Firewind, page 1
Bill Pronzini
Firewind
***
Firewind is a harrowing tale of bravery and honor in the face of deadly treachery. When three outlaws try to steal a cache of illegal guns and ammunition from lumber baron Austin Trace, they bungle the job, setting fire to the town instead. Most of the weapons and explosives, assembled by the fanatical Trace for his "army of vengeance", have been loaded into two sealed freight cars - cars that are part of the train that represents the only way out of the blazing valley. Led by rancher Matt Kincaid, the townspeople embark on a desperate race against time and the flames, pulled by a failing locomotive, and unaware of their deadly cargo.
***
From Publishers Weekly
Three outlaws arrive in the country town of Big Tree, Calif., on a blazing hot day of a long dry summer, in this well-crafted western by veteran Pronzini (The Last Days of Horse-Shy Halloran). A huge shipment of munitions is a-sittin' in Big Tree just a-waitin' to be stole-and they're a-goin' to do it. But the burglary gets bungled, an explosion sets the town on fire and there is only one way out of the parched valley for the townsfolk-by train. That way lies peril, however, for not only is the only locomotive in some disrepair, but the munitions are on board, and the fire is spreading fast-as fast as the train is racing. Pronzini, a pulp aficionado, adds to the race-against-time tension of his homespun stage with sideline subplots: a guilt-ridden love-triangle, an outlaw's hysterical memories of his father's death in a fire, a one-legged man's bitterness and misguided heroism-building to an acceptable, if rather bland, ending. While not attempting to transcend the genre, the author has added to it with his usual professionalism.
***
CHAPTER ONE
It was some past noon when they climbed the last long stretch of wagon road to the rim of Big Tree Valley.
The Espenshied freighter had developed a hot axle and screeched like a banshee all the way up the grade. The noise had set Clee Rudabaugh's teeth on edge. But there was no place along the narrow road for Morley Patch, the teamster he'd recruited in San Francisco, to pull off so he could grease the axle from the tar bucket. Now, along the rim where the road leveled off and widened out for a space before it began its descent, Patch halted the six-yoke ox team and the screeching along with it. The sweltering silence was like a balm on Rudabaugh's tortured eardrums.
Patch and Chavis both took out bandannas and wiped their sweating faces. Chavis said, "Christ, it's hot," and spat down among the oxen.
Rudabaugh had nothing to say. Talking to these two was a chore at the best of times, and he avoided conversation unless it was necessary. Patch was taciturn by nature, nervous at times, and slow to use his wits, but he could handle a freighter better than anybody Rudabaugh had ever seen - and that was vital on these narrow mountain roads. Besides which, he took orders without back talking. Chavis took orders, too, up to a point. He was a hulking, mean-spirited dullard, not much brighter than the oxen pulling the Espenshied. Rudabaugh had known him since before the war, when they'd both ridden with a band of freebooters posing as Regulators during the trouble between Free Soilers and pro-slavery factions on the Kansas-Missouri border. They'd looted villages and farms, riding by night to avoid the genuine peacekeepers, and got away with it fine until the army sent in extra troops.
Chavis began rolling one of his loose cigarettes, dribbling tobacco down the front of his hickory shirt. You'd think that a man who had lived more than forty years would have learned how to roll a tight smoke. Rudabaugh quit looking at him, watched Patch - heavyset, plodding, with whiskers so thick they grew down his neck under his collar - get down off the high seat and move out of sight to the rear of the wagon. Then he took the spyglass from under the seat and got down himself.
He stretched cramped muscles, went along the rutted hardpan of the road to where a cluster of rocks rose like a small watchtower. He climbed the rocks, taking his time about it. He didn't have to go all the way to the top before he commanded an unobstructed view of the valley spread out below.
Heat haze shimmered above it like a layer of smoke. Some of it was smoke, he saw then, coming from inside the big, fenced mill compound off north. Behind the sawmill, a big mushroom-shaped chip burner was sending up thick plumes that flattened and spread out when they hit the layer of haze, same as against something solid. If there'd been a breeze, you would be able to smell the wood smoke up here; but there was no breeze. It was hot, all right. This was northern California mountain country, but it was desert-hot just the same.
He fitted the spyglass to his right eye, adjusted the focus. He scanned the valley first, fixing it all in his mind. The mill was at the north end, where the only two roads intersected - tucked into the wedge formed by the roads as if it were the filling in a fat slice of pie. The company town, Big Tree, fanned out to the south, what there was of it. One-block main street, a couple of side streets, thirty or forty houses and cabins extending partway up the wooded hillside to the east. The feeder railroad spur angled in through a cut in the hills at the south end, passed through a yard section and over east of Main Street, and then through the wide front gates of the mill compound. In the yard section there was a roofed platform and a small work building, a water tower, and two short sidings. A small locomotive was on one of the sidings, drawn up beneath the water tower; on the other siding were a pair of boxcars and a couple of old passenger coaches that looked as if they would shake apart in a stiff wind. That was about all there was to see, other than trees and hills - some of the hill flanks logged bare except for stumps and tangles of slash and second-growth timber - and jutting mountain scarps in the distance.
Rudabaugh gave his attention to the mill. Big Tree Lumber Company. Austin Trace, Proprietor. He smiled thinly as he scanned the big sawmill, the storage sheds, the ricks of logs and sawn lumber, the conical mounds of sawdust and chips; the rail tracks and yard engine; the workers moving here and there at their jobs. On the near side of the hill above the compound was the house from where Austin Trace could look down on everything he owned. Especially on the big storage building not far away, where the munitions were supposed to be. All of it was enclosed by redwood fencing eight feet high, more as a barrier against prying eyes than to keep out intruders.
Everything seemed to tally with the map in Rudabaugh's pocket, and with what he'd been told by Untermeyer and Duggan. But after they found a place to make camp, he'd go down for a closer look. There were a few things he needed to find out before they went after the cache.
Rudabaugh sectioned the spyglass and climbed down off the rocks, again taking his time. Above the haze of heat and smoke, the sky was a cloudless blue. If it stayed that way, there'd be a moon tonight. In and out in less than eighteen hours - that would be the ideal way to do it.
In poor and out rich. The thought made Rudabaugh smile his thin smile. In poor and out rich - thirty thousand dollars rich. When Untermeyer paid off, it would be the most money he'd ever held at one time, by a damn sight.
Still smiling, he went back to the freighter, where Patch was greasing the hot axle and Chavis was pissing on the road next to the off-wheel ox.
***
When Matt Kincaid rode down the east slope into town, he spied Sam Honeycutt over in the rail yard. There was nobody else around and he felt the need of some conversation; he rode on down Main Street to where Honeycutt was sitting in the shade alongside the work building, doing something to a section of track switch. The cold nub of a short-six seegar protruded from under the old man's droopy, tobacco-stained mustache. At Kincaid's approach, he glanced up and a smile creased his wrinkled hound's face.
"Afternoon, Matt."
"Sam."
Kincaid dismounted, tied his horse, and sat down. Stretched his long legs out in front of him and took off his hat. His shaggy red hair was damp with sweat. He ran a hand through it, then took out his kerchief and mopped his face and neck. "Hot," he said.
"Ain't it. Fire weather."
"Now that'd be all we need."
"Drought, heat, dry timber - we been plenty lucky not to've had a fire around here." Honeycutt paused. "They ain't so lucky over to Pine Hill."
"Fire over that way?"
"Started yesterday. Word come over the wire this morning."
Despite his sixty-odd years, Honeycutt held down a number of duties in Big Tree.
One of them was telegrapher. He also saw to track and rail equipment repairs, served as a fill-in engineer on the Springwood run if the need arose. He had worked in railroading for forty years, mostly on the Union Pacific back in Kansas and Nebraska, until a dispute with a division super put him out of work. He'd come out here then, because he had kin in California, and got himself hired by Austin Trace.
Kincaid chewed at his underlip, thinking that Pine Hill was only thirty miles away to the northeast. He asked, "Out of control?"
"Yep. And likely to stay that way. Weather like this, any forest fire's too wild to tame."
"Any chance it'll spread this far?"
Honeycutt shook his head. "Not enough fuel. But it'll do a hell of a lot of damage before it burns itself out. Two thousand acres gone already, all prime timberland."
A silence built between them. Kincaid was no longer thinking about the fire danger; he had too many other things on his mind to add another worry. He sat half watching a sixteen-mule team come down the east road, hauling a freighter with a pair of back-actions coupled behind it; all three wagons swayed under loads of high-piled logs. Bells suspended above the bearskin housings of each mule's collar made clear, steady sounds in the overh
A woman came walking out of one of the side streets onto Main, a market basket over one arm. Kincaid sat forward to squint against the sun-glare. But the woman wasn't Rose Denbow.
He leaned back again. Hell of a way for a grown man to act, he chided himself for maybe the hundredth time. But knowing it and putting a stop to it were two different things. She was on his mind night and day now. He was in love with her, no denying that. And there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it, except to stay clear of her and wait for the flame to die down, if it ever would.
He was plenty of things, but a wife stealer wasn't one of them.
He shook himself, considered filling his pipe, decided it was too hot to smoke, and thought about moving on to the company store for the supplies he needed. Instead he sat slouched on the bench and asked Honeycutt, "You got that Baldwin ready for service yet?" Meaning the Baldwin locomotive on the siding behind them. Honeycutt had been tinkering with it for a year and a half now, six months longer than Kincaid had been in these mountains. It had been taken out of service at the mill because of an assortment of mechanical problems.
"Just about," the old man said. "Got her steam up two days ago, ran the gauge all the way up. She'll run. Question is, how far and how long?"
"How come she's still under the tower?"
"Figured I'd take her out tomorrow or the next day, downtrack a ways. See how she goes. If she don't give me any trouble, I'll take her all the way into Springwood. Have the chief mechanic and his crew take her into the roundhouse and give her a proper going-over."
"Then what?"
"Dunno yet. I'd like to keep her here, as a backup to that new Mallet at the mill. She'll probably end up in the Springwood yards, though." Honeycutt made a wry mouth. "Me, too, before I'm turned out to pasture."
"Doomsaying again, Sam?"
"Facts is facts," Honeycutt said. "Things at the mill worsen every day, seems like. Production's the lowest in ten years, and Trace just don't seem to give a damn. Talk is he's fixin' to lay off another eight to ten men."
"Why doesn't he sell out?"
"Don't ask me. He's had offers, I know that."
"He'll have to sell sooner or later, won't he?"
"You'd think so. Never know what a man like him will do, though. He just ain't been the same since his son got killed by the Nez Perce and his wife grieved herself to death. Warped him, losin' both of them three months apart. The mill ain't mattered to him since."
"Something must matter to him," Kincaid said. "He's been down to San Francisco three or four times lately."
"Beats me what it is. Thought maybe he'd been workin' out a deal to sell, but that don't seem to be it." Honeycutt took the seegar nub out of his mouth, scowled at it, and pitched it away into the dust. "If he don't sell, the mill's a goner - dead inside of two years, the way he's runnin' it now. And if the mill dies, this town dies with it. We'll all be lookin' for new jobs and new places to live."
"Me included," Kincaid said. "I can't sell my beef to bears and a scatter of Indians. My ranch won't be worth a plugged nickel."
"Still think I'm doomsayin' for nothing?"
"I never thought that, Sam. I just keep hoping you're wrong."
"No more than I do," Honeycutt said ruefully.
From where he sat, Kincaid could see past a couple of shade oaks to where the two sealed boxcars sat on the siding nearby, ahead of the passenger coaches that were kept here for emergencies and holiday runs to Springwood. He had noticed them when he rode in. He asked Honeycutt, "What's in the boxcars?"
"Machine parts, supposed to be."
"Supposed to be?"
"Two full-loaded boxcars is a hell of a lot of machine parts."
"They being shipped out?"
"Yep. Over to Springwood and then north somewheres. Ben Purdom brought 'em out on the Mallet yesterday. They're scheduled to go out on tomorrow's run."
"Why would Trace be sending two carloads of machine parts up north?"
"Just what I asked Ben," Honeycutt said. "He didn't know. Said Trace had the cars loaded last night from a storage shed that's always kept under lock and key. Nobody allowed inside. Parts come in piecemeal, he said, and he can't recollect any of 'em ever bein' used. Funny, ain't it?"
"Some. Reckon he's selling off equipment to raise capital?"
"Could be."
Kincaid shrugged. "Well, whatever's in those cars, I guess it's no particular business of ours."
"No," Honeycutt agreed. "I guess it ain't, at that."
***
Will Denbow sat on the edge of his bed, lips peeled in against his teeth, and began the ritual of strapping on his wooden leg.
It was made of hardwood, with a thick circlet of cotton batting inside the top, where it fitted over his stump, and a padded harness that fastened around the upper thigh. Denbow thought of it as a crutch, as something a man who had never leaned on anything or anybody was now forced to lean on for the rest of his life. It was a constant reminder that he was half a man, and he hated it. He hated it almost as much as he hated the smooth, round stump that ended above where the knee ought to be, all that was left of his right leg.
He didn't look at the stump as he strapped on the peg leg; he had quit looking at it not long after the accident six months before. That made the task of putting on the crutch difficult, but he didn't care about that. He kept his eyes on the open window across the bedroom, fumbling with the harness, getting it cinched into place awkwardly by feel. A faint breeze, thick with the smell of pine pitch and resin, came in through the window but did not stir the stagnant air in the room. Even at four o'clock in the afternoon, the summer heat lay like a heavy blanket over the valley.
Pustules of sweat dotted Denbow's face. He paused to draw an arm across his forehead, then finished buckling the harness and caught the wooden leg in both hands and jammed it hard into the stump; felt a sharp, satisfying cut of pain. Then, in clumsy movements, he pushed off the bed. Once he had his balance, he turned to the chair where his pants were.
Rose was standing in the bedroom doorway.
Denbow said irritably, "What the hell are you doing? You know I don't like you watching me put on the leg."
"I wasn't watching you. I've only been here a second "
"Well? What do you want?"
"Are you going out?"
"What do you think."
"I… wish you wouldn't."
"No? Why not?"
"I thought we might… well, you know."
"For God's sake. Is that all you think about?"
She winced. "Will, that's not fair."
"Isn't it?"
"You know it isn't. It has been more than two months…"
"Hell it has. You keep track of things like that?"
"Why do you make me beg this way?"
"It's too damned hot," he said.
"You never used to think it was too hot."
"I never used to think a lot of things. I never used to have one leg, neither." He limped to the chair and struggled into his pants.
From the doorway Rose watched him. Her eyes were a pale blue, like blue velvet. He avoided them, just as he avoided looking at the stump of his right leg.
She said tentatively, "Will…"
"No, damn it," he said. "How come all this sudden need for loving, anyhow? Before the accident you weren't after me about it all the time."
"Before the accident we never went two months without each other."
"What is it with you? You like doing it with a one-legged man? You enjoy this stump of mine sliding around on top of you?"
She put a hand to her cheek as if he'd slapped her. "My Lord, what a thing to say?"
"Well? Do you?"
"You're being cruel."
He felt cruel, as cruel as life had been to him. He sang a verse of a dance-hall song, as he sometimes did, because he knew she hated it:
