Next, I raised up, to see what was going on in the cab. The train had picked up a little now, and if they ran this locomotive like Cap had run his, she was due for a little wood. But the fireman was just looking at the scenery and wasn’t doing anything about wood at all. It came to me, we generally had three times as many cars as this engine was hauling, and probably she didn’t need firing quite as quick. And there wasn’t a thing I could do, because before I could move, the drop gate had to be up, to screen me. The tender has tanks on the sides and at the back, but in the middle is a narrow place filled with wood stacked crosswise, and to keep it from sliding all over the cab there’s a drop gate, an iron plate that runs in grooves between the tanks and that raises with a bar. When you fire, you up with the gate, and I had to have it up, because unless it was, the tips of my fingers, where I’d be sliding along the outside of the tender, could be seen from the cab. And unless it was up, I couldn’t be sure the fireman would be stooped over, pitching chunks into his firebox.
I began to get nervous somebody would see me, from out in a field, and I changed my position, so I’d look like one of the train crew that just happened to be riding there, for some reason. I kept peeping, and then began to wonder what I’d do if we overshot the horses and still I couldn’t move.
Then all of a sudden I heard a squeak, and it was up. I hooked my fingers over the top of the tender, kept my head down, and slid out on the flange that runs around the bottom of the tender body, like a little catwalk. I had practiced it forty times, and I knew exactly how long it would take me to get to the handhold and the step at the front of the tender, just behind the cab. It would be six seconds. This time, though, it took a little longer. I kept worrying about people seeing me from the field, and stopped two or three times to look around, and that slowed me. So far as I could see, I wasn’t seen. It was open country, with nobody around.
When I got my foot on the step and caught the handhold, the fireman was still pitching wood. I had expected to throw down on him, from my coat pocket where I had shifted the gun so I could use it with my left hand, and wigwag him to jump without hollering at the engine driver, because if that hombre threw his reverse bar and shot his steam, I’d be out there in the middle, with a stalled locomotive and five hundred passengers swarming over me and nothing to look forward to but a necktie party that wouldn’t do Jeff Davis any good at all. But when I started to draw I changed my mind. Because when the fireman finished pitching and kicked shut his firebox door, he did what I’d done a thousand times. He stood there gawping at his gauge, hoping for a little rise. His back was to me and I reached for the back collar of his shirt. I grabbed, jerked, and pitched, and out he went on his head, and didn’t move, that I could see, after he hit the dirt. The engineer never noticed a thing, and we kept rolling along, him leaning out of his window, looking straight ahead. I stepped inside, threw down, and touched him on the shoulder. “Jump, pardner, jump.”
He rolled down the other bank, and at last I had my train. But before I could even reach for the throttle, which was still on the notch he had given it, or sound the three shorts on the whistle she was waiting for, there came this jerk that threw me up against the tender, the signal gong snapped once, and there went the cord, whistling over the tender and to hell and gone through the eyehole in the baggage car. That was the first thing I figured out wrong. I don’t know why, but I had been picturing it that if we cut the train back of the baggage car, that’s where the signal cord would part too, and we were ready for what we thought would happen on that basis, because first off we thought all attention, for a minute or two anyway, would be centered behind. But it never occurred to me the cord would break at its weakest point, which of course was the frazzled part next to the gong in the cab. So of course that meant eyes front. So of course that meant Caskie recognizing me where my bandanna slipped off, and opening up without waiting to hear any more.
But that was only the first thing that went wrong. On her end of it, at the wrecked Conestoga wagon she came out on the platform of the first passenger car like she was supposed to, to wait for my whistle signal that would tell her I was cutting the steam so the car would run up and make slack in the coupling, then step across to the baggage car platform, lift the pin, and throw her steel. Then she had things to do with the baggage man when he came running out, if he did. But, like I said, I couldn’t take care of my end of it as soon as I had figured on. And that left her standing there. And the baggage man, when he saw a pretty girl out there, came out and started to chin. So she was afraid to be short with him, and that put ideas in his head. He began inviting her in with the baggage, and by now she didn’t know what she was going to do about my signal, even if she got it. She had to do something, so she told him she’d come in with him if he’d go back in the car and get her valise, because if she’s in there with him she can’t watch it. So he went on back there. And that was when Mr. Fireman, that had lit on his head and been knocked out for a second, jumped up almost under her feet from where he was laying on the side of the track, and began yelling at the top of his lungs to the people in the passenger cars that train-robbers have stole the engine and they’re holding up the train. She didn’t wait then for any signal. She heaved her spike, and pretty near went head first off the baggage car when the first passenger car went up in the air, then banged down on the ties with a jerk that broke the coupling, then went slamming off to the ditch with the other three cars piling up behind it.
Then she made a mistake. If she had stayed outside where she was, maybe the mail clerk, what with the shooting, the cord, and all, would have figured the excitement was still up front. But she had it in her mind she was to get in with the baggage and lock the baggage man out if she could, and even if he was left behind in the wrecked passenger cars she still supposed that’s what she ought to do. But the mail clerk saw her through his peephole, and did something he wasn’t ever supposed to do. He came back there. “Young woman, what are you doing here?”
“They’re robbing the passengers back there! They’ve cut the train, and there’s a wreck. Can’t you hear the people screaming?”
“I asked you what you’re doing here.”
“I came to warn you.”