The Railroad War Read online

  “What horses?”

  “Our ranch horses. Don’t you remember, Bobby? I’m Jessie Starbuck, and you’re at the Circle Star ranch.”

  “I didn’t remember right off, when the shooting woke me up,” the boy said. “But I do now.” He pointed to Ki. “Who’s he?”

  “This is Ki. He’ll be your friend too, just like I will, if you’ll let us.”

  Bobby studied Ki’s face for a moment, then nodded slowly. “I guess I will. But where’s Mr. Alex Starbuck? He’s the one I came to find. Grandpa needs help real bad.”

  “We’ll talk about that in a minute,” Jessie promised. “The first thing to do is to get you settled back in bed.” She spent a moment rearranging the covers after Bobby lay down, then said, “Now before we talk about helping your grandpa, wouldn’t you like something to eat? You must be hungry.”

  “I guess I am, some,” Bobby replied. “I feel sorta funny all over. Not as much as when I woke up. But when the guns stopped going off and I used the chamberpot, I felt better.”

  “I’ll see what I can find in the kitchen,” Ki volunteered.

  When Ki had gone, Jessie sat down on the bed. “Bobby, Alex Starbuck was my father, and he’s dead.”

  Jessie watched the boy’s face carefully. Bobby swallowed hard, but, as with any youth brought up on the frontier, death to him was a fact to be accepted stoically. His eyes widened and she saw his face beginning to pucker into a disappointed frown.

  She went on quickly, “Perhaps Ki and I can help your grandfather, but we’ll have to find out what kind of trouble he’s in. Suppose you tell me about it.”

  For a moment or two, Bobby was silent, his frown deepening. Then he said, “If Mr. Starbuck was your daddy, I guess he told you about him and Grandpa sailing all over the ocean together.”

  “He didn’t exactly tell me, but I know a little bit about it,” Jessie answered. “Your grandfather used to be the captain of a ship called the Sea Sprite, didn’t he?”

  Bobby nodded. “He brought things to San Francisco for Mr. Starbuck, all kinds of stuff from China and Japan and places like that. Sometimes Mr. Starbuck was on Grandpa’s ship with him.”

  “Yes.” Jessie nodded. “I know a little about that.”

  “They fought pirates together sometimes,” Bobby went on, his eyes opening wider. “And I guess Grandpa done a lot to help Mr. Starbuck, because when Grandpa got hurt and couldn’t be a ship captain any more, Mr. Starbuck gave him some land in Nevada Territory. Grandma was still alive then, and my daddy was just a little boy, but he’s dead too, now. Went East to fight in the War, and never came home. So some of Grandma’s and Grandpa’s folks too, from back East, they came out to live with Grandpa on his land.”

  “This was the land my father had given him?” Jessie asked when Bobby ran out of breath and stopped.

  “Yes, ma‘am. Well, everything’s been fine in Hidden Valley until just a—”

  “Wait, Bobby,” Jessie broke in. “This land my father gave your grandfather is called Hidden Valley?”

  Bobby nodded again. “It’s called that because it’s sorta separated from everyplace else by the foothills.”

  “What foothills?”

  “Why, the Sierra foothills. Hidden Valley’s way over west in Nevada Territory, right close to California.”

  “All right, I understand now,” Jessie told him. “Go on.”

  “There’s some men that want to build a railroad through the valley,” Bobby said. “But they need a lot of land for their tracks, and some of the folks don’t want to sell their land because it’d break up their farms, and some of them would have to leave their houses, and all like that. So the railroad people are mad, and the folks in Hidden Valley are mad, and there’s all sorts of trouble starting.”

  “And you’d heard your grandfather say that if he ever got into trouble and needed help, he knew Alex Starbuck would help him?”

  “Yes, ma‘am. Mama heard him say that too, and she told Grandpa he better ask Mr. Starbuck for help before it was too late. And Grandpa always says it’s not that bad yet. So I sorta figured that if he wasn’t going to do anything, and Mama wasn’t going to do anything, I’d better.”

  Jessie said slowly, “Bobby, I don’t suppose you told your mother or your grandfather that you were going to ask for help?”

  Bobby shook his head emphatically. “I sure didn‘t! Because if I’d of told ’em, they’d of said no!”

  “How did you know where to come and look for my father?”

  “Grandpa’s talked about Mr. Alex Starbuck ever since I can remember. I wasn’t real sure where this ranch was, so I sorta asked him a few questions, and started out.”

  “What did you do for money?”

  “I work and earn my own money, Miss Starbuck. I didn’t have to ask anybody for help. I hitched some rides on wagons along the way through the valley and rode the stage coach some and got to the Santa Fe railroad. The ticket seller figured out where I had to change trains to get the rest of the way. And I got here, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did, But you came very close to not making it.” When Bobby did not answer, Jessie went on, “What did you expect my father to do for your grandfather, Bobby?”

  “I—I guess I ain’t sure. But Grandpa said so many times how certain he was Mr. Alex Starbuck would help him—” The youth stopped short, his lower lip quivering. “I guess I made a mistake, didn’t I? I ought to of found out more before I left. I didn’t know Mr. Starbuck was dead.”

  “Sometimes news doesn’t travel very fast, Bobby. Even bad news.” Jessie sat silent for a moment, then she asked the boy, “I guess you know what ‘inheritance’ means, don’t you?”

  “Why—it means something that’s passed along in a family, like a house or money, I suppose.”

  “Or an obligation,” she added. “No Bobby, even if I don’t quite approve of the way you went about things, you haven’t made a mistake coming here. From what you’ve told me, I’m sure Alex would have helped your grandfather.”

  “You mean you’re going to—”

  “Of course. I always try to do what Alex would have done himself, Bobby. We’ll have to talk some more, and you need to rest a few days. But Ki and I will go back to Hidden Valley with you and and see what we can do to help your grandpa get things straightened out.”

  Chapter 3

  West of the rutted road over which the lurching, bumping stagecoach was traveling, the land rose steeply in a single breathtaking upward sweep to the towering crests of the pine-covered Sierra Nevadas; to the east, it stretched in a slowly lifting expanse of arid semidesert to the low, broken humps of the barren Wassuk Range.

  Since they’d left the comparatively comfortable seats in the swaying passenger coach of the Santa Fe Railroad at Kingman, Jessie, Ki, and Bobby had jounced and bounced constantly in one or another of several stagecoaches they’d boarded. They’d changed vehicles in tiny towns: Eldorado, Potosi, Reville, Columbus, Belleville, and, most recently, Aurora.

  Jessie thought as they traveled that the towns must have been bitterly disappointing to the first miners and prospectors who had named them out of hopes and dreams and memories. In most of the new communities there had been a few good years, then the lodes had begun to peter out, and the same men who’d established them had moved on to look for new and bigger strikes. The number of passengers traveling on the stage line gauged the decline of the towns; when the coach pulled out of Aurora, Jessie and Ki and Bobby were its only occupants.

  After starting north from Kingman, the stage had passed one heavy freightwagon after another hauling rails and ties north, but it was not until they left Aurora and started up the shallow valley between the Sierras and the Wassuks that they’d seen any actual track laid by the South Sierra Railway Company. The rails were still new, not yet worn shiny, unused by anything heavier than handcars. Several of these had whizzed past the slower stagecoach, with two men pumping the handles while a half-dozen others balanced precariously on the crowded plat
form.

  “Isn’t this a strange way to build a railroad, Jessie?” Ki asked as they watched one of the handcars disappear. “From everything I’ve heard, the rails are usually laid from each end of the line to meet in the middle, but this South Sierra Railway outfit is starting in the middle and building to each end.”

  “I don’t know much about building railroads, Ki,” she said. “But from what Bobby’s told us, they’re also laying rails south to Hidden Valley and north to the Southern Pacific mainline.”

  “That’s right,” Bobby chimed in. “Grandpa says they want to get the big shipments out of the mines up north of the valley, at places like Washoe City and Como and Virginia City.”

  “Well, that makes sense, at least,” Ki said. “And I suppose there’s a reason for it, but it seems to me they’re counting a lot on getting the right-of-way through Hidden Valley.”

  “Grandpa says that, too,” Bobby nodded. “He says us folks in Hidden Valley have got the railroad promoters in a bind. If they can’t buy the land through those passes at the north and south ends of the valley, he says they’ll have to spend a mint of money putting their tracks through the mountains.”

  “If the country around Hidden Valley is anything like what we’re looking at now, I’d agree with your grandpa,” Jessie said.

  “It’s pretty much the same,” Bobby told her. “Lots of ups and downs every place you look.”

  Jessie didn’t say that the geography of the valley was no surprise to her. Before they’d started from the Circle Star, after having given Bobby a few days of rest to recover from his sunstroke, she’d finished reading Alex Starbuck’s early diaries. In them she’d found entries explaining why her father had felt so indebted to Captain Tinker; the entries had also revealed the acute perceptions that had made Starbuck so successful.

  “At midnight, a day out of Tientsin in the Chingchan Strait, boarded by Chinese pirates,” Alex had written in his copperplate script, the words as legible as the day he’d put them down, though the oxgall ink he’d used had faded to a pale purple-tan. “Capt. Tinker at helm, mates and crew belowdecks when pirates attacked. Luckily, I was in my cabin, so I could get to deck to help Tinker. Exhausted pistol ammunition, and Tinker fought to me with cutlass, after suffering grievous sword-slash in thigh. Except for Tinker. I would not have survived the fight and my cargo would have been lost.”

  In another diary, of a later year, she read: “Visited Capt. Tinker, found him in deplorable situation. He was forced to sell the Sea Sprite as the wound received from pirates when he saved my life now prevents him following his profession. Have decided to give him Hidden Valley land for which I outbid the cartel. While the passes at each end of the valley are the only ones in a hundred miles suitable for a railroad line, I have no need for them until my railroad ventures reach the stage where the line I plan can be built. Hidden Valley has enough good farmland to allow Tinker to support himself by selling what he cannot use himself, and when the day comes to build my railroad, I can rely on Tinker to let me put its rail through the passes.”

  A final entry in the same diary told of Alex taking the Captain to Hidden Valley and showing it to him, then delivering the deed to Tinker. Jessie did not search through the later diaries. From the three entries she’d read, she could understand why her father had given Hidden Valley to Captain Tinker, and why Tinker would feel that if he needed help, he could turn to Alex.

  “I can understand a lot more than that, of course,” she’d said to Ki when telling him of the diary entries. “Alex outbid the cartel for Hidden Valley when he was competing with them during the time he was first investing in railroads. They must have records too, but even without records, some of them would remember the valley and the passes.”

  “They’d remember how your father beat them, too,” Ki had reminded her. “The cartel never forgets or forgives a defeat. The feeling you had when Bobby first showed up was right, it seems. The South Sierra Railway Company is just another name for the cartel. We’ll go help Captain Tinker fight them, of course.”

  “Of course,” Jessie had replied, and the matter was settled.

  Now, jouncing along in the stagecoach on the last leg of their journey to Hidden Valley, Jessie could appreciate her father’s vision even more. Looking at the rugged mountains to the east and west, she could see where a route across level land such as the valley floor would make the passes at each of its ends a prize almost beyond price.

  Ahead of the stage, Jessie saw a huddle of buildings lining the road, and as they drew closer to them, she recognized them as the railhead supply camp. On one side there were new and well-built structures; these were offices for the construction bosses, and storage buildings for tools and supplies. The buildings were flanked by stacks of ties and rails, and away from these at a little distance stood corrals for the oxen and mules that pulled the big freightwagons.

  On the other side of the road stood a motley miscellany of other buildings, most of them shabby, some fairly substantial, but many only false fronts with tents behind their façades. Some had identifying signs: rooming houses and restaurants, saloons, gambling houses, and a few stores. Some had no signs, but were easy to recognize; they were cribs for the whores who, like the gamblers, swarmed where men had money and few places to spend it.

  Jessie had seen similar shantytowns at other railheads, and remembered that the shanties moved with the rails. Many of them were even designed to be moved, built on sturdy timbers to which wagon wheels could be attached. This feature and the predatory character of their inhabitants had been combined in the name by which construction crews called them wherever railroads were being built: Hell on Wheels.

  At that hour in midafternoon, Hell on Wheels had not yet come to life, and the road was deserted on the side the shantytown occupied. The opposite side was as active as a disturbed anthill. Men hurried between the buildings, and crews of laborers loaded supplies on the big freight wagons—not only ties and steel rails, but spikes and fishplates, sacks of nuts and bolts and wrenches, mauls, shovels, sledgehammers, all the materials needed by the tracklaying crews up the line.

  Ki was sitting beside the window on the right-hand side of the coach, Jessie on the left side, and since there were no other passengers, Bobby was occupying the seat facing them so that he could slide from window to window and watch whatever interested him in the area through which they were passing.

  Ki’s interest had been caught by the activity in the supply yard. He saw a big flatbed wagon, piled high with a load of crossties, pull out of a loading area just ahead of the stagecoach and start for the road, and he noticed that it was being drawn by a team of horses instead of the more usual mules or oxen. He wondered why, then some other movement elsewhere in the yard caught his eye and he looked away from the wagon.

  His attention was drawn back to the horsedrawn freightwagon by the flickering whip the teamster on its seat was wielding. The loaded wagon was moving along one of the lanes that had been left between the heaps of supplies at right angles to the road, to give the freightwagons access and loading space. In spite of its heavy load, the wagon was gaining speed rapidly, and the distance between it and the road was not great.

  Ki wondered how the teamster was going to turn his horses into the road at such a speed, and instinct led him to gauge the distance between the team and the road. Experience told him instantly that unless the teamster reined in, the wagon and the stagecoach would reach the intersection at the same time.

  Ki watched as the gap narrowed, but the teamster still did not pull in. Instead, he whipped his horses to a faster pace. Ki realized then that he had no time to waste. The freighter was obviously intending to drive full-tilt into the stagecoach, and apparently the man handling the stagecoach reins had not noticed the danger looming ahead.

  “Jessie! Bobby!” Ki called. “Grab the catch-straps and hang on!”

  Without waiting to see whether they followed his order, Ki thrust his head and shoulders out of the stagecoach window
and got his feet on the seat. He levered his body up until he was half inside and half outside the vehicle, his arms stretching up its side while his hands groped for a hold on the baggage rack on the coach’s roof. He got a precarious grip on the rail and hauled himself up. The stagecoach driver turned in his seat, gaping at Ki’s sudden appearance.

  Ki had no time to explain to the driver. He was swaying back and forth, still on his knees, trying to keep his balance on top of the swaying, jouncing coach and at the same time get on his feet. The freightwagon was near the intersection now, only a dozen yards separating the lead horses from the stagecoach.

  Suddenly the freightwagon’s teamster hauled on the off-rein, causing his team to veer sharply to the right, out of the path of the stage. As soon as the team began turning, he released the reins and yanked sharply at a rope he’d been holding.

  Ki saw the linchpin that held the wagon tongue to the axle fly through the air at the rope’s end. The teamster jumped from his seat, rolling to lessen the jolt of his landing as he hit the ground. The driverless wagon kept moving swiftly ahead, a massive juggernaut now only a few feet away from the stagecoach and rolling at high speed with its heavy load of wooden ties.

  With only seconds to spare, Ki found his balance atop the stagecoach. Leaning forward, he stretched out one hand to grab the reins from the stagecoach driver while, with the other hand, he pulled the long tasseled whip from its socket and lashed the backs of the stage horses with quick, flailing strokes.

  Stung and surprised, the team responded to Ki’s frantic lashing with a mighty jump. The high-bodied coach swayed and tilted and almost overturned, but the team’s final frantic jump had pulled it clear. The freightwagon thundered past behind it, missing the stage by inches.

  Careening ahead, the wagon rolled across the road and, with a thunderous impact and a splintering of boards, crashed into the front of a saloon in Hell on Wheels.

  Ki did not turn his head to see the effects of the crash. He had dropped the whip and was sawing on the reins with both hands, trying to pull up the panicked team, which the noise of the crash had spooked even worse than had his whiplashing.