Cape Hell by Loren D. Estleman Page A

“Old Dan Tucker” on the piano, I might be rid of it; but it refuses to erase itself by becoming ludicrous.
    I thought about packing the Colt along when I left the coach, but like the Winchester it was a Mexican copy of an American original made with inferior parts and unreliable, so I left them there and balanced myself out with the Deane-Adams and Bulldog revolver. The shotgun was too unwieldy and might pitch me to my death, so I left it as well and stepped out onto the car’s verandah.
    A steel ladder bolted to the back of the tender led to the top, but it was open, filled as recently as our stop in Alamos, rounded over with uneven chunks of mossy-smelling wood, and offered shifting and treacherous footing aboard a moving train. I climbed halfway up, gripped the top with both hands, and made my way around the corner, scrabbling with my feet until they found tenuous purchase on a nearly nonexistent ledge.
    The Ghost was approaching forty miles an hour, but from where I stood it might have been going a hundred. Hatless, in my shirtsleeves, I clung to the tender, the hot wind buffeting my ears and snapping the ends of the bandanna around my neck. Given the choice I’d have turned around and gone back to the safety of the coach, but a train needs a fireman and the man assigned to that post was busy operating the locomotive.
    Inch by inch, my fingers growing numb from the desperate tightness of their grip, I crept forward. I glanced down once, when my boot slipped, and saw the land dropping off nearly vertical to the piles of rocks at a base that seemed a mile below; and these were only the foothills. The mountains themselves shot straight up on the other side of the car, their peaks piercing the clouds like the tines of a fork.
    I wasn’t so much afraid of losing my grip as I was of surrendering it. In a flash—as if the train had turned a corner square into the sun—burning Mexico became frozen Nebraska, five years ago. I’d been either collecting or dropping off a prisoner, in a city I’ve forgotten the name of, when the clanging of the bell belonging to the pump-wagon, the town’s pride and joy, brought my attention to the half-finished steeple of the Methodist church, where a carpenter clung to the remnants of a scaffold that had collapsed beneath him. The ladder just reached him, but as the volunteer stretched to take his hands, the carpenter let go, plummeting without a cry to the street below. He didn’t die immediately, but lingered on, succumbing to pneumonia on his third day on the cot in the doctor’s back room. My business was finished, but I stayed on to hear the end of the story. The Methodist pastor declared his passing the work of Satan during his services, but in his quarters later told me that Death was a siren, whose call was sometimes more strident than the will to live. At the thought, I felt the backs of my knees tingle with the thrill of instant release. That made me tighten my hold. I would not be ruled by my joints.
    I was nearly to the cab when we swung around a bend, the train seeming to lean out from the shelter of the hill forty-five degrees. My feet swung clear; I was like a shirt on a clothesline blown out straight by a gust of wind. An image flashed into my mind, a photograph I’d seen in a book, of a train lying full on its side, the hollow V-shaped underside of the cowcatcher exposed like the tender flesh under a man’s chin.
    I lost my grip, scrabbled wildly at the smooth side of the tender, but some infernal force had pulled the edge of the top beyond my reach; the car seemed to have increased in height. Groping in panic, I came to a rod of some kind mounted horizontally, and threw my other hand up beside the first just as the train entered a bend in the opposite direction. I didn’t know the rod’s purpose; probably not to encourage some reckless fool to suspend himself from it. For what seemed an hour I hung loose as a broken