Behind the Iron Read online

  Mr. Schultz didn’t appear to be listening. He kept looking down the train, past the passenger coaches, the smoking car, all the way to the caboose.

  “Major Mosby,” the German said softly. “It is not good that he is not here.”

  “Maybe,” MacGregor said, “they tied him up. We should have checked on him sooner, sir. Let’s go find him.”

  * * *

  They found him, but he wasn’t tied up. He wasn’t alive, either.

  Major Mosby lay on the caboose’s floor, the coffee he had spilled when he dropped his tin cup all but dried or drained through the cracks in the flooring. The blood underneath his navy blue woolen coat had stained the floor. Fallon placed two fingers on the conductor’s throat but knew he would feel no faint beat. His left hand reached up and closed the dead man’s eyes.

  “They give him no chance,” Mr. Schultz said. “He did not even have a gun on his person.”

  “Truly,” Dan MacGregor said, “I am sorry for this good man’s passing, but he must be glad that we have avenged his death by cutting down all of his killers.”

  Nodding slightly, Schultz pulled himself to his feet. Fallon rose too, found a blanket, and covered the dead man with it.

  “We’ll leave him here,” MacGregor said. “I can have my man Holderman ride back here, sir, if you feel that necessary.”

  “There is no need,” the engineer said.

  “Very well,” MacGregor said and headed out the back door they had left open. “Then let’s get moving. Now. We need to find Linc Harper.”

  * * *

  Werner Schultz kept the locomotive at a slow speed, as Fallon leaned out on the northern side of the rails and Holderman studied the terrain to the south. Atop the tender, Dan MacGregor used a pair of binoculars to study the distant woods on both sides of the track.

  “Mr. Schultz,” Fallon called out.

  “I see it,” the big German said, and the wheels began that screech as the train slowed to a stop. MacGregor must have seen the body, too, for he climbed down before the train began to slow and turned to Holderman.

  “Get to the passenger cars. Tell them to keep their heads down and stay on the floor. Tell them Linc Harper’s gang could be anywhere and we don’t want them to get hurt. Now.”

  Holderman’s face was blank with confusion.

  “Do like I say, damn you,” MacGregor snapped.

  Harry Fallon wasn’t sure what to think, either, but when the train stopped, MacGregor practically kicked Holderman out of the cab and shouted, “Now. Now. I don’t want anyone to see this. Get to it, man. Hurry.”

  As the big man hurried to the first passenger coach, he issued the warning, “Stay down. Get on the floor. It’s for your own good.”

  MacGregor was running in the opposite direction, toward the body on the gravel, near the rails, lying in a pool of blood.

  Limping, Harry Fallon slowly followed. The German engineer and the fireman came right behind him. They stopped as Dan MacGregor struggled to overturn the body.

  “Linc Harper,” Werner Schultz said, “rob no more of my trains.”

  That, Fallon thought, was a damned understatement if ever I’d heard one.

  When Fallon and Harper had fallen through the hole in the roof of the express car, Fallon had hit nothing but floor, ash, and scattered sacks and papers. Linc Harper landed on a piece of ragged timber that likely had been propped up by a strongbox. The jagged edge had torn through Harper’s stomach, punched through his back, and Harper had rolled out of the doorway blown open by the dynamite charge. If he had not been killed outright, he had bled out quickly.

  The blood Fallon had seen on the floor of the express car, it turned out, was not from the blown-to-oblivion express agent. It was Linc Harper’s.

  “Damn!” MacGregor said. “Damn it all to hell.” He turned from the corpse and glared at Fallon. “Why couldn’t you have taken him alive?”

  Fallon studied the detective. This reaction came as a surprise. Linc Harper, the most wanted train robber in Missouri, was at last out of commission. Dan MacGregor, and the American Detective Agency, could claim not only wiping out Linc Harper’s gang—but killing the leader, too, and stopping another train robbery.

  “Boss,” Doolittle, the fireman said in a consoling voice, “y’all just killed ol’ Linc Harper. You folks gonna be heroes across the whole United States of America.”

  MacGregor swore. He spit the bile out of his mouth. “Four thousand dollars,” he said, and spat again. “That’s all the state of Missouri has put up for Harper. I don’t care about four thousand dollars. His last robbery netted him forty-two thousand, nine hundred and twenty-seven dollars and thirty-two cents in cash, coin, and bearer bonds. That’s not including watches, jewelry, and trinkets and the cash they took off the passengers. Which is probably all the survivors of the robbery got, anyhow. That’s what I’m after.”

  So, Harry Fallon had just learned something about Dan MacGregor. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Isn’t that how the saying went? For all his nice talk, Dan MacGregor was turning out to be just as corrupt as his old man.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Harry Fallon waited until Aaron Holderman managed to turn MacGregor’s wrath away from Fallon and back on that worthless tough, which did not take that long.

  “I reckon we should just cut our losses,” Holderman offered. “Four thousand bucks is better than nothing.”

  “Shut up, you fool!” MacGregor snapped. He looked back at the passenger coaches and suddenly grinned. “Wait a minute.” He rose and faced the engineer.

  “What time will we be at Mount Van Zandt?”

  The engineer stared as if the detective had lost his mind. “This train does not stop at Mount Van Zandt,” he said.

  The fireman added, “Lessen the bridge over the Gasconade be washed out.”

  “This train is stopping there today,” MacGregor said.

  “But we are late already,” Mr. Schultz said.

  MacGregor pulled greenbacks from his wallet. “This train is stopping there today.”

  Mr. Schultz wet his lips with his tongue. The fireman shoved his big hands into his deep pockets and stared at his filthy boots.

  MacGregor turned toward Fallon and explained: “There’s an icehouse in Mount Van Zandt. I went to college with the owner’s son.” He quickly looked back at Mr. Schultz. “That icehouse is still there, isn’t it?”

  The engineer shrugged. “I do not know. I guess. Maybe. I have not stopped there since, as Doolittle said, the last time the bridge was washed out during a spring flood. Last year.”

  “It was there a month or two back,” Doolittle said. “Ain’t much to that town, though, so I don’t know how long it can stay in business.”

  “It supplies ice to Rolla, and also ships to towns along the Rock Island line,” MacGregor said. “That’s how it stays in business. And the fact that there’s hardly anybody left in that town makes this even better.”

  He peeled off a few bills and handed them to Mr. Schultz, then took two more bills and gave them to Doolittle, who reluctantly pocketed the bribe.

  “We take Harper’s body off the train,” MacGregor told Fallon. “Dump his carcass and let’s find the location of the money from Harper’s last robbery.”

  Fallon nodded. No, the apple does not fall far from the tree.

  “You said there’s a relay station near the spot where the train was first stopped?” MacGregor again turned his attention to the engineer, whose head nodded.

  “Ja. One mile. Maybe two.”

  “We’ll stop there,” MacGregor ordered. “Wire the stations ahead, tell them that we’ve just been held up by Linc Harper’s gang, but that we have wounded men and are screaming our way to Jefferson City. They should hold all eastbound trains till we arrive. We’ll tell them that we’ve also got practically all of Linc Harper’s men. Dead. Except we did not get Linc Harper.”

  The engineer stared at Fallon, who just looked dumbly back at the German.


  “Get Harper’s body loaded into the express car,” MacGregor ordered.

  “With that stick still in him?” Holderman asked.

  “Unless you want to pull it out,” MacGregor said.

  It took all five men to lift the body and toss it through the wide opening. Holderman and Doolittle then climbed into the ruins of the car and dragged the body out of sight.

  “What do you think?” MacGregor asked Fallon.

  Fallon just stared, thinking: You really don’t want to know the answer to that question. So he just shrugged.

  “What about the other bodies?”

  Holderman’s question from the blown-open door to the express car turned MacGregor’s attention away from Fallon.

  The fireman had leaped down, but Holderman remained in the car.

  It was a question, apparently, that Dan MacGregor had not considered. His mouth opened, closed, and he pressed his lips together and thought.

  “You should leave them,” the engineer said. “We need to get to that relay station quickly. I do not know when the next train will be leaving Jefferson City, but finding a side track can be hard on short notice. And a train robbery, a destroyed express car, one dead express agent, and a murdered conductor are enough for one trip. We do not wish to add a head-on collision to our tally.”

  “We’re not leaving any bodies for wolves or bounty hunters once the word of the robbery hits Jefferson City,” MacGregor said at length. “We stop. Throw the bodies aboard this same coach.” His head nodded as though he were convincing himself that this plan was indeed the best option.

  “Makes sense to me.” Holderman climbed out of the baggage car and dusted off his hands on his thighs once he was back on solid ground. “That way we can at least get any reward the men we killed have on them. And maybe this cheapskate railroad company will pay us a few dollars for saving their hide.”

  Mr. Schultz grunted as though any money from “Missouri’s most trusted line since 1888,” the Hannibal-Saint Louis-Jefferson City Railroad Company, would not amount to much. “This line,” the engineer said, “does not even have porters on its trains.”

  MacGregor did not seem to hear or care.

  “You two head back to the engine, get this train moving west,” MacGregor said. “Slow, though. You’ll see the bodies, and when you do, make sure you stop the train. We’ll get off, like the conductor. When the body or bodies have been loaded, I’ll wave at you, and you start riding again. We’ll keep that up till we get to where this damned old ball first started.”

  Fallon cleared his throat. “All the dead men should be right where they started the ball. The only one I know that got killed after you started backtracking east was Linc Harper.”

  “You’re right.” MacGregor beamed at that thought. “Excellent. Excellent. Let’s get moving.”

  Fallon began thinking: Forty-two thousand, nine hundred and twenty-seven dollars and thirty-two cents minus . . .

  * * *

  The train moved down the rails east until the first dead outlaws appeared, and then Werner Schultz eased the train to a stop.

  “Everybody in the coaches!” MacGregor yelled after stepping off the train and walking down the tracks. “Stay with your heads down. There still might be some bandits lurking about.”

  As Fallon grabbed a dead man’s legs and MacGregor picked up the corpse by the arms, Fallon asked, “You think so?”

  “Not really, but maybe.” Holderman and the fireman were walking away from the tracks. MacGregor’s head tilted toward them. “Two of the bunch ran after the horses. I dropped both of them as we started the train reversing down the tracks. That’s who Holderman and that big black cuss are picking up now. A couple more were also running for their mounts, but when they realized what was happening with the train, they quickly returned to try to get aboard.” MacGregor grinned. “I set their sun, too.”

  “You were busy,” Fallon said.

  “So were you. You must have had your hands full with Harper.”

  Fallon shrugged.

  By the time the last corpse had been tossed into the express car, the dead cargo numbered twelve—two more than Fallon and MacGregor had estimated. The body count did not include the express agent, since there really wasn’t any body to speak of. Nor did it include the conductor, since he was stiffening in the caboose.

  Eleven train robbers, plus Linc Harper, should make for a substantial reward, Fallon thought, but certainly not forty-two thousand dollars. Still, Fallon could not figure something out. Did Dan MacGregor want to turn in the money for a reward? Or did he want that forty thousand bucks for himself?

  When the train reached the relay station, MacGregor leaped off and sprinted to the little wooden shack with the pitched roof on the north side of the tracks. Fallon limped over, his calf throbbing and his leg beginning to stiffen from the crease of that bullet. The engineer withdrew a key, stuck in the big, shiny chunk of brass, and released the padlock. MacGregor pulled open the door and smiled at the sight of the telegraph machine.

  But the smile died instantly. “Who knows Morse code?” he said in a panic.

  Werner Schultz answered: “Major Mosby.”

  “Hell’s fire!” the young detective snapped. “Who still alive knows Morse code?”

  With a heavy sigh, Fallon slid past MacGregor and found the dusty stool. “You’ll need to connect the wires,” he said casually. “And keep in mind I haven’t done this in sixteen years, and my training on the Katy line was pretty much nothing. And don’t expect me to go very fast.”

  Once the wires were connected, Fallon tapped out a signal and waited. The reply came quickly enough, so Fallon drew in a deep breath, looked up at Dan MacGregor, and asked, “What exactly is it you want me to tell them in Jefferson City?”

  Before MacGregor could answer, Aaron Holderman shoved his way into the shack. “How can you be dead certain this hombre will send the right message? He might try to be smart, say something else maybe. I wouldn’t trust this convict, Danny boy.”

  Fallon shook his head. “Yeah,” he said sarcastically. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ll tap out a message and maybe have a passenger or freight train, or a combination, come screaming down the tracks to meet us at twenty miles an hour and send every mother’s son of us—not to mention every innocent passenger in those coaches—straight to hell.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the telegrapher working for the Hannibal-Saint Louis-Jefferson City Railroad Company in Jefferson City had assured Fallon that the track would be empty and that law enforcement and some of the best doctors in Missouri’s state capital would be waiting for the arrival of the westbound train from St. Louis.

  Fallon signed off with a thanks and disconnected the machine. He slid back in the stool and looked at Dan MacGregor and Aaron Holderman.

  “Then everything’s working out perfectly,” MacGregor said. “Just perfectly.” The handsome detective spun around and nodded at Werner Schultz. “Mister Engineer, you can take us straight to Mount Van Zandt. Finally, things are starting to look a bit brighter.”

  Fallon cleared his throat. He waited until the detective was giving him complete attention.

  “We’re what, two hours from the station at Mount Van Zandt, right?”

  Werner Schultz nodded.

  “You’re going to have a hard time getting Linc Harper’s body off this train without some of our passengers noticing,” Fallon said.

  Holderman sang out: “We’ll just tell them that Linc Harper’s bunch is hiding in the woods. That’ll keep their cowardly hides on the floor, hugging the carpet and praying for God’s mercy.”

  A lengthy silence followed before MacGregor sighed, cursed, and spit on the shack’s filthy floor. “I think Fallon’s right. Our passengers are mighty sick at lying on the floor. Curiosity gets the better of even the most yellow coward.”

  “So how do you get around this?” Werner Schultz asked.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The young detective grinned,
revealing his perfect and perfectly white teeth.

  “We leave them behind,” Dan MacGregor said. He smiled up at the engineer. “You’ll have to tell them, Mr. Schultz.”

  “No,” the big German said, “I not get shot. No matter how much gold you offer.”

  * * *

  The passengers aboard one of “Missouri’s most trusted line since 1888” appeared to be on the verge of riot, and, perhaps, murder.

  “Ladies,” Dan MacGregor pleaded, waving his arms and trying, but not coming close to succeeding, to quiet the raucous mob. “Gentlemen. This is for your own protection.”

  Aaron Holderman tried to help. “Do you folks want to get shot down like dogs?”

  The rabbi shook his head, and when the crowd, Holderman, and MacGregor also paused, the elderly Jewish man said: “You abandon us in the middle of these thick woods, so thick it feels as though we are in a cave. There is no telling what beasts, what hoodlums, live in this unholy forest.”

  “And,” said an erudite woman, “what happens if another train roars down these tracks, east or west?”

  MacGregor gestured. “You will be safe on the siding. It will be more dangerous for us to take this train the last few miles to Jefferson City.”

  Voices sang out. “My brother is sick and maybe dying.” . . . “We have been through enough torment already.” . . . “My lawyer is Jason James Johnathan the Third of Columbia, Missouri, and he will be suing your railroad for ten thousand dollars if you leave us here.” . . . “We got no food on this train, no liquor neither, and half the women aboard are older than my grandma, so what the hell is it we’re supposed to do till an engine comes from Jeff City to pull us in?” . . . “You folks just want to leave us so all the newspapers will give your side of the story, print your names in the paper. That just ain’t right.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Dan MacGregor said, waving his hands down to quieten the raucous passengers. “You have just endured one of the bloodiest holdups in the annals of our young, noble country.”