The Paul Bedford Collection Read online

  All the men had dropped to the ground. At least one was hit and crying out in distress. The others loosed off a couple of wild shots in reaction. Joe remained on one knee, having chosen to ignore the ‘fire and move’ rule. The chances of them hitting him at that range were slim, and he surmised that they would soon be under fire from another source.

  With divine timing, Dan opened up with his Spencer. As his weapon crashed out, hot ashes leapt up from the fire. Yelping with pain, one of the gang got on to all fours to scramble away. Squeezing off a well-judged shot, Joe then rapidly reached for another cartridge. The prairie wind whipped the powder smoke into his face and away. As ever he found the sulphurous whiff curiously exhilarating.

  The .52-calibre ball had struck the unfortunate man in the hip, knocking him into the very fire from which he had been trying to escape. Howling in agony, he thrashed around, desperately trying to escape the flames that engulfed him. Completely ignoring him, his remaining companions hugged the ground and returned Dan’s fire. Being the nearest, they erroneously considered him to be the most dangerous.

  With his rifle reloaded, Joe leapt to his feet and advanced at a fast trot. Dan was in trouble. The fifteen-shot Henrys were peppering the ground around him, smothering any return fire that he might manage. What those rifles lacked in power, they made up for in speed. The sharpshooter was less than one hundred yards away before someone remembered his menacing presence. Shifting to meet the rapidly approaching threat, Rufus lined him up in his sights. In his eagerness to make a kill, the scrawny consumptive raised up from the ground.

  With his chest heaving, Joe had no time for any considered marksmanship. Instinctively aiming low, he drew in a deep breath and fired on the up-roll. The large ball caught Rufus squarely in the chest and literally blew him backwards. Discarding the Sharps as though it was so much rubbish, Joe dragged his Colt Army from its military-issue flap holster and charged at the campsite, screaming foul blasphemies. A red mist had enveloped him. His blood was up. Nothing else could account for such a suicidal display. He cocked and fired three times. The .44-calibre balls from the single-action revolver failed to strike flesh, but they disrupted any return fire. A vicious-looking thug in a flash waistcoat clambered to his feet, chambering a cartridge into his Henry Rifle. As Joe juddered to a halt, a bullet from Dan’s Spencer lifted the top of the man’s head clean off. Blood and brain matter cascaded over the dead man as he crumpled to the ground.

  The Union Pacific needed prisoners, and only one man remained unblooded. Yet, although armed with both a belt gun and a Spencer, he no longer wanted any part of the conflict. Turning rapidly away, he began to ‘tote the mail’ for the river. Dan wasn’t near enough to intercept him and Joe had had a belly full of running.

  ‘One chance,’ he bellowed. ‘Stop or I fire!’

  The river bank beckoned and the runaway increased speed. Cursing, Joe took a two-handed grip and levelled his revolver. Feeling no guilt whatsoever at shooting a man in the back, he squeezed the trigger. The soft lead ball caught the fugitive between the shoulder blades and neatly pitched him into the river. No longer any kind of threat, he could keep. With two chambers remaining, Joe again cocked his piece and turned back to the camp. Bloody carnage along with the dreadful smell of burning flesh awaited him. Only one man still lived, and Dan had a tale to tell.

  ‘Sweet Jesus, Josiah. I ain’t never seen the like! Your first shot took two of them down. I saw it all. It went straight through the first feller and hit this son of a bitch in the shoulder. Hot dang!’

  Joe realized that such marksmanship could be perceived as quite an achievement, but all he felt was a strange emptiness inside and an unsettling weakness in his legs. He had taken part in numerous skirmishes during the war to preserve the Union, but that had seemed different somehow. Back then he had been in uniform, surrounded by his comrades and under orders.

  The protests of the wounded man dragged him back to the present. ‘You pus weasels have got no call to treat me like this. I’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘You call wrecking a train nothing, mister?’ Dan’s indignation was genuine. The sight of the two burnt corpses back at the track had stayed with him.

  ‘We didn’t have anything to do with that,’ retorted Jake indignantly. ‘We just happened upon it when it was all over.’

  The leader and sole survivor of the gang was an odious-looking individual with a pock-marked face and rank, greasy hair, but he possessed a certain native cunning. Observing his two captors carefully, he tried to assess his chances. Believing that familiarity was his best bet, he tried another tack. ‘Say, you fellers wouldn’t happen to have some “Oh Be Joyful” on you, would you? This wound’s given me a powerful thirst.’

  Joe had had enough. Ramming his gun muzzle into the side of Jake’s head, he rasped out, ‘Land sakes, I tire of this. Tell me who you work for now, or you’ll take a lead pill.’

  The other man’s attempt at bonhomie abruptly disappeared. ‘Go to hell!’

  ‘After this day’s work I believe that I shall,’ Joe replied in all seriousness. The reality of being a back-shooter as well as a sharpshooter had just sunk in and it didn’t sit well with him. He had been pushed into it by the activities of the piece of scum in front of him and he could feel anger beginning to build within him. Holstering his revolver, he reached down and picked up one of the Henry Repeaters. Turning it over in his hands, he immediately noticed something strange about it, but that could wait. Steeling himself, he placed the muzzle over his prisoner’s shoulder wound.

  ‘If you don’t tell me who you work for and where I can find him, I’ll have to hurt you bad.’

  A queasy look came over Jake’s face. ‘If I tell you anything, I’m dead anyway.’

  ‘Josiah, perhaps we should. . . .’ Dan’s fresh face was clouded with concern. As it happened, his companion didn’t like what was about to take place any more than he did. He just didn’t show it.

  Apparently relenting slightly Joe said, ‘Just tell us where in Columbus you get your instructions. Then we’ll patch you up and set you on your horse.’

  Then, without warning, he leaned on the butt of the rifle. Jake’s high-pitched scream made both railroad men flinch. Blood coated the gun muzzle. Joe felt sick to his stomach, whilst his young companion swiftly averted his eyes.

  ‘Omaha,’ howled out their captive. ‘We met him in the ma—’

  Jake’s head exploded like a ripe melon. His blood and brain matter splashed everywhere. Only then did they hear the gunshot. Both men dropped to the ground, with Joe reaching for his spyglass. Some four hundred yards away, a man in a duster coat had mounted his horse and was urging it to speed. Without his rifle, the former Berdan sharpshooter had no chance of hitting the runaway, and quite probably little chance with it. The accuracy had been breathtaking.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Omaha!’

  Thomas Cartwright’s teeth, almost lost under his luxurious beard, worked ferociously on a fat cigar butt. His sunburnt forehead creased under the effort of intense thought. Thirty-four years old, he had been a lieutenant colonel in the war and was now charged with building a railroad. He was five feet eight inches of belligerent muscle and not a man to trifle with.

  ‘Omaha is a railroad town,’ he remarked fiercely. ‘It was just a few shacks before the Union Pacific rolled in. You’re telling me that those bull turds were working out of our town?’

  ‘I don’t reckon that feller was lying, Mister Cartwright,’ Joe replied soberly. ‘He was in an awful lot of pain at the time.’

  The railhead boss regarded him pensively. ‘Six men, all dead, you say.’

  ‘That’s how it ended up, Mister Cartwright. It wasn’t my choosing, but the odds were stacked too high to go in easy.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I guess you did good, Wakefield.’ As he uttered that grudging praise, the ‘track boss’s’ expression was hard to read. It contained surprise, for sure, but also something more intangible that made Joe wonder whether h
e and Dan had actually done the right thing in tackling the wreckers. Possibly aware that his remark had fallen short of outright praise, Cartwright continued with, ‘Those responsible have got to learn that they can’t just ride roughshod over an operation as big as this.’

  As if to support that statement there came an unremitting stream of profanity uttered in a strong Irish accent as Shaughnessey, the ‘walking boss’, strode past the plush carriage containing the three men. That forceful individual drove on the gangs of sweating workers as they lowered the iron rails on to the waiting crossties and spiked them down. Four rails were laid each minute, hour after hour. Thanks to their unceasing toil, the railhead was rapidly approaching the small settlement of Grand Island, near the north bank of the Platte River. Everything was carried out with military precision, which was not surprising as the construction of the Union Pacific was in the hands of ex-officers from the victorious North’s rapidly contracting army.

  ‘Something’s not right about any of this,’ Cartwright continued thoughtfully. ‘Three derailments without robbery or demands. And then there’s the killings. It’s almost as though the bastards are trying to scare us into stopping the supply trains. One thing’s for sure, it’s slowing us up. The terrain’s flat, so the grading proceeds swiftly, but without more rails the track-laying won’t be able to keep pace. Without track we can’t make any money and without that we can’t fund all this.’

  He stopped long enough to light the well-gnawed cigar, apparently oblivious to the oppressively hot atmosphere in the carriage. As it began to emit clouds of pungent smoke, he seemed to come to a decision. ‘You two are going to take a train ride. There’s at least one returning for supplies tomorrow. If the man or men behind that gang are in Omaha, then that’s where you need to be. And you might could see your way to hiring some more help. You’re likely going to need it.’

  Dan was aghast. ‘What if our train gets derailed, sir?’

  Cartwright slowly shook his head in despair. ‘Son, they’re not going to wreck it heading east. It’ll be empty!’

  The young man flushed with embarrassment. To shift attention from him, Joe proffered one of the rifles that they had recovered. ‘What about this?’

  The former colonel knew his weapons. ‘This is a Winchester. Similar to the Henry, but a whole lot better. The loading gate in the side of the frame makes for fast reloading, even lying down. With the wooden forestock, you won’t burn your poor little hand when the barrel heats up. It’s so new I haven’t even seen one out West before.’

  ‘What shall I do with it?’

  ‘You killed a man for that gun, Wakefield. I surely ain’t going to try and take it off you.’

  When the Union Pacific Railroad heading west on a diet of whiskey met the Central Pacific Railroad heading east on a diet of tea, the journey time from coast to coast would be reduced from six months to a mere six days. The entire span of the recently unified United States of America would be irrevocably linked for the first time. What the telegraph had achieved for communication, the railroad would achieve for transport. The steam locomotive was a modern miracle, but in its current state it was also a very basic and uncomfortable form of travel. Wood burners emitted vast quantities of glowing sparks, which had to be controlled by a cone-shaped deflector under the mouth of the chimney and a wire screen covering the exit. These measures could never completely stop flying sparks from blowing back on the travellers, yet to close the rudimentary windows meant suffering in the stifling summer heat.

  The two men were sitting on hard-backed wooden seats in the single passenger carriage that formed part of the train. Its other components were all flat cars, designed to carry track-laying materials. The only other passengers were three sullen tracklayers, discharged by the walking boss for persistently tardy work. They had been offered one-way tickets from the railhead near Grand Island to the supply depots in Omaha. Generosity didn’t come into it. The railroad just wanted rid of them. They sprawled untidily over the bench seats, happy to rest from their eternal toil, but resentful at their abrupt dismissal. The one-hundred-and-fifty-mile journey would take some five hours, including a stop at Columbus.

  With plenty of time to think, Dan had obviously got something gnawing at him. ‘Why didn’t you tell the colonel about the seventh man?’

  Joe regarded his friend pensively. ‘I don’t really know. Maybe because it could have made us look sloppy. And it certainly wouldn’t have changed anything. All that ass boil wants is results. He’s cross-grained by nature and not interested in anything unless it directly affects his precious railhead.’

  With that he fell contemplatively silent. The real issue was just what someone stood to gain by slowing up the advance of the Iron Horse. Could it be that the Central Pacific was trying to steal a march on their rivals? The more track that they laid, the more they stood to gain in government grants. Wrecking and outright murder seemed a bit excessive, though, even in such a ruthless environment.

  Such thoughts occupied Joe Wakefield for some time until, gazing out of the window, he realized that they were again approaching Columbus. The stricken locomotive was still lying on its side. In the past twenty-four hours, the good townsfolk had seized anything that they could carry and the track had been hastily repaired. A few minutes later, the eastbound supply train approached the rough-cut buildings that made up the settlement. It was here that the two men encountered an individual the like of which they had never seen before.

  The locomotive stopped next to an elevated water tank. As Joe stood up to stretch, a tall character wearing city clothes took his attention. The man’s walk was slow, yet deliberate, as he moved towards the single carriage. There was a panther-like grace to his bearing. Long, curly golden hair splayed out over the collar of his frock coat. A luxuriant moustache adorned his somewhat ill-formed upper lip. Two Colt Navy Sixes were tucked, butts facing forward, into holsters on his highly polished leather belt. As he was about to mount the first step, the stranger’s eyes flicked over to take in Joe’s curious gaze. There was an intensity about them that gave him pause. And that wasn’t his only concern.

  As the new arrival temporarily moved out of sight, Joe dropped back down next to his friend. ‘Take a look at the city gent coming in, and at what he’s carrying.’

  Dan had plenty of opportunity to do just that; such was the man’s leisurely progress down the central aisle. Just prior to him reaching their position, a brawny tracklayer happened to clamber across from the far side of the carriage and dropped down on to the seat opposite. Someone or something outside had clearly taken his interest.

  ‘Golden Hair’ came to a halt next to their section. Although slimly built, there was an aura of power about him that hinted at hidden capabilities. Having favoured the two manhunters with a mild glance, his eyes glittered as he viewed their new neighbour. ‘You’re sitting in my seat,’ he stated softly.

  The Union Pacific employee had shoulders like house sides and hands like hams. He could doubtless lift or hammer anything that was required of him. Having been recently made unemployed, he was also in just the right mood for a fight. Gazing sharply up at the interloper, he laughed out loud before replying, ‘And you’re a black liar, mister!’

  With that, he got to his feet and stood waiting, confident that his mere appearance would be sufficient to back up such strong words. Lifting his powerful arms, he began to flex his fingers, as though inviting a response. As the other man was within range of his fists, he was clearly not worried about the highly visible belt guns. Knowing that most confrontations usually fizzled out, Joe fully expected more wordplay from one party or the other before they drifted apart, but it was not to be.

  The sudden violence occurred with lightning speed. Golden Hair threw the linen duster coat that he was clutching in his left hand in a roundhouse swipe that lashed into the labourer’s head. Caught unawares, that individual attempted to fend it off, and in doing so left himself open to a vicious blow on the forehead from the butt of a Colt N
avy Revolver. With a groan, he crumpled to the floor of the railway carriage.

  His assailant deftly twirled his weapon, so that the seven-and-a-half-inch octagonal barrel was suddenly pointing in the general direction of anyone who might choose to intervene. Tossing the coat on to his intended seat, he condescendingly drawled, ‘Either of you track hands want to make more of this?’

  Apparently neither of them did, because they both kept their places. Either of them would have happily indulged in a fistfight, but there was little point in getting shot dead attempting to claim a window seat. Nodding slowly, Golden Hair slipped the revolver back into its resting place and turned to face his new neighbours. An easy smile crept over his features as he addressed them. ‘I take it you gentlemen have no objection to my sitting here?’

  Although intrigued by their new acquaintance, Joe did not intend that the man should deal out any more hard knocks. ‘I doubt if that Navy Six could withstand another blow like that,’ he remarked mildly. ‘And if I did object, it wouldn’t be my fists that I’d use on you.’

  The interloper’s smile froze. ‘Oh, and what would you employ?’

  Joe silently gestured towards the side of the carriage, where he had placed his Sharps.

  A guarded look replaced the smile. ‘Long distance, eh. That might could make you a hunter of sorts. What particular critters do you favour?’

  ‘Two legs or four. Makes no difference to me. What’s your weapon of choice?’

  Golden Hair gently patted his brace of Colts as he replied, ‘These answer tolerably well across a Faro table.’

  With that, he turned sideways across the bench seat, tilted his wide-brimmed hat over his face and lowered his head on to the duster coat that had so taken Joe’s attention. Their discourse was obviously at an end.