The Good the Bad and the Ugly

The second rock shattered. Maybe a bullet would cut the chain—if the impact didn’t tear his hand off. But Wallace’s holster was empty. The pistol had been jarred loose by their fall.

Tuco peered wildly along the embankment. He saw no glint of metal, no sign of the gun.

Dragging the heavy body, sobbing and panting, he inched his way along the course of their rolling tumble, searching in vain for the weapon. It could be anywhere among the rock fragments that formed the embankment —or it could be lost in the thick mesquite below. It might even have been buried by a landslide started by their own rolling bodies.

The full impact of his self-made predicament was beginning to hit him. In every direction he could only see the arid landscape without a tree or a sign of human habitation.

He fell on the unconscious man, shaking and slapping him.

“Wallace, wake up—wake up. You’ve slept long enough. Wake up and help me. I can’t drag you for miles, you big tub of rotten guts. Wake up and walk with me.” A new and more terrifying thought struck. “Wallace, you aren’t dying, are you? You wouldn’t die and leave me here like this. You can’t die when I need you.”

He collapsed across the limp figure, whimpering, tears rolling down his cheeks.

A dark speck appeared suddenly overhead, then another and another. Silently, patiently, the vultures were taking up their vigil in the brassy sky. Somehow they knew, as they always did, that it would soon be time for the feast.

CHAPTER 15

THE new locomotive was officially the BLW Number Nine, but after her trial run the engineer had enthusiastically rechristened her Mighty Maude. She merited the name.

Mighty Maude was not only the newest locomotive on rails but by far the largest, heaviest, fastest and most powerful. She also possessed the loudest whistle. When she flung her wailing hoot across the sere wasteland the engineer’s boast was that coyotes and jack rabbits ten miles away fled in blind panic. The fireman, whose task was to hurl heavy chunks of hardwood from the tender into the gaping maw of her firebox, had a different and somewhat biased reaction.

“That damn hooter uses up too much steam. Every time you toot that contraption the steam gauge drops ten points. I got to heave twice as much cordwood to bring her back up again.”

The engineer dismissed such carping criticism with comments directed at his fireman’s work habits and ancestry.

He would, however, gradingly admit that Mighty Maude did have one fault, albeit a minor one. This was in the design of her cab. When the man who drove her was properly seated at his controls the forward cab window was just a trifle too high. The engineer could are a great distance along the track ahead but nothing closer than five hundred feet in front of the great boiler.

On the straightaway this was no great handicap. But on a sharp or blind curve Maude might plough into anything. The obstacle would be a wagon in the act of crossing the track or—even worse for the train—a herd of wandering cattle whose heavy bodies had been responsible for many a disastrous wreck.

The engineer’s solution to this dilemma was to jerk his whistle cord vigorously and repeatedly at the approach to every curve. This inevitably led to a highly colourful and profane shouting match with the fireman. Since these exchanges had to be carried on over the pounding of the drivers and the thunder of the exausts, both men usually finished their runs too hoarse to communicate above a whisper.

The engineer peered ahead through the shimmering heat waves to where the track curved out of sight behind a great, wind-sculptured mass of red sandstone. He reached for the dangling cord and Mighty Maude’s hoarse scream racketed ahead.

On the far side of the sandstone butte, where the tracks emerged from the blind curve, Tuco lifted his head and listened. In a moment the sound came again, louder and nearer—the unmistakable hoot of a locomotives whistle. His eyes glittered with the light of one reborn.

He scrambled to his feet, took hold of Wallace’s belt and dragged the dead weight up the steep embankment with strength born of desperation. As he dropped the heavy body to the ties and rolled it between the rails the corporal stirred and moaned weakly.

“Don’t wake up now, Wallace,” Tuco panted. “It’s too late to do any good and what you would see would just make you unhappy. Be a good fellow and lie still.”

He flung himself face down at the outer side of the track, stretching the chain of the handcuffs taut across the rail. The hoot of the whistle was earsplitting and above it he could now hear the rumble of the speeding train. The rail beside him bummed and quivered.