Authors: John Joseph Adams
Thankfully, Benedict was quicker than either the Doctor or me. Before he signed on
as deputy, he’d wrangled cattle. Now he came with his rope and had it around the wrecker
on the first try, like they were both part of the same circus act. Hudson seized the
chance to scoop up the iron bar. Benedict and I got hold of the wrecker and hauled
him like a sack of horse oats back to the office. He put up a struggle all the way
back, and Benedict and I lost our footing more than once. By then it really didn’t
matter how much more mud we had on us.
I thanked the Doctor and told him to go and get some shut-eye.
“Why’d you do it?” I asked the wild man when we were indoors and Benedict was fetching
the keys to open the cell. “What has Parker Quail done to you?”
“Never heard of no Quail,” mumbled our man. Inside the office, the fight had gone
out of him. He was slumped down in the chair we’d pushed him into. He seemed more
worn out than angry now, all his rage gone from one moment to the next, the way it
often did with drunks. He gave off a stench like a barrel of vinegar.
“You were smashing private property,” Benedict said evenly, opening the cell. “That
horseless carriage belongs to Parker Quail, as if you didn’t know.”
“Doesn’t matter who it belongs to,” the man said resignedly. “Had to smash it. That’s
what you do. You smash ’em. Smash ’em to pieces, so they can’t move, can’t do nothin’.
Smash
them
before they smash us. It’s just another kind of war, just like the one between the
States.”
I tried to gauge the man’s years. “You fought?”
“Sure I fought. Did you?”
I nodded. “Hampton’s Legion, under Hood’s Brigade. My war only lasted ’til Antietam,
though. Guess I was lucky to get out of it with just a limp.”
“You were Legion?”
“What I said.”
“I was Legion as well.”
I looked at him skeptically. “This far west, that’s some coincidence.”
He truly did look like a wild man come down from the hills. Hair so long and straggly
it fell all the way down his face, so you couldn’t tell where hair ended and beard
began. No hat, and clothes that were halfway to shreds. Boots that were hanging off
his feet. Smelled like he hadn’t been near any kind of water, warm or otherwise, in
years. Hard to guess his age, too. The grey hair made him look old, but the eyes that
looked through the hair, where it allowed, were sharp and attentive. They were clear,
too. If he had been Legion, he couldn’t be much younger than me. But the war between
the States was thirty years gone.
All of a sudden, I felt a shiver of recognition.
“You got a name?” I asked, with a tingling feeling going right through me.
“You know who I am, Bill. Didn’t realise it was you, ’til you mentioned the Legion.
But what are the odds of two southern boys fighting in the same infantry unit, windin’
up in the same one-horse town in the Arizona Territory? Unless we came here together?”
“Abel,” I said quietly, almost as if I didn’t want Benedict to hear me. “Abel McCreedy.”
“Been a while, Bill.”
Benedict sauntered over. He had splashed his face in the basin and washed most of
the mud off. “You two acquainted, Bill? Thought you didn’t recognize him.”
“I didn’t, at first. But it’s been—what—twenty odd years?” For Tommy Benedict’s sake
I added: “Abel and I shipped west after the war was done. Tried to make a living as
bounty hunters. When that didn’t work out, we signed on with the Pinkertons. Later,
I ended up deputizing for a marshal in Eloy. Abel stayed with the Pinks… least, that
was the last thing I heard.”
“Worked out for a while,” Abel said philosophically. “But you know how it is. Always
been better on my own. Tried to go freelance.”
“And?”
“Got myself into some trouble, Bill. Big trouble.” He raised his filth-caked hand
slowly, and pushed the hair away from his face. He still had the beard, but there
was no doubt now. I was looking at my old partner.
Big trouble. I guess it had to be.
“You’re in a whole heap more of it now,” I said.
“I got carried away out there,” Abel said. “But I had my reasons, Bill. I’m as sane
as the day we parted.”
“What brought you into town now, after all this time?”
“Things built up. I guess I was kind of hopin’ our paths would cross, Bill—figured
you’d help out an old friend. But then I saw that man’s horseless carriage and it
all boiled up inside me and I couldn’t stop myself.”
Benedict was watching us, arms folded. Abel’s story about not recognizing me was obviously
a lie, if he’d been looking for me from the outset. “Want to lock him up yet?”
“Hear me out,” Abel said. “Then do what the hell you want.”
I nodded to Benedict. “Stroll over to Quail’s saloon. If no one’s awake, leave it
that way. Otherwise, do what you can to placate ’em.”
“And if Quail decides to send some of his friends over to have a word with the man
who smashed up his horseless carriage?”
“They’ll be breaking the law.”
“Ain’t stopped them in the past, Bill.”
“McCreedy’s in custody now. That’s all Parker Quail needs to know. Any problem with
that, he can take it up with me.”
I waited until Benedict was out of the office. Parker Quail was a constant thorn in
our sides. He had made a lot of money from his gambling and whoring businesses, money
that he liked to flaunt as often as possible—the horseless carriage was a prime example.
He also had a streak of mean in him that would have made a pit viper timid. On two
occasions, Quail’s men had broken into the Town Marshal’s office and busted men out
of jail. Once to free an associate, another time to enact brutal justice on a man
who had crossed Quail. Neither of those things had been during my time as marshal,
and I was not going to let it happen on my watch.
Still, I cast a wary glance at our new fortifications, the improved locks and reinforced
window bars. Would someone be able to get in?
“For your sake, Abel, you might be better off in the cell. At least until tempers
have died down.”
“I don’t care about… who’d you say the man was?”
“Parker Quail,” I said slowly. “You mean this really wasn’t about getting back at
him?”
“Told you, Bill. It was about the
machine
, not the man. It’s always about the machines. They’re all that matter now.”
* * *
This is what Abel McCreedy told me, while he was still in custody.
I’ve never been sure of how much to believe, even allowing for what happened with
Tommy Benedict later that night. Or of what happened to Abel, come to think of it.
None of it, maybe. Perhaps just a little. But in all our time in the Legion, in all
the years we bountied together, during our time under the Pinks, I never knew Abel
McCreedy tell a lie or bend a truth. He just wasn’t the lying or exaggerating type.
Never thought of him as having too much in the way of imagination.
“It started with the wreckin’ parties, Bill.”
“The wrecking parties,” I said, as if this was meant to mean something.
“The train wrecks. The ones they put on, for the show. Started as a fad, like it was
going to come and go, way these things generally do. But there was money behind it.
Money and power. Too much to stop, even when people started gettin’ maimed and dyin’
over it.”
I knew about the train wrecks, although it had taken Abel’s prompt to jolt my memory.
It was a lunatic thing to do, when you thought about it. Started in Texas, maybe Ohio—someone
getting it into their head that there could be profit in staging train wrecks before
a paying audience. They laid out maybe four miles of railroad track, straighter than
an Apache arrow, and near the middle, where the two trains were due to collide, nature
had seen fit to provide a natural amphitheater from which several tens of thousands
of paying customers could view proceedings. They laid out more tracks to bring people
in to watch, put in a new depot and telegraph station just to cope with the number
of spectators. They put in a grandstand for VIPs, only two hundred yards from the
rails, and a press box for photographers half as close again. Mister Edison even came
with his new motion picture camera. There were medicine shows, hucksters, a bandstand,
even a purpose-built jail. They hitched up cars behind the two locomotives and sold
advertising space on the sides of them. They promoted the thing for months.
It was a grand success, and also a disaster.
They brought the trains together, then backed them off until they were two miles apart.
Their engineers started them going then jumped off before they had got up too much
speed. Soon the locomotives and their trains were rolling faster than a man could
run. Then there was no force on Earth capable of stopping them.
During my time in the Legion, shortly before that shot at Antietam put me out of commission,
I saw a Union munitions dump go up. I was a mile away and I have never heard, nor
care to hear, a louder thing. They say there was twenty tons of explosive in that
munitions dump. When the locomotives ran into each other, it was as if that dump contained
fifty tons, maybe more. Their boilers were not meant to explode, but they did anyway.
Pieces of metal landed half a mile away. People died. Not many, it was true, out of
all who came to watch, but enough that there was an outcry. They sacked the promoter.
There was a move to ban organized train wrecks.
“But someone didn’t want ’em banned,” Abel said. “A Utah Congressman tried to push
through the necessary legislation. They found him dead. His brother tried to find
out what happened. He disappeared. Then the brother’s wife hired me to dig a little
deeper.” Through his beard I made out the cock-eyed smile of a man able to look back
at his own mistakes with some detachment. “I shouldn’t have taken the case. I learned
things, Bill. Things that you can’t never unlearn. Things that brought me here.”
“You’re not making much sense, Abel. What does train wrecking have to do with Parker
Quail’s horseless carriage?”
“It’s machines, Bill—don’t you get it? It’s all just machines. They’re comin’, rollin’
toward us like those locomotives. There’s nothing we can do to stop them.”
“Still not making sense, sorry.”
Abel closed his eyes. I could almost feel him trying to organize the crazy clutter
of his mind. “I followed the money. What you always do, right? I wanted to know who
was willin’ to murder and intimidate government officials to keep these wrecks happenin’.
And I followed it almost all the way. That’s when I met
her
.”
“Her.”
“The woman. Said her name was Miss Dolores C. Steel. Ten years and I can see her like
she’s standin’ in front of me now. Dressed all in black, like a widow. Black silk
gloves, black veil on her hat, always carried a black parasol.” Seeing the mental
picture he must have thought he was painting, he added: “But she wasn’t old and dowdy,
like one of them war widows. I’d have said she wasn’t no older’n thirty. Still a very
comely woman, dressed in the latest Boston styles. Had a very particular way of speakin’,
too. Had me wonderin’ if she wasn’t from our shores.”
“Where did you meet?”
“At a wreck in Idaho. But I’d seen her more than once before, at other wrecks. She
was obviously close to the money. At first I thought that was because she was involved.
Then I found out she was like me,
tryin’
to get close to it.”
I nodded. “I’m guessing the woman—this Miss Steel—was connected to one of the victims.
Either someone who died at one of the wrecks, or someone who got in the way of the
next one happening.”
“What I thought as well. But it wasn’t like that.” Abel hesitated in his narrative,
as if debating how much he dared tell me. “You knew me well in the old days, Bill.
Would you say I had a level head?”
“None leveler.”
“Then make of this what you will. The day we met properly, before we’d even spoken,
I followed Miss Steel into a huckster’s tent. I meant to speak to her quietly, to
warn her that she was getting close to dangerous men. But she’d tricked me. There
was no one in that tent save the woman herself—she’d been meaning for me to follow
her! As soon as I’m inside, she spins round like a cornered cat. I start to raise
my hands, let her know I mean her no harm. But I can’t! I’m totally frozen! I want
to move but nothin’ happens. And I don’t mind telling you, Bill. I felt the fear of
the good Lord run through me.” Again there came that hesitation. “I knew I was in
the presence of somethin’ that wasn’t natural. That woman wasn’t a woman at all. Ten
years ago and it feels like yesterday. You ever had that feeling before a thunderstorm,
Bill? As if the air itself is all charged up and crackly?”
“Once or twice.”
“That was how I felt around Miss Steel. And it was comin’ off her. She lifted her
veil, let me see her face properly. And then she did the thing I’ll never forget,
not so long as I have another breath to draw.”
“Which was?”
“
She took off her face
.”
I repeated his words, in the hope they might make more sense coming out of my mouth
than his. “She took off her face.”
Before Abel could answer there was a loud bang as Benedict came back through the door,
flinging it wide open. I’d seen that determined look on his face and I knew it meant
a particular breed of trouble.
“Something up, Deputy?” I asked, tearing myself from Abel’s crazy narrative.
“Exactly what you feared, Bill: Quail’s men are up out of bed and spoiling for a fight.”
Benedict went straight to the armory and took out his favorite Winchester shotgun,
which he kept loaded and ready for occasions such as this. He strode back out with
the Winchester held like a staff, barrel to the sky. My revolver still holstered from
the earlier business, I followed him outside. It was still raining like Noah himself
would have needed a second ark.
Benedict and I stood on the wooden sidewalk, head and shoulders above the men who
had followed Benedict back to the office.