Death Train to Boston (20 page)

I dismissed Melancthon Pratt from my mind—there was no point trying to consider the unpredictable, I
should simply have to handle him on the spot, if he came. I had done well enough I thought, in light of the wives' household habits, in choosing the hour or two after lunch for practice of my outdoor navigating skills.

Mornings I practiced indoors, in my room—practiced with an aim toward getting better and better; then I did an about-face and practiced at dissembling, so as to disguise the progress I'd made. I did not want anyone to know how hard I was working to master this art of walking on crutches with my arms bearing almost all my weight; less still did I want to be caught giving any unexpected demonstrations of my rapidly improving skills.

Looking up to check the angle of the sun and its orientation in the sky, I concluded that it was probably around half past one, and the cabin door I'd just exited faced east. Well, I should have known that because the afternoon sun always came through my one window, which was on the side of the room opposite the door.

One window . . .

That was damn odd. Having advanced a few feet into the yard, I turned and looked back at the cabin. It was rustic, but neatly built—not of boards, as those are very hard to come by in the West, but rather of some sort of rough shingles that had weathered to an attractive shade of gray. Some care and expense had gone into its construction. The door and the one step were painted a pristine white, like the bench.

Why then would a free-standing cabin have only one window?

I continued to puzzle over this as I began, laboriously, to make my very first circuit of the cabin's perimeter—my aim, to be as familiar with my former prison cell from the outside as I was from the inside. It shared no walls with any other structure, there was nothing adjoining, and it was not possible to see into the other
buildings below, so why should its builder have been parsimonious with ventilation and views?

Why? For economy's sake?

Perhaps, but probably not. Glass was no longer so expensive as it used to be, not even in the West, where most everything had to be imported, either from the East by train or from the West by boat, around the Horn or across the Pacific Ocean.

This business of the single window was a minor point, but feeling trapped as I did, I had obsessed over it. I'd wondered if perhaps there might not be some kind of connecting corridor on the other side of one of my blank walls, like a cloistered walkway in a monastery. Clearly there was no such thing.

Having completed three-quarters of my circuit around the cabin, I stood for a moment with my back braced against its southeast corner, relieving some of the weight from my arms. From this vantage I had the best view of the Big House, and on closer scrutiny it seemed not quite so far away as I'd first thought, appearing to be situated in a dip of land that screened the lower two-thirds of it from view. That is to say, if the Big House had been a person, from about the ribcage down that person would have been invisible to me.

How very interesting! That same dip of land obscured the wives' cabins entirely, except for their roof-lines. I squinted against the sun, wishing I could spare one hand to shade my eyes, but I could not. Truth to tell, my arms were beginning to tremble. Oh, bother. I resolved to ignore all discomfort.

The Big House either had a loft—which is to say, it would be about one and a half stories high—or had high ceilings. The cabins of the wives were by contrast tiny, if one judged from the roofs, which were all that I could see of them. Smaller than my guest cabin, which I had thought quite small but now saw was grand by comparison.

Eventually I would check out everything down there more closely, but not now. I would be forced by my aching arms to go back in soon. Yet I lingered, squinting, searching without success for a barn, stables, or any other outbuilding where horses, wagons, any form of transportation might be located. Surely such equipment must be housed down there somewhere. Certainly none of it was up here with me. Here I was in the guest cabin in isolated splendor. As for splendor, hah; but I was isolated indeed.

Turning now to complete that last leg of my circle around the cabin, I made a mental note to remember to be more profuse in my thanks to the wives when they brought meals and other things to me. How they must have rushed to keep the food from getting cold! And no wonder that no matter how hard I'd strained to hear a step outside my door, I never had. Though the grass here was sparse, it was enough to deaden most sound.

With a sigh and a final look around, I pushed open the door, negotiated the one step up in a final burst of effort, and went back inside. No one had seen me. So far, so good.

They played double solitaire and argued about when to get off the train.

Meiling won at her half of the game again and again, until Michael began to suspect she was able somehow to influence the cards with her mysterious grandmother-given powers. Either that or she cheated.

But Michael won their argument by virtue of his superior knowledge of Utah geography. He argued effectively that if they were to have a chance of finding Fremont before the onset of winter froze up their passage through the mountains, they could not leave the train before Salt Lake City.

He would have preferred to stay on until Provo; Salt
Lake was a concession to Meiling, a sop he threw to her soothsaying ability even though her part of the argument had been irrational and had irritated the hell out of him. She said she still sensed danger all around him. He didn't want to hear it. Hell, he'd had danger all around him for most of his life.

Meiling knew that about him; she just wasn't thinking clearly. The grandmother's mumbo-jumbo might have restored her Chinese-ness, but it had messed up her mind.

"Everywhere there are mountains," Meiling commented, looking out the window.

"Um," Michael said. He was looking for a red jack, the jack of hearts—he was sure he'd seen it in there someplace, so why couldn't he turn it up? But no. Oh no.

"Where we're going will be mountainous too," Michael said irritably, "but first we'll have to cross the basin of the Great Salt Lake. I hope you know what you're doing by insisting we leave this train before Provo."

She looked over at him, then down at her cards. "I believe I do." She went through the pack in her hand again, turning up every third card. "Oh," she said, then played a huge number of cards in a flurry.

"Dammit, how do you
do
that?"

"Do what? I am playing the game correctly, am I not?"

"Yes, Meiling. You are not only playing it correctly, you're winning. Every goddam time."

A hint of a smile brushed her lips as she turned her head again toward the window. "I think I've played enough for one afternoon."

"Um-hm," Michael said.

He supposed he had too, and began to gather up the cards to put them away.

"I should like to rest for a while before the dinner
hour," Meiling said, not looking at him. "Perhaps you will go to the clubs car for a smoke. I cannot rest with you hovering over me."

"Meiling, I don't hover."

"Then may I express myself in different words: I cannot rest with you present in the same space that I am occupying. Your energy is not restful, Michael. I am sorry to have to say so, but that is the truth."

He riffled through the cards. He gave each pack a forceful tap upon the playing board, which rested half on his knees and half on Meiling's, then shoved them with more force than was required into the side-by-side sections of their pasteboard box.

"My energy will be a hell of a lot more restful when I've found Fremont. If it bothers you I'm sorry, but there's not much I can do about it."

"That is not true. You could go to the clubs car, as I asked."

"It's club car, Meiling, not clubs. One club, singular, not plural." Michael folded the playing board and tossed it onto the bench seat beside him. The two-pack box of cards he tossed on top of it. The cards had been provided by the railroad, and were decorated with the letters "SP" embossed in gold, in a fussily rococo style.

"And no," Michael continued relentlessly, "I can't go for a smoke. Not without you. I'm not leaving you alone as long as we're on this train. If you don't like it, you can get off at the next stop."

"We have already had that discussion."

"Indeed we have."

She turned on him, her eyes blazing again. "I've told you, the danger is following you, not me! I need to rest, Michael! And so do you."

Michael rose wearily. He was both tired and tense, a bad combination. She was right: He too needed to rest.

Against his better judgment, he held up a hand to her, palm out. "Okay, okay, okay. I give up. I'm going
to my compartment. We'll both rest for a couple of hours, then I'll come back here for you and we'll go together to the club car for a sherry, and then on to the dining car for dinner. Is that satisfactory?"

"Yes, thank you." Meiling made her customary small bow of the head, sincerely this time, not as an affectation but rather in the habit of her people.

"You're welcome," said Michael stiffly as he slid open the compartment door. He put his head out and looked right, then left. Up, then down. He saw nothing suspicious.

"A couple of hours, then," he said to Meiling, and closed the door behind him.

There is that man again," Meiling said. "He is watching you."

"His name is Hilliard Ramsey, and actually I believe, my dear Meiling, he is watching
you.
You're far prettier than I." A glass of smooth, mellow sherry and a cheroot had restored Michael's spirits. The rest in his own bunk hadn't hurt either; in fact, he'd slept like the dead . . . with his hand on the revolver the whole time.

"He is your friend?"

"No, my dear Meiling. He is my enemy, old and sworn."

"Oh, I see. He is the one you have told me of, who says he is only following you."

"Um-hm."

Michael crossed his legs and made a minor adjustment to the black silk scarf that served him as a sling. This broken collarbone was a damn nuisance—he couldn't do a thing with his left hand. In a public setting like this he was vulnerable.

Of course,
he thought lazily as he let the alcohol warm his veins and cloud his mind,
Meiling can protect me with her jujitsu.

"Tell me, Meiling," he said quietly, "what do your mystical powers say about that man, Ramsey? Is he merely following me, or does he mean me harm? Is he in cahoots with the big fellow who was lurking outside your compartment door?"

"You are serious?" She looked from Michael to Ramsey and back again, tilting her head only the slightest bit on her graceful neck as her dark eyes slid from side to side.

Michael thought,
She looks like a Chinese princess tonight.
She had decided to play the role of his woman, his concubine. She hadn't had to tell him this, he'd understood when he saw the way she'd dressed for dinner.

Yet in her masquerade Meiling was not just any woman, not just any concubine, but high-born: Her clothes and jewels announced it. Long earrings of amber and gold dangled from her ears, and amber beads were nestled in her raven's wing hair, which she had arranged in some kind of figure-eight thing on the back of her head. Her tunic, in the traditional style with mandarin collar and side slits, was of rust-brown satin trimmed in black satin piping, and her full trousers were also satin, also black. Sleek gold slippers encased her narrow feet.

Michael understood that the elegance of this outfit was deceptive. The amber beads in her hair were the heads of long, needle-like steel hairpins that could be turned into dangerous weapons in an instant. The side slits in her tunic, and the wide trousers, gave her freedom of movement. And the gold slippers, while pretty to look at, were flat-soled—she could run and kick in them easily. Clever woman.

With a pang, Michael remembered how Fremont had envied the cultural heritage that enabled Meiling to wear trousers. And how, not many years ago although it seemed a long time now, Fremont had worn black trousers herself one night. . . .

Meiling said, "There are too many people in this room for me to be able to single out one man's energy at this distance. But if you were to ask him to join us and introduce him to me, so that I might be physically near him for a time, I might be able to do it."

Michael arched a black eyebrow. The thought amused him. "I'll do it. You know what he'll think, don't you?"

"Of course." Meiling bowed gracefully from the waist, dipping her head lower than she normally would have done. "Surely you did not think I would wear these clothes in the normal way of things."

"No, of course I didn't. Very well, I'll bring him over. You know, Meiling, this could be rather entertaining."

But she wasn't smiling. She said, "Enjoy it while you can."

FATHER IS ILL," Verla said. I was astounded. Whatever else I may have thought of the man, Melancthon Pratt seemed such a force of manhood and Mormonism as to be immune from the little diseases that strike the rest of us humans down from time to time.

"I am very sorry to hear it," I said.

"He says he would like to see you," she continued.

"Oh, I don't see how—" I demurred, but did not go on to complete my sentence because of the expression on Verla's face. She was obviously in no mood to be contradicted on anything.