She was looking at Bull. He looked at Jake, who looked away, in his mind a picture of Sliver dead among the rocks. Then with that readiness and steadiness that had always filled poor Sliver with envy he lied to a good end. “The last thing he tol’ me, Missy, was not to wait. ‘’Twould hinder me an’ hinder you-all. I’ll make my run alone.’”
“Very well.” Her sigh would have fitted an anxious mother who felt that her boy would be safer under her own eye. “Very well, but I do wish he were here.”
Again Bull glanced at Jake, who once more looked away; but neither spoke.
While riding slowly forward Bull laid out their plan. “It ’ull be up to you an’ Missy,” he told Gordon, “to take care of the engineer while Jake an’ me stan’ off the crowd. She kin hold a gun to his head while you pitch the stuff aboard.”
The sun had now set. The dusk thickened as they advanced and through its warm curtain presently broke the distant gleam of cooking-fires. Some were down on the tracks; others on the car-roofs built on rude hearths of earth within stone circles. When Bull called a halt and surveyed the scene through the glasses it presented the familiar spectacle of a revueltosos’ train-camp: women bending over the fires; some on their knees at the metates, others stirring their clay cooking-pots, all gossiping at their work. Here and there a man’s face showed in the fire glow; but always an arm in a sling, crutch, or bandage explained his presence there. Unsuspecting, believing that in those wide spaces the railway presented the one avenue of attack, they kept no watch; were stricken dumb when, half an hour thereafter, a stern command to hold up their hands issued from the darkness beyond the firelight. Only one man raised a gun, and as Bull’s rifle spat he threw up his hands and plunged headlong from the top of the car to the ground.
Squatted, at supper, with his women by a fire under the lee of the mogul, the Mexican engineer proved easy game. A poke in the side from Gordon’s gun emphasized his command to cut the engine off the train. Trembling, the fellow obeyed and stood mute, shaking with fear, with Lee’s gun pressed into the nape of his neck, while Gordon pitched their stuff into the cab. When, moreover, after firing a few warning shots along the length of the train, Jake and Bull climbed aboard he opened wide the throttle and sent the mogul spinning northward.
The instant they started Gordon grabbed the fireman’s shovel. “Here’s where I fulfil one of my kid ambitions.”
Looking back from the seat where she had climbed beside Bull to watch the tracks ahead, Lee saw his face focused in brilliant red light as he shoveled and raked the clinker off the bars. Jake, with his usual caution, sat with the engineer; from whom he prodded valuable information with the muzzle of his gun.
His strident repetitions thereof carried above the roar and rattle of the speeding engine across the cab. “He says the half of Valles’s army is scattered like pin feathers afore a north wind!... With what’s left he’s making a las’ stan’ north of Chihuahua!... He still bosses all the country from here to Juarez!... This outfit was out raiding haciendas to supply the new base!” The next item of news he delivered with a cheer. “Hooray! the line’s open clean to the border! He don’t know of any trains being run to-night! Thinks we’ll have a clear track!”
Just then lights and the ruddy glow of fires flashed out as the engine came spinning out of a cut through low hills. It was merely a section gang, and as they sped past they obtained a glimpse of curious brown faces.