an even better one.

  “You get off.”

  He didn’t say it like a platitude. He said it like a promise.

  “Really? It’s that simple?”

  Gustav nodded. “It’s that simple.”

  “We don’t like the setup, we just walk away?” I said—not realizing the mistake I was making using the word we.

  My brother nodded again.

  “Alright,” I sighed. “You win. For now.”

  Old Red didn’t look much cheered by his victory, though. In fact, he almost seemed disappointed that I hadn’t managed to change his mind for him.

  It was easy enough to find our way to the local S.P. office, for it’s at the center of the colossal web of wood and steel that stretches out from Ogden to cover half the nation. The Southern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and a slew of local lines all join up just west of town, their tracks tangling together at the foot of the massive brick mountain called Union Station. We’d skirted the snarl on our way into Ogden the day before, but now we were riding right into the heart of it.

  As we drew close enough to hear the whistling, clanging, and chugging of the trains, the horses grew jittery … and so did my brother. He had a twitchy look about him—a jumpiness he tried to wipe away with his handkerchief as we entered the station.

  “Change your mind?” I asked him.

  “Just feelin’ a touch poorly, that’s all.” He dabbed at his face a second time, for it was already slick with sweat again. “Maybe you oughta do the talkin’ when we find this ‘Col. Crowe’ feller. I wouldn’t be at my best, augerin’-wise. And my best ain’t half as good as yours anyhow.”

  “Oh, I
don’t know—that was some pretty good blarney you laid out just now.” (When my brother comments on my flair for balderdash, it’s usually not to offer his appreciation.) “Anyway, I’d hardly be at my best tryin’ to wrangle a job I don’t even want.”

  “Still … you’re the talker, Otto. I need you to handle this.”

  I looked over at Old Red and found him gazing back at me, his eyes saying the word he couldn’t quite bring himself to put on his lips.

  Please.

  My brother was placing his dream in my hands. I couldn’t very well drop it, no matter how peeved I might be.

  “Alright,” I grumbled. “Gimme Lockhart’s note.”

  Gustav clapped me on the back, something he feels moved to do not once in a blue moon but more like once in plaid one. There’s another word he and I rarely use with each other, and he used it then.

  “Thanks.”

  When we found the Southern Pacific office tucked away in a quiet wing of the station, I asked to see Colonel Crowe with all the breezy confidence of an old pal.

  “Got a message for him from Burl,” I told the pimply young clerk who’d greeted us with a quizzical stare. “Lockhart.”

  The clerk loped off down a hallway, and I took the opportunity to shoot another peek at my brother. He seemed less fidgety now that we were away from the smoke and bustle of the depot, yet so much color had drained from his face he looked like a pillar of salt with a red mustache. He’d taken a nasty wound a couple months before—a gunshot courtesy of someone his deducifying had displeased—and I started thinking he might not be as healed up as I’d assumed.

  “Down the hall, last door on the right,” the clerk told us when he returned, flashing a smile that didn’t offer friendliness so much as advertise his amusement at some private joke. “He’s waiting for you.”

  I’d pictured Colonel Crowe as a stout, barrel-chested Ambrose Burnside type. But the puny fellow we found awaiting us hardly had the chest for a mug of beer, let alone a barrel. Whichever regiment the colonel had served with, I could only assume his commanding officer had been General Tom Thumb.