

IN THE YEAR OF MY REVOLUTION

By James Welsh

Copyright 2015 James Welsh

Smashwords Edition

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Oh le bon temps où étions si malheureux.

Alexandre Dumas

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce

Chapter 1

Burlington, Iowa

December 1892

"No, no, take it back, please. I said I wanted water, not coffee."

"But that is water."

The man swirled the drink in the sweaty glass, looking curiously at the hurricane of grit swirling dizzy in the cup. "This is water? Are you sure it's not coffee?"

The waitress shrugged. "Whatever's in there gives the water taste. Clear water can't do that."

The man, impressed that the waitress would shamelessly try to sell him muddy water, laughed. "Well, when you put it like that..."

"Hunter! Hunter! Are you in this game or not?"

Ian Hunter smiled. "The game is..."

"Waiting, Mr. Hunter, it's waiting," one of the men at the table rumbled.

There were six men seated at the table that was meant to hold only five. There was Louis, a man who lived in Iowa only because he was wanted in all of the other states. He covered up the bald spot on his head – the monk's crown – with a blood blister in the shape of a rifle butt. There was Barrett, who had a boulder for a head and who once held up an orphanage, because he wanted to be the first man in history to do so. There was Clive, who had sunken eyes like the graves he dug up for family heirlooms. There was Harper, with a grizzled face and hair as long and black as his clothes – he was just a priest. And then there was Elijah Cobb, a man who had the build of a champagne flute, and whose pale face clashed with his jet hair like cream splashing off black ceramic.

The men all looked each other in the eye, chasing after their own reflections in the cracked glass of the others' irises. The card players found themselves in a hall of mirrors, their fears stretched fat and tall.

Ian was seated across from Cobb at the round table, sitting in the midnight chair of their little clock. While the other poker players were reading each other, trying to become literate in their bluffs, Ian was as bored as a god must be. He had already met enough villains like them in his life, and he knew their looks were not so much hard as much as they were stale. Ian let them know just how bored he was by letting his fingers garden his thick, sycamore beard. He knew that a person's eyes instinctively followed hands like the footsteps of candles in the night, and he needed them distracted so that he could be free to look around the room.

The saloon they were sitting in was once the pride and shame of Burlington. Once upon a time, patrons would walk through that wide door with gold crown molding and find themselves in a world of women with dangerous legs, and not just because the ladies kept revolvers strapped to their shins with their garters. Liquor was the saloon's blood, and it bled to the edge of death every night yet still kept living. And with men found their fortunes in card games as if the dealers were gypsies, the saloon was the first place to look when a man went missing.

But the saloon partied too hard, and it aged faster than the whiskey it sold by the barrel. Now, the doorframe was peeling, revealing that the gold was nothing more than cheap paint. Other bars sprouted up around town and stole what the saloon thought were loyal customers. But while the establishment was husked of its shine, the owner still put a sizable deposit in the bank every Friday evening. The fact that the owner's brother was a pirate on the nearby Mississippi was just a coincidence.

One of the last veterans from the saloon's old days was perched on Barrett's leg like a bird on a gnarled branch. Ian remembered her name – it was Natalie – although Barrett didn't, even though Barrett had paid her to be in love with him for the next three hours. She wore a raven mask that was once the color of coal but had since withered grey. Some feathers still streaked from the mask, but the years had plucked many of the feathers. Her top was burgundy, presumably to cover up wine spills.

She was continuously crossing and uncrossing her legs, trying to find a better position on Barrett's rickety lap – through Natalie's frayed, black-cat skirt, Ian spotted garters but no stockings to go with them. He wondered what guns she had holstered in the garters. He imagined a single-shot derringer, one for each leg. She had the bored confidence that comes with having two bullets but only needing one. The drink she had before sitting down with Barrett made her hands shaky, but her trigger finger was probably as steady as ever.

Across the room, the bar counter jutted out of the wall like a broken finger, the countertop bowed so much that a glass of beer could have ran away if it wanted to. There was a bison head on the counter, the mount having fallen off the rotting wall a few days before. Patches of its mane had molted off, leaving behind leathery skin that crackled in the air. What sips of light could worm their way through the dirty windows lit up the bison's black eyes like coal on fire. Behind the counter was a large mirror that sat like a blister on the wall. On the mirror was a bullet hole surrounded by a halo of cracks. Ian noticed that the bullet hole lined up with the reflection of his face – not always the best sign.

Behind the counter was another of the saloon workers, a woman old enough to be looking back at her life rather than towards it. She had hair as black as the sea with white foam floating on top of it. She wore a cowboy hat cocked like a revolver's hammer, ready to strike, and a black dress that once felt comfortable but now stuck to her like oil. Her skirt shrank over the years since she started working there, and now her skirt showed off the cold milk of her thighs like the dawn getting out of bed.

Ian took all of this in within just a few seconds, because he knew that he would need an escape route soon. The only thing that worked in the room besides his brain was the clock, and there was only thirty minutes left until noon struck. He caught Elijah taking glances back at the clock too, his seat creaking as he did so. With every passing minute, the creaking grew and grew like fire in dry grass.

The other players were oblivious to this. The next round came: Barrett was dealing, and so Clive was the first to bet, putting down a dollar. Then came Ian, who looked down at his hand and couldn't make sense of the cards. Ian frowned for a few moments before turning to Louis and showing him his hand.

"Is this a good hand?" Ian asked.

"For the last time, stop showing me your cards!" Louis snapped, pushing Ian's hand away.

"Yeah," Clive laughed. "Stop showing him your cards and start showing me."

The betting continued clockwise around the table, because time is money, and it wasn't long until the first person folded. Barrett stared at his cards in one hand, while he ran his thumb over the fingers on the other, cracking the knuckles like peanut shells. Then he growled and threw the cards down on the table. He had nothing, not even a decent high card.

"Not a good hand, I guess?" Ian wondered out loud, peering over at the fallen hand. It was hard for the others to determine if he was joking or not. Harper folded soon after and so did Louis. Ian, Elijah, and Clive were the only men left standing. Neither Elijah nor Clive paid any attention to Ian, rightfully believing that the rookie had no idea what he was doing. Just then, silence fell across the room like an eclipse, the only sound a soft clicking like raindrops knocking on the window. Still Elijah kept looking up at the clock, as if he was trying to find the tell in the clock's face.

Finally, the reveal came. Clive spread his cards in a rainbow across the table – he had two sevens and two fours. Elijah shook his head as he put down a high card of an ace. Clive was about to collect his earnings, forgetting that Ian was still in the game, when Ian set down three kings.

"Does this beat your hand?" Ian asked innocently.

Clive growled something primordial and pushed the winnings over to Ian. As Ian counted through his windfall, he wondered out loud, "Say, shouldn't three kings be called _the wise men_ in poker? I feel like that should be a thing."

All he got was a table of stares. Ian shrugged. "Well then, never mind. And Clive?"

"Yeah?"

"You might want to get that stone off the bottom of your boot. You sound like a Morse code operator having a seizure."

Clive stared at him blankly and reached down to inspect the sole of his boot. Ian pretended to rub his nose to hide a little smile.

The next game of poker started. This time, the dance picked up some rhythm and Louis was steadily betting a solid amount each turn. The other players were leery, and so it wasn't long before they folded like notes. Only Ian kept up with the pace, calling each of Louis' bets and even raising him once or twice. A laugh jumped out of one of Barrett's mouth, a laugh so big, it caused Natalie to jiggle on his lap. The laughter was infectious, and the other players joined in.

"What's so funny?" Ian asked. He didn't like it when others were laughing and he wasn't in on the joke.

"You expecting to get lucky twice?" Barrett asked.

"I think I'm starting to get the hang of this," Ian said, feeling a little defensive.

"He's right, you know," Louis said to Ian. "You're just burning your money at this point, and it's not even keeping you warm."

And still Ian kept playing. When the time came, the two men put their cards down. Louis hesitantly revealed his hand: a pair of queens. The other players groaned as they realized that they had folded with much better cards. Ian sighed and offered up his cards. "I guess you got me. All I have is a high card of three..."

"Wait, what?" Barrett leaned over the table. "That means you have four of a kind in twos."

"Oh! I didn't even notice that," Ian yelped, grateful. "I guess that means I win again. Also, here..." Ian offered his handkerchief to Louis. "I noticed you were sweating quite a bit. That's not healthy, you know."

Louis refused the handkerchief. "Everybody sweats."

"Yes, but not in the middle of December."

As the next game started, Ian asked casually, "So, Mr. Cobb, are we keeping you from something?"

"What's that?"

"You've been looking at that clock as if it's showing you a bit of leg."

Elijah cleared his throat. "My train's leaving at noon. I have a business meeting in Cheyenne."

Ian looked surprised. "What are you still doing here then? I know we're great company, but don't miss your train on the account of us. I took a look at the train schedule when I walked by the station earlier. There won't be another train coming through for at least a few more days."

Elijah scoffed. "I'm right where I need to be." He then looked at Ian's scruffy look and his ragged coat – he couldn't see Ian's boots under the table, but he imagined them to be polished with mud. "What are you doing looking at a train schedule anyway? You look like you've never been on anything with wheels in your life, let alone a train."

"You shouldn't judge people, you know," Ian pointed out. He added with a little smile, "Unless you're me, of course."

"What are you, a gypsy or something?" Barrett asked. "You're going to tell me how I'm going to die by reading my palm?"

Ian shook his head. "I'm more fluent in the language of fingers. Like how your tell is that you run your fingers along your bald head like you're running them through hair. Speaking of which, you should probably invest in a hat. Not only would it improve your poker game, but I can't stand to look at that knobby head of yours. You have more hills on your skull than Rome..."

"Why you..." Barrett growled as he tried to reach for something in his pocket, but Natalie was still sitting on his lap and blocking his hand. He asked her in a voice that was casually dangerous, "Can you move so I can get my knife?"

"Aw, don't stab him – not yet anyways," Natalie said, her eyes laughing at Ian. "He's too much fun."

"Can we get back to the game, please?" Elijah asked, raising his voice like a fist.

Ian lightly smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. "I almost forgot that our good friend here has a train to catch for his business meeting. Speaking of which, I see you're packing light. You don't have any luggage with you. You don't have a coat – don't you know how cold it gets where we're going? And you've been betting big, but not like a businessman would. You're mocking me for looking poor, but I'm getting the impression that I'm the richer of us two."

"I'm not poor. Someone broke into my room last night and took my stuff."

"Poor, robbed – same difference," Ian said with a shrug. "But I suspected as much. Your eyes are bloodshot – meaning you haven't been getting your sleep – but you don't have bags under your eyes, so whatever caused the insomnia happened recently. And the fact that you're willing to miss your meeting over some silly game of poker means this game isn't a game to you – it is desperation. It must have been a fortune you lost. But how do you expect to win back a fortune with the spare change you have in your pockets? I'm no physicist, but I'm pretty certain you can't make something out of nothing. Unless, of course, you had some something else that was valuable, like, for example..."

"A first-class train ticket to Cheyenne?" Elijah offered, putting his ticket down on the table.

"Who in their right mind would play you for a ticket to Wyoming?" Louis demanded.

While looking Louis in the eye, Elijah pointed a finger at Ian from across the table. "He sounds interested."

"Oh, I am," Ian said, looking at the ticket. He couldn't help but feel a little hungry for it. "I've heard good things about first class – it's about time I experience it for myself, to see what I've been missing out on."

"Are you sure it's not because you have somewhere you have to be and the train that can get you there is booked solid? I should have known it was you."

This caught Ian off guard. "Who am I, then?"

"You're the man who robbed me. You ransacked my room last night, looking for this ticket, and now you're here to finish what you've started."

"I don't have to answer to you. You're not a marshal."

Elijah looked thoughtful. "You're right that I'm no marshal. But..." Elijah pulled a revolver out of his holster and aimed it at Ian's forehead. "I carry like a marshal."

The table went still, and for a moment, Ian thought he was caught up in the snare of a beautiful painting. The others looked ill, but Ian just smiled. "I wouldn't do that if I were you. You shoot me, and you lose the game."

"How could I possibly lose?"

"Let's play one round. If I win, I walk out of here with your ticket. If you win, I tell you where I hid your money and then you get to plant a bullet in my face. Just think about it – you can't possibly shoot me, turn the town upside-down to find your money, and get on your train before it leaves."

"You want to bet?" Elijah rumbled.

Just then, a train whistled somewhere. The floor under their feet vibrated and dust dripped down from the rafters above.

Ian's smile widened. "Yes, I'm willing to bet on that. Now, let's play."

With that said, Ian took out a wad of cash and put down twenty-five dollars, equal to the cost of the first-class ticket. Elijah noticed that the billfold Ian had looked suspiciously like his own.

With the money and the ticket sitting between them, the pot suddenly became the richest man at the table. None of the others could match the stakes, and so they sat out and watched the two men duel. Elijah tried to keep his revolver trained on Ian while shuffling the deck of cards with one hand, looking awkward doing so. As some cards were tossed Ian's way, he asked, "Do you want to know how I did it? How I robbed you?"

"No."

Either Ian wasn't paying attention or he couldn't resist, because he continued. "I've heard stories about you, so I figured you must be well-paid for making trouble. And you're a man always on the move, because if you stop, the law will finally catch up with you. You're no better than a shark that has to keep swimming or else it dies. So you must keep your money on your person, and what a fortune you must have made over the years. But what if the sheriff stopped you while you were walking around town, and he found a gold mine that could walk and talk? You couldn't risk it, so you hid your money in your room at the hotel, in a place where no one could have found it. I'll take two cards, please."

Ian traded his cards for fresh faces. He no longer had the look of a rookie – if anything, he looked downright dangerous at the game.

"When I broke into your room through the window – please be impressed, because your room was on the third floor – I must admit that I was fooled at first. You didn't keep your money under the mattress, you didn't keep it in the nightstand, and you certainly didn't keep it in your luggage. So where could it have possibly been? And that's when I saw it: an old copy of the magazine, _The Pioneer_."

"Never heard of it," Barrett grunted as Elijah traded a few of his cards, his hand shaky in more ways than one.

Ian said, "Of course not – few people have. But before the magazine died, it made one important contribution to literature, and that was it published Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," the heartwarming story of a murderer who confesses to his crime after hearing his victim's heart beating under the floorboards. Now, we both know that you're a lackey deep down in your soul, and that you probably haven't had a single original thought in your brain for years. As soon as I realized that, I could practically hear the money's heartbeat under a loose floorboard in the corner of the room."

"You wouldn't even know what to do with that kind of money," Elijah said, ready to flip over his cards and win his life back.

"I got exactly what I needed. I got you to show me where you've been hiding that train ticket of yours," Ian said, putting his cards down triumphantly. The others leaned over the table and examined the hands. Elijah had a straight, but Ian had a full house. "Let me correct myself," Ian said. "I meant to say where you've been hiding _my_ ticket."

Ian reached over and plucked the ticket from the table like it was a feather. "If you give me your address, I'll write and let you know how nice Cheyenne is..."

Ian's sentence was punctuated by the sound of Elijah unloading a round from his gun into the ceiling above them. There was a brief silence before Ian – who was unable to help it – said, "I don't mean to be obvious, but if you were aiming for me, you missed."

"Tell me where my stuff is!" Elijah screamed, finally losing his temper, when he should have lost it so long before.

"Since you asked so nicely, I threw your satchel into the river. I don't know a thing about fashion, but trust me when I said I did you a favor. As for your money, it's about to walk out of here, get on a horse, and chase after the train that'll be pulling out of the station any minute. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have all of your money."

"So what's stopping me from killing you now?" Elijah snarled.

"I guess you can say I have Jesus on my side."

Elijah pushed down on the broken bone of the trigger and the gun screamed. The shot pounced across the table and buried itself in Ian's chest. The other poker players yelped and stood up, one or two of them drawing their own revolvers. But Elijah was ready for them, and he scanned the group with his gun. "Don't anyone move! I'll make you regret it!" He screamed.

Ian, meanwhile, was slumped over the table. He was so still, he might as well have been asleep. But if he was asleep, that meant he had to wake up – and he did. Elijah and the others watched, shocked, as Ian slowly sat upright in his chair, massaging his tender chest, wincing. "Didn't you think it was odd that everything in your room was stolen except for that revolver you kept in the nightstand? I ripped pieces of paper out of a Bible, took the bullets out of the cartridges, and replaced them with verses. I think you just shot me with a page out of Corinthians. I told you Jesus was on my side."

His eyes wide, Elijah flipped the cylinder of the revolver open, to empty the blanks and to fill it with the real bullets that jangled in his pocket like coins. But, as he attempted to do so, he heard a hammer being cocked on a revolver that wasn't his. He turned and saw the priest Harper aiming at him.

"Point a gun at me?" Harper asked icily.

The next few seconds were filled with the bells of shots, and passersby in the street were startled by the gunfight going on in the broken saloon, and they were even more taken aback when the saloon's front door exploded open and Ian stumbled out of the clouds of gun smoke. Ian sprinted across the front porch, his feet pounding against the tight drum of the wooden planks, towards the hitching post. His calfskin satchel that was too rich for him was thumping at his side. The riot of noise from inside the saloon lit a fire under the herd of horses strapped to the post. The horses neighed and became nervous but one horse as white and quick as winter's wind understood. It turned and offered its saddle like a sacrifice as Ian jumped off the porch, skipped off the railing, and landed on his means of escape. He unshackled the horse from the post and bunched the reins up in his hands. Never one to kick with the heel, Ian instead leaned forward and hissed a word in the horse's ear. It was a secret trick that he picked up from his uncle.

Immediately, the horse reared before taking off like light from a candle. The horse took shattering strides: for every leap, Ian saw nothing but clouds that looked like the surf breaking over a reef, and for every fall, Ian saw the earth rise up to challenge him. It took every inch of Ian's lean muscle to hold on to the earthquake beneath him. People slid past like paint dripping down a portrait. For a moment, he thought he heard the horse unleash an unearthly neigh, but the he realized it was the train's whistle – the train would be pulling out of the station any moment, without him.

At the same time, Elijah had emerged from the saloon, wearing blood on his face like war paint. He was in such a daze, he wasn't sure if the blood was his or someone else's. Spitting iron, Elijah stumbled down the street, trying to find his runaway ticket. As he staggered around the corner of a general store, he found it. The train station sat just down the street, and Elijah saw people pouring out of the building like a spring from a leaky bucket. Elijah could hear some women screaming from inside of the station, and suddenly he knew to follow the screams. He rushed up to the entrance, forcing his way through the churning crowd. And at first, Elijah missed it, because it was camouflaged in the crowd's shouts. But then he heard the familiar cry of the train whistle, and he suddenly realized that his train was leaving without him.

Elijah made his way to the door, roughly shoving aside a man leaning against the doorframe, and he plunged himself into the outside. He found himself at the end of the long platform, the wooden planks dyed a chocolate brown by the morning rain. To his horror, Elijah watched as his train pulled out of the station, the locomotive straining against its harness. And, racing alongside the train, was Ian pushing his horse through the clouds of steam. The horse flew like Pegasus, its hooves clicking against the loose stones alongside the track.

As Ian pulled the nervous horse closer to the train, he took a second to glance back at the train station, already shrinking away into nothing. He could see the angry speck that was Elijah standing on the train tracks. Ian couldn't see it quite clear, but he imagined that Elijah had his hands pressed to the sides of his head to keep a headache from exploding.

Ian took a deep breath and leapt from the horse to the platform of one of the coach cars before he could talk himself out of it. Ian landed on the platform, so surprised that he made it that he almost fell off. But Ian found his sea legs and grabbed ahold of the railing. Leaning out as far as he could, he blew a kiss, making sure to be exaggerated so that Elijah could see it.

"Tell the children I'll write often!"

Chapter 2

"Hey, George!" The young man in the dinner suit called out.

Although the porter's name was Laurence and not George, he still turned at the sound of the name. A young, black man with a neat mustache and trimmed hair, Laurence had to fight down a groan that rose in his throat like vomit. He had only been on the job for two months, and already he was tired of being called everything but his own name. The other porters – who were black as well – told him that he would get used to it just like they did, but Laurence couldn't see why he should.

"Yes, Mr. Coburn?" The porter asked, getting the man's name right.

"I want you to come over here and smell this awful smell," Martin Coburn demanded.

"I'd rather just take your word for it, sir."

"It smells like mold," Martin continued. "I've never smelled mold before, but I imagine that this is what it smells like."

Laurence sighed, making sure that Martin did not see him sighing. He walked through the tight corridor of the first-class sleeping car, excusing himself as he squeezed past another couple. He poked his head into the Coburns' sleeping compartment and took a whiff. He looked back at Martin and said, "I'm sorry, sir, but I'm afraid your nose just has an imagination."

Laurence wasn't going to admit it, but it did smell like death in the compartment. While Martin had never smelled mold before, Laurence had plenty of times, and it took all he had not to gag. A recent torrential downpour had hit the Kansas City area, causing the Missouri River to become engorged and spill over onto the shores. The rail yard had been caught up in the floods, and this car was among those that had drowned. The workers thought they had wrung out all of the train cars, but it appears that they missed one. But Laurence wasn't going to admit this, especially not to paying customers.

Martin sputtered, not sure how to respond. Standing next to the young man was a woman with goldfinch hair and sky-blue eyes, her looks richer than the outdated dress that she wore. She was day to her husband's night, with his brown eyes and even darker hair. And where her love stumbled for his words, she didn't so much speak as she stabbed with her words. "Don't go through the trouble of lying to us. You're going to find us other sleeping arrangements, or my husband will have the papers back home drag your company through the mud."

"Please, Selina..." Martin begged.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," Laurence said, throwing his hands up in surrender. "The rest of the first class is entirely booked. As a matter of fact, the entire train is booked. The only option I can give you is to squeeze in with the third-class passengers. I'm sure they'll make some space for you on the benches."

"That's an awful idea!" Selina snapped.

"It'd be an adventure," Laurence said, gently rephrasing what she said.

"A rose by any other name," she scoffed. "You're either making room for us here, or we're getting off the train."

Laurence could barely contain his smile as he gestured towards the window, the scenery flashing by. "Well, just make sure your dress doesn't get caught up in the wheels when you jump."

"Why you insolent...!" Selina began, spit crackling from her lips like lightning.

"Excuse me," a voice called out, building a wall between the woman and the porter. The Coburns and Laurence turned to see the diplomat. She was leaning against the doorway into her sleeping compartment. Her white blouse was wrinkled like clumps of sugar, and she cocooned herself with a thick overcoat the color of a dark forest. She wore a wide skirt that looked but didn't ring like a bell. Her eyes were nuggets of emerald and her chocolate hair waltzed in the wind that wasn't really there. She looked sharp but her words were soft like a dull knife.

"My compartment is far too roomy for one person," she continued. "You two are more than welcome to make it more uncomfortable for the time being."

The Coburns hesitated, unsure of what to do. Selina was the first to speak. "We accept," she said, brushing past the porter and stepping foot into the stranger's compartment. Martin followed close behind, as if pulled by the gravity of his wife, his world. The compartment was indeed too roomy for one person, with a generous aisle separating a plush couch from a bed that you could vanish into like quicksand. In the corner, pushed against the window, was a little writing desk.

"We'll stay, but only for a little bit," Martin said, looking down at his pocket watch.

"Nonsense!" The lady said gallantly. "Come – sit."

As the Coburns planted themselves, trying to look as dignified as possible, the stranger sat down hard on the bed's edge. Her feet dangling just an inch off the floor, her hands drilled into the mattress around her, the stranger said, "So, your first time riding first-class?"

"No," Martin said quickly.

The stranger cocked an eyebrow. "Are you sure? Because usually, first-class travelers know that money can open up doors for them, especially doors to empty sleeping compartments. That black man out there is paid next to nothing in wages, and he survives on tips alone. Every first-class traveler knows that, although none of them will admit to it."

"You admit to it, though," Selina pointed out.

The stranger smiled. "Ah, but I'm not first-class, not in the slightest. I didn't pay for the room – my employer did. If it was up to me, I would have sat in the back with the poor folk and spent the difference on whiskey when we reached Cheyenne. If you want, you two can take the bed in here tonight. I'm far more comfortable sleeping on a bench, to be honest."

Both of the Coburns were taken aback by the rough edges on what they thought was a polished lady. The stranger noticed this and grinned. "You look surprised, as if you thought my head would be mounted on the wall of a hunter's cabin. I've been told that a woman like me is a rare catch: someone who's comfortable in any clothing, whether it's a socialite's or a working-girl's."

"Well, anyway, thank you for your charity in letting us stay here," Martin said, trying to change the subject. "It's very Christian of you."

The lady laughed. "I don't follow Jesus – I follow a good story. And that's what I saw when I saw you."

This caught Martin off-guard, because no one had ever called him interesting before. The woman continued, "Not only are you unfamiliar with first-class etiquette, but you also have a crooked bow tie on, which means that someone – possibly a parent, given your age, but more likely a servant given your status – has been dressing you your whole life until very recently. With that in mind, your dress shoes are unpolished too. You're learning how to be your own man, but you're still learning. This, and your newlywed wife, tells me that you ran away from home or that you got kicked out."

Martin blushed hard, and Selina asked, "How did you know we're newlyweds?"

The woman shrugged. "It's simple – you two are too happy to be anything else."

Martin finally found his words. "How did you know so much about me?"

"I know just enough to ask questions. It's why I'm a reporter."

Martin breathed in sharply. It suddenly dawned on him who they were talking with. From his short stint working at his father's newspaper, he knew of only one female reporter. "You're Nellie Bly," he said.

"You make it sound like an accusation," Nellie said with an easy laugh. "But yes, I'm guilty of being Nellie Bly." She didn't have to say what it was she did. Her name alone was famous after she went undercover as a patient at an insane asylum and exposed the horrors there. Nellie then went from being undercover to being overseas. After reading Jules Verne's _Around the World in Eighty Days_ , she decided to bring the book to life. And while it took the characters in Verne's book eighty days, it only took Nellie seventy-two. She made her newspaper columns come alive like pop-up books, and her readers loved her for it.

All of this acted out like a shadow play against the candle in Martin's mind, and it terrified him. Nellie watched, fascinated, as Martin's face turned different shades of white. She turned to Selina and said, "I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark. What's his father's name?"

"Ernest Coburn," Selina said. She then added, "He's the editor of _The News_."

"Selina..." Martin begged.

"Oh! I know that paper well enough," Nellie chirped. "It's what I read when I want to know what's wrong with Baltimore." She looked in Martin's direction. "You're afraid there's no honor among thieves, and that my next article will be about a rival editor's son running away with the new bride. If you're worried about that, then you've never read one of my articles before. I'm interested in the bigger picture, one so large that you can only see it in pieces, pieces like the ones I write. My editor sent me out here to write about the poor immigrant masses living in San Francisco."

"This train isn't going to San Francisco, though," Selina said, confused.

"Of course not – I was in Kansas City waiting for my ride out to California when I heard the good news. You do know who's on board with us at this very moment...don't you?"

Selina looked genuinely baffled while Martin gave a nervous cough. Smiling, Nellie continued, "We have the charming Sheldon McKenna onboard with us."

Selina gasped. "The murderer?" She asked.

"Not so much a murderer as he is the plague itself. Rumor has it that he's killed hundreds, but you know how rumors are," Nellie said conversationally.

"What in the world is he doing on this train?"

"The marshals have been chasing him halfway across the country after what happened in Wyoming. They found him in Kansas City, where he was in jail for the disappearance of a prostitute. Normally, the police wouldn't care what happens to those poor girls, but this particular girl was the daughter of a state legislator. Anyway, he was waiting trial when a marshal spotted his name on a dispatch and told Kansas City the catch they just netted. So the marshals are taking him back to Wyoming, where he'll answer for what he did there. When I heard about that, I just couldn't resist tagging along."

"But to have a murderer onboard..." Selina said, looking sick.

"Relax – I saw him getting loaded onto the train at Kansas City. He's wearing shackles like Cleopatra wore jewelry, he has a regiment of marshals escorting him, and they have him all locked up in one of the refrigerated cars. As long as he's chained, he's nothing more than a slab of meat that used to be a bull. But he's more than that. Just think of the potential."

"The potential for what?"

"Well, when he gets to Cheyenne, the trial of the century is going to be waiting for him. Do you remember what happened back in April? About the fight between the ranchers out in Wyoming?"

"I can't say I've ever heard of it," Martin admitted.

"Well first, if you thought you were leaving behind the evils back East when you took the train out west, you were mistaken. Out in Wyoming, you have the Wyoming Stock Growers Association – the WSGA – which is made up of all of the rich and powerful ranchers. And since Wyoming is cattle country, they essentially own their state. The federal government just leases the state from them, really, by buying their steaks. But not all of the state bleeds the WSGA – there are small ranchers out there, folks with a few heads of cattle. For the past few years, the big ranchers have been trying to take over the small ranchers, because apparently the WSGA doesn't have enough of a monopoly. But how do you justify taking over another rancher's land? That's not a rhetorical question, by the way."

The Coburns were silent, and Nellie shook her head. "If you want to live out West, you have to start thinking like they do. The big ranchers claimed the little ones were rustling their cattle, and that's a capital offense out here. You could burn down an orphanage and get a lighter sentence than you would for stealing a single cow. Oftentimes, the ranchers don't even wait for the sheriff – if you ever see a man hanging from a tree out here, it means he rustled from the wrong rancher, one with plenty of friends and even more rope.

"Now, whether or not the little ranchers were actually rustling cattle from the WSGA is an argument for another day. Some think they did, while others aren't as sure. Regardless, the WSGA used that as an excuse to take some of the small-time ranches out of commission and invade their land. A group of ranchers got wise to the act and formed the Northern Wyoming Farmers and Stock Growers' Association, the NWFSGA for short although an acronym like that doesn't seem much shorter. Anyway, they hoped that by banding together, they could compete with the WSGA. But where others see competition, the WSGA saw conspiracy.

"So this past spring, they hired dozens of the vilest gunmen out in these parts, promising them a tremendous bounty for every rustler they killed. As the gunmen went on a rampage through the countryside, killing any poor rancher they found, the sheriff raised an army of townspeople numbering in the hundreds. The two sides met at a ranch, the hired gunmen manning the garrison while the sheriff's army laid siege to the castle. The sheriff probably would have slaughtered them if President Harrison hadn't ordered a regiment of cavalry to the battlefield to stop the fighting. The cavalry arrested the gunmen hired by the WSGA, but they inexplicably let them go on bail and every one of them fled the state. And of course the government forgot to file charges against the WSGA. Apparently their idea of cleaning up is to sweep everything under the rug."

"And Mr. McKenna?" Selina asked.

"The WSGA had hoped that people would forget what had happened out here, and the people did, because while a person can be smart, the people are always stupid. No more than a few weeks after the crisis, the papers stopped reporting on it because nobody wanted to listen, and you always give the audience what they want. But what do you think is going to happen now? Every journalist hopes for a circus in the courtroom, and McKenna is going to be my clown. I mean, when he used to work in the rail yard, he would skin his victims and package their flesh with the slaughtered cows being shipped to Chicago."

"You actually think that people will want to read about the trial just because they want to hear about a monster of a man? What a grotesque notion."

"Every good story has a villain. You wouldn't have the Bible without Satan, if you think hard enough about it. McKenna is going to draw in my readers, but they're going to find themselves wanting to hear more about the puppeteers that moved him and his fellow gunmen-for-hire during that war for Wyoming's soul. The only way any good can come of this is if I get the public riled enough back home to force Congress into looking at the WSGA's monopoly. If I can be the cause of that, I'll die as happy as I lived."

"You know," Martin said thoughtfully, "with all of this talk of conspiracy and murder and fights between the classes, it sounds like you're talking more about back East than anything else."

Nellie wanted to ask Martin what he could possibly know of conspiracy and murder and fights between the classes, even being the son of a newspaper man, but she held her tongue. Instead, she said, "East, West – they're just directions on the compass, nothing more. Don't believe everything you read about the West. It's just as depressing as things are back home, but in a fresh and exciting way. You look disappointed to hear that, Mr. Coburn."

"Oh, I am. Selina and I were hoping for a new start out here, a life where we can be equals instead of master and servant as we were back home. And by the sounds of it, our past is following us wherever we go."

"It's much more than that, Mr. Coburn. Your past will be waiting for you at the train station in Cheyenne with open arms," Nellie said, giving a little laugh. She had to laugh because the Coburns certainly weren't. "I once had a failed teacher – which is a shame, because he was good, really good – explain it to me like this. We – and when I say that, I mean everyone – we're all a flu, and a contagious one at that. Ever since the Greeks put ideas to papyrus, we've been dreaming of the West. It's why the Romans invaded England, why the Huns conquered Europe, why the Spaniards colonized South America, and why the prospectors chased after rumors of gold in California. And why do we always look west? Because we sicken everything we touch. Look at the cities we've left behind: they're all choking on fumes, being robbed by bandits, dying from the gangrene of a thousand sins. You and your wife are out here because you heard that the West is a dream you can see when you're awake. But the West you've heard so much about is always one mile west of where you're standing. You can chase it all you want, but you're never going to find it."

"You're a reporter," Selina said, smiling humorlessly. "It's your calling to report the bad news – of course that's all you see."

"A few years ago, one of my colleagues reported a story that came out of Kansas. Two families were arguing over a creek that divided their property, both wanting the water for their cattle. One thing led to another, and before you knew it, there was a gunfight that killed or wounded every man from both families. In a place as huge as the West is, the fact that men are killing each other over a creek is a sign that the East has truly invaded. Thoughts?"

Martin pretended to look down at his watch, when in reality he had nothing to offer. He was beginning to wonder if it would be less depressing to sit with the poor in coach. Lucky for him, his wife rescued him by saying, "I think...that we're hungry. If you'd excuse us, I think we're going to put the dining car to use."

Nellie motioned towards the door. "Well, by all means. I was told by the porter that the pheasant's pleasant, although I've always been a soup person myself."

Nellie watched with wry eyes as the Coburns hurried themselves from the room. They were acting out the two reflexes every soul had in the face of trouble – they were running away and eating. Perhaps they weren't supposed to learn about such things while enjoying their honeymoon on the run. But the Coburns had to learn the truth about the world rushing past the train window, and if someone had to tell them, it was best that it was a reporter. This is in spite of the fact they were probably not old enough to be ready for the bad news.

"But really, who is old enough?" Nellie asked the empty room.

The day she realized that she was a problem in search of an answer was the same day that Nellie became a reporter. She realized that most people saw everyone but themselves as fools at best and madmen at worst. It was her duty as a writer to strip the scales from their eyes. It was only when people could accept the evil in themselves that they could find the good. It was a long journey from that moment of discovery to how tall she stood now. It was only a few days prior, when she was standing on the train platform in Kansas City, trading in her ticket to San Francisco for one to Cheyenne, when she got some unexpected news. As Nellie stepped away from the counter, a man standing in line behind her introduced himself. Mr. Olivier said that he had overheard her name and guessed that he was talking to the famous Nellie Bly – she loved the way he said the word _famous_. The man said that he was from the Pittsburgh area as well, and that he read her work whenever he had the chance. It wasn't until that moment that she realized she was no longer living in the shadows but she was throwing her shadow across the world instead.

She smiled to herself and picked up the copy of Shakespeare's _Macbeth_ and returned back to her reading, her feet propped up on the luggage the Coburns had left behind.

Chapter 3

"And what will we be having today, gentlemen?"

Clark Rowe scratched underneath his beard, and the waiter couldn't tell if he was being thoughtful or just had an itch. Clark abruptly said, "I'll take the steak, rare. What year Merlot do you have?" Before the waiter had the chance to respond, Clark waved his hand. "Never mind the year – any would do."

"Very well, sir," the waiter said, relieved that Clark didn't care for a particular year, because they only had an 1872 available. He then turned to the little man with a goatee and glasses across the table. "And you..."

"How fresh is the salmon?" Davis asked, not bothering to look up from his menu. "Still kicking, I hope?"

The waiter was not sure how to respond. "It was at one point, sir."

"I'll take that with a nice Riesling."

The waiter's eye twitched. "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid we don't have any Riesling onboard. Instead, may I interest you in a fine Pinot gris?"

Davis sighed. "As long as the grape isn't from Alsace."

"Certainly, sir. And will anyone else be joining you for the meal?"

"No," Rowe said with a laugh. "The wives somehow found something more interesting onboard a train than eating and staring out the windows."

As the waiter hurried off, Rowe turned to Davis. "You know," the old man said gruffly, "anytime you're out in public, you should be ordering steak. Anything else is just bad advertising." Rowe waved a hand at the full dining car around them and said in a lower, but not softer, voice, "Ezra, just think what they're thinking: a rancher who doesn't eat his own produce."

Davis shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Apparently you kept your eyes closed when we toured that vile slaughterhouse back in Kansas City."

Incredulous, Clark demanded, "Don't you dare tell me you got faint at the sight of the carcasses. Humor me and ask yourself why the hell did you buy a ranch if you're afraid of what you raise?"

"I let others ask that question so I don't have to," Davis said defensively, a trace of his Highlands accent rising in his voice like the red in his cheeks. He took a moment to pull a crystal flask from his pocket and take a swig from it. "Tell me, Mr. Rowe, when was the last time you did something you didn't want to do?"

Clark laughed as he propped up his arm on the table, the back of his hand facing Davis. As the golden shackle glimmered on his ring finger, Clark asked, "Is this too obvious of an answer?"

"I'm being serious," Davis said, trying not to pout.

"Well, so am I."

"When you get back home to Cheyenne, what's the first thing you think of when you see your ranch?"

"Mice playing in the fields."

"Mice playing in the fields," Davis repeated.

"When my father had built the porch years ago, he squeezed the boards too close together. They squeak, and when the children run on them, it sounds like mice."

"And there you have it. The ranch is your past – it's all you've ever known. My ranch is my future, my investment, the rock on which I will build my church."

"And what a rocky place it is," Clark said with a short laugh. "You couldn't have picked a worse place to build."

Davis ignored the quip and persisted. "Don't forget your father was the one who built that ranch, who gave you that ranch."

"And he never failed to remind me of that," Clark added.

"I found my ranch only after my father had exiled me from my home. What your father giveth, my father taketh."

"But really, whose fault is that?"

Davis showed a little bit of teeth, and he tried to pass it off as a smile. He asked suddenly, "Do you want to play a game of chess?"

Clark wasn't expecting the question. "Chess? How in the world are we going to play chess?"

Davis tossed up his hands. "I don't have the world at my feet – yet – but we do have the game at our feet." He pointed at the black and white tiles that ran the entire length of the dining car. "I'll be white, if that's okay with you."

Clark looked at Davis for a long moment before shaking his head, a sigh falling off his lips. "I guess it'll be something to do while we wait for our food." He pulled a piece of scrap paper and a pencil from his pocket and smooth out the paper on the table. As he did so, he looked at Davis curiously. "You aren't going to use any paper?"

Davis tapped his head. "No need – I can remember the pieces just fine. Like I said, I have the game at my feet."

Clark wasn't ready to believe this. "If you can keep all of that straight, then I'm the King of England." That last part was usually just a harmless saying, but Clark knew that it meant more to Davis than that. After all, at one point, Davis was an heir to the throne – 23rd in line, to be more specific. Clark enjoyed the flinch in the Scotsman's eye.

Their pieces obviously already set, Davis made the first move, pushing his imaginary king pawn forward two spaces. The pawn rested at the feet of a man sitting at a table nearby, the piece curled at his feet like a dog. Davis announced, his hands folded in front of his face as if in prayer, "King pawn to e4."

"How original – I think that's the first time that move's ever been made in chess," Clark said sarcastically, making the annotation on the chessboard he had written down on his scrap paper. He then said, "King pawn to e5."

Davis' next move was unleashing his bishop pawn, which Clark's cannibal king pawn immediately ate. The gambit accepted, Davis took the sacrifice in stride and immediately began pouring his troops through the hole in the ranks. Davis posted his bishop on c4, whereas Clark brought out his queen.

As they played, Clark said, "I guess you could say your ranch has had a rocky start in more ways than one. You couldn't have picked a worse time. Our little safari with the rustlers some months back cost us a lot."

"How much are we talking here?" Davis asked, looking down at the checkered floor, thinking of his next move. "Because the other members look at me like I'm crazy when I ask about the finances, as if the ledgers don't exist."

"Well, that's because they don't exist," Clark said, before adding, "at least not on paper. If it did, then the investors will know how broke we are."

"How broke?" Davis repeated. "I can't speak from experience, but I don't' think there are degrees of poverty."

"That's what you took from what I just said?" Clark asked. "Don't you understand? When we took the fight to the rustlers, it milked us of every dollar we had. And what were the spoils of war? A head of cattle at an all-time low, and even then we can't get a damn buyer. We couldn't even get the railroads back in Kansas City to agree to a partnership with us, transporting the cattle at a discount in exchange for a voice in the association. A few years ago, people would kill to have a say at our meetings. Now look at us. And the Knickerbocker Trust was able to secure us a loan, but only by using our ranches as collateral. The moment we default on that loan, we lose everything."

"And why wasn't I made aware of this loan?"

"Well, you would have had to have actual collateral in order to play the game. You have the ranch, but you don't have the cattle."

"I told you – I'll have the cattle in the spring..."

"Which makes me wonder," Clark interrupted, "how in the world you became a member of a rancher's association when you don't even have any cattle. What do you even know about cattle besides the price for a steak?"

"My knight to f5," Davis said. "And it's not what you know..."

"It's who you know?" Clark said, finishing his sentence. "Who do you know?"

Davis looked sour for a second. He took another drink from his flask as he spoke. "Don't interrupt me. Just because I was torn out of my father's will doesn't mean I can't be useful. I'm so much more than my father. I have connections in royal houses across Europe, each of them sitting on a throne of money. And I am the sum of their parts. I am the string that moves their hand that writes the check. You're wondering why I'm not worried about this little money trouble – truth be told, I've never felt more comfortable. I'm exactly where I want to be. Are you going to move?"

"I'm moving my pawn to c6," Clark said quietly, taking in what he had just heard. "You may be able to win over some of the members with the promise of money..."

"I already have."

"But the association is just that – an association. We're all equal partners in this, and I'll be damned if we become slaves to your money."

"Pawn to h5," Davis said. "There's going to come a time when the storm clouds roll in, and my ranch will be the only one with its doors opened."

"Moving my queen back to f6..."

"You mean you're retreating," Davis said with a little smile. "Are you afraid that, by this time next year, you'll be answering to a British nobleman, just like your ancestors had?"

"I'm not afraid. And don't put words in my mouth or I'll put bullets in my action," Clark growled, patting the revolver holstered under his jacket.

"Well, it's like they say: actions speak louder than words. Who am I to say otherwise?" Davis said, not at all afraid, which scared Clark a little.

"You know what?" Clark said, standing up abruptly. "Forget your game. If that waiter ever comes back, tell him to send the food to my room."

As Clark walked away, Davis called out, "Be careful where you're stepping! Don't mess up the board now."

As Clark slammed the door behind him, startling the passengers in the dining car, Davis laughed to himself. While Clark thought that he was leaving the game, truth be told it was a one-player game ever since the first move. Davis had planned for Clark to take his queen, two rooks, and a bishop – each kill distracted Clark all while the Scotsman slowly but surely surrounded the black king. Davis had calculated that he would have won the game in precisely three more turns if only the old man had only been more cooperative.

***

At the back of the train, the view of the prairies was beautiful. Those who sat further up the train saw the prairies slip past the windows like raindrops skipping across the glass. But if you stood on the back of the train and looked out, the harvest of gold and emerald slowly sank into the vanishing point in the horizon, like watercolors washing down the drain. And with the setting sun lighting up the grains in the fields like matchsticks, the moment was Monet.

The moment was lost on those in the refrigerated car, though. Its usual cargo being slabs of meat, the car had to be tightly insulated to prevent the summer heat from putrefying the goods. There were no windows on the car as a result, and the darkness and the stink of meat would make anyone feel that they were literally trapped inside of their own body.

And in the center of the car, chained to a metal pole that stuck in the floor like a conqueror's flag, was the sticky black bile that clings to your liver. The dirty man sat sprawled on the blistering floorboards, his legs twisting as he tried to find a better sitting position. But it was hard – his wrists were bound tightly to the pole, so intimate that he hadn't felt his fingers in hours. Like the last icicle of winter, the sense of touch was trickling down his arms. There was a loose anaconda of rope that coiled around his torso up to his neck, further pinning him down. It would not be long before he would feel one with the pole, as if he couldn't feel any less human.

Although a curtain of chill fluttered in the air, his face still felt salty. He tried to rub his forehead against the pole, but he couldn't quite manage it. It seemed as if everything was sloughing off him, and would continue to do so until his bones clattered to the floor.

The animal winced as sweat pooled in his eyes – he blinked hard but the saltwater was stubborn and his dark blue eyes looked like the seafloor. But the sting woke him up – until that moment, the numbness had been crawling under his skin like cancer. He tried to gurgle something, not like a baby learning how to speak, but like a bear that had just woken up after a long winter.

He called out to the darkness around him, speaking the tongue of fever dreams come to life, but the darkness did not answer. But where most would have become frightened in a jail like this, the monster just laughed – it was the kind of laugh that comes with finally understanding the punchline to a joke heard years before. He then tried to keep busy, pretending that the dice in his pocket was clattering around in the hollow of his loose fist. He was a lucky craps player in what felt like another life, when his world was larger than the length of chain that kept him to the pole.

His game of craps was interrupted by another slap of nausea, this one overwhelming him to the point that he threw up. Since he was essentially paralyzed by the chain, he could not turn his head, and so he vomited all over himself. As he felt the vile taste dripping off his beard, staining his only shirt he had to his name, he idly wondered what he could have possibly thrown up. He hadn't had anything to eat for two days now.

"Is there enough room at the table for one more, Sheldon?" A sweet voice asked in the darkness.

The beast wasn't startled in the slightest by the voice. He rasped, "Always."

A slender hand birthed out of the dark, and Sheldon could feel the electricity of the hand as it brushed past his face and took the imaginary dice from his chained hands. As the hand rolled the dice, Sheldon heard the familiar clatter of the ivory as the sides of the dice collided with one another and created new math problems. The hand launched the dice and they scampered across the hard floor like a stone skipped across the pond. The dice clapped against the wall and came to an abrupt stop, and a few seconds later the voice called out with a laugh, "Seven."

"Liar," Sheldon coughed.

"You don't trust me, Sheldon?" The voice pouted. "We've known each other our whole lives. When have we ever lied to each other? Well, we only knew each other for one night, but that night felt like a lifetime – especially because I died at the end of it."

More than anything, Sheldon wanted to tell her that she looked more beautiful in death than she had in life, but he couldn't find the right words to express just what he meant. Instead, he said, "Drink."

"You want something to drink? Hold on," the sweet voice said Sheldon heard the sound of something being poured into a glass and felt the rim of the cup press against his cracked lips. He could smell the strong, antiseptic smell of aged bourbon. The voice tipped the glass forward and the drink went down his throat like blood rushing through a dried vein. Sheldon sputtered and felt awake in a way he hadn't felt in days, like a marionette that figured out how to use its own strings.

"Thank...thank..."

"You're welcome," the voice said. "Now try to get some sleep. It's a long ride to Cheyenne."

Sheldon nodded and leaned his head back on the metal pole and drifted off into a long sleep as the slender arm wrapped around his back and a tight cocktail dress pressed against his heaving ribs.

And that was how Sheldon McKenna finally found his peace, in a refrigerated train car as they crossed over the border with Nebraska, with the temperature dropping like leaves in autumn and with four armed marshals posted just outside the door, both to keep him in and to keep others out.

And Sheldon's soul – and he did have a soul – was the only one inside of the train car.

***

As the train rattled through Nebraska like electric horses on a track of copper, it was clocking a brisk forty miles per hour. What was fast for any other railroad was routine for this company. They had invested in only the finest steel forged in Pittsburgh for their tracks. Usually, temperature swings played games with steel, and so most tracks heaved like mercury in the lungs of the thermometer throughout the year, fracturing in the winter and buckling in the summer. But businessmen as far away as Chicago advertised their tracks as being as strong and weighted down like a dropped anchor. _Rails as straight as the mayor's teeth,_ all of the posters said. With the bipolar seasons offered up by the prairies railroad tracks could never be too consistent.

Over five hundred miles to the northwest, a different machine was assembling itself in the beautiful barrens of Montana. But where the steel tracks were born in the womb of a boiling forge – one that was over 2,000 °F – this machine was rising out of a cold forge, one that was below freezing, sub-zero actually. There was a stubborn patch of cold front that had floated down like a bubble from the Arctic the week before and became lodged in Nebraska like a splinter. At the same time, there was a punch of warm air that was snaking its way through the deep wrinkles of the Rockies. As the warm front ramped over the mountains, it sliced through the cold air, managing to dislodge it in the process. The warm air was a wet blanket, holding enough moisture to drown cities. And when that warm air mixed with the cold, it formed snowflakes by the infinity, until the clouds looked like a field of dandelions. Every snowflake was a watchmaker's imagination, made up of dozens, even hundreds, of tiny ice crystals that hugged each other like gears.

Most clouds are puffs of smoke, like words spoken in the cold night. But this storm chose to be different. The skies turned a dangerous shade of white, as if the world was disappearing into a shark's smile. And as white as the storm was, the thick clouds blocked out the sunlight, leaving the land scorched like gunpowder until you could smell the sulfur. And nature moved the storm across the earth like a stick of rubber, erasing the ink down to the bone of the white paper.

A few miles southeast of the storm's teeth, there was a ranch with dozens of head of cattle. They grazed in a lonely pasture, surrounded on all sides by warty hills. They ate quietly, unaware that they had been orphaned just that morning – their rancher laid dead in his kitchen, a broken cup with cold coffee dripping off the jigsaw ceramic.

As the cattle ate their fill of grass, a snowflake drifted between them. The flake was so fragile that even the tiny wind from the swish of the cattle's tails tossed it around. As the snowflake kissed the ground, it melted away like a seed planting itself into the soil. Two hours later, all of the cattle were dead in the field, buried by over a foot of snow that the winds had shoveled over the carcasses.

The dragon of snow roared down to Nebraska on its wings of wind, leaving behind it a trail of bleach, snow that burned the eyes and dissolved the lungs with every breath. And still, to the east, the train continued to chug towards Wyoming, those onboard unaware that the tracks were leading them straight to the gates of hell frozen over.

Chapter 4

Nellie sat at her writing desk in her cozy compartment, trying to write the first sentence of her next article. The Coburns were in the dining car, and Nellie had promised them the sleeping compartment for the night. She only had minutes left of peace before she was exiled to the noise of the third-class car, and so she had to write quickly.

But the urgency was lost on her. She was finding the scenery wheeling past her window to be a much more interesting story. As quick as the crew pumped the train's heart with coal, the sun was still the faster runner in the world. It had already settled into the soft west for a long night's sleep, but not before laying down rails of light for the train to follow. Nellie watched as the sunshine played in the fields to the north. The way that the red dusk and the shadows it cast rippled in the fields reminded her of a wriggling coral snake she saw in the Arizona Territory once.

It burned her that she couldn't figure out how to start her article. She chose to blame it on her new editor – a writer's only as good as their editor, and Samuel was a miserable excuse for his title. Her former editor at the _New York World_ , Mr. Jacobsen, was too quiet for the newspaper world, but he saw a writer where others saw a woman, and Nellie appreciated him for that. But when he passed away, Samuel replaced him, and it felt to Nellie like she fell into a hole that went straight to hell. Before she left New York some days before, she had gotten into a heated debate with Samuel over her writing.

"Ms. Cochrane," Samuel said, referring to her by her actual name instead of her pen name from the papers, "when you come back from your little excursion in San Francisco, we're going to have a little talk about your writing."

"Samuel, we're going to have this talk now. Just hearing the way you said that makes me angry, and you don't want me to pent up my rage over the next few months."

"When you come back, we're putting you on the society page."

Nellie looked disgusted. "I already did that back in Pittsburgh. If you want to be arrested for homicide, put me on that and watch me die from boredom. You want me to talk about fashion? I can barely spell the word as it is."

"Perhaps, but the fact of the matter is your writing is a gimmick. The readers are more interested about you going undercover than they are about the subjects. Soon, the novelty is going to wear off like it is ink on the page, and where would that leave you? You're going to have to evolve, Ms. Cochrane, as much as you don't want to."

"You do know that we work for a tabloid, right?" Nellie asked, baffled.

"Why do you think they hired me? All this paper does is print stories about crime sprees. It's as mature as children passing notes in class, and that is why the deep pockets that run this paper hired me, so that the paper can get the respect it deserves."

"And just like a child, the paper's going to regret it ever wanted to grow up," Nellie snapped. "You're caught up in the old ways of playing this game."

"And you're caught up in your own sensationalism."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you have to distance yourself from your work and not take things so personal. It means working to standards that aren't your own. And it means not to make so many enemies."

"You mean you don't want the newspaper to make enemies," Nellie said cynically. "I'm not a dog – you can't expect me to make friends."

"I'm starting to understand that about you. You know what I also understand? In this world, you can either help people or make money. You can't do both. I want you to think about that the next time you write an article. You can choose to write a review of a play that the theater paid us to write. Or you can write an article about orphans being forced to blast holes in mountains and get everyone upset. But I can guarantee you that, as outraged as everyone would get, they won't act on it." Samuel paused, then added nastily, "If that's all you're looking for is to do good, then you should have become a nun."

Just then, there was a knock at the door, and Nellie lurched back into the present. She looked up from her blank paper to the door behind her. "Who is it?" Nellie called out.

"I'm one of the porters, ma'am. I'm just checking to make sure everything is in order."

"Everything's fine in here."

"Are you sure? Are you a qualified porter, like I obviously am?" The voice persisted.

Nellie laughed a little, now wanting to put a face to the voice. And so she walked across her little room towards the door and opened it. Standing in the doorway was a man who was dressed like a porter but who looked nothing like one. He was too skinny for his uniform, the sleeves fitting him like a loose blanket. And his hair was too slimy, and his beard too gnarled, for the train company's strict dress code. But as slovenly as the man looked, his eyes were the boxer's sharp jabs when so many others looked at the world through vacant eyes.

"How's everything in here?" The porter asked vigorously, squeezing past a surprised Nellie and inspecting the room. "Are your pillows comfortable enough? We could strangle some birds if you need more feathers for the pillows. Are you getting enough light in the room? Of course not – it's nighttime after all. Did you need another bottle of wine?"

Nellie looked quizzically at him. "Since when did they start serving drinks in the sleeping compartments?"

The porter paused, trying to find the next words to say. He then feigned shock. "You mean to tell me that the porter I saw taking a bottle out of the dining car was actually stealing it? You know, sometimes I don't even recognize this country anymore." Before Nellie had a chance to say anything else, the porter barreled on, "Anyway, did you need any more blankets?" He saw the Coburns' luggage sitting on the floor next to the bed. "It looks like you have company. Did they need any more blankets?"

Nellie peered at him, growing more curious by the second. "You ask a lot of questions – now let me ask one. Do I know you from somewhere? Something about you seems so familiar."

"That's funny, ma'am, because I was about to ask you the same exact question. By chance, are you related to someone who was found dead under mysterious circumstances?"

Nellie was taken aback by this. "No, but I bet you say that to all of the pretty women you've ever met."

"Not all of them – just the ones I want to stop asking questions."

Nellie flopped down exaggerated on the mattress, pretending to be casual. She was actually digging through the bedcovers, trying to find the stiletto that she had put on the bed earlier when she was unpacking. She had gotten the knife from a man in New Orleans who had tried to rob her. In the dark, she felt the handle and grasped it. The moment the porter decided to stop playing games, she would be ready to make his stomach leak.

"Mister...?" Nellie asked.

"Sigerson," the porter said, finishing her sentence.

"Call me crazy..."

"What a name for someone to give their child," the porter interrupted.

"You didn't let me finish. As I was saying, call me crazy but I don't think you are who you say you are," Nellie said accusingly. The porter looked nervous and tried to say something, but Nellie cut him off. It was her turn to interrupt him now. "Stop trying to be so clever – you're just making yourself sound stupid."

The porter stared at her for a long moment before sighing. "Oh well, I guess there's no point in me continuing the charade."

"No, no there's no. Who are you really?"

"Would it sound less ridiculous if I said that I was an inspector checking on the thread count of pillows onboard the train?"

Nellie simply rolled her eyes. The porter shrugged. "It was worth a try. And I need your trust because I might need your help."

"And what makes you think you can trust me?"

"To put it simply, if I don't confide in someone soon, I'm going to go insane. And you look like the kind of person I can trust. We may have known each other for only a minute, but I feel like we're both the same person in more ways than one."

"I'm hoping that wasn't meant as a compliment."

The porter looked sour, but continued, "My name is Ian Hunter. I'm a professional adventurer who's currently working pro bono."

"So you're a vagrant," Nellie said bluntly.

Ian couldn't help but laugh. "No, no – that would mean I wouldn't have any direction in my life. I know exactly where I'm going."

Nellie lifted an eyebrow. "Are you sure about that? It seems like you can't even decide who you are right now."

"Speaking of that, how did you know that I wasn't a porter? I want to know, for educational purposes."

"It was simple really. Anyone with half a brain could have seen right through that disguise of yours."

Ian protested, "But I already fooled over a dozen people before I got to you."

Nellie snorted. "Again, anyone with half a brain could see through it. For one thing, every porter that works for the company seems like they're fitted for their uniform, and your uniform is a few sizes too large..."

"Well, eating right and exercising can do that."

"Two, you were acting smart."

"Thank you for that..." Ian started to say then stopped. "Oh, you meant the bad kind of smart."

Nellie nodded. "This train company treats its passengers better than it treats its own employees. Based on the way you've been talking to me, the company should have fired you a long time ago."

"It sounds like I'm not the only one around here who has pretended to be someone else."

"You said you're doing it for free – I do it for money. I'm a journalist who works undercover."

Ian looked interested. Nellie was expecting him to recognize the only prominent female journalist in the country, but all Ian said was, "Do you have a sample of your work? I'm interested in reading some of it."

"Maybe later."

Ian looked thoughtful. "Well, I can see you working undercover now. That would certainly explain why you weren't alarmed when you found me out. Anyone else would have been terrified. Although I imagine if I had a knife in my hand, I wouldn't be afraid either."

Surprised, Nellie glanced down, but she saw that her hand with the blade was still concealed under the bedsheets. "How did you know...?"

"You looked too calm, and you were gripping onto something tight underneath the sheets. Since you aren't a child, I'm assuming that it isn't a doll."

"That's very perceptive for an adventurer."

"Professional adventurer," Ian corrected her. He sat down at the desk chair. "Perhaps I should provide some context."

"Yes, please."

"Some adventurers climb mountains, others swim in shipwrecks. I'm going to Cheyenne to save a woman I know from being murdered."

"Okay, you're going to need to provide a bit more context," Nellie requested.

"You're going to find this hard to believe, but I have a lot of enemies," Ian explained. "I came across a letter not too long ago that confirmed that hit men were being hired to kill the woman in my life. I've already put a stop to one of the hired killers, but the remaining one is onboard this train somewhere, waiting to be caught without knowing it."

"And what, exactly, makes you think that I'm not the killer?" Nellie asked.

Ian looked at her oddly. "Well, it's simple, really – you aren't a former military officer who's from Louisiana."

"You found all of that out just from that one letter?"

"Of course I did. The letter was written by the second hitman to his employer, accepting the assignment. He opened the letter with _Bonjou_ , which is a French greeting with a pronounced Cajun twist to it. As well, the letter's writer referenced that he will be in uniform during the trip to Wyoming.

"And what makes you think that just because he's wearing a uniform that makes him a soldier? Lots of people wear uniforms. He could be a postal worker for all you know."

"Because dressing as a military officer gives you certain privileges, like instantly earning people's trust as well as being able to carry a gun."

"Still sounds like a postal worker to me. But this is all very perceptive for a professional adventurer like you."

"I'm no detective," Ian said modestly. "I can sit on an apple, though, and tell you what flavor it is."

Nellie laughed – she couldn't help it. "I suppose there's no amount of explanation that can possibly help. I just want you to know how incredible all of this sounds. This must be some woman of yours."

Ian shook his head. "First, she's no one's woman. Second, have you ever met someone so flawless that they ruined your life? She's that person to me."

The words had sounded bitter enough, but there was a little smile that Ian couldn't hide. Nellie, who had spent some time living as other people, could see when other people wore masks. There was a heart beating behind Ian's cold, logical heart, even if that heart was nothing more than a fiber. Nellie couldn't find it in herself to turn him away, even a few minutes later, when Ian convinced her to let him see a sample of her work. Her thanks was him deriding her writing as having as much heart as it did logical fallacies. He was a jackass, but a good jackass.

Chapter 5

While the thermometer leaked mercury outside, inside of the dining car the weather felt like a warm summer day. The glow from the chandeliers overhead left the car in a perpetual afternoon, and the heat of the privileged rinsed the walls. It was a late dinner for all of them, and Charlotte Johnston was starving.

With her long, black hair brushed to the side and her eyes the color of blue coral, she was a night swim in the bay and every bit as cool. As she dissected her turkey with pomegranate sauce, her companion, Adele Rowe, looked at her dumbfounded. Her own chicken salad was still intact on her plate.

"Where do you put it?" Adele asked.

Charlotte laughed. Her slim green dress showed no signs of tightening. "In my mouth, obviously."

"Seriously, though," Adele persisted, her mouth as tight as bun of blonde hair.

Adele was as prim and proper as Charlotte was relaxed. The woman in the green dress said in her thick Scottish accent, "I've found that thinking happy thoughts helps with digestion."

"And what are those?"

Charlotte slipped a little smile. "They're thoughts that aren't sad, obviously."

Adele shook her head. "That's not what I meant. What are these happy thoughts of yours?"

"Oh, when I rescued myself from a father who loved the drink more than he loved his family and a mother who was afraid of everything."

"You mean when your husband rescued you by marrying you?"

Charlotte's eyes narrowed. "I just let him think he was rescuing me. It'll take more than a doctor to patch up his pride if he thought otherwise."

"We've known each other for a few weeks now – are we friends enough that I can be frank?" Adele asked abruptly.

"Of course."

"Your husband lost everything when he married you. He lost his good standing, his place in his father's will, and his title. At least give him some credit."

"I don't think of it as him losing out on all of those things, and they are just things. I think of it as him gaining me. We are making a fortune together that he couldn't on his own. Besides, it's better to take than to be given." Charlotte then added, "What are your happy thoughts, if you don't mind my asking?"

"My family – what I can remember of them anyway."

"Are they dead?" Charlotte asked casually.

Adele was taken aback by this. "No, but they might as well be."

As she said this, she glanced nervously at the back of the train car. Curious, Charlotte's eyes followed her gaze. Standing by the door was a man built like a gladiator but who was dressed as a businessman. He wore a suit that threatened to split at the seams and had a haircut with a military precision to it. He looked as if he had never smiled in his life, and even from a distance, the women could see a rippling darkness in his eyes.

"Your husband's bodyguard?"

"He's like a prison – not only does he stop people from getting to us, but he stops me from getting to people." That was all Adele said, although she wanted to say so much more. She wanted to talk about how she hadn't seen her mother and her sisters in years because her husband Clark wouldn't allow it. She wanted to talk about how Clark had his bodyguard, Ethan Vaughn, follow her everywhere she went "to keep an eye on her," as Clark had once ambiguously ordered him. If Ethan's job was to keep Adele safe, she felt that he was doing an awful job at it.

"And how are you ladies doing on this fine evening?" A voice boomed from above them. Adele and Charlotte looked up from their seats to see the conductor, Xavier Allen, hovering over them. Allen was a pudgy man who had attempted to comb his hair earlier but gave up halfway through.

"We're doing just fine, Mr. Allen," Charlotte said with a fake sweetness. "I'm just enjoying this fine turkey "

"Personally, I've always been partial to steak, which is why I'm trying to get us to Cheyenne as quickly as possible. There's a fine steakhouse there with a tab under my name."

"Well, we do appreciate that. I for one can't get home fast enough," Charlotte replied.

"Is..." Allen paused as he took a look at his pocket watch, "...six hours soon enough?"

Charlotte pouted. "That long?"

"Any faster and we might as well be shot out of a cannon," Allen said with a jiggling laugh. It was the only joke he had, and he was once told that he either had to find new jokes to tell old people or old jokes to tell new people. Lucky for him, his life was surrounded by strangers. As he said this, he saw out of the corner of his eye a man with a square jaw and a red grizzle on his face like embers. Usually, William Gordon was all smiles, to the point of being obnoxious. The fact that his face was dressed for a funeral meant something. The engine stoker was usually drenched in soot from working in the locomotive, but he had taken the time to wipe off as much of the sticky smoke as he could. There was still a patch of soot tattooed on his neck that he had forgotten. The passengers in the first-class car looked at him oddly, thinking that he had forgotten to evolve with the rest of them.

"Mr. Allen, can we talk somewhere more private?" Gordon asked through clenched teeth.

Allen gave him a sideways look that bordered on the incredulous. "When in history has anyone ever willingly agreed to question like that?"

"Let's make history then, sir."

The engine stoker walked the conductor through the crowd and out onto the vestibule at the end of the train car. Although there was a sheath that covered the gap between the cars, the cold somehow still bled through and drained the world gray. Allen rubbed his hands together briskly as Gordon closed the door behind him.

Before Allen had a chance to say anything, Gordon said, "We're going to have to slow down this train."

The conductor was surprised by this. "Why? Is there a problem with the engine? Are we running low on coal?"

Gordon shook his head. "Everything's fine, but it won't be."

"Nobody likes a man who talks in riddles."

"A bit earlier in the evening, just before the sun set, we were looking out the front when we saw something. There's a big nerve of storm clouds sweeping in from the west. And you may think that the black clouds in summer are terrifying, really there is nothing scarier than gray clouds in winter."

Allen snorted. "They say that seeing is believing, but in this case, I wouldn't believe it, Mr. Gordon."

"Sir?"

"I read the weather reports before we left Iowa. They were reporting some bad weather coming in from Canada, but that it would likely dissipate because there's another front coming in from the Rockies."

"I know we aren't meteorologists, but we know bad when we see it. One of the crew said he saw the same sort of clouds before a blizzard hit Kansas a few years back. He said that the storm that followed was like God scrubbing the world clean. We're thinking..."

"Thinking what?"

"We're thinking that we should stop the train until we know where this storm's going," Gordon said hesitatingly. "At the very least, we should slow down a bit."

"Nonsense!" Allen exclaimed. "I'm not about to jeopardize my record because I'm surrounded by people afraid of snowflakes."

"You're going to jeopardize a lot more than your record if you keep on pushing ahead like this."

"And what, exactly, do you intend to do about this?" Gordon asked, refraining from adding, "Besides whine about it?"

"All you do is smile and punch tickets. I make the train run."

"Is that a threat?" Allen asked.

"I'm just stating the facts," Gordon said with a shrug. "If you're threatened by reality, that's your problem, not mine."

"Reality cuts both ways. You have your paycheck waiting for you in Cheyenne, and you're never going to see it if you stop this train."

"Funny, I thought we still got our pay from the company headquarters back in Kansas City," Gordon said, half-seriously.

Allen rolled his eyes. "I meant in the metaphorical sense. If you stop the train, you might as well go and join the third-class passengers. William, you have a wife and kids – are you willing to risk your family's future on your meteorological skills?"

Gordon stared at him for a long moment before sighing. He shuffled off to the locomotive, leaving behind Allen in the ball of the rattle. As the railroad tracks clacked beneath him, Allen's brain swam in the cesspool of his thoughts. He thought of the company's most recent financial report, which read like the Bookkeeping of Revelation. Revenues were plummeting because of rising competition, and there were record expenses due to repairs from their rail yard being flooded. The end times were coming for their company, and if they were late pulling into the station, that would only hasten the company's bankruptcy. He could just imagine the public relations nightmare if he was the conductor onboard the company's first late train.

As Allen thought this, a suicide of dark snowflakes fell from the night.

***

As Ian made his way back from the bathroom – having changed his outfit back from the porter's uniform to the vagrant fashion – he heard voices bleeding through the cracked door to Nellie's sleeping compartment. Curious, he pushed the door open with a finger and peered into the compartment. Inside he saw a blonde woman who had a gorgeous smile but no idea how to use it. The lady was sitting on the desk chair, her hands clasped in her lap. Even though she was wearing a thick skirt, it was obvious that she was tapping her foot impatiently.

Ian's eyes scanned to the left and saw Nellie standing at the bed, packing her belongings. She was chattering about the assignment that she was going to work on in San Francisco when she heard the door creak open. Turning and spotting Ian, Nellie said pleasantly, "Mr. Hunter, I'd like you to meet Ms. Selina Coburn. Ms. Coburn, Ian Hunter."

"I think this is where I'm supposed to say _charmed_ ," Ian said as he walked over and awkwardly kissed Selina on the hand. "And what is it that you do?"

"I'm a woman, because the world won't allow me to be anything else," Selina said flatly, put off by Ian's abrupt question.

Ian snorted, mistaking Selina's bitterness for wit. Before Nellie had a chance to clarify, Ian said brightly, "But you're so much more than a woman. You're a maid also – well, you were a maid."

The women looked at him, surprised, and Selina cried out, "Am I really that obvious? What gave it away? Was it my dress, the way I look, the way I talk?"

Ian shook his head. "Ms. Bly here already told me your story."

"Then why would you ask?" Selina wondered.

"I was interested in hearing your answer. I had a feeling that you would lie, and you can learn more about a person when they're lying than when they're telling the truth."

Selina huffed, not enjoying being made light of. Ian either didn't notice or didn't care, because he then proceeded by saying, "Where's your husband at?"

"I'm not sure, actually. When we were having dinner, he said he wanted to step outside for a minute and get some fresh air. I must admit, it was pretty stuffy in the dining car. I haven't seen him since. I thought that he may have come back here to lie down."

"Don't worry – I'm sure he hasn't run away," Ian offered helpfully. "I mean, it is common for newlyweds to have buyer's remorse, but he wouldn't have jumped off the train, not at this speed anyway."

"I do appreciate your help, Mr. Hunter," Selina said sarcastically. "I really do."

"You're welcome," Ian replied, tone-deaf. Nellie had to stifle a giggle as a mangled cough. It was all too much for her. It was obvious that Selina couldn't have cared less about Ian, but if anything, Nellie's appreciation for Ian only grew. It was refreshing to find someone who had no time for society's absurd logic, who was as brutally honest as an ax. But then she remembered reading _Jane Eyre_ , and how she found the character Edward Rochester to be so tiresome. She hoped that at least Ian had the ability to evolve.

***

The train swept smoothly across the countryside like brushing leather with a knife. The ride was so silky, that the passengers would have been forgiven if they had thought they were falling into the abyss instead of clattering against steel beams. And as the train dove deeper into the bottomless night, the dandelion of snowflakes grew, as if the forge of hell was coughing up ash from tis black lungs. Even the thick beam of light that shone from between the locomotive's teeth could barely scythe the cotton snow. It would have reminded the lost souls from shipwrecks of what the ocean floor looks like, a graveyard at night where the corpses rain down.

To the men packed inside of the locomotive, it definitely felt like hell. Gordon, who was manning the firebox like he always did, was spooning coal into the always-hungry furnace. As each shovelful of coal was dumped, it kicked up a tremendous flurry of embers like mosquitos. Sweat poured down Gordon's face and neck but he didn't need a towel. The fire was thirsty too, and the heat licked the water off his skin with its long tongue. It was a job that took two or even three men on any other train, but Gordon found a strength that didn't belong to him. And Gordon found it tiring – not in that it sapped his muscle, but the constant shoveling felt like a hypnotist's watch, the routine rocking him to sleep.

The conductor, however, was not nearly as tolerant of the heat. Allen stood at the rear of the locomotive, where he had one of the windows cracked open. Fingers of freezing air wrapped around the edge of the glass and tried to push the window open even more. With a wrinkled nose, Allen looked at Gordon's swampy clothes and asked, "When was the last time you took a bath?"

Gordon managed to look thoughtful, even as his arms pulsed with pounds of coal. "Good question – who's the president now?"

"That's revolting. The second we come to a stop in Cheyenne, I'm ordering you to get a bath. I can't have you tramping around the train, looking like an ogre. You'll scare the peasants."

Gordon snorted. "Let's compromise. I'll roll around in the snow for a few minutes. It'll clean me up, and it's good for the soul."

"All you'll do is turn the snow black," Allen said before turning to the man propped up at the controls. "How is our train holding up, Mr. Patton?"

Victor Patton was a poor man, but he was told to never show it. With a polished mustache and neatly cropped hair, Patton never let on that he was homeless, a victim of gambling debts unpaid. Like a prince without a country, he spent what little he had left on himself and nothing else. He chirped, "Things are going well, Mr. Allen – for now."

"Caution never got anyone anywhere fast," Allen pointed out.

"Maybe, but neither does an empty water tank. I just checked a few minutes ago. The water level is low."

Allen was flabbergasted. "You didn't think to fill up the tank before we left the last station?"

Patton's eyes darkened. "Of course I did. The only thing I can think of is the night before, when the temperature dipped below freezing. Some of the water inside of the tank must have frozen and expanded. Now that the tank is all warmed up, the water's settled down and we know just how low the levels are. The fact that you're making us push the train like this isn't helping. You know what I think we should do?"

"What?" Allen asked.

"I think we should stop, melt some snow, and refill the water tank. It would take an hour, maybe two, but we'll definitely have no more trouble after that."

Allen shook his head fiercely as the train rounded a hill. "No, no, no. I didn't speed us up just to slow us down. We have to get to Cheyenne on time, even if that means spitting in the tank."

"Don't be a fool about..."

The locomotive suddenly jackknifed to the left, throwing the three men onboard to the right. Gordon, who was standing in front of the firebox, screamed as he lurched forward. His hands had instinctively shot out to shield himself from the fall, and he heard the sizzle of flesh against hot metal. Patton cracked his head against a lever, knocking himself out cold. Allen managed to grab ahold of the pull cord for the train whistle before he could fall forward. The whistle sounded a funeral dirge, and Allen thought for sure that he was going to die. The locomotive brutally overcorrected itself and veered to the right, causing the men to tumble just when they were beginning to find their balance again. For a bizarre moment, Allen heard someone chanting a prayer in Latin and thought that an angel was standing behind him. He didn't realize that he was the one speaking, reciting prayers that he hadn't heard since he was a child.

The locomotive tilted, and Allen thought that he was going to slide off the world. Then everything went sideways, and what was the floor was now the wall, and the gears and levers and the firebox were now the floor. The men laid crumpled in the peace of the chaos for what felt like an eternity. Then, Allen slowly picked himself up, wincing from a cracked rib. He looked over and saw Gordon huddled and softly crying over his hands. Numbly, Allen looked at the hands, which were seared from the firebox's grates, so badly burned that the meat was beginning to peel off. Allen then remembered Patton and turned and looked. The engineer was a few feet away, lying awkwardly on his side, a lever rammed through his right eye socket.

"Oh, God," Allen moaned. He turned to Gordon. "William, can you get up?"

"My hands," Gordon said through his tears. It was the first time he had cried since his mother passed almost two decades before.

"I know, I know. We have to get out of here," Allen said heavily. "We're on a – ledge or something. We're going to fall any moment and take the whole train with us. Come on."

Allen ripped two strips of cloth from his undershirt and wrapped them around Gordon's blistered palms. Then, locking the engine stoker's arm with his own, Allen awkwardly scrambled up the steep floor. As he did, Allen nervously heard the locomotive groaning all around him. When they reached the door, Allen stretched out his hand and grabbed ahold of the handle. He turned the handle and tried to pull the door open, but it wouldn't budge – the door was jammed.

"William," Allen said softly. "I know it's going to hurt like hell, but try to hold onto something. I have to get the door open."

Gordon nodded and, using the crook of his elbow, latched onto one of the levers that lined the ceiling. Meanwhile, Allen continued to yank on the door handle. He had never wanted to open a door so much in his life. And still the door wouldn't budge. It wasn't until he launched himself off the floor and used all of his weight that the door finally became unglued and swung open. Surprised, Allen almost lost his grip on the handle and plummeted to the firebox below. But he held on and, taking Gordon by the collar, managed to pull both of them out of the wounded locomotive.

Even with his heavy wool uniform on, Allen felt the blizzard down to his soul. He had never felt so cold in his entire life, and it took his heart all it could not to freeze in mid-beat. Gasping, Allen spun around, trying to survey how the world came to an end. Through the blizzard, he could make out the dim outline of a bulging hill to his left and a valley to the right. Beneath his feet was a wolf pack of snow that had buried the tracks and caused the derailment. What he didn't know was that it had snowed in the area just a week before, and the old snow that had accumulated on the hilltop had just crumbled away earlier that day, its stitching melted away by the noon sun. The avalanche had drenched the train tracks, and the blizzard caused the soft snow to harden again.

It was a miracle that the rest of the train was still on the tracks, but not even miracles last. The coal-car, which was seated behind the locomotive, was already beginning to lift up on the left side. Allen watched as the car swayed in the strong wind, and he realized that the right kind of gust could cause the tender to fly like a bird's wing. Taking Gordon by the arm, the conductor rushed over to see what could be done. The link-and-pin coupling between the locomotive and the tender was mangled from stress. There was no way he could knock the pin out of the link.

He rushed to the next car, which held the baggage for everyone onboard. The coupling between the tender and this car wasn't as badly damaged, but Allen could see where the pin was still slightly bent. They were running out of time, though, and he couldn't risk running to the next car and uncoupling it there. If the tender went, so did the rest of the train. That was when he spotted an ax hanging on the door for the baggage car and grabbed it.

Gordon watched on, helpless, as Allen struggled with popping the pin out of the link. The conductor was already weak, and the cold was sapping his strength. But it only took a few swings, hitting the head of the pin at an upward angle, before the pin popped out and landed in the snow. The second he did, Allen felt a blast of wind in his ear, deafening him. The same gust pushed with its thousands of hands against the tender, causing it to lose its grip on the tracks. There was a sharp grinding of metal before the locomotive and tender were lapped up between the teeth of darkness and sent falling to the stomach of the valley.

Chapter 6

"Is everyone okay? Voices, please, I need voices!"

Allen launched his voice down the corridor as he strode through each of the train cars. There was a tremble in his voice, although he didn't know if it was from the adrenaline or his likely fractured rib. He needed to know if any of his passengers were wounded or worse. The passenger manifest was lost with the locomotive, but he remembered the train being booked to capacity, with eight crewmembers, twenty passengers in the first-class car, ninety passengers spread out among the three coach cars, four marshals and one prisoner. One of the crew was already dead, and Allen did the rushed math in his head: 122 souls left. He never cared for Patton, and he knew that the engineer would be forgotten. But every other person who died would bleed consequences for him.

And there were going to be consequences. There was a passenger dead in first-class, having cracked their head on the sink in the washroom, as well as two wounded. In the coach cars, there were three dead and eleven wounded. He groaned as he watched a doctor onboard lay out the dead on the floor of the baggage car, burying each with the dirt of a white sheet. There were newspaper editors back east who wouldn't consider it beneath themselves to spray a picture like that across the front page. He could already see the headlines that they would write. They would paint him as a monster when he was just trying to be a hero. And the company that he had worked for since he was a teenager will now certainly fall because of him.

As Allen's brain kicked around paranoid thoughts, he walked away from the open door leading into Nellie Bly's sleeping compartment. Nellie, Ian, and Selina were seated inside, looking solemn. Fortunately, the derailment was blunted for them, as they were thrown against the mattress in the room. Besides a bruised shoulder for Ian, they looked fine on the outside. Inside, though, they had thoughts churning like cream.

"What if something had happened to Martin?" Selina asked in a voice so afraid that she didn't believe it to be her own. Martin Coburn had still not appeared, and she was beginning to suspect the worst.

Nellie shook her head. "The conductor said that the dead placed in the baggage car have already been identified."

"They're still searching the train, though, aren't they? And if he's alive, he would have shown up by now," Selina said quickly, moments away from hysterics. Any moment, she was going to realize that she was all alone in a strange world, she just knew it.

Ian was about to say something reassuring when he realized that he didn't know how to comfort people. So he stayed silent as Nellie wrapped an arm around Selina's shoulders. "It's going to be fine. Your husband didn't risk everything he had just to die before he could enjoy a life with you. They're going to find him with just a bump on the head and calling out your name."

"That's the problem. When we first got married, he was as optimistic as a candle. But over the past few days, he's been talking funny."

Ian raised an eyebrow. "When you say he's been talking funny, do you mean in a humorous or disturbed way?" Before Selina had a chance to respond, Ian answered his own question. "Well, what's the difference really? I mean, laughter is a cathartic release of anxiety, so really, humor and mental illness are both shades of the same color – it's just that humor is a shade brighter."

Selina looked at him like she had just discovered some new, bizarre bug. Nellie just looked at him curiously. "Where did you learn to talk like that?"

"I thought we already established that whatever I say, you aren't going to believe."

"I keep forgetting," Nellie said, amused, before turning back to Selina with a serious look. "You think he's going to do something that he'll regret?"

Selina shrugged, feeling helpless. "I don't know. All I know is that we're newlyweds, we're out in the frontier, and we don't have much money left to our names. Martin's father has likely already cut him out of the will back home. As fast as the train was moving, I think reality has managed to catch up with us."

There was a hard silence in the compartment before Ian finally said, "Well, I can't speak for your husband, but I for one am worried. An old gypsy once told me that I would die in a godforsaken place – it might as well be Nebraska."

Ian said that, hoping for a laugh, but the two women just stared at him. It took him a moment to realize that they weren't staring at him but past him and so he turned. Standing in the doorway was Martin, his face stone, his hands shaking with electricity. His hand was clenched tightly around his pocket watch, leaving a tattoo in his palm.

Selina didn't stand up and run over to him, mostly because she was afraid that she would spontaneously slap him rather than hug him. Instead, she sat poised in her chair and demanded, "Where were you?"

Martin stared at her through a dew of tears. Then, he just said sadly, "Selina."

***

It was when Allen was uneasily walking through one of the coach cars that he heard the sound he feared most in the world.

A woman cried out, "What do we do now?"

The woman's voice was a boulder thrown into a pond, and the shell of murmuring cracked open. The next thing the conductor knew, he was besieged on all sides by questions. For a man who was used to hearing questions such as when they would arrive at the next station, he was not prepared for emergencies such as this. He sputtered for an answer, and when only false starts of words came out of his mouth, the passengers realized that they had to answer their own questions.

"Let's send a party to Cheyenne!" One of the men cried out. "They ain't going to know where we're at, and they ain't going to know what shape we're in. By the time they find us, the only shape they'll need to know is how to measure our coffins."

As the others jeered in agreement, Allen paddled through the sea of people, desperate for dry land but finding none. Hoping to calm them down – mostly himself – Allen begged, "Please listen to me when I say we are not in any danger as long as we stay here! Anyone who steps foot out that door will never come back, I can guarantee that much. We have an adequate supply of food to outlast the blizzard. When the good people at the station realize that we're gone, they're going to search every inch of track until they find us, alive and well."

"Well, the food's going to last forever, because it's going to be refrigerated," a voice said behind Allen. The crowd died away as everyone turned to see Gordon standing before them, his hands heavily bandaged. Even though he was technically still on the job, he made no effort to hide the whiskey on his tongue as he spoke.

"Our fearless leader is right – we have plenty of food," Gordon said hazily. "What he's conveniently forgetting is that we only have enough coal to last us for one, maybe two days. We would have more, but it's currently buried in the snow at the bottom of the valley. And the way the weather's looking, once the coal goes, we go. The math's real simple, I'm sorry to say. We got to do something, and sitting around waiting for rescue is not something."

Gordon's words injected the crowd with courage. Allen tried a second time to persuade them otherwise, but by then it was too late. The people in coach were already arguing amongst themselves as to who should brave the cold and follow the tracks the rest of the way to Cheyenne and salvation. They did the math and figured that they could make it to the town and back with a snowplow within two days as long as the weather didn't worsen.

But in Allen's world, the weather could only worsen. He remembered, as a child, living deep in the prairies of Kansas. One year, there was a blizzard that suffocated his town like a blanket in July. It hit at the worst possible time too, as it was the middle of the day and the people were out and about and nowhere near home. In particular, a young Allen and a pack of children were sitting in their one-room schoolhouse, learning arithmetic, when Allen looked out the window, bored, and saw the first snowflake fall. Minutes later, the snow was falling so thick that it looked like they were drowning in a pail of cream. Their teacher panicked – although there was a stove at the front of the classroom, there was not nearly enough firewood. Since the school was on the outskirts of town, the teacher decided to risk a walk into town and come back with a rope, to guide the children towards the inn where there was warmth for all. Before the teacher left, she assured her children that she would be right back – if the students were older and wiser, they would have known that she was doomed after saying that. When the storm died the next morning, rescuers came to find the children huddled around the last embers in the stove. It wasn't until the snow melted weeks later that the teacher's body was found, just feet from the backdoor to the inn.

All of this went through Allen's mind as the people talked of going out to find help, but he knew now there was no point in stopping them. At the same time, their list of heroes was narrowed down to five, as they couldn't spare provisions for any more. There were also two women who had offered to help, but the men refused, secretly afraid of being outdone by them. A collection plate of sorts was passed up and down the aisles of the train, as people donated layers of clothing that the men could put on to protect them against the cold. Even then, nothing in life was as certain as death, and the men grimily wondered if their shapeshift of borrowed clothes would be their funeral suits.

When it came time for the men to step outside, the fear in the crowd had twisted into an emotion even darker, one that had no name. The whole train car watched in silence as the men, led by a round Russian immigrant named Fyodor, swung the door open and hopped out into the snow. If anyone on the train had said a final goodbye to the men, they didn't hear it – the blizzard's winds were a gunshot, loud enough for a deaf man to hear. The snow was as thick as scars, and they couldn't tell if they were about to walk into white or black.

The wind was pushing so hard that the men struggled to get through the door. When the last of the party left, the door slammed shut. Some of the people in the car jumped a little, either from the thunder of the door closing or the sharp silence that followed. Some of them ran to the windows, all in the hope of catching one more sight of the men. But when they reached the windows, there was nothing but darkness, as if the men had dissolved by the acid in the night.

***

The conductor had not bothered to do a survey of the last car on the train because they weren't paying customers. The federal marshals had commandeered the train car for the purpose of transporting their prisoner, and the company executive were none too pleased given how close the company was already to bankruptcy. And so they implied to Allen before the trip to make the ride uncomfortable for the marshals, in the hopes that they won't be asked for such a favor again.

Fortunately, the marshals had survived well enough, with only a few scrapes and bruises. When they had first set out from Burlington, Iowa, the marshals had positioned themselves so that two men guarded the front door of the car while the other two men guarded the back. It just so happened that the two men positioned on the rear platform, Haley and Bowman, had moved up front, the biting cold just too much for them. And so the four marshals were huddled together on the front platform of the car, cocooned in the womb of the vestibule between the cars.

When the derailment had happened, the men had flung forward as if flicked by the hand of God. As one, they landed against the railing, grunting and yelping in surprise. As they worked to untangle themselves, the marshals didn't realize how lucky that two of their numbers were on the back platform not too long before. If the train had derailed while they were back there, it was likely that one of the marshals could have fallen off the train and mangled themselves in the stampede of metal.

"What just happened?" One of the marshals, Haley, wheezed. His ribcage had clanged against the railing, and the pain gnawed into him. Still, he ran his fingers through his hair to make sure that he was presentable before inspecting his bruised ribcage.

"We must have hit something," Irving said in his usual, deadpan voice.

"We're in the middle of a desert..." Haley began.

"Prairie," Irving corrected.

"Whatever," Haley said, shaking his head. "What's out here that we could possibly hit?"

"Make yourself useful, Nigel," Ansel said, "and go up front and check with the conductor."

Still massaging his ribcage, Haley grunted and walked into the train car ahead. The door had barely closed behind him when Irving said with a rare flare of emotion, "What an insufferable brat. I couldn't take one more second of him boasting about his investments. Some risk – he was gambling with the money his father gave him."

The grizzled and sour Bowman barked a laugh. "You know, I was wishing for his conversation to go off the rails, not the train."

"Next time, pray louder so there's no misinterpretation," Ansel said, before turning serious. "Are you two gentlemen alright?"

"We're just fine. And you, sir?" Bowman asked.

"Hopefully just as fine as our houseguest is," Ansel said, jerking his thumb back at the car behind them, where their prisoner was housed. As he said that, his eyebrows notched up a little. "That reminds me – we should check on him."

As Ansel moved to open the door to the refrigerated car, Bowman asked, "What's the point? The animal gave up his soul long ago when he started butchering people. All we're doing is transporting a bag of bones to Wyoming. Who cares if the bag spilled out?"

Ansel, who was ignoring everything that his colleague was saying, turned abruptly and said, "I can't get the door open."

"What do you mean, you can't get the door open?"

"What else could I possibly mean? The derailment must have jammed the door in place," Ansel said between pushes. Suddenly, he gave up and kicked the door. At first, the door was stubborn, but after the third kick, it surrendered, and a clumsy light spilled into the dark train car. The derailment had pried some dust that was painted into the roof above, and it was raining down like salt from a shaker. The inside of the car was a bearable temperature. Ironically, the insulated interior of the refrigerated car – meant to prevent the hauled meat from being spoiled in the summer – protected them from the brutal blizzard outside.

"Get me a lantern," Ansel called back. One of the marshals handed Ansel a lantern, the glass broken from the accident. Ansel held out the light and stepped cautiously into the dark car. There was only a little fuel left in the lantern, and the flame couldn't pierce more than a few feet away. As Ansel walked, he said loudly, "Prisoner, are you alive in here?"

There was nothing but an overwhelming silence. The hairs on the back of Ansel's neck slowly began to stand, like sunflowers at dawn. "Answer me, prisoner!" Ansel snapped. With a free hand, he slowly reached down to his waist and gripped the revolver at his side. He was prepared for the worst. He was prepared for the pole that kept McKenna in place to have come undone from its bolts. It reminded him of when he served as a Union scout in the war, and he was sent deep into Tennessee on a moonless night to cut the enemy's telegraph wires. Then, he expected death to leap at him out of the dark at any moment. He found himself experiencing that same feeling of dread again.

He took a few more steps before suddenly coming to a halt. Ansel groaned softly. He said slowly, "You gentlemen better see this."

Bowman and Layton walked into the car, armed with a lantern themselves, and stood to either side of Ansel. As they did, Layton asked, "What's wrong, Russell...?"

Layton's voice ran away from him when he saw what Ansel was looking at. Laid before them was the body of feared killer, Sheldon McKenna. The corpse was still tied securely to the pole, and that was the only thing that kept the body from going limp altogether. The head leaned forward slightly, blue in the cheeks, with a stream of vomit still dripping from the corner of the mouth. There was a necklace of bruises around McKenna's neck, and the legs were frozen in rigor mortis at bizarre angles.

"Check the car for any signs of a break-in," Ansel said softly.

"You don't think...?" Layton wondered out loud.

"Someone did this to him. Check the car."

Bowman and Layton checked the backdoor for the car while Ansel kneeled down and put a finger to McKenna's neck. He was checking for a pulse but not expecting any. Shaking his head, Ansel stood up as he heard Layton call out, "No signs of this door being opened."

"Are you sure?" Ansel asked.

"I'm sure. The lock we put on the inside of the door is still intact. We were guarding the only other entrance. There is no possible way that someone could have snuck in without us knowing."

"Somebody had to have killed him," Ansel said, pointing at the body beneath him. "This is no natural way to die."

"Then who?"

Chapter 7

"What the hell...?" Haley sputtered.

The young man had just returned from the front of the train with news of the derailment when he found the door to the refrigerated car open. He peered inside to find his brother marshals leaning against the wall, smoking cigarettes from Layton's pack, looking at the dead man in front of them.

"Hell's no longer in the man, but the man's in hell," Layton said solemnly before taking a long drag on his cigarette.

"And I'm assuming we're having a smoke to celebrate?" Haley asked as he walked over to Layton and tried to take a cigarette from the pack he held at his side. But the dismal man, who hadn't combed his hair since his wife had died four months before, snatched the pack away from Haley's curious fingers.

"We still have a problem. All we've done is replace one murderer with another."

Haley scoffed. "What makes you think that he was murdered? I just saw people bloody and screaming up and down this train. Who's to say he didn't crack that nutshell of a head against that pole?"

"Look at his neck, kid," Ansel said, gesturing towards the corpse. Hesitatingly, Haley stepped forward and looked at the killer's neck.

"What do you see?" Ansel asked.

"Bruises." There was a plumage of angry bruises wrapped like a chain around the neck.

"There is a gash on the back of his head, from where it hit the pole. But the pole couldn't explain the neck."

"What about the rope?" Haley asked. "Couldn't that have choked the bastard?" There was still the coil of rope that joined the body to the pole, the rope stretching the whole way from the dead man's waist up to his neck.

"The rope is loose at the neck. I made sure of that when I checked on him about two hours ago. Our job was to get him to Cheyenne, not to kill him." Ansel paused. "You and Mr. Bowman were posted on the rear platform up until about an hour ago, right?"

Haley made a point of taking his gold pocket watch out and looking at the time. He had already checked the time a few minutes prior – he was just showing off his new watch now. "That's right. It was getting too cold, out there in the elements."

"And when you two walked through the car then, you didn't see anything suspicious," Ansel said, in a voice that wavered between a statement and a question.

"Nothing suspicious," Haley said, not reading between the lines. Bowman did, however.

"Where are you going with this, Russell?" Bowman demanded.

Ansel cleared his throat. "Nowhere in particular." He said this, having just realized the implications of what he was about to say. He was about to accuse two federal marshals of conspiring to murder a prisoner in their custody. He was about to accuse them, knowing that he did not have a shred of proof, beyond them being the last people to see McKenna alive. He was about to accuse them, when he was unsure if he wouldn't have done the same himself.

"Let's hunt down a suspect," Ansel said quickly. The other marshals nodded eagerly.

***

"George?"

Laurence rolled his eyes. "Yes, gentlemen?"

The porter was fetching another blanket from the linen closet for an elderly passenger when he was confronted by the pack of marshals. The men were wearing thick coats, and so Laurence couldn't see the badges that were pinned to their chests, nor could he see the guns they had holstered at their side. To him, they were just four more passengers.

Haley caught the eye roll. "There better been something interesting on the ceiling, boy, to make you do that."

The other porters had once told Laurence to be silent and let others speak for him. But his identity was already robbed when people called him George. He had never met an actual George in his life, actually. He was going to be damned if they took his voice as well. His eyes narrowed and his fine mustache flinched just a little. "Boy? I'd reckon we're about the same age."

Haley looked insulted, but the other marshals laughed. Ansel took a step forward and unbuttoned his jacket, casually flashing his badge. "We're going to need to ask you some questions...sir."

"Now, I don't know the question, but I know the answer: I didn't do it. I've been in this car for the past hour – the customers can swear to it."

"We can believe it," Ansel said reassuringly. "But did you see any of the passengers acting strangely recently?"

Laurence started to speak, but then stopped. He looked thoughtful. "Boss told us that you were guests and nothing more."

"If you knew what was good for you, you'd start talking," Haley snapped.

Laurence shrugged. "You can arrest me, sure. But the boss can fire me, and this job is all I got. 'sides, I've had a lifetime of people telling me what they think is best for me – it never ends well."

"Don't worry about you, don't worry about me, and especially don't worry about my dear friend here," Ansel told the porter. "All we're asking is that you be worried about one passenger. You must have that passenger manifest memorized by now."

"I do."

"And which of those names was acting strange?" Ansel persisted. "What name stands out?"

Ansel asked so earnestly that, for a moment, Laurence forgot that he was talking with a federal marshal. He blurted out, "Mr. Coburn."

"And what was he up to?" Bowman questioned.

"His wife came up to me some time ago, saying that he disappeared when they were eating in the dining car, and that she hasn't seen him since."

Ansel leaned forward, the weight of his curiosity tipping him over. "What seat did he reserve?"

***

The marshals swept through the train cars like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Fear marched ahead of them – the marshals' boots clicking against the floor matched the rhythm of a terrified heartbeat. Curious passengers turned and saw Bowman, Ansel, and Layton glide past them, with the shorter Haley struggling to keep up with their long strides. In their wake was a soft breeze that raised goosebumps like the dead on the passengers' arms. They didn't understand this feeling of dread, and they didn't want to.

When they arrived at the first-class sleeping car where the Coburns were at, every compartment door was latched close. As the marshals walked past, they could hear a faint whispering in the walls, the way a house talks to itself when no one's there. When they arrived at the door to the Coburns' compartment, Layton knocked his thick fist against the thin door and called out, "Mr. Coburn, are you in there?"

The whispers died. Then a voice said uncertainly, "Yes?"

"Open up the door – marshals."

The door squeaked open, and a young man with a heavy gaze stood in the doorway. Ansel peeked past the man – the compartment was cramped, with another man and two women sitting inside. Ansel found it curious that, while the women were seated on the bed and cushioned chair, the man was sound asleep on the hardwood floor. The marshal thought this was all the more unusual because there was plenty of space to sit or lie down otherwise on the cushioned seats.

The blonde woman perched on the chair demanded, "What's going on?"

Ansel ignored her. Instead, he asked the man, "You Mr. Coburn?"

"I am."

"Good," Ansel said as he motioned for Bowman and Layton to apprehend their suspect. But two marshals weren't required. Martin didn't resist. Instead, he took a look at his watch and muttered something about the time. The young man then stood up and let the marshals walk him out into the hallway. Selena, though, put up enough resistance for the both of them. She launched herself out of her chair and shouted, "What are you doing? Why are you taking away my husband?"

"Please..." Martin said from the hallway.

"I don't understand! I just don't understand!" Selina cried, hysteria infecting her voice. She leaped forward – if she lost her husband, then she would truly have nothing else left in the world to lose. Ansel, who was still standing in the doorway, put out a brick wall of an arm that stopped Selina in her tracks. He roughly pushed her back into the compartment and snapped, "Don't make me find space for two prisoners now!"

With that said, he slammed the door shut

Everything had happened so quickly – Martin's arrest happening in less than a minute –the inside of the compartment was as frozen as a painting. Selina was kneeling with her palms pressed against the door, Nellie wore her hands like a tragic mask, and Ian was still sleeping. Then, Selina began to pound her fists against the door, in deep hysterics. She had never felt lost until that moment. Nellie hurriedly wrapped her arms around Selina and shushed her, trying to be a comforting blanket she knew she could never be. As she comforted the crying woman, Nellie glanced back, hoping for some assistance from Ian. To her bitter disappointment, the man was still dozing.

But while his eyes were closed, Ian wasn't sleeping. If anything, he had never been quite so awake.

***

"What's that?" Martin asked, shocked, as the marshals moved him into the refrigerated car. The marshals had left the body out to ferment like wine, because there was no other choice. And Martin had never seen a corpse before – he had never even been to a funeral. Martin froze in place in the doorway, and Haley roughly pushed his shoulder to get him moving. Martin almost toppled over, saved only by Ansel's arm, which shot out like a bullet.

"Are you okay, sir?" Ansel asked their suspect, concern painted on his face. He turned to his comrade and said, "Nigel, that's no way to treat a guest."

Ansel motioned to the corner, where the floor was as cold as the dark side of the executioner's ax. No other words needed to be said. Martin awkwardly sat down on the floor, wincing as he did so. He had been sitting on cushions for so long that he forgot what reality felt like. He looked up to see the four marshals looming over him. He suddenly felt like a child again, and his parents were standing just a switch away. He glanced through the forest of legs and saw the outstretched corpse. He asked again timidly, "What's that?"

"The Devil's marionette," Layton said heavily. "I'm afraid you missed the puppet show."

"What's the real reason you've arrested me?" Martin demanded.

The marshals shared a blank look before Ansel asked, "What do you think you were arrested for?"

"I thought...I thought my father had put out a warrant for my arrest. I stole money from his billfold before I left home," Martin said, suddenly feeling foolish.

The silence that followed was punctured by Bowman's heavy laugh. "You thought your father sicced marshals on you like we're dogs? Who's your father? Not that we care."

"Ernest Coburn, editor of _The News_ back in Baltimore."

Bowman snorted. "He probably has more money than he knows what to do with. It'll be years before he finds out that he's been robbed, I bet."

Haley gestured for Bowman to be silent. He turned to Martin and said, "We heard that you vanished from your sleeping compartment a bit earlier this evening."

"I wasn't aware it was a crime to walk around the train," Martin said defensively.

"Calm down," Haley said in a soothing voice. "No one's talking about you breaking the law. All we're asking is if you saw anyone acting suspiciously while you were wandering the train."

"Did someone murder that gentleman then?" Martin asked, pointing at the body.

"Just answer the..." Haley repeated.

"Why would someone want to murder him?" Martin wondered.

Ansel knelt down until he and Martin were looking each other in the eye. The marshal said, "Surely you must know who that monster is. He made a loud enough racket when we loaded him on the train."

But still Martin stared at him blankly. Ansel said, with a rising note of exasperation, "It's Sheldon McKenna, a man responsible for countless gruesome deaths in Wyoming. Odds are likely there's someone on this train who's related to one of his victims. I can just barely imagine the things they would do to his corpse now, let alone when he was alive and kicking just hours ago."

"Hey, Russell," Layton called out, "What was the bounty a group of ranchers from Wyoming placed on his head, decapitated?"

Ansel laughed. "It was enough to turn a marshal criminal, that's all I remember." He turned back to Martin and looked at him thoughtfully. "I'm sure a man like you, desperate enough to steal from his own father, would be very interested in taking an offer like that."

Martin's eyes narrowed for a few moments before abruptly widening. "Hold on – you aren't suggesting that I'm responsible for this, are you?"

Martin's answer was Layton grabbing a tuft of his hair and smacking Martin's head against the wall. "You're not allowed to ask questions!" Layton snapped, his free hand on the holstered gun at his side. "Only we can! Now, stop wasting our time and admit it."

"Irving..." Ansel said, placing a calming hand on his comrade's shoulder.

"What?" Layton growled, his eyes never letting go of Martin.

"Look at the poor bastard – he can barely breathe, let alone make a confession," Ansel replied, looking sadly at Layton. His old friend wasn't always like this.

The noose of a hand loosened from around Martin's throat. Martin gagged and slipped down to the floor, massaging his neck which felt like it was on fire. The marshals looked on, silently, as Martin recovered enough to say, "I didn't do it."

"We want to believe you, sir, we really do," Ansel said gently. "We want to believe that you're just passing through, and that you could care less about these people. We want to believe that your hands don't have any blood on them. But unless you give us a good reason not to, we'll lock you away in a cell, where the only guarantees you'll have will be a leaky roof over your head and two runny meals a day. So please, go ahead and convince us."

Martin tried to say something, but all he could do was burst out sobbing. And as Martin cried, the marshals smiled over him – they found their suspect.

"Irving," Ansel ordered, "get me some shackles for our new friend. We want him to feel right at home while we figure out what to do..." – just then, there was a knock at the door – "...with him. Who is it?"

"It's the conductor," the voice said from beyond the locked door. "I heard a commotion. I just wanted to make sure that things are okay."

"Things are just fine in here, sir," Ansel called out. "Now, why don't you go and tend to your passengers? I'm sure they need you."

"Well, the problem is I know you have one of my passengers in there, and that he needs me more than ever right now."

Ansel had never looked so curiously at a door before. He hesitated before motioning for Haley to open the door. When Haley opened the door, they were taken aback by what they saw. Instead of the conductor – whom they had spoken with earlier in the day – they were looking a stranger in the eye. While the conductor was pudgy with a clean-shaven face and slick hair, this man was thin with a ragged head of hair and a beard as thick as oak.

Chapter 8

"You're not the conductor," Ansel blurted out after a few awkward moments.

The man looked amused. "You'll go far with a mind like that."

"What are you trying to pull?" Haley demanded. "You didn't just lie to a marshal for no good reason."

"But I didn't lie – technically, I am a conductor. I took some correspondence courses back home and I am a minimally qualified one. I can pull a train into a station with only a few casualties. Anyway, I just realized I forgot to introduce myself – name's Ian Hunter. And you are...?"

"About to arrest you," Haley said curtly.

Ian shrugged. "Okay, but don't accuse me of being rude because I forgot to give my name." He looked over Haley's shoulder and saw the body tied to the pole. "Is that the last person who tried cracking jokes around you?"

"That's right, it is," Haley snapped. "And just keep cracking those jokes of yours."

Ian wasn't nervous at all. With a little smile, he said, "Don't waste your breath questioning our friend here over the murder of Sheldon McKenna. We've all lost enough today. I, for one, lost my lucky penny."

"What makes you think all that?" Ansel wondered out loud.

"Well...it's obvious, isn't it? Why else would you be questioning Mr. Coburn in the same room as a corpse that would have more use as a punching bag?"

"It got results, didn't it? We got him to confess to the crime. You don't know what you're getting yourself into here. Now, get out of here before we get some secrets out of you," Haley said roughly before pushing Ian hard in the shoulder.

But the thin man didn't move. Insulted, Ian said, "I don't know? I know more than you do. I know that Mr. Coburn is innocent of the charges. He lacks motive to kill the man, and he stands to lose his wife – who is really all he has left in the world – if he's convicted. Am I truly the only one who sees the discrepancy here?"

The marshals laughed, causing the hairs on the back of Ian's neck to ruffle with indignation. Haley scoffed, "What do you know? You're just some vagrant by the looks of it. You probably can't even afford intuition."

"You know, a poor man once told me that those who have nothing see everything," Ian said. "They learn to appreciate all of the things they can't have. I'm so poor I can see into another plane of existence."

"Come in out of the cold," Ansel said, beckoning Ian to step closer. He was finding this stranger to be more curious with every passing moment. He ordered Haley, "Close the door before the rest of us die."

As the door closed heavily behind Ian, Ansel said, "You have a compelling theory there, Mr. Hunter. But your talk about motives is just conjecture. We're going to need proof that's a bit more solid than your word."

"You're right – otherwise, I'm just wasting your time, aren't I?" Ian said. "Which reminds me...Mr. Coburn, what time is it?"

Caught off-guard, Martin could only look dumbly at Ian for a few seconds before finally reaching into his pocket to retrieve his watch. What was usually an instinct now felt foreign to him. The watch just felt wrong in his hand. He said thickly, "It's a few minutes after 10."

"Really? That's odd," Ian said, surprised. He pulled out his own watch to compare. "Because my watch is saying 11."

"And I'm sure somewhere in the world, someone's watch is reading 7," Layton said, rolling his eyes. "Where are you going with this?" Unlike Ansel, the rest of the marshals were beginning to lose their patience.

"The reason why his watch is an hour faster than mine is because he wound it to match the new time. The time zone changes when you enter western Nebraska. If my calculations are correct – and they are always correct – we entered that area during Mr. Coburn's disappearance and just before the derailment had occurred. The only way he could have realized the shift in time zones was by going to the front of the train, where the crew's quarters are and where they have clocks for every time zone in the country. I'm sure the conductor – the real conductor – would vouch for this man being at the front of the train during that time. Now, how could Mr. Coburn be at both the front and back of the train at the same time?" Ian paused and looked at Martin with pity. "That has to be most boring alibi I've ever heard. No wonder you admitted to killing the poor bastard – at least it makes for a better story."

"But that's the problem," Ansel said. "He did admit to the murder. What's your reasoning for that?"

"I'm not so sure about that, to be honest. My current theory for that is it has something to do with love, which I am no expert on. But then again, Mr. Coburn here is just a newlywed, so I doubt he knows more than me on the subject. How close am I, Mr. Coburn?"

"Closer than I wish," Martin said. He was afraid to look up at the faces he knew would be judging him. "When I was in the dining car with my wife earlier, I went to pay for our meal when I realized that I was almost out of the money I had stolen from my father. I've lived a life of privilege. The only thing I know how to do is spend money. How am I going to take care of my wife and I a week from now, when I'm officially broke?" He continued with a crackling voice, "And when I heard that I was facing life in jail, with a guarantee of food and shelter, I thought to myself that was my only out. It's either that or going back home and admitting to my parents that they raised an incompetent boy."

Silence fell over the men like snow. Ian was the first to speak. "I suppose we should also consider the fact that a spoiled young man would have no idea how to break into a refrigerated car, not when there are men guarding the front and back doors and the side doors are completely sealed. He wouldn't think that a refrigerated car of this size would require such a large quantity of air, or that so much air would require a large vent to match." He pointed up at the vent system above their heads. "But even if he had the mechanical aptitude to dismantle his way through the vent and kill your prisoner, there is still the problem of his circumference, which I'm sure you can calculate based on the blueberry pie he had earlier today. Unless he broke the laws of both man and physics, there is no possible way for him to squeeze through the vent and slip into this car."

"You seem to know a lot about how these vents work," Ansel said slowly. He looked Ian up and down. "And you seem scrawny enough to fit through a vent if you wanted to."

"I must obviously be the killer then," Ian, throwing his hands in the air in a gesture that was both frustration and surrender. He waited impatiently for the marshals to grasp what he was implying.

"That's not a confession, I hope?" Ansel said, praying that such a smart man couldn't be so stupid.

"It depends: do I look like the kind of person who would murder someone?"

Then, as one, the marshals hurriedly drew their guns and aimed at Ian's heart.

"Lay down!" Ansel ordered. "Put your arms behind your back! We have some questions for you."

"Well, that wasn't the response I was expecting," Ian said, disappointed.

***

"Am I interrupting?"

Davis had opened the door to his sleeping compartment to find his companion, Charlotte, kneeling on the floor by the window. Her head was bowed and her hands were clasped as if in prayer. But the only time Davis had known her to bow her head was when she was smoothing out her dress, and he had known her to clasp her hands only during social outings, because that was only proper.

Charlotte, her eyes still closed but still looking out the dark window, said, "No, there wasn't any conversation for you to interrupt."

As Davis closed the door behind him, he couldn't help but be curious. "I've never known you to be evangelical." He jumped onto the mattress, too tired to unsheathe his feet, his shoes dirtying the sheets. "Are you praying for us to get rescued? Can you put in a few good words for me? I would kneel with you, but the floor even looks cold."

"I'm not praying for us to survive," Charlotte said. "I'm praying for us to live."

"Well, it'd be hard for us to live if we don't survive," Davis said, staring listlessly up at the ceiling.

Finally, Charlotte opened her eyes to glare at him. "I'm being serious. I could only hope that we die in this blizzard. At least then, our names would show in the newspapers back home. If we survive this, we'll just die by obscurity. We've lost enough already."

"Why did you think I just met with Mr. Rowe? We were discussing the future of our little association."

"It's little and shrinking," Charlotte spat. "It'll go extinct soon enough if something drastic isn't done."

"If I could perform miracles, I'd rather be getting drunk off water."

"Separate yourself from the worms and show a little backbone for once so..."

"Can we talk about this later?" Davis whined. "I'm tired."

"No!" Charlotte said, so sharply that she startled even herself. She continued, in a softer voice, "No. The next time Mr. Rowe sees you, you're going to show some teeth and make him think you're smiling. You're going to make him afraid of you without ever knowing why. You're going to make them all afraid of you. Of all people, you should know that power is never given in life but it's taken. Your father may have taken you out of his will, but his will to conquer the world is still in you. Are you still the same man I fell in love with, the one who was destined for greater things? Or was I wrong to lose everything when I gained you?"

Davis said, his eye twitching, "I'm still that same man, Charlotte."

"Stop talking and do something. The only thing you have to lose is your courage."

***

"Then what happened?" Nellie asked, breathless.

Martin was still shaking like wind chimes from what had happened. "I don't know. Right after they arrested him, they tossed me out of the car and shut the door in my face."

"I just don't understand..." Nellie said, shaking her head. Nellie and the Coburns were huddled together in the first-class sleeping compartment. Martin had just stumbled through the door a few minutes before with a tale that seemed to grow taller as he spoke.

"You shouldn't be so surprised," Selina said, her hands folded neatly in her lap. She may have been crying hysterically earlier, but she made it a point to overcompensate now. "You've known him for less than a day. Who knows what he's capable of?"

"That's not what I meant. I meant...well, I've spoken with him all this evening. We haven't been separated since we first became introduced. Where did he find the time to kill that murderer?"

"Then he lied to the marshals about being the murderer."

"But why?" Nellie persisted, still not understanding.

"What, exactly, did Mr. Hunter tell you he did for a living?" Selina asked.

Nellie shrugged. "He told me that he was a professional adventurer, but I'm sure if someone else asks him, he'll give them a different answer."

"Where's he from?"

"Again, I didn't get a clear answer out of him," Nellie said. She didn't mention the strain she heard in Ian's voice, almost as if he was hiding an accent. The journalist in her refused to say something before she was able to verify it. Besides, she was too busy being distracted by Selina's questions and the rebellion they had awaken inside of her. Because the more she thought about it, the more she realized that she didn't understand her new friend. She had spent the better part of a day speaking with him, and she didn't know a thing about him, and this unnerved her – as it should have. Then she added, with a sudden spark of hope, "Maybe we'll be able to ask him soon enough."

"I come from my mother, although if you ask her, she'll never admit to it," a voice said suddenly behind her.

Nellie and the Coburns all jumped. Nellie turned around wildly to see Ian leaning against the door, his hands planted casually in his pockets. They hadn't heard him come in, even though the door had a little squeak to it when it was opened. Ian looked so much at peace with the world that it was hard to imagine that he had just escaped from custody a few minutes before.

Nellie was so startled, she wasn't sure if she wanted to hug or slap Ian. Instead, she found a middle ground, snapping, "What were you thinking? We were worried for you." The emotion in her voice caught her off-guard.

"Well, someone had to be worried for my safety, and it definitely wasn't going to be me," Ian said as he settled down into a cushioned chair. He winced dramatically. "Sitting on the floor like that can age a man."

"Why would you do that?" Nellie persisted.

Ian's smile evaporated a little. "Well, how else was I going to find out the truth?"

"The truth?" Nellie repeated.

"It was obvious that Mr. Coburn wasn't guilty. No offense, Mr. Coburn, but I've known killers, and you aren't a killer."

"What do you do for a living, exactly?" Nellie asked, Selina's question now infecting her.

Ian ignored her as he continued, "When the marshals had taken away Mr. Coburn, I found it interesting that he made no attempt to resist his arrest. While I had no idea what he was being arrested for, his compliance was what drew me in initially. And when I walked into that train car, and I saw Mr. Coburn and his interrogators near the tied-up corpse, the intrigue obviously deepened. And so I committed myself to the only logical choice: I falsely admitted to the murder."

"That was the only logical choice?" Nellie wondered, uncomprehending.

"I needed to free our innocent friend here while also understanding the mystery behind the murder. And so I told them what they wanted to hear, and in a few minutes, they had me tied up to the pole and left me alone in the room."

"They left you alone? Why?" Martin asked, still shuddering from his encounter with the marshals.

"I have a talent for driving people away. I don't get invited to a lot of social events, which, believe it or not, I consider to be a gift rather than a curse," Ian said. What Ian failed to mention was that one of the marshals, in a spasm of frustration, had pressed his gun against Ian's temple during his interrogation. Ian didn't bother to share this detail because he didn't find it relevant to his story. "And thank goodness they left me alone with my thoughts, because I needed it."

"You weren't alone. You were tied up with a corpse," Martin said, understandably horrified.

"Correction: it was evidence, but it wasn't the only evidence. Did you remember the paint peeling off the walls?"

Martin shook his head slowly. Ian sighed. "You couldn't have asked for a more blatant clue as to how Mr. McKenna had died."

Nellie leaned forward, having forgotten her earlier disgust with Ian. She asked, "How does the paint give it away?"

"Paint can peel for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is if the paint comes into contact with moisture. So this is my theory. When I was in Kansas City, I read that the rail yard that houses train cars for this company was caught up in major flooding recently. I believe the refrigerated car was among those impacted, and its ventilation system was severely damaged as a result. Now, the ventilation system onboard your average refrigerated car uses a supply of chloroethane to cool the air that is pumped into the interior. As useful as this chemical is, it can be dangerous, deadly even, if you are breathing it in for a sufficient amount of time. Mr. McKenna was inadvertently being poisoned by the sheer levels of the chemical present inside of the car. During their brief interrogation of me, the marshals revealed that they were posted outside of the doors of the train car for most of the trip from Kansas City. It was only by this saving grace that they weren't killed in the same manner.

"So when I found myself being bound to the same pole as the dead killer, I decided to check the body for evidence of chloroethane poisoning. Initial symptoms include dehydration, blurred vision, and dizziness only a drunk can appreciate, among other ailments. The longer you're exposed to the chemical, the worse the symptoms become, culminating in vomiting, loss of consciousness, and failure of the heart and lungs. When I looked over the corpse, it showed signs of these very symptoms. There was dried vomit around the mouth and the corpse was blue in the face, indicating that McKenna ultimately died from choking on his bile. There was bruising on the neck indicating that he was flailing against his restraints at one point.

"Not only did the body tell a story, but I was in danger of becoming a storyteller myself. While I'm confident that most of the fumes had dissipated by the time I found myself in my sticky situation, I still felt a bit woozy. They say that chloroethane poisoning is similar to intoxication. Whether I was beginning to feel the effects or if I had just subconsciously convinced myself that I was being poisoned was irrelevant. What was relevant was that I had to make my escape, and escape I did."

"How did you escape?" Nellie asked.

Ian grinned. "In my travels, I once met an Indian soldier who deserted his post while stationed in Bombay. When the soldier was captured, his British captain was planning on strapping him to the mouth of a cannon and lighting the fuse. The night before the execution, the Indian somehow escaped his cell. He told me how he did it so that we would be even. Do me a favor and I'll pay it forward."

"I think we're missing the bigger picture though," Nellie pointed out. "And that is that no one is responsible for McKenna's murder. The marshals are looking for a killer that doesn't exist. If anyone should be tried for his murder, it should be the awful engineer who designed that ventilation system."

"Do you think that scenario is actually playing out in their minds?" Ian argued. "As far as they're concerned, they're trapped on a train brimming with suspects. This McKenna fellow is one of the most hated people in Wyoming, if you believe everything you read in the papers. The marshals would believe in a pair of hands being the killer before they believed in a chloroethane leak. And given that Wyoming is still recovering from that range war some months back, all it takes is accusing the wrong person of murder to rip off the scab. Who knows what's going to happen in the next day – the next few hours, even. It'll be enough to make God go mad."

Chapter 9

"Mr. Hunter?"

"Yes?" Ian said. He was stretched out on the chair in the sleeping compartment, his feet propped up on the mattress across from him. He spoke without cracking open his eyes.

"Can I trouble you for a minute?" Martin asked, more than a bit hesitant. He was swinging his pocket watch like a pendulum without meaning to.

"Trouble away," Ian sighed. "I'm not going anywhere."

That much was true. Since Ian had escaped while in custody of the marshals, he was technically a fugitive until he could clear his name. Until then, he was confined to the sleeping compartment like a prized stallion to its stable. He was already so bored that he was secretly praying for a knock at the door and the marshals to arrest him again. The fact that the women had gone to dinner and left him alone with the insufferable Martin only made him wish for another round with the marshals.

"Back in the refrigerated car, when I was being questioned by the marshals," Martin said, "what made you think that I was innocent?"

"I suppose you can just call it woman's intuition."

The joke went over Martin's head. "But you're a man," he said, serious.

"I picked up my intuition from my mother," Ian said, rolling his eyes. "But if you really must know, I paid one of the porters some..."

"Who? George?" Martin interrupted.

Finally opening his eyes, Ian stared at him blankly for a few moments. "Who?"

"You know, George – the one who tends to this car."

Ian frowned at him. "His name's Laurence, actually...you do know that George is just a lazy nickname that people give the porters, right?"

"Right, of course," Martin said in a tone that was not entirely convincing.

"You know, our species wasn't just dropped on the top of the world. We had to claw our way to the top, and you know how we did that? We observed everything, from the colors of the poisonous fruits to the breathing of a lion in the tall grass to the smell of a wildfire. We only got this far by being painfully aware of everything going on around us. The fact that you didn't bother to learn the name of a useful man like Laurence bothers me. Anyway, I paid him a bit of money to find you and report your location back to me and only me."

"Why did you go through all of that trouble over me?" Martin asked.

"Again, we must be painfully aware of everything. Nobody just disappears on a train – you were obviously somewhere that you didn't want your wife to know about. So while I wanted to know – just out of curiosity, mind you – I thought it would be best to be discreet about it."

"And I appreciate that."

"So what were you really doing in the crew's quarters?" Ian asked in a way that was so casual that Martin almost missed the question.

"I thought we already covered this when the marshals were interrogating me," Martin replied. "Remember? I was checking the time."

"No, no – you didn't set out to do that. You just happened to notice the change in time zones when you had walked into the crew's quarters. You were there for something else, and you won't even trust me with the information after I saved your life."

"And a lot of good you did, saving my life," Martin said, an answer Ian found to be curious. Just then, the door to the compartment opened. Alert, Ian jumped out of his chair, expecting a confrontation with the marshals. Instead, it was just Nellie and Selina, back from dinner.

Ian breathed a sigh of relief. "Did you bring me any presents?" Ian asked, hopeful.

Nellie, who had part of her wide skirt bunched up in her hand, procured a dinner roll and handed it to him. Ian looked at his meal, downcast. He said heavily, "Just like the dinners my mother used to make."

"You'll eat it and you'll like it. That was all I could smuggle out of the dining car without getting the porters suspicious."

"You couldn't get some butter at least?" Ian asked as he chewed on the bread, the hard crust crackling in his mouth. "No offense, but you have more than enough fabric on that skirt to hide some more food, if you know what I mean."

"Are you calling me fat?" Nellie asked with grinning eyes.

"No, I'm saying you have more than enough fabric on that skirt of yours."

"And I'm assuming that you need the butter to slick back that hair of yours some more?"

"It's a good thing I'm supposed to be a cold-blooded killer – otherwise, my feelings would be hurt," Ian said. "You know, I don't get why so many people hate me so much."

Nellie shrugged. "I guess it depends."

Ian looked perplexed. "It depends on what?"

"Well, how many of those people have you spoken with for more than a minute?"

Ian laughed a little. "Are you saying that I'm a bad conversationalist...?"

The door to their compartment burst open. All four people spun around, not knowing what to expect. But for the second time in as nearly minutes, it wasn't the marshals. Instead it was the porter Laurence, breathless, his face polished with sweat. Martin said, indignant, "You're supposed to knock, you know..."

Ian held up a hand to silence him. Whatever Martin had to say, Ian had a feeling that Laurence had something more important to share. "What is it, Laurence?" Ian said, offering the porter a seat. He saw the look on the porter's face before, when a person struggled to put a tragedy into words.

Laurence cradled his head in his hands and rocked back and forth. Ian put a hand on Laurence's shoulder and repeated, "What is it?"

The porter looked up at Ian. "You're going to have to see it to believe it."

***

As Laurence led Ian and his companions by the light of his lantern, he explained, his voice still on shaky legs, "We were told by the conductor to do checks on the passengers every thirty minutes, you know, to make sure that everyone was doing well."

As Laurence opened the door and ushered the passengers into the next car, Ian caught a glance of the box of coal being used to fuel the car's stove. He noticed how low the coal was getting. "We won't be doing well for much longer," Ian muttered.

They walked through the vestibule between the train cars. As they stepped onboard the next car, they found themselves walking between piles of luggage that loomed like mountains but swayed like trees. There was a hole somewhere in the wall, big enough for a whistle of wind to worm its way through. Something about the whole car seemed off to Ian. He let his eyes adjust to the darkness for a few moments before he realized that they were inside of a passenger car that had been hastily converted for hauling luggage. The carpet had been stripped off the floor, leaving behind the ugly planks that creaked like old bones at every step. The sleeping compartments were gutted, with only the frame remaining. Out of the corner of his eye, Ian saw four sets of feet poking out from behind a pile of luggage.

Ian pointed this out. "They're the people who died from the derailment, I presume?"

Laurence sighed. "They are – I helped carry them here. But they're not the reason why...well, again, it's best that I show you."

While most of the train car was hollowed out to hold as much luggage as possible, there was a tiny restroom still intact in the far corner. Laurence followed Ian's gaze and said, "It's in there, Mr. Hunter."

As Ian approached the restroom, he called back, "Laurence, do me a favor and shine a lantern over here."

The porter quietly did what he was asked as Ian reached the bathroom door. Ian looked down and saw a dark puddle trickling from beneath the door. Reaching down, he ran a finger through the puddle and held it up. He frowned when he saw his finger painted red. Ian shook the blood off and twisted the door handle – the handle was loose but the door was stiff, as if it was jammed. Wheezing, Ian managed to get the door open a foot, just enough for him to peer inside. In what little light could find its way to him, Ian could see something propped up against the door, like the shadow of a puppet.

"Did you find the body like this?" Ian casually asked as he pushed the door the rest of the way open.

Nellie was alarmed. "There's a body in there?"

"All I saw was the blood, and that was all I wanted to see," Laurence said.

"Mr. Coburn, help me pull this body out," Ian called out from the restroom.

Martin paled. "I'd rather not, thank you."

"You've already been accused of being a murderer today. You might as well get your hands bloody."

Martin sighed and walked over to help Ian pull out the body. The two men grunted as they dragged the corpse. As they set it down on the floor, Selina started to scream, but Nellie quickly muffled her. As Nellie calmed down Selina, the group looked at the body. The corpse was as still as a sculpture and looked like one. The broad shoulders and bulky chest were obvious even through the man's tailored suit and were the result of years of exercise, all wasted. The last painful seconds of his life lingered on in the snarl tattooed on his face. What had caused Selina to scream was a large knife that was planted in the man's side. Ian noticed a number of other stab wounds in the victim's abdomen.

Ian leaned down and inspected the knife stuck in the man. He said to himself, "It's a good thing that he was stabbed rather than shot."

"I fail to see how that's any better," Nellie said as she kneeled down next to him.

Ian pointed at the knife handle, crafted out of a mule deer antler. "A knife has a personality of its own – a bullet doesn't. When our murderer stabbed the victim, he might as well have planted a flag. It tells us more about him than we could have known otherwise."

"Explain," Nellie commanded, intrigued.

"Just one moment," Ian said as he wrestled with the blade. He had to work it back and forth a number of times before he was able to free the knife from the body's ribcage. There was an awful suction sound, followed by blood slipping out of the open wound. Ian examined the knife curiously, turning it around and peering at every detail. He said, "This is a knife used for skinning animals."

"How can you tell?"

Ian pointed at the rounded edge of the blade. "See that – that allows the person to peel away the skin from the animal without damaging it." He then pointed at how the rounded edge curled back on itself a bit. "And that gut hook allows the person to pull the intestines out of the animal. Whoever our killer was, he was definitely involved with animal skins. He's also left-handed."

"How do you know these things?" Nellie asked.

It took all Ian had to hide his smile. "There are two clues: all of the stab wounds are on the victim's left side, and there is blood on his lips. That indicates that our killer crept up on his victim, held his hand over the victim's mouth, and stabbed him repeatedly using his dominant hand. During the scuffle, the victim bit his killer's hand, explaining the blood on his mouth that didn't come from his mouth."

Ian heard another gasp from behind him, and he turned, expecting to see the Coburns losing their nerve again. But it wasn't the Coburns. Instead, some more of the passengers and crew had appeared, having heard Selina's scream from a minute before. Ian sighed. "This is all I need is for this to become a spectacle."

As the crowd began to grow, Ian hastily took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped the bloody knife in it. Nellie asked him, "You're going to take the evidence?"

"This is too important for those incompetent marshals to mess up..."

"Did somebody call for us?" Haley called out sarcastically.

Ian turned his head sharply. Two of the marshals, Haley and Bowman, were pushing their way through the crowd towards the crime scene. As he roughly pushed aside a passenger, Bowman ordered, "You stay right there, sir! We've been looking for you."

Ian stood up and raised his hands, not in surrender but to ask the marshals to stop. "Now, I know what this looks like, gentlemen. I mean, here I am, having escaped from custody, I'm standing over a dead body, I'm covered in blood, and I'm holding the murder weapon. But this isn't what it looks like..."

By this time, the marshals had reached Ian. As Haley reached for his holstered gun, he asked, "So what does it look like then?"

"It looks like...it looks like..." Ian said, struggling to find words. He suddenly lashed out, striking Haley in the face with his right fist. In the same, sweeping motion, he snapped his arm back and elbowed Bowman in the temple. As both of the marshals stumbled, Ian ran past them and into the startled crowd.

"I apologize for not finding something clever to say!" Ian shouted as he ran through the vestibule into the first-class sleeping car. He slammed the door shut behind him just before a shot rang out and a bullet gnawed on the wooden door. Ian didn't stop to appreciate how lucky he was just then. Rather, he sprinted through the sleeping car and into the dining car, accidentally knocking over a porter with a pitcher of water along the way. As fast as he was running, though, his mind was even quicker. He had to suppress those millions of years of primitive instinct, to run and hide when the predator gives chase. The marshals would stop at nothing now to tear the train apart and find their prey.

No, he had to do more than disappear – he had to evolve entirely.

***

The marshals kicked open the door to the coach car, startling some of the passengers out of their hibernation. Just a few hours before, the coal had dwindled for the coach cars, and the porters were being forced to use coal dust to keep the fires fed. But it wasn't enough, and as the fire had starved, the blizzard had drilled its way through every crack in the car. And so it wasn't long before heavy curtains of cold had been draped everywhere.

At first, the people in the coach cars shook like mad. And then, all of the sudden, they couldn't feel the shaking in their hands. Their fingers were heavy and limp, as if they were sweating anchors. The paralysis was being poured into them, and it wouldn't be long before the stillness touched their hearts.

When the two marshals had entered, a few of the passengers picked their heads up to look at the disturbance. But then the curiosity had flickered out in their eyes, and the passengers had gone back to sleep, thinking that they were just dreaming. But for the marshals, everything in the car felt very real to them. Even the shadows felt solid enough, and Haley expected any moment for a silhouette to jump out and plunge a dark dagger into him. The pneumonic wheeze of the storm outside sounded like Ian's breath, just inches away in the darkness. The marshals knew that a life was going to suddenly scream to a stop any moment – they just didn't know if it was going to be theirs or Ian's.

As the two marshals made their way down the aisle, ready to draw their revolvers, they passed by a man who was sleeping too comfortably on the wooden bench. The man's hair was slicked to the side, and his beard was black and greasy. He wore a black eye that had flecks of red across it and a long jacket that was the color of wet sand. Bowman looked at him curiously for a moment, not recalling seeing the man before, when he heard Haley hiss, "Whitaker!"

Bowman looked away from the man and down the aisle, where Haley stood. Haley gestured with his lantern towards the end of the car like a lighthouse. "Stay with me," the young marshal said.

Bowman grunted and continued walking with Haley. As he did, he pulled out his revolver and cocked back the hammer. There was only so much more train left, and a cornered man becomes desperate. But one way or another, they were going to get their man, like they always did – whether or not their man was actually guilty was another question entirely.

The marshals made their way to the end of the car, opened the door, and stepped out into the vestibule. They had barely closed the door behind them when the door at the front of the coach car opened. Nellie stepped into the car, looking around wildly for any sign of her fugitive friend. As she walked down the aisle, she suddenly stopped and stared at the man sitting on the bench to her left, the same man who Bowman had looked at just seconds before. Her eyes narrowed, Nellie tapped the man on the shoulder.

The man's eyes opened as Nellie whispered, "As a woman, I'm supposed to know when makeup has been applied wrong."

"I'm sorry, but I didn't have much time to apply a foundation," Ian said. When he was running out of the dining car, he took a moment to dip his hand into the coal box and take out a handful of dust. He wiped his hand in his beard to make it darker and ran his hair to the side. For an additional touch, he rubbed some of the dust around his eye. He realized that he still had some of the victim's blood on his other hand, and so he mixed it in with the coal dust to give the impression of a black eye. He then turned his coat inside-out to complete the ensemble. "Besides," Ian added, "it was enough to convince the marshals, and that was all that mattered."

Nellie squeezed in between Ian and an elderly gentleman on the bench. She leaned over and said quietly to Ian, "Right after you made your exit – pursued by a bear as Shakespeare once put it – someone in the crowd identified the body."

"And?"

"His name was Ethan Vaughn. He was a bodyguard for one of the ranchers traveling in our car."

Ian frowned. "So it was political then."

"You think it was political?"

Ian nodded. "The bodyguard for a rich rancher, who was found attacked from behind and stabbed repeatedly? I'd say so. Is the rancher still safe?"

"For now – I saw his other bodyguard hustling the rancher and his wife into their sleeping compartment."

"So first Mr. McKenna dies, and now this Vaughn fellow. This is only going to escalate."

"I thought you said that McKenna died from natural causes? That is, if we assume that dying from chloroethane poisoning in a refrigerated car is perfectly natural."

"We know that, but no one else does. All it takes is a spark to start a fire, and McKenna was a lightning strike. All it would take..." Ian paused and lowered his voice even more. "All it would take is a poor rancher in a coach car like this finding out that one of the villains from the range war has been found dead under mysterious circumstances. A small-time rancher with a grudge hears something like that, they can get inspired. And I imagine it'd be easy to take care of a bodyguard – they're so used to protecting their employer that they don't think to protect themselves."

Nellie was afraid to ask how he knew that last bit of information. Instead, she asked, "So, what do you think is going to happen next?"

Ian's face was stone. "I think we both know what's going to happen next."

Chapter 10

"So, uh, young man, what you looking for?"

Ian, whose head was folded against his chest, his arms crossed, looked up. Sitting next to him on the bench was an elderly man, his hair like the blizzard outside. And while a bald spot was beginning to fester on top of his head, he had a wooly beard that must have itched. A yellow smile hacked its way through the overgrown beard and lit up his face.

Ian stared at the man for a moment, trying to place the accent. He then said, "You're Swedish."

The man looked taken aback by this. "Yes, I am! How you know?"

"I can hear the symphony in your voice," Ian said. Then, noticing the man look confused, Ian rephrased himself. He mimed an oscillation with his hand. "Your voice – it's musical."

The man understood. "Oh! Thank you, thank you." He pointed to himself. "Kasper Solberg." He then pointed to the sleeping woman next to him, her head resting on her shoulder. She had wavy, red hair, like a fire that knew it was about to die. "Elisa – my wife."

Ian gave a weak smile. He was so exhausted. "Ian Hunter," he said, patting his chest. "It's nice to meet you."

Ian tried to close his eyes again, but Kasper repeated, "What you looking for?"

Ian sighed. "Sleep."

The Swede gave a loud, blasting laugh. "Sleep? If you want sleep then why you leave home? We live in St. Paul and we hear they find gold in creek. I'll make a necklace for my Elisa. She never had a necklace. If you don't know what you looking for, find a necklace."

"I will keep that in mind – thank you," Ian said curtly. He tried to close his eyes once more, but Kasper prodded him awake one more time.

"We thought we die poor, but then we read the newspaper. Well, my wife, she reads the newspaper – she knows the, eh, language better. And I think: here is our second chance! Maybe second chance for you is not jewels. Maybe second chance for you something else?"

Part of Ian wanted to tell the elderly man that, statistically speaking, he wasn't going to enjoy his second chance for much longer. But there was an enthusiasm in Kasper's voice that spoke better than the Swede did, making Ian want to believe it.

Ian was about to say something when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Solely by instinct, Ian grabbed at the hand and glanced up sharply, only to find himself face-to-face with Nellie. "Give me a warning next time," Ian growled at her, annoyed.

"You must be the wife! It's nice to meet you," Kasper said, extending a leathery handshake. He may have missed the tension in Nellie's face, but Ian didn't. Ignoring Kasper's hand, Nellie motioned for Ian to follow her. All too eager for another mystery, Ian rose out of his seat at the bench and followed Nellie. Behind him, he could hear Kasper struggling to find the word in English to express his surprise.

As they walked briskly, Ian asked, "What happened?" He needed to know why he was being pulled out of exile in the coach car.

"There's been another murder, well, three actually..." Nellie began to say as they made their way to the end of the car. Nellie yelped a little as Ian grabbed her by the arm and hustled her into the bathroom. Nellie was forced to squeeze between the dirty toilet and infested wall as Ian closed the door.

As Nellie recovered, she said sarcastically, "Dark, cramped, wet – I feel like I'm being born again."

There was a gas lamp planted on the wall, giving off a fluttering light like a firefly. The little flame haunted Ian's face. "What happened?" He demanded.

Nellie paused. "There was a murder-suicide in the first-class car."

"Not involving our hapless friends, I hope?"

"No. Remember the rancher I told you about earlier, the one whose bodyguard shoved him into his sleeping compartment after the last murder? The wife had put a bullet in each man's head before killing herself. We heard the gunshots, of course – it sounded like the world was ending. I ran in, and that's when..." Nellie choked up, as the words inflated in her throat. "I saw the revolver still smoldering in her hand. It was the only thing still warm on her." She shook her head. "I never felt so cold in my entire life."

Then, perhaps prompted by her words, Nellie reached out, hoping to embrace her friend and feel warm again. But Ian suddenly gripped her by the shoulders, stopping her in her tracks. "Listen," he said steadily, "were the marshals already there when you were there?"

"What? No, no, they weren't. Someone went to go fetch them."

"Go back to the car, now! I need you to take a second look at the crime scene..."

Nellie looked down and shook her head. "I can't," she said tearfully.

"You will, before the marshals get there and do what they do best and foul up the investigation. If we lose the trail now, we won't pick it up again until the next person dies. We have to find out who our murderer is."

Nellie stared at him. "You don't think it was the wife?"

"Go – now!"

Nellie and Ian awkwardly switched places in the tiny restroom so that Nellie could walk out the door. Before she could do, Ian suddenly thought of something. "Nellie?"

"Yes?"

"Remember: it's the little things that matter. When you look at a painting, you don't look at the big picture – you look at the brushstrokes."

Nellie was confused. "Of course you look at the big picture..."

"Just go!" Ian said, pushing her back out into the hallway and closing the restroom door behind her.

Nellie stared at the door for a moment, trying to make sense of what he was asking of her. Then, shaking her head, she muttered, "The things I do for charity."

The moment she walked out onto the vestibule and closed the car door behind her, the door at the other end of the coach car opened and the marshals marched through, on their way to yet another crime scene.

***

As Nellie walked through the dining car, she tried to see the world through Ian's dark eyes and find the brushstrokes. True, she was an investigative reporter, who had once feigned insanity in order to investigate conditions at an insane asylum. She knew how to pull details like weeds. What she didn't have was Ian's cold, inhuman observations of the world around him. His mind was like reading a geologist's journal. Nellie tried to find that same indifference in her soul, but it wouldn't surface. Her editor had picked her apart for that before, saying that she got too entangled in her subjects and couldn't distance herself from her articles. She once thought that was her greatest strength, but her short time with Ian was beginning to make her question that. Can you truly study a world that you're apart of?

By then, Nellie had stepped onto the rickety vestibule between the dining car and first-class. Before she opened up the door to the sleeping car, she took a deep breath. It was time to make her strange friend proud.

She opened the door and immediately felt like she had just walked onstage in the middle of a tragic play. A crowd of first-class passengers and porters had crowded the door to the Rowes' sleeping compartment. The women there had their hands to their mouths, the mask of shock. The men looked grim, shaking their heads in disbelief. If Nellie had the time, she would have thought about the marathon of scares running through their minds. She would have thought about how they reserved a spot in the first-class car, thinking that they would be insulated from just how real the world can get. To have a murder occur just feet from where they slept made them feel violated, as if the walls around them were just in their imagination.

But Nellie didn't have the time to dwell on thoughts like that. She had seconds, if that, before the marshals arrived and closed off the sleeping compartment as a crime scene. She had to inhale as much of the details as possible. As Nellie made her way through the crowd, she spotted the Coburns huddled together, Selina washing her face with tears, Martin's knees shaking without his knowing.

Feeling empowered, Nellie hissed at Martin, "Run into the dining car and distract the marshals!"

"Why..." Martin began, but stopped when he saw the acceleration of fury in Nellie's eyes. Suddenly realizing that now wasn't the time for an explanation, Martin said, "Okay."

Her eyes wide, Selina tried to reach out and grab Martin's shoulder, but her husband had already made his way towards the door. Turning to Nellie, Selina demanded, "Don't you remember the last time my husband talked to the marshals...?"

But Nellie had abandoned Selina too. As she wrestled her way through the crowd, Nellie excused herself as politely as she could as she elbowed people aside. Then abruptly, Nellie found herself at the door to the sleeping compartment. She immediately felt the chill in the air, as streamers of frost slipped through the window that was cracked open. Nellie then fought down the urge to vomit as she looked into the shadow of the human spirit.

The first body she saw was that of Owen Bristol, the last remaining bodyguard to the Rowes. He had his back to the door when he was shot, and when Nellie had opened up the door earlier, his body had fallen out into the hallway, almost landing on her. From the floor, Owen's eyes were staring back up at Nellie. His lips were locked in a painful grin, as if he had heard a punchline in the gunshot. There was a jagged circle dug into his forehead, where the bullet had drilled through and scrambled his brains. A slug of blood was trickling down the side of his head and dripping on the floor.

The second body she saw was that of Clark Rowe, one of the more famous names in ranching in Wyoming. With his salty beard and wrinkles irrigated in his face, Rowe still did not have the look of a man prepared to meet his end. His body was sprawled out on the couch, a limp arm dangling just an inch off the floor. Clark's jaundiced eyes were open and staring in horror at the ceiling. Even from where she stood, she was distracted by the golden color of his eyes, and it reminded her of the ancient tradition of placing coins on the eyes of the dead. Of all the money that Clark had accumulated through his life, this was the only gold he was taking with him into the afterlife.

And the third body belonged to Adele Rowe. The slim lady, with straw-colored hair knotted tightly into a bun, Adele once looked as warm as the sunshine, but now she was as cold as the moonlight. Her face had leaked its burning color, and her jaw was slack as if her scream had outlived her. She was propped up against the back wall of the compartment, underneath the blizzard-black windows. Her left leg was stretched out in front of her, her right curled awkwardly to the side. She had the revolver in her right hand, the elbow still leaning against a cushioned chair. From where Nellie stood, it was hard to tell where the bullet had entered Adele's skull. But there was blood draining down the side of her neck, ruining her pearl necklace, and so the wound must have been just behind Adele's ear. Nellie found it so hard to believe that someone with so dainty hands could have been responsible for so monstrous a crime.

Nellie was able to absorb all of this information in just a handful of seconds. She was startled by this to say the least. She wondered if this was what it was like to be Ian. She then wondered if Ian ever became startled anymore.

Just then, there was the sound of a door opening, and Nellie heard a heavy parade of boots enter the train car. She didn't have to turn around to know who it was, mostly because she heard the one marshal snap at Martin, "For an innocent man, you sure have been found at the scene of a lot of murders lately."

Martin mumbled something forgettable about bad luck as one of the marshals roughly pushed Nellie to the side before saying, "Step away, lady. Let us do our work in...oh, God."

The marshal forgot what he was saying as he saw the grisly scene before him. Nellie quietly melted back into the crowd as the marshal shook his head. He said to one of his fellow marshals standing behind him, "Remind me when we get to Cheyenne that I have to start a drinking problem."

***

"So, what did you see?" Ian asked a little too eagerly.

Again, the two found themselves pressed together in the claustrophobic bathroom in coach. There was a part of Nellie that felt obligated to be concerned. What would the other passengers think if they spotted the two of them stepping out of the bathroom together? If Ian was worried about such an embarrassing situation, he certainly didn't show it.

Nellie began her story with a sigh, and then she went on to describe the massacre with as much detail as possible. Where others would have been sickened by such a tale, Ian had never been more attentive. Ian had even apologized at one point for interrupting her to ask a question about how Clark was found on the couch. If Nellie had known Ian for any longer than a day, she would have appreciated just how rare it was when he remembered his manners. Nellie supposed, though, that someone had to listen to her story, because she certainly didn't want to. As she spoke, she could feel the tide of sick rising inside of her. She could barely get the last of the words out before her throat clenched up. She felt as if Ian was strangling the words out of her, and she was beginning to understand just how deep someone could hate Ian Hunter.

But finally the story was done, and Nellie sat down on the toilet lid, putting her face in her hands as if in prayer. It was obvious that Ian wanted to pace, to burn off the electricity that was bleeding through his body. But in a space so small, Ian had to resort to putting his head against the wall and hammering his fists lightly against the paint.

Nellie looked up and stared at Ian, vaguely curious. "What are you doing?" Nellie asked.

"The hand the lady held the gun in...did you get a good look at the hand?"

"As best as I could. I was across the room, after all. I wasn't about to go walking through their blood."

Ian stopped pounding his hands against the wall and sighed dramatically. "If you want to investigate something, you have to be willing to get your hands dirty – or your feet for that matter."

"Thanks," Nellie said sarcastically. "I'll keep that in mind in case I ever want to become a reporter. And her hand was fine – my mother could only wish I kept my hands like that. She likes to say that I have my father's hands."

"And her gunshot wound, you believe it was somewhere behind her ear, towards the back of her head almost?"

"I would go as far as to say that, yes."

Ian looked away from the wall and at Nellie. "You have the two most important clues in your hands, and you're somehow just rubbing the sticks together without making a fire."

"Then make me a fire," Nellie said, getting impatient.

"Well, you described her as having delicate hands," Ian began. "Yet she was able to hold a revolver behind her ear and pull the trigger." With one hand, he mimed holding a gun to his head, in the same spot he was describing. "At the very least, this is an awkward position to hold. At the most, you find out just how weak your arm is. Mix that together with the powerful kick to a revolver, and you're looking at the very real possibility of bruising or even fractures. And yet, there's no sign of trauma on her wrist, not even a bump."

"Are you a doctor or something?" Nellie asked, incredulous that a vagrant like Ian could be so knowledgeable about so much.

Ian ignored her as he continued, "And you mentioned that her left leg was stretched out. Now, it's not definitive, but there is some correlation between handedness and footedness as one would imagine. So we can reasonably conclude our femme fatale was left-handed, sinister in more ways than one. But if she was left-handed, why did she hold the gun in her right? Things aren't adding up. You mentioned that the window was open?"

"By just a hair, but that's just enough in weather like this."

"Even if the room was stuffy, the cold out there is a wolf that can kill a man in seconds. And there is nothing outside that they can see beyond a few feet. So there was no point for the people inside to open the window..."

Ian paused, and then his face brightened. "You're going to like this."

"I probably won't, but continue."

"Well, what if it wasn't someone inside? What if it was someone outside? So here's my theory: our killer crept up to the window, unseen in the blizzard, and opened the window and opened fire. When he was done, he reached through the window and planted his gun in the woman's hand. It explains everything: the awkward wound behind the lady's head, the gun not being in her dominant hand, the window being open in a snowstorm. It explains everything..."

"Except for a motive," Nellie interrupted.

Ian hesitated. "Well, yes, but if we knew the motive, we would know the killer's identity. That would just be too easy. It's just a shame that the wind is blowing so hard out there. Otherwise, we could decipher the boot prints the killer left behind. I once identified a killer based on the indentations his footsteps made in the sand."

"You must enjoy teasing people, saying things like that," Nellie said.

Ian ignored her, though, and said to himself, "But there's more than one way to find a name. Sometimes, even, the name speaks for itself."

Chapter 11

"Marshal? May I speak with you for a moment?"

Ansel was kneeling, examining the head wound on the bodyguard killed in the massacre, when he heard the little voice call out. The marshal looked up to see one of the first-class passengers standing in the doorway. He didn't know the passenger by name, but he recognized the face, with the thick glasses and thin goatee. Ansel remembered the face during a visit to the dining car from what felt like years ago but was actually two days beforehand. The marshal remembered the passenger being in an intense conversation with the corpse to his left.

Ansel stood up, wincing as his knees creaked. "How can I help you, sir?" He asked.

The passenger struggled for the words. "My name is Davis, um, Ezra Davis. I am – was – a business associate of his." He pointed with a shaky finger at Clark's body stretched out on the couch, staining the fine cushions red.

"I'm sorry for your loss, sir," Ansel said with a sigh, but not for Davis losing an associate. He sighed because Death was running rabid through the train, and there was no telling who was going to be the next one bitten. He didn't even remember the war being this heavy on the soul.

"I need to talk with you," Davis said in a pleading voice. He added, "In private, please." Ansel's first impression of Davis was that the man had status, and yet he had never seen someone so powerful look so helpless.

Still, Ansel was reluctant to leave the crime scene. He pointed to his fellow marshal, Haley, who was pulling Adele's body away from the wall to get a better look at her wound. "We're still investigating this mess," Ansel said. "If you have something to say, say it here."

"It's for the best that I don't say it here," Davis persisted. He gestured to the curious crowd that was still milling about in the corridor as he mouthed the words, "Someone might hear."

His eyes narrowed, Ansel looked at Davis for a few moments before saying to Haley, "I'm going to go talk with this gentleman for a few minutes. Make sure no one but me walks in here while I'm gone."

"Don't worry about that. I didn't even want to walk in here," Haley said with a grimace, lifting his boot up and examining the blood that had gotten on it. In another time, Ansel would have been alarmed that this was what disgusted Haley the most about the scene. But Ansel was distracted by Davis and what he could possibly have to say.

And that was how, less than a minute later, Ansel found his self in the sleeping compartment next door, sitting across from Davis and two of his companions. The woman sitting next to him was wearing too elegant of a dress for the murders that happened next door, her hair too polished for their train being stuck in a blizzard. To the other side of Davis sat a silent man with a square jaw and curly hair that was graying at the wingtips. They were sitting in awkward silence before Davis broke it with a hammer. He asked, "Did you want a drink? I have a bottle of single malt that's packed away in my suitcase, but I can have Mr. Price here fetch it for us."

"That won't be necessary," Ansel said stiffly. "I won't be here for that long. Now, you said you have some important news for me?"

"Oh, yes, that's right," Davis said before clearing his throat. He looked to the woman sitting next to him. She gave an encouraging nod, and so Davis continued, "I think I know who is responsible for what's been going on."

"Is that so?" Ansel said, barely interested. He found that whenever something inexplicable happened, there were as many theories as there were people. He learned long before to be skeptical around people who offered unsolicited opinions.

Ansel's lack of faith was telling, because Davis said, "I know you don't believe me. You must be asking yourself what qualifies a privileged man like me to talk about something so unfortunate. In reality, that is all of the qualification that I need."

"Is that so?"

"It is," Davis said, starting to find his strength. "Do you know what Clark was? What I am?"

_Both pains in my backside,_ Ansel wanted to say. Instead, he asked, "No, what?"

"If you had thought to review the passenger manifest when this was starting to happen, you would know. Regardless, we're ranchers, returning home from a business meeting in Kansas City."

"And how, exactly, is that relevant to the crime we have on hand?"

"We're survivors of the range war that happened in Wyoming some months back. It was sprayed across newspapers everywhere – you must have read it somewhere. But if you've already forgotten that you had been transporting that foul Sheldon McKenna to Wyoming, then you can be forgiven for forgetting the headlines then."

Ansel brushed off the veiled insult, instead choosing to be surprised. "How did you know about Mr. McKenna?"

"Word travels quickly, especially on a train, and especially when that train is trapped in the snow," Davis said. "But that's not the point. The point is that when we heard about that monster dying, we thought to ourselves that it was for the best. True, some of our more foolish associates had hired him as a mercenary during the fight, unaware of what atrocities he was capable of. But monsters live to be slayed, so we thought it was the universe just straightening itself out. But then we heard about what happened to one of Clark's bodyguards, being so brutally murdered in the baggage car. We began to think that maybe the universe was over-correcting itself. And then what happened to Clark and his other bodyguard..."

"All signs point to the wife being the culprit," Ansel interrupted. "You think that the wife was responsible for the other murders?"

Davis' eyes snarled a bit at being interrupted. But in an instant, he was back to his regal self, saying, "What the manifest will tell you is that his wife's name was Adele Rowe. What the manifest won't tell you is the family that she had come from. I don't remember the family name – I only remember it was something forgettable – but they were poorer than the dirt they plowed. My associate rescued her from that life of poverty, and she never forgave him for that."

"And he actually told you all this about his wife?" Ansel wondered.

"He told me because he was hoping that someone else could understand it for him. But she held onto those feelings of resentment over these many years until she heard that those on our side in the war were dying onboard. I once saw a spark travel from one burning cornfield to one across the road and light up that one as well. Sir, I think we're seeing that spark now."

"Again, because you're rich, you feel qualified enough to talk about the poor?" Ansel asked, incredulous against his will.

"I don't know what it means to be poor, but I know what it means to be desperate. When I finally found love..." Davis paused to pat the hand of the woman next to him. "My family didn't approve of Charlotte. They said that she was poor in everything. They said that if I were to marry her, I wouldn't raise her up to our class but I would fall to hers. I lost my inheritance over what they insisted on calling a scandal, but I called the love you find in fairy tales. And I've been raising us up from those depths ever since. So yes, I know how the desperate feel, and I know how they want revenge for losing. They're hungry, and they won't feel full until us three..." He gestured to his self, Charlotte, and the bodyguard Price. "Until us three are just as dead as the Clarks."

"So what would you have me do?"

"What would I have you do? Your job, I suppose. Your job is to keep order, and we are the order. I'm not asking you to like me – I can tell by the look on your face that I've already lost that battle. I'm asking you to think about what the newspaper headlines will read next week across the country, that the rich were being hunted down by the poor. Just think of the repercussions that would follow something like that? The country's economy is already hanging by thread..."

"More like a hangman's noose."

"Well, let's go with your metaphor then. Do you really want to be the one who kicks the chair away? Or are you going to play nice with us?"

More than anything else, Ansel wanted to throttle the arrogant rancher. He could barely follow his superior's orders, let alone a civilian. But deep down, he knew that the little rat was right, and he hated himself for thinking that. Finally, Ansel said, "Let me talk with the others."

"This isn't a committee decision. There is no other choice but to do the right thing."

"I think you and I have a different definition of what's the right thing to do," Ansel growled. "But talk to me like that again, and I'll do something that both of us know is the wrong thing."

***

"What do you think you're doing?" The porter demanded.

"Back off, George, if you know what's best for you!" Haley snapped, pointing his gun at him, a twitch of the finger away from ending the porter.

Even thirty seconds ago, the porter wouldn't have imagined that he would find himself in this situation. He and his coworkers were huddled around one of the tables in the dining car, picking at the food that even the starving passengers wouldn't eat. The porter was looking down distastefully at the watered-down turnip soup in front of him, trying to picture it as anything else, when the door to the dining car slammed open. As one, all of the porters looked up to see two of the marshals striding in, the wormy Haley and stiff Layton. The marshals shot like an arrow to their table, and Layton grabbed Laurence by the collar. The others stood up, loudly protesting, their chairs knocked over. At the same time, the door at the back of the car cracked open and suddenly closed.

"You're coming with us," Haley ordered. "We have questions for you."

They had already been damned to a life where they were treated as less than equal. With the blizzard seeping into every crack and hole in the train, they just wanted to die like human beings. And with the way the marshals were treating them like cattle, the porters were even being denied that opportunity. And it was only after they had endured every pain possible that the porters decided to snap. And now the porter closest to Laurence was having a gun pointed in his face.

"Are you really going to shoot me, marshal?" The porter snapped. "Go ahead and do it! Take me out of here!"

"Mr. Haley..." Layton said. He had enough of death onboard that train. As a matter of fact, he had enough of death in his lifetime.

"Shut up!" Haley screamed, the gun shaking in his hand. As insane as the marshal was in that moment, the porter had never felt so determined and focused. He had never wanted to live as much as he wanted to die right then.

And it looked like Haley was about to cooperate with him. Before Haley had a chance to squeeze the trigger, a blur shot past and tackled him. As Haley felt one of his ribs crack from the impact, the blur had pushed his shooting arm towards the ceiling. There was a thunderclap as the bullet slammed into the metal above them.

When the confrontation had begun to heat up seconds before, Nellie was about to walk through when she heard the angry voices. She had rushed back to tell Ian, who was still in hiding in the coach class, what was going on. Normally, Ian approached everything logically. But when he saw Haley about to kill the porter, his instincts took over.

As both Ian and Haley collapsed to the ground in a heap, a surprised Layton struggled to pull his gun from his holster. One of the other porters was quicker, though. Layton yelped as a bowl of turnip soup was tossed in his face. As Layton stumbled backwards and connected hard with a nearby table, Laurence yanked Ian off the floor and yelled, "Get out of here!"

"Good advice, Laurence. They say that the wisest man in the world surrounds himself with smarter friends..."

"Go, now!" Laurence yelled.

"Oh, right!" Ian ran through the dining car, magnetized towards the coach cars. He slammed through the door and into the next car, startling all of the coach passengers out of their slumber. He tore down the dark aisle, past the rush of faces, as he heard the door open up behind him. Ian stole a quick glance back, hoping that the marshals weren't in pursuit. But it was only Laurence and two of the other porters, desperately trying to flee the fight. Ian had made his way to the far end of the car, his fingers around the door handle, when he heard a shout from behind, "Where are they? Where are you hiding them?"

Ian darted to the side and hid between a bench and the wall, trying to catch his breath. For a few moments, he couldn't hear what was going on over his heavy breathing, the blood pumping through his head. But as the world cleared up around him, he wished that it hadn't.

Ian heard Haley call out, "Everyone in this room has two choices: either give up the men that ran through here, or get arrested for harboring suspects!"

"What's going on?" Someone called out.

"It's none of your business..."

"Tell him, marshal!" Another voice shouted. "Tell him that one of those no-good ranchers got what's coming to them."

"Was that what happened? God, I wish I was the one who pulled the trigger then," a rough voice laughed in the crowd. Ian dared to peek around the corner of the bench and look down the aisle. He could see the two marshals in a building standoff with the angrier and angrier crowd.

"Don't tempt me!" Haley snapped, waving his gun across the crowd. "I'll make the papers, I swear I will!"

As crazed as the marshal felt, he didn't have the nerve to walk into a potentially hostile crowd, especially one that outnumbered the bullets he had with him. Layton was even less interested in walking any further. As they backed up towards the waiting door, someone from the crowd jeered, "Afraid, marshals? Those rich bastards already took our livelihoods. You might as well take our lives!"

Neither marshal knew what to say. They didn't understand how the rich ranchers had held a powerful monopoly over the poor onboard. In a world as infinite as the American West, the rich had conquered the grazing land, had rustled the cattle, and had set the prices with the markets back east to stifle competition. The poor ranchers had gone west to find their freedom, but all they found were masters at the end of the train tracks. The marshals were outsiders to this world and didn't understand any of this. All they understood was order and the quiet, no matter how unsettling, which came with it.

Ian watched as the marshals opened the door and swept through it, back into the dining car. The second that Layton had slammed the door shut behind him, Ian had felt a hand land on his shoulder. Startled, Ian spun around, seeing Nellie standing over him, her face grim.

She asked, "Is this what a war looks like?"

Chapter 12

"What are we going to do now, Ian? What are we going to do?"

Normally, Nellie didn't talk with so much desperation dripping from her voice. But she and Ian were now barricaded in the cattle car that still held McKenna's corpse. Ian had taken a pipe he found and rammed it between the handle and the doorframe so they didn't have to worry about any unwanted visitors. Although that just meant that they couldn't easily get out of the room either. And although the temperatures were hovering just above freezing, and so they didn't have to worry about the smell of a disintegrating corpse, the rot still filled her senses.

She was looking to Ian for guidance, because when you can't find a confident soul, an insane one would do. To her surprise, though, Ian was sitting in the far corner, staring blankly ahead, his hands wrapped around his knees. To air out the car and the deadly gases that had built up from the faulty equipment, Ian had opened the rear door to the car. He had tied a length of rope between the door handle and an exposed nail in the wall. The storm tried to let itself in, but the rope held and the most the door did was fan itself, opening and closing again and again.

Nellie tried to be patient. But the repetition of the door opening and Ian's silence made her repeat the question, this time a little louder, "What's the next step? If your plan is to wait here and freeze, I just want to let you know that my loyalty will last until they bring me a blanket."

"Or until the symptoms of the poisoning kick in," Ian said listlessly. "That reminds me, if you're feeling off-key, let me know. The rest of the gas should have dissipated by now, but one can never be too careful."

"It sounds like the gas has already gotten to you," Nellie said, hearing the sluggishness in his voice.

"No, it's not that. It's this case. I have no idea what to do."

"Why not? You know everything else, or at least you act like you do."

"That's the problem," Ian said, the emotion rising in his voice. "I'm not being given the chance to know anything. I have to find out who is responsible for these murders, all the while dealing with those marshals and surviving the class war that's brewing out there." He paused then added, "And I still have to figure out is the hitman that is traveling with us to Cheyenne. If I don't find him, then I'm going to lose someone who's very important to me."

"We have to work with we've got," Nellie said with a shrug. "Let's review the deaths, shall we?"

"Okay," Ian said, pointing to McKenna's corpse in the center of the room. "We confirmed his death as being due to natural causes. It's not part of the pattern. So instead, we have to draw from two crime scenes. Unfortunately, two can only prove coincidences, not patterns."

"But the two sets of murders eliminated the Rowes and their bodyguards," Nellie pointed out. "There has to be a pattern to that. What would the motive be?"

"I don't know," Ian said, feeling the helplessness now.

Nellie marched over to Ian and kneeled down in front of him. Ian was startled when Nellie reached out and grabbed him by the shoulders. Staring intently at him, Nellie said, "I never thought I would have to say this to someone before, but I need you to be a jackass. You're at your best when you're most awful. I know it seems like a lot of people have already died, but even more will die if we don't get to the bottom of this."

Ian stared at her. "Of course more people are going to die," he said. "Everyone is going to die. We're stuck on a train in the middle of a blizzard. Our food is running out, our coal is running out – I don't know if we're going to starve or freeze to death first. It's enough to make everything else pointless."

"I don't believe that," Nellie said quietly.

"You don't believe that," Ian repeated, uncomprehending.

"When I did my trip around the world for an assignment, I met a gypsy on an island off the coast of Greece. He told me some things I didn't want to hear but that I needed to hear. One of those was that a person's fate can't be found in their future."

"Yes, it can. That's what fate is – it's your future."

Nellie shook her head. "You would think so, but no. He told me that your fate is actually in your past. Every single thing that has ever happened to you is just another piece of ivy that wraps around your body like a piece of thread on a soldier's uniform, until you find that all you're fighting for is your past."

"Were those his exact words?"

"Well, his English wasn't perfect, so I had to fill in some of the gaps, but that's not the point. The point is you shouldn't look at it as you're going to die, because everyone is going to die. You look at it as you just solving another mystery in your life. You seem at your happiest whenever you're hard at work. Before I met the gypsy, I was struggling with my work. After I got into the public eye with my first big story, I was constantly worried about living up to their expectations. I was afraid that I had risen so high only to fall hard. But after the gypsy told me that over a cup of cheap wine, I realized that I had been going about things all wrong. I was worried about where my writing would take me, when I should have just been worried about writing. I've been working with that mindset ever since, and I've been sleeping better at night because of it."

"I find that morphine helps with sleeping better, too," Ian said.

Nellie looked insulted. "Don't try to trivialize this, Ian. I'm just trying to help. You don't want to fall into the same rut that Mr. Davis fell into."

"Who?" Ian asked.

"Ezra Davis," Nellie said. "He's one of the people traveling in first-class. I heard people talking about him in the dining car when we first left Burlington. Now there's a good example of what we were just talking about. Apparently, he was some nobleman who got chopped off the family tree, and he's been obsessed over fighting his way back to the top by joining the WSGA. He was hurting himself over the future when he should have recognized where he came from: a sheltered background that didn't prepare him at all for the real world."

"I remember that name," Ian muttered. "Why does that name sound familiar?"

"I'm not your secretary – I can't keep track of all of the terrible people you've had the misfortune of meeting."

Ian's eyes widened. "I know where I've heard that name. He's the Scottish noble who lost his title and inheritance over an affair. I remember when the story broke."

"That's funny – I don't recall ever seeing that in the gossip column," Nellie said. "That woman he's traveling with – she must be his new wife then."

"No, they can't get married. The Church of England frowns strongly on remarriage, especially if it's between two adulterers. Ironic, given that the church was founded by Henry VIII when he couldn't get his marriage annulled by the Pope."

"How could you possibly know all of this?" Nellie asked, exasperated.

But Ian ignored her and continued talking. "I also remember the controversy that erupted when he was kicked out of his family. The establishment wanted to make an example of him philandering ways, but he had a lot of support from other nobles, especially given his age. Men twice as old could only dream of having royal support as far away as Sweden. I saw him once before – I never understood his charm. He acted like a little, petulant man-child that got everything he ever wanted. I guess he's what every nobleman aspires to."

"Well, now I know more about him than I ever wanted to know," Nellie said. "Please tell me it has some relevance to the murders."

Ian never smiled so widely in his life. "How's this for a theory? Let's pretend we're Mr. Davis for a moment. We've just been shamed from society for carrying on an affair. We've lost all legitimacy within our family, so there's no hope of us securing our father's title of duke. We can't remarry in the eyes of the church, and so we can't earn an estate through marriage. We have support from other nobility, sure, but they don't dare say so publicly for fear of losing their own credibility.

"So we hear about opportunities across the ocean in America, and we decide to move there. We have no idea what we're going to find, but by this time we're desperate for anything. We go as far west as Wyoming, where we weasel our way into the ranching business. But we show up at the wrong time, with our organization dealing with competition that's growing as fast as our costs. But what if it wasn't the wrong time? What if it was right? What if we saw a chance to profit from the chaos around us, like a gunpowder mill during a war?"

"But how could Davis possibly hope to cash in on a range war?" Nellie asked.

"Remember what I said about Davis having the private support of nobility back in Europe? Well, a check can be private enough. The ranchers out west are hurting from the conflict, and Davis has the financial backing to keep them afloat. And when you're desperate enough, you don't care where your money is coming from. That's what he's up to: he's instigating another range war to make the ranching organization come to him for help."

Alarmed, Nellie said, "So, all of the deaths, all of this chaos that's unfolded..."

"It's Davis at work. I'm still confident that he didn't have a hand in McKenna's death, but I don't doubt that he saw an opportunity there. Then, it was a simple matter of sacrificing the Rowes and their bodyguard and making the marshals believe that one of the poor ranchers onboard was responsible. What we're witnessing right now is the opening act of a power play. Although a lot of good his scheme is doing him. We're going to die in this snowstorm before Davis ever becomes the face of ranching out west."

"Help's going to come," Nellie replied, not really believing it anymore.

"Still, we're going to air the truth about this, one way or another."

"So you're going to somehow slip past those marshals, catch Davis, and force a confession out of him?"

"Yes, and all just in time before we freeze to death," Ian said brightly. "And I just need your help to pull it off."

Nellie rolled her eyes. "Of course you need my help."

"Come on now – I wouldn't be this optimistic if I didn't have a solid plan. Just nod your head and follow me."

Nellie thought for a long moment. "Well, it won't be a good death, but it'll be an interesting one."

"That's the spirit!"

***

"You think that we're going to get saved?" Bowman asked no in particular.

"Yes, by Jesus," Haley said with a short, barking laugh. "Well, some of us will be, anyway."

"I'm being serious," Bowman said, rolling his eyes. "Those men that went out into the storm the other day, surely they must have gotten to Cheyenne by now."

"That is if they survived," Ansel said, pulling up a chair. "For all we know, those men could be frozen on the train tracks a mile ahead."

The marshals were barricaded in the first-class car, having never felt so isolated with so many people around. Davis and his traveling companions were holed up in their sleeping compartment while the marshals sat out in the corridor. Ansel had insisted on jamming the latch closed on the window in the compartment, to prevent the shooter from forcing it open. As well, he had his fellow marshals lean a table against the window, so that no one could see in. Even further, Ansel had the passengers douse their candle and cast their sleeping compartment in darkness. Enough passengers had already been lost, and he wasn't interested in losing any more.

As exhausted as Ansel was, he still had his hand grazing his holstered gun, his eyes cautiously watching the door. He continued, "I don't think we're prepared for the very real possibility that no one is coming to save us. We're almost out of coal in this car, and there's no telling how much more coal we have left elsewhere on this godforsaken train. All we can hope for now is that our funerals will be nice. I hope they bury me under that maple tree in the family plot." He smiled weakly. "It'd be nice to have some shade."

"Well, since death is apparently knocking, I suppose we should confess our sins," Bowman said. "When I was a kid, I stole a newspaper."

"I once had immoral relations with a married woman," Haley said.

Bowman snorted. "Make sure to confess for that lie. I can't imagine any woman putting up with you for more than a few minutes at a time, let alone a married one."

Before Haley had a chance to respond, Ansel said, "I wish we weren't here."

"Well, I think it's too late for us to return our tickets," Bowman joked. "I'm sure the train company has some sort of policy against that."

Ansel shook his head. "I mean, I wish that we weren't standing watch outside of a rich man's room, like we're mercenaries."

"Again, Russell, you know what we're paid to do: to follow orders. And out here, the ranchers are the order," Layton said listlessly.

"Maybe you're right, but that doesn't mean I have to like it."

"Well, that's work for you," Layton replied.

"And look at it this way," Bowman said to Ansel. "There's still a killer on the train who's hunting down the rich ranchers. We're doing good sitting here, more than you think we are."

"Maybe we are. Irving, I'm going to need you to go and root around for some more coal. I'm starting to feel the chill."

"I'll get up in just a minute," Layton said drowsily. "I promise."

Chapter 13

"So, what's this idea of yours?" Nellie asked.

They were back in the lead coach car, the one that connected with the dining car. Nellie found herself on the bench, squeezed between Ian and her growing doubts. When they had first met, Nellie had found Ian to be a functioning lunatic. But even though they only knew each other for a few days now, Nellie had evolved towards him.

Nellie had a random memory of primary school, and the teacher talking about the Ancient Greek story of the prophetess Cassandra who was cursed never to be trusted. When Paris of Troy had brought home his beloved Helen, all of the Trojans welcomed her except for Cassandra. The prophetess had foreseen the tragedy that followed in the wake of Paris' ship. But nobody ever believed her, not even when the Greeks came and laid siege to the city for ten years. A young Nellie had sighed and looked out the window and daydreamed during most of those lessons, but that one had stuck with her. And as she looked over at Ian, she knew that this was no different. She had to trust him, even when everything told her not to.

Ian was off in his own little world, and Nellie repeated her question. "What's the plan?"

Ian snapped into focus. "Well, the idea is simple. Right now, there are seven people who are barricaded in the first-class car: four guards and three passengers. The last time I was in that car, I noted that the coal supply was running low. And that was some time ago. Odds are pointing to them running out of coal entirely and them now relying on the supply from the dining car. That too will run out any minute now, if my estimates are correct."

Nellie reminded herself that she had to believe him. "And so what happens after that?"

"What everyone else has chosen to overlook is that there is a perfectly good bucket of coal sitting at the front of the car, right next to the door," Ian said, pointing to the front. Nellie looked ahead and indeed there was a bucket sitting there, the lumps of coal peeking over the brim. "I saw it out of the corner of my eye when I was fleeing from the marshals for the second time."

"Third time," Nellie corrected him.

Ian smiled thinly. "Oh, my mother would be proud. Anyway, my guess is that one of the porters was walking with it when he decided to take a break in the dining car. And...well, you remember what happened in the dining car not too long ago. The porter must have forgotten about it in the fiasco that followed."

"So what are you going to do with the coal? Are you going to pelt them with it when they walk through the door looking for fuel? Or are you going to squeeze into the bucket and jump out when they grab it?"

"Well, wait until I finish before you start telling me how ridiculous it all sounds," Ian chastised her. "But seriously, the coal is the key. Did you wonder why I insisted on retrieving my satchel?"

"Well, not until you just asked me that question," Nellie admitted. When they were making their way from the cattle car to the lead coach car, Ian had stopped at the restroom in that car. Nellie thought that he was going to relieve himself, but she was surprised when he emerged from the restroom with a rich leather satchel in hand. She didn't know that he had the bag with him at the beginning of the trip, which he had stuffed into the crack between the sink and the wall. If it had been any other person, Nellie would have been curious. But again, she was choosing to accept Ian's insanity as reasonable.

"So what's in the bag, then?" Nellie asked, figuring that was the question that Ian wanted from her. Ian didn't answer but instead opened the satchel. He leaned over and showed the inside of the bag to Nellie, and all she saw was just chaos. There were wrinkled papers and crumbling cigars and a yellowing book on botany and what looked like a riding crop. She also heard the crackling of broken glass at the foot of the bag. Nellie looked back at Ian. "Did you expect me to be surprised by all of that?"

Ian looked a little disappointed. "In a way, I was. But while it looks like a mess, it's organized just the way I want it." He suddenly reached into the bag. Without even fishing around, he yanked out a shiny object and held it up to Nellie. She peered at it, and even in the dim car, she could see the glint of gold.

"It's a snuffbox," Ian said as he cracked open the lid.

"It's beautiful," Nellie said, her eyes dazzled by the box's gold skin and the deep purple stone planted in the lid.

Ian shrugged. "It's just a box. As long as it can hold something, I don't care what it looks like."

He turned the little box over on its side and dumped its insides into the palm of his hand. Nellie saw that it was a cloth pouch, but before she could say anything, Ian said, "And this is my remaining supply of opium. This is my most prized possession."

"I'm not sure how I'm supposed to respond to that."

"It's probably for the best that you don't," Ian said. "But anyway, this is the plan. I'm going to dump all of this opium in that bucket of coal, and we're going to wait for the marshals to find it. What they won't know while they're dumping the coal into the fire is that they're also dumping enough opium to knock out an elephant. From there, we just have to wait for the fumes to circulate through the car and put everyone to sleep. Then we walk in and drag out the unconscious Mr. Davis. He's going to have quite the nightmare when he wakes up." Ian finished, looking rather triumphant with himself, and then looked at Nellie. He frowned. "Why do you look so nervous, Nellie?"

"Does it show?" Nellie laughed. "I'm with you, of course. I just want you to acknowledge that what you're asking is absolutely insane, something that anyone else would refuse to go along with. I want to hear you say that you're asking too much of me."

Ian looked at her for a few moments. Finally, he said, with some effort, "I'm asking a lot of you, and I'm sorry for that..." He stopped in mid-sentence and stood up and walked to the front of the car. Nellie looked down the aisle and watched as he discreetly poured the entire bag of opium into the bucket. He walked back, a strut flickering in his stride, and took his seat next to Nellie. Ian looked at her and added happily, "But there's nothing you can do about it, because you want to know how the story ends."

"Maybe, but I don't want to end before the story does," Nellie said.

"Don't forget your speech back in the cattle car, about being true to your past. I thought all of you reporters were driven by a good story."

"We are, but we also like surviving long enough to write about it."

You mean to tell me that you've traveled around the world and seen what humanity is capable of, and now you're afraid of what might happen?"

"And you aren't?" Nellie asked.

"I've already died, and frankly I can't tell the difference between Earth and Hell. There's nothing left for me to be afraid of. One of these days you're going to learn that same lesson. Who knows? Today might be that day for you."

The second that Ian finished talking, the door ahead creaked open. Both Ian and Nellie turned and watched as one of the marshals slipped into the dark car and looked around. Spotting the tempting bucket of coal, the marshal stooped down and took it by the handle. Ian noticed that the marshal was being careful not to attract attention. Although the car was returning back to its slumber, all it took was the slightest noise to break the truce.

"This better work," Ian said. "Don't tell me I wasted the rest of my opium for nothing."

Ian got up once more, dragging Nellie by the arm behind him. As they made their way to the door, Ian had a horrible thought: what if they blockaded the doors? He had no idea how long the effects of the stupor would last, and he couldn't risk the marshals waking up before he could get into the room and capture Davis.

The door to the dining car opened easily, almost too easily. As the light from the car peeked out, Ian glanced inside. The marshal was walking quickly, already closing the door at the far end of the car behind him. For the first time during the trip, the dining car was starved of motion. As the pair walked through the empty car, Ian could feel the pinpricks of hair on the back of his neck. His heart beat faster as he wondered what was on the other side of the door. Whatever it was, he was ready – he had to be.

When they reached the next door, Ian pressed his ear to the wood and listened for a few moments. Confident that there was no one out on the vestibule, they opened the door and stepped out onto the platform. Ian softly closed the door behind them and gestured to Nellie to keep quiet. He suspected, and rightly so, that the marshals in the next car would blast them apart if they heard even a sound out on the platform.

Ian crept to the platform of the next car and repeated the same process of eavesdropping through the door. This time, he could hear voices – they were indistinct and murmuring through the wood, but he could hear them nevertheless. Already, Nellie was shivering, the cold that seeped through the vestibule getting to her. But Ian wasn't paying enough attention to be cold. His ear pressed to the door was as steady as it would ever be.

After what felt like forever but was barely a minute, Nellie wanted to ask Ian if she could sit in the dining car and wait to be called into action. But before she could, Ian snapped to attention and twisted the door handle in his grip. He was so quick that he was already in the room before the door could swing open and clatter against the wall. As Ian vanished into the room, Nellie followed close behind. At least, she followed for a few steps before coming to a halt.

She was amazed by what she saw. There was the dour marshal who had gone to fetch the coal – he was passed out in front of the stove. The other marshals were a few feet away, also sprawled out on the floor. In spite of the circumstances, Nellie almost burst out laughing at the marshal who looked like a weasel. Haley had fallen backwards in his chair, and his arms were stretched out – he looked peacefully asleep, in spite of how much that fall backwards must have hurt.

Suddenly, Nellie felt a bit intoxicated. Without warning, her legs wobbled, and for a moment, Nellie thought that she was going to fall. It wasn't until she found herself being dragged out of the car and onto the platform by Ian that she realized she had fallen after all. "Stay here," Ian said, feeling sheepish. He thought that the open door would provide enough ventilation to water down the opium in the air. He had miscalculated, though. As Ian made his way back into the car, Nellie called out lazily after him, "Watch out for that first step."

While the others were feeling the effects of the opium, Ian could only feel a tingling sensation. For once, Ian was glad that he had built up a thick resistance to the drug over the years. "And they told me I had a problem," Ian muttered. "All this time, I had a solution."

The sleeping compartment reserved for Davis was in the middle of the car. There was a marshal asleep on the floor in front of the compartment door, and Ian grunted to push him out of the way. He tried the doorknob – it was loose in his hands. And so he took a deep breath and forced the door open.

The first thing he felt was a clumsy fist smashing into the side of his face. Surprised, Ian stumbled backwards, tripping over the fallen marshal as he did so. As Ian fell to the floor, he looked up to see Carson Price, the bodyguard, looming over him. The man had a wet cloth pressed firmly to his face, acting as a hasty mask. Ian could see that the opium had managed to take its toll, though. Any other day, the bodyguard would have been a challenge. But he swung slow with his fists, and Ian saw a stagger in the man's walk.

Ian scrambled to his feet as Price advanced. Price threw another punch, but this time, Ian was more than ready. He ducked the bodyguard's left fist and saw his opportunity open up. Ian put all of his weight into his punch and landed it on the left side of Price's ribcage, just below his armpit. Price gasped and fell to the side. He writhed on the floor, gasping until he too was infected by the opium.

"A man is only as strong as his spleen," Ian slurred, the fumes finally getting to him. That was when he heard a thud, followed by what he thought at first was an explosion. He glanced back at the sleeping compartment and saw Davis perched in the open window, about to jump out. The explosion he heard was the sound of the wind rushing in, like an invisible lion roaring through the tall grass.

Davis looked at him as if he wanted to scream out in frustration. But instead, Davis turned and leapt out of the window. Ian rushed to the windowsill and looked out. He could only see a swirling darkness. In his mind, though, he could see Davis in the snow, trying to find a way back into the train. While Davis was surely concerned about getting back on the train, Ian was afraid he wouldn't. The night was dark, and it wouldn't take much for someone to become disoriented and walk off in the wrong direction. Ian needed Davis alive – the mystery would only end with his confession.

Without another second of hesitation, Ian ran to the window and jumped out.

Chapter 14

The first thing that Ian felt was nothing.

The jump from the train window to the snow bank was only two feet, if that. But the snow was sugary, and as he fell into it, cobwebs of the powder clung to him. As he clambered his way out of the snow, desperate for a solid footing, he couldn't tell apart the screaming in his mind from the wolf pack in the wind. By then, though, the cold had already short-circuited his brain and took away his memory. He swayed drunkenly, lost in a field where the snow grew tall like wheat. His mind was as white as the prairie and the prairie was as black as the skies. Ian was losing himself – it would not be long before he became as primordial as the world that raised him.

But then one word found its way through the blinding snow to him: hunt. There was still a villain that he had to end. He had to catch the rancher and make him confess – it was the only way that Ian could make all of this go away. Wildly, he glanced around, hoping to see Davis within his grasp. But all he could see was the storm around him, like a whip that was being uncoiled. Tide after tide of wind drove the snow like spikes that flattened out into plaster against his skin. He could feel the frost molding to his body and blowing out the fire in his veins. Already, he could feel his arms and legs growing tired, drained of their momentum as if it was only oil. He never realized how heavy death could feel until that moment. Ian wished like hell that he had a coat, a hat, a lantern, anything that could make his blood flow again.

As strong as the lights were shining from the train's windows, they were only a stale glow in the storm. He wondered if this was what it was like to live in the ether, where it is both dark and bright. But there was no time for philosophy – he had to catch his man. And, as if he was thinking too loud, Ian saw a rippling shadow move in front of the dull light. It was barely a scrape of a shadow, but Ian had spent a lifetime breaking down the world around him: words into syllables, life into cells, diamonds into atoms, and motion into a series of photographs. He thought big by thinking small.

Confident, Ian charged into the rush of snow. The spray of flakes stung his eyes, so bad that Ian had to throw his arm up like a shield. The snow was deep and clumsy, and Ian had to step high to clear the snow with every stride. Already, the running was sapping him of what little strength he had left. But the adrenaline from the chase was sparking inside of his brain, blinding him as to how much energy he truly had left. The mystery was almost solved, the chase was almost over.

Ian huffed as he made his way to where the shadow stood. Just inches away now, Ian leapt and tackled the silhouette in the chest. But just as Ian jumped, the shadow fluttered into pieces. Ian landed hard in the soft snow, cursing himself for being fooled by the mirage. Even though no one saw him, Ian still felt the burning embarrassment. He was better than this.

But there was someone who saw him. As Ian pushed himself up, he felt a swift kick to the back of his leg that broke him back down. As surprised as he was, Ian turned on his back and threw his arms up, his instincts immediately snapping in. It was just in time, too, as he felt a plank slap against the flat of his left arm. Ian let out an unwilling cry – once again, he could feel something. He would just rather it be the taste of whiskey.

"You think you could stop me?" A voice yelled out, strained by the wind, as the plank cracked again across his arm. "I'll do as I damn well please!"

The rotting board that Davis had ripped off the train car swept through the air as invisible as death. By now, though, Ian had found the pattern. This time, as the board connected with his left shoulder, he shot out with his right hand and grabbed ahold of it. Wrapping his left hand around the board as well, Ian twisted his body hard to the right. The board swung like the pendulum on a metronome, and a surprised Davis tripped and fell into the snow a few feet away.

As Ian stood up and stumbled to where Davis fell, he roared, "Hit me in the arm that I smoke with, why don't you?" Ian lashed out with his foot, hoping that it would land in Davis' ribcage. When Ian heard a startled yelp, he felt a dark satisfaction he had never felt before. He knew that Davis couldn't hear him through the storm, so Ian was going to make sure that he could feel him. "You're lucky you didn't hit me in my right arm! That's my drinking arm!"

Ian reached down to grab Davis by the collar. He wanted to share his pain with him, the pain of being an exile, the pain of losing everything he had and yet still finding more to lose, the pain of having to be someone else. But before Ian could do any of that, he felt the ground give beneath them. Both of the men yelled out as the snow crumbled and they tumbled down towards the valley

Ian lost what little senses he had left as the world spun around him, like watercolors dripping down a canvas. He struggled to find a solid grip, but he was rolling too fast and the snow was too soft, any holds evaporating between his fingers. He thought he could hear the screams of Davis somewhere ahead of him. Ian got bored of the vertigo quickly and decided to put a stop to it. As he tumbled, he squeezed both of his hands together as if in prayer and slammed them as hard as he could into the ground. As he skidded, the pile of snow quickly gathered between his arms, and after a few seconds, he braked to a stop.

Breathing heavily, Ian pressed his forehead against the snow, hugging the side of a ledge for the second time in his life. Below him, he could hear Davis' cries shrinking.

***

When Davis finally landed on solid ground, it took two seconds for his yells to catch up with him. Davis was so still in the clouds of snow that even he thought he was dead. But after a minute, the Scotsman slowly got to his feet.

When he had landed, he thought at first that the snow had broken his fall. But as he stood up and attempted to walk, he realized with a gasp that the snow had broken something else. He had landed on his one ankle all wrong, and now the agony was blistering underneath the skin. Even when he didn't put weight on it, he could feel every nerve. He winced and then muttered, "A tragedy, just like everything else."

As he hobbled along, he reached into the pocket of his jacket, hoping to take a swig of whiskey to kill the pain. But all he could find was the cut of glass, as his glass flask had shattered during the tumble into the valley. He yelped a little and pulled his hand out of his pocket. Even in the darkness, he knew the cut on his finger was deep, but the blood was warm. He took a handkerchief from his other pocket and wrapped it tightly around his wounded hand.

After tying off the cloth, he glanced around, trying to find his bearings. He was on the valley floor, so deep that not even the long arm of the blizzard could reach him. The wind had calmed down, and massive snowflakes were falling like raindrops racing each other on a window. Still, the heavy cold had settled along the valley floor, and if Davis was wading in the chill before, he was drowning in it now. The blizzard was dripping in his brain, calcifying the gray matter and turning his mind to stone.

Suddenly, a little flicker of light appeared ahead in the abyss. The light was only as bright as a firefly's pulse, so weak that the flame could be blasted away by a whisper. But still, there was magnetism in the fire that drew him towards it. Perhaps it was because it reminded him of the lighthouse from his childhood back in Scotland, the rotating beam he could see on clear nights from his family's estate. Perhaps it was because he was desperate for even a glance of heat. Or perhaps his dazed mind thought that it was a light shining from the train. They talk of fish at the bottom of the sea that are drawn to lights in the venomous dark, unaware that it's an anglerfish luring them into its jaws.

Whatever the reason, Davis continued stumbling through the night towards the little flame, until he became nothing more than a shadow against the light.

***

At the same time, as Davis' hell became hotter, Ian's became colder. He was scrambling his way back up the hillside towards the waiting train. He couldn't see the lights from the train, but he knew that the only way was up. There was nothing waiting for him in the pits far below. But every step was a struggle, as his feet slipped on the snow. There were even two times when Ian had almost slipped and tumbled backwards. Both times, though, Ian was able to lunge and claw at the snow like some animal.

His hands were animal, but his brain was still man. As he shuffled up the hill – made steep by the storm – he knew that there was no chance of reaching the train. He had to wait until the storm broke up, but how could he survive the wait? How could he evolve on the spot to survive the night?

And that was when he realized that he was already evolved for the challenge. Without wasting another moment, he immediately fell to his knees and began digging feverishly. Any minute, his arms would be uselessly numb, and he would definitely die then. He breathed heavily as he worked, the bitter air scraping the inside of his throat. But he didn't pay attention to his ragged breathing as he hollowed out a cave just big enough to hold his body. As he squeezed inside, he fought down the claustrophobic panic. After all, there was barely enough room for himself, and it was likely that the snow above his head would collapse at any moment. Ian was almost certain that he was going to die. The question was how interesting the death was going to be.

Once inside, Ian padded and smoothed out the ceiling just an inch over his head. Reasonably confident that the snow would hold out for at least awhile, Ian then began to brick the entrance to his cave with snow. He left a hole towards the top for oxygen to filter into the cave, and a hole at the bottom for the heaver-than-air carbon dioxide from his breathing to escape. Ian didn't have much faith in his crude ventilation system, though, so he would have to keep a watchful eye for symptoms of carbon dioxide poisoning.

There was one more thing he had to do to survive the night. The thought of evolution earlier reminded him of a lecture he had attended, where they discussed the mammalian diving reflex seen in seals but is present to some extent in other mammals such as human beings. This effect explained how arctic creatures survived dives into freezing waters. When the creature's face touched the water, it sets off a chain reaction that slows down the heartbeat and constricts the blood flow to the limbs. It shut down all of the body's systems except those that were most critical, allowing the creature to survive in the most hostile environments. Hoping that the professor who delivered the lecture wasn't a complete idiot, Ian took a handful of snow. He hyperventilated a few times before smashing the snow in his face.

He thought that he was cold before, but he wasn't prepared for this. It was if his face was on fire, and he fought down the urge to scream. And still he kept his hands pressed to his face, massaging the snow into his skin. His heart sprinted for a few moments before collapsing. His breathing slowed down to match the pace. It was not long before his lazy breath was mummified in its own fog. It was only then that Ian's hands dropped from his face, the white mask staying behind. His face was so still that the snow didn't even crack and crumble off his cheeks.

Drunk off the cold, Ian's last thoughts before falling asleep weren't of fear or pain. If anything, he felt like an infant again, waiting to be born. The wind, which whistled like a knife through the air just moments before, now sounded like a mother's lullaby. He felt himself falling into the gravity of the womb, where the cold felt warm and the strange felt like home.

His slip into his dream world was so seamless that he accepted the person stretched out on the snow next to him as being real. The tight cave even expanded to accommodate for the second body, something that Ian's logical mind also accepted. He twisted and found his nose a few inches from an elderly woman staring at him. In the light of a candle that Ian couldn't see, she looked as old as he always remembered her being. She still reeked of the herbs she always steeped in her tea.

His landlady of many years looked at him with a mother's eyes, firm but tender. Wagging her finger at him, she said, "You better not back out on your lease now."

"Don't bluff," Ian said with a smirk. "You would rather burn the place down than throw my belongings out in the street."

"Well, if that's what it takes to get rid of the horrid smell seeping from your place, let me just find my candle," the old lady retorted.

"It's not a smell, it's a science experiment into how quickly human hands decay in different types of soil..."

His landlady made a face. "Why am I not surprised?"

Ian looked triumphant. "It's why you'll never get rid of me. You don't want a stranger renting from you. At least you know how awful of a creature I am."

"What's this I hear about you being a human hand collector?" A voice said from Ian's other side. He turned around and saw a stern man with a balding head and thick eyebrows staring at him. Ian's breath picked up a little – his coffin of snow was starting to get too crowded.

He put on a brave face, though. "They were all donations from the medical school, let me assure you."

The inspector didn't look convinced. "So says the man who once robbed a grave."

Ian rolled his eyes. "You keep forgetting I had an alibi. The same night that crypt was ransacked, I was halfway across the country, impersonating a sheriff."

"Spreading state secrets, are we, little brother?" A voice drawled to Ian's other side. Ian turned wildly and saw his brother squeezed between him and his landlady. His brother looked as lazy as he ever did, with his wrinkled tuxedo and massaged hair. Ian's brother clucked disapprovingly. "Don't embarrass the family name now."

"Embarrass the family name?" Ian asked, incredulous. "You asked me to go on that little fact-finding mission for you, because you didn't want to cancel the bridge game you had scheduled that night."

"I don't go to my information – my information comes to me," Ian's brother pointed out.

"I'm not your hound," Ian snarled.

His brother smiled widely. "And yet, whenever I say _fetch_ , there you go."

"What's he talking about?" A voice spoke up. It was the quietest one of the bunch, but creeks carve valleys. Ian glanced around for his partner and found him in a vice between the inspector and the wall. His loyal friend was as youthful as ever, with a strong head of hair and a brain that echoed.

"You know the story. I told you about it the last time we met," Ian reminded him.

His friend's eyes squinted for a few moments before lighting up. "That's right! Sorry, I forgot."

"You're supposed to be my biographer, and yet I'm remembering my stories for you," Ian said with a patient smile for his friend, his partner, his writer. He had to smile to hide his grimace. The cave was becoming crowded with his luggage of ghosts, and he was finding it harder to breathe. And then, just like that, the ethereal light inside of the cave was snuffed out, and the memories died with it. The darkness was sudden, as if a bottle of ink had spilled out across his life story. And that was when a voice glided to him through the night.

"That's all they are, just little bits of memory," the woman said, her voice like plucked violin strings. "They're syllables of the past. You've always felt trapped by them. Don't lie to me now. I know you too well, because we're the same. We both have electric minds that reassemble into countless rooms to explore. Don't you want to get lost in me, love?"

Ian's eyes stung. He reached out to hug the voice, but all he felt was the ceiling of snow just inches above his head. The frost sparked a realization deep inside of him. He said thickly, "I wanted you to be my future, but you're the past just like the rest of them. Let me get some sleep, please."

The woman went silent. And for the first time in years, Ian was alone. He had decades of his life measuring himself against other people's standards, when he could be just as tall as he wanted to be. He was just as shackled to them as the Coburns were shackled to the East. The newspapers spoke of the West as being a god of experimentation, but the people brought the East with them like the pharaohs brought their servants with them into the afterlife. And so many wondered why they were spat out by the frontier. Just like the old shouldn't replace the new, yesterday shouldn't happen after tomorrow. Ian was no longer going to carry around his past like stones in his pockets. Even as he thought this, the mirages vanished and the cave grew just a little bit bigger. He just wished he reached that understanding before being eaten by the monster in the snow.

He thought of all this, not realizing that not too far away, Nellie was pressing her face against the window of the train car, desperately trying to find Ian's silhouette in a landscape of shadows. As ready as Ian was to let go, Nellie wasn't.

Chapter 15

The poets would have gotten it right if they had called that long night a chimney. The thick night plastered the walls with soot, and ash heaps of snow drowned the grass before it could learn to swim. The world was icing over – it would not be long before the land became a marble monument to how strong life could be, with no one around to enjoy it.

But there's no night without a day to stretch it across. Stretch the night too thin and tears start to run through the fabric like shooting stars. It was how every sunrise began, ever since the world learned to pirouette. And, given how shattering the night had felt, that the sunrise was normal would have been a disappointment to some. For others, though, the routine behind it was a work of art that they had not appreciated before now.

As the claws of sunlight ripped through the soupy clouds and ran across the prairies, it bred with the Chinook wind that the Rockies shook off like a hot blanket. And just like a fire stoked at the feet of a chimney, the orange glaze lit up the snow and melted it down. The warmth was contagious, and the sooty skies caught fire. In just a matter of a few minutes, the acidic morning dissolved the night and all was finally right.

The train stood out in the melting snow like a rock in the surf. As the sunlight heated up the black exterior of the train, the snow that leeched off the steel melted even faster. The sun baked the train so much that some of the passengers cracked their windows open, to let a bit of cool air breathe in. And as the windows on the train yawned open, an excitement could be heard from inside. They were still miles away from the nearest town, and their supplies were running out. But the sun was out, and to them, that was all that mattered.

About a hundred feet from the train, there was a bulge in the snow. It was a strange lump – there was nothing remotely natural about it. What made it odd was that it was shifting around, like a tree rustling when there wasn't a breeze. A few seconds passed, and then Ian erupted out of the snow. He gave a devolved shout as he shook off the snow like he was a wet dog. After spending the night buried in the snow, his eyes and ears were sensitive. His eyes were rinsed in light like water, and every inch of sound trumpeted in the chambers of his ears. In the distance, there was the sound of snow crunching that sounded like a note slammed down into a pipe organ.

Ian spun around like a wild man, startled by the noise. He felt a little bit ridiculous to see it was only a man standing outside of the stranded train, smoking a cigar. Ian only felt foolish for a few moments before realizing something beautiful: he had survived his night in the wild. He wanted to shout with joy, but when he inhaled deeply, he spontaneously started hacking. The night in the blizzard had burned his esophagus. He could feel every inch of his lungs as they expanded and contracted. But the pain was good. If he had felt nothing, then it would not have been long before he was nothing either.

He looked down at his fingers, afraid of what he might see. Although the chill had nipped at his fingers like a hungry dog, there was no sign of the black frostbite he had seen on a dead mountain climber before. Instead, his hands were as red as shame, and as he looked at them, he suddenly realized how much they itched. He clenched his hands into fists, wincing as the dry skin crackled and bled at the knuckles.

The man who was standing at the feet of the dining car was one of the porters. They were burning the last chunks of coal, and a carpet of frost was infecting the floor of the car. Desperate to stay warm, the porter had stolen a cigarette from one of the passengers, even though he had never smoked before in his life. He was about to drink the smoke when he saw something like a bug unfurl in the snow. The porter squinted, trying to focus on what he was seeing. The morning sun was skipping against the snow like a rock across a lake, and it had been playing magic tricks on his eyes. But even after he rubbed his eyes, the porter could still see the bug puffing up like a balloon, its features filling in until Ian was trudging up the hill towards him.

Shocked, the porter didn't even realize that the cigarette had already fallen from his slack jaw. The cigarette was poking out of the snow, its flame snuffed out, as Ian walked past. He stopped to fish the cigarette out of the powder. "Good morning," Ian said, chewing on the cigarette. "I didn't miss breakfast, I hope?"

The porter stared at him in amazement for a few moments before finally sputtering, "Where – where did you come from?"

Ian looked thoughtful, as he tried to imagine what would be the most entertaining lie. Then, his face lit up. "I wanted to go out for a walk, but I guess you can say I got cold feet."

Ian laughed because someone had to, and he stepped past the bewildered porter and into the dining car. The car, which was thick with the hungry just the day before, was running low on all food. As well, some of the porters had walked through the car just an hour before and stripped some of the wood paneling off the walls to use as firewood. Now, there were only a few people left behind in the car, there to escape the suffocation of the crowded cars.

One of the lonely souls was the porter Laurence, who was sitting on the bar counter, his legs dangling in the air. When he caught sight of who walked in, though, his boredom evaporated. Pushing himself off the counter, Laurence exclaimed, "Mr. Hunter! Where have you been? We've been worried!"

"I guess someone had to be. It certainly wasn't going to be me," Ian said numbly. As stiff as his words felt, his legs were rattling. Ian could just barely make it to one of the tables before collapsing into a chair. Laurence was standing nearby, still frozen in shock, before Ian said through clenched teeth, "Get me something hot."

Snapping out of it, Laurence ran behind the counter to fetch what he could. As the porter did so, Ian's carefully constructed persona started to break apart. His arrogance collapsed into a chattering jaw, and his wit became slurred. Ian was on the verge of crying when Laurence called out, "I'm sorry, Mr. Hunter, but we don't have any more coal to boil tea."

Staring blankly ahead, Ian's words tumbled out of his mouth. "What about...what food you have?"

"What food? Just potatoes by this point," Laurence said, feeling helpless.

Ian thought for a moment. "Potato, whiskey, tin can."

"What?"

"Just do it!" Ian snapped.

As Laurence rushed the ingredients to Ian, the handful of sleepy people in the car were beginning to wake up, watching the scene with curiosity. Ian was ignoring the audience festering around him. Instead, he dropped the potato into the tin can with his shaky hands and motioned for Laurence to pour the whiskey into the can. Laurence hesitated, knowing that the company wouldn't be fond of him donating the high-proof bourbon. But then he rationalized it away by thinking that they were all going to die someday, anyway. And so he poured the bourbon to the top of the can.

"Light it up," Ian said quietly, struggling to keep some control over his voice.

By this step in the recipe, Laurence was no longer questioning Ian's logic. He quickly struck a match and tossed the splinter into the can. The spark drowned in the liquor and immediately the amber murk exploded into a little sun. The others recoiled from the sudden flash, but Ian remained still. As the fire settled and the tin can began to glow a dull red, Laurence asked, "That's not going to scorch the table, is it?"

Ian shrugged. With a weak finger, he gestured around at the room stripped of paneling to keep the fires burning a little longer. "Probably – but is now the time to start caring?"

Ian went back to warming his freezing fingers over the fire. Laurence sat down across from Ian at the table and asked, "Why the potato? Does it help with keeping the fire going?"

Ian smiled a little. "It gives me something to eat when the fire's out. I like potatoes." He twirled his hands slowly over the flames. "Did I miss anything good while I was gone?"

"That rancher's wife got arrested. I guess the marshals figured that one rotten soul was as good as another. I missed the show, but one of my friends told me that she put on a good cry."

"I take it the cry wasn't good enough."

Laurence shook his head. "The rancher's bodyguard was talking with one of the marshals. My guess is that he spilled his guts."

"That tends to happen when someone gets punched in the gut," Ian said, still remembering the fist he dug into Price's side. That was likely the best punch he would ever throw. He idly wondered what larger role the wife had to play in the conspiracy. But the more he wondered, the more he realized just how pointless it all was now. "A lot of good it did, though. We're all going to be dead within the day, as stiff as planks."

Laurence paused. "Well, it'll save money on coffins, I guess."

Ian snorted. "I guess."

By this time, enough of the whiskey had burned away to reveal the potato, its skin charred. Ian looked down at it curiously as he asked distantly, "And my friends?"

"They're fine. Your lady friend wouldn't want me to tell you this, but when I was walking through the car last night, I saw her staring out the window." Laurence smirked. "There's something there. You only came back because you knew there was someone waiting for you."

"No. I came back because I had a job to do." There was still the remaining hit man onboard the train, sent to kill the woman from Ian's past. He was still obligated to her, although now she was little more than the memory that kept him warm the night before, and Nellie was very real and standing behind him.

He felt her presence and turned slowly in his chair. Indeed, Nellie was standing behind him, her arms crossed, her eyes red. Nellie made it obvious that she had never felt so vicious before. She said through a clamped jaw, "Why...?"

She had so many questions she wanted to ask him: why he jumped out the window to chase the rancher through the blizzard, what happened to the rancher, how did Ian survive the night in the snow. She had so many questions, and she wasn't going to get a single answer.

Just then, there was a distant howl. For a moment, everyone forgot to breathe, as they imagined wolves churning in the snow around the train like sharks. But that was only for a moment, as they realized that their salvation was chugging towards them. A few hundred feet further down the tracks, there was a train coming from Cheyenne. The men who had left the train during the blizzard had done the impossible and found help

Ian flashed the best smile he could to Nellie, and he held up his hands like a magician. "Your old train was broken, so I bought you a new one."

Nellie slapped him.

***

Ian was still rubbing his raw cheek as they were leaving the dining car and heading towards the rescue train. As they walked, Ian – who had received the charity of old leather gloves – was massaging his cheek with one hand and holding the hot potato in the other. Even through the thick cowhide, he could still feel the pulse of the heat. His heart, which had lost its rhythm in the night, was finding its beat using the glow as its guide.

Nellie, who was marching just ahead, looked back and said, "We have to get you back inside quickly."

"Why's that?"

"Your hands already have frostbite. If you allow them to get cold again before they can heal, the pain will be even worse. Trust me – I saw it happen to a drunk lumberjack who decided to go outside and relieve himself one night. A tip: try to hold your bladder during the winter months in the Yukon."

Nellie and Ian were among the dozens that were streaming out of their wounded train and into their new ride. As they shuffled through the snow and into the shadow of the new train, Ian could only imagine what the first class must have been thinking. While the train they were abandoning had a luxurious sleeping car and stately dining room, the new train was a series of cattle cars buckled to a scratched locomotive. But while the train was a splinter in the eye, it was built solely to get anywhere. The train itself was used to shuttle miners through the Rockies at any time of the year. If they lit a large enough fire under the steel horse, the train could blast through any avalanche with its grinning snowplow.

And as they filed quietly into one of the cattle cars, what they saw was barely enough to make even a miner comfortable. The car had bare, hardwood floors that squeaked with every step, and stiff benches that straightened your back and burned away your sins. As grateful as they were to be rescued, a few grunts could be heard as the people tried to get comfortable on the rough benches.

Nellie led Ian to a seat and set him down hard on the bench. Ian looked at her with an idle curiosity as she gingerly took the potato from his hand and put it into her pocket. Ian was trying to think of something smart to say when Nellie took his hands and clasped her own around them. As Nellie sat down and nestled against his ribs, she said, "As the cold blood starts flowing from your limbs, it's going to lower the temperature for the rest of your body. It'll make your heart seize up. We have to keep all of you warm."

Ian's blood was flowing now, but only in his brain. As he thought, Nellie continued, "I wonder where the Coburns are on the train..."

"We're going to be moving again soon," Ian said quietly.

"How could I ever doubt your brilliance?" Nellie said dryly. "Yes, we're going to be moving again soon, and thank God for that."

"This is bad. This is very bad."

"And now I'm doubting your brilliance again. How is this bad?"

"The hunt is back on. The hitman sent to kill the woman – he's on this train with us. She was safe as long as we were stuck. But the moment this train pulls into the station, she's as good as dead."

As Ian spoke, Nellie suddenly realized that she had no idea who this "woman" was in his life. All Nellie knew was that this lady meant something to Ian. Fighting off a flare of jealousy, Nellie tried her best to be helpful. "Well, by this time, we've gotten ourselves a pretty good census of everyone onboard the train."

"I'd say."

"And no one fits the description you gathered from that letter?" Nellie asked.

Ian rolled his eyes. "Well, obviously not. Otherwise, I would have already caught him."

Patiently, Nellie continued, "Maybe you have the right evidence, but you're just drawing the wrong conclusions."

"That's like walking down the right path and still getting lost."

Nellie shook her head. "No, it's like if we looked at a vagrant, and you could only think of how rotten he smells, while I can only see him as a human being."

"Are you telling me that I don't need a bath?" Ian said with a watered-down smile. He realized how dirty he looked just then.

"Be serious for once – you mentioned that the hitman must be wearing a soldier's uniform, right?"

"That's right, and given the language in the letter, I was operating under the assumption that the hitman hailed from Louisiana, and thus he must have been a Confederate soldier during the war. You know how they wear their uniforms with pride when they should hide them out of shame. But I haven't seen a single rebel uniform since I stepped onboard the train." Ian paused. "And that's where I made my mistake."

"How?"

"He said he would be wearing his uniform, but that doesn't necessarily mean he would be. The Confederate uniform was made of cotton, which would be an awful choice for winter weather. The odds are good that a man from Louisiana has never seen a blizzard in his whole life. He would have realized what a mistake he had made before the train even got to Iowa. So no, he wouldn't be wearing a uniform, not now anyway. You're right that I drew the wrong conclusion."

"So what does that leave?" Nellie wondered.

Ian was quiet for a few moments. He hesitated, then answered, "I always found something odd about the language, but I wasn't sure why."

"You said so yourself," Nellie pointed out. "You said that he was Cajun judging by the language."

"Perhaps I should clarify. It wasn't so much the quality of the words but the quantity. There was only one Cajun word in the entire letter: the _Bonjou_ used in the greeting. A native would have been more comfortable with the language. So who would know an obscure Cajun greeting but no other words?

"You know, after I discovered the letter, I read a book on the history of Louisiana, trying to gain a deeper context for who our writer is. I read how New Orleans was occupied by the Union Army after the Civil War had ended. So it's just as equally likely that our hitman was a Union soldier instead of a Confederate one. It would explain the hitman being somewhat familiar with the New Orleans dialect. So now the trick would be to find a veteran onboard who had served with the 6th Cavalry Regiment."

"My cousin served with that regiment," Nellie said.

"Is your cousin onboard the train?"

"No. He's living in Philadelphia now."

"Well, he's not much help to us, is he?" Ian said sarcastically.

"Don't you get it? My family is from Pennsylvania, and that's where that regiment was formed..."

Nellie's words trailed away until she was just mouthing the syllables. Then, she gasped. This caught Ian's interest. "What? What are you thinking?" Ian asked, suddenly energetic.

"I was just thinking...well, whenever I was in Kansas City, trying to get a ticket to Cheyenne, there was a man in line behind me. He heard my name and knew right away who I was. He said that he read my work from time to time. He mentioned being proud of me as a fellow Pittsburgher..."

"What did he look like?" Ian demanded.

"He was tall and thin, with wavy blond hair." Nellie ransacked the rest of her brain. "Oh, he was also wearing a long, brown overcoat...where are you going, Ian?"

Ian had freed himself from Nellie's embrace and wincing up to his feet. He hissed down to Nellie, "What do you think I'm doing?"

And with that said, he limped through the cattle car, leaving behind Nellie who was frozen with surprise. As he walked, he didn't look away from the crowd of eyes staring him from the benches. If anything, he met their gaze, trying to find the blond man. But nobody in that car matched the description.

Abruptly, the train began to move, catching Ian off-guard and almost off-balance. Since there was no way to turn the train around, the crew was resorting to making the train go in reverse back to Cheyenne. But even at such a slow speed, the momentum was unexpected. To catch himself, Ian had to reach out and grab the shoulder of a man sitting down on the bench. Ignoring the man's growl, Ian steadied his feet and his mind. The portrait that Nellie had just painted for him was an unexpected development, but he had to think through this logically. He only had one chance to do this right. Memory was clay, and it was possible that Nellie could have misremembered her meeting with the gentleman. Ian couldn't risk apprehending the wrong suspect and scaring away the right one. He had to be better than the marshals.

Ian swung open the door that led to the next car. Unlike their earlier train, this one was not built for comfort and so there were no vestibules between the cars. A hand of cold air rumpled Ian's hair as a spray of snow stung his eyes. Holding up a gloved hand to shield his face, jumped the gap between the cars and opened the next door. This cattle car was the same as the last, brimming with weary passengers who couldn't find the strength to be excited about their rescue. And none of these passengers came close to matching the description that Nellie had given.

Before Ian had boarded the train, he counted the cars because he counted everything. There were a total of six cattle cars, as well as a baggage car and a tender, all being hauled by the ugly locomotive. Ian and Nellie had settled for the rear car, and so he had four more cars to inspect. As he passed through the next car, he spotted the Coburns huddled together, talking so intensely that they didn't see him. _It's for the best,_ Ian thought. He didn't have time to follow social conventions that he didn't like in the first place. He pushed on to the next car, seeing the marshals sitting on either side of the shackled Charlotte Johnston and Carson Price. Ian hastily put a hand to his face, pretending to scratch himself. All he needed was for one of the marshals to recognize him. Although they had caught the conspirators responsible for the murders, Ian was confident that he was still in trouble with them.

"I have to get off this train," Ian muttered as he walked away. The train was crowded enough without adding marshals, a hitman, and annoying people to the mix.

A few minutes later, Ian had reached the lead cattle car, disappointed that he didn't find his man. He was about to turn around and walk back to a waiting Nellie when he stopped. He looked curiously at the door just ahead. He remembered there was still the baggage car to inspect. There were no other places for the hitman to hide, but Ian wished there were. He could only imagine what that car was like, with mountains of luggage and a hitman camouflaged in the clutter. And it would just be Ian and the villain – no one would hear a cry for help over the clatter of the train. Ian took a deep breath, the liquor of air calming his nerves. He opened the door before him and he walked into the baggage car.

His first impression was that the car was even worse than he had imagined. All of the rescued passengers had haphazardly tossed their luggage into the car, not caring about organization. The towers of luggage swayed uncomfortably, threatening to topple at any moment. To make matters somehow even worse, the mess blocked most of the light coming from the already-cramped windows. As a result, the inside of the car was cast in twilight, reminding Ian of stumbling lost in the snow. And just like the blizzard, he felt for sure that the car would swallow him up too.

And just like the night in the blizzard, there was a monster waiting in the shadows for him. Ian had no sooner closed the door behind him when a silhouette stepped out from behind one of the mounds. By the light that was strained through the window, Ian saw a willowy man with blond hair. He was wearing a thick jacket, kind worn by cavalry officers while fighting Indians in the frontier. The hitman was lazily aiming a revolver at Ian, the man's gnarled fingers a mismatch to the gun's sleek geometry.

Ian smiled. "I see neither of us is surprised to see the other, Mr....?"

"Mr. Olivier," the hitman said.

"I supposed I'm obligated to say it's a pleasure to meet you," Ian said. "I'm..."

"Sherlock Holmes."

Chapter 16

"Sherlock Holmes?" Ian asked. "The name sounds familiar."

Olivier laughed. "It must be because no one has called you by that name for months now – a year even? You've been living behind the mask of this Ian fellow for so long that the mask has probably fused to the skin. Of course you've forgotten – let me refresh your memory. You got into a struggle with my employer, the brilliant Professor Moriarty, and both of you fell to your deaths into the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Well, the reading public thought that you fell to your death anyway. You should have seen the headlines the following day. Of course, by that time you were on the run and going by a different name, because you knew that we would be hunting you down."

"I still don't know who this Mr. Holmes is, but I like the sound of him," Ian said, trying to sound natural.

"That sounds like something that Holmes would have said. I was told that you have lived your entire life under the assumption that only you could love you, and Moriarty's plan operated by that one constant."

"Plan? What plan?" Ian asked, his nerves prickling.

"Ah! And the mask starts to crumble. It was once explained to me that Ponce de León searched for the Fountain of Youth in Florida, never realizing that his four children waiting for him back home in Puerto Rico were his immortality. And while I knew that Moriarty could never bear a child of his own, there is more than one way to have a child. Anyone could make a machine come to life with a few gears and oil, but it takes a true genius to make ideas come to life. And I'm not talking about an idea to build a dam or to declare war on a country – nothing that crude. I'm talking about ideas that evolve on their own, ideas that manipulate and free, ideas that create and destroy, all without their benevolent creator."

"I don't like all of this thinking about thoughts," Ian shrugged. "Show me a metaphysical man, and I'll show you someone who thinks they're smarter than they actually are."

Olivier ignored him and continued. "Moriarty's ideas were his children, and his children were his immortality. His firstborn son was the idea that Western civilization could be tricked into destroying itself. His plan was so precise that he had the date picked for the final stage: June 24, 1893. And then you killed him."

"And I'll do it again too," Sherlock said, finally dropping all pretense.

"Of course – Moriarty hadn't expected anything less from you. But like I said, he built his ideas to evolve on their own, and evolve it did. June 24th is no longer the end of times – we have now calculated it to be July 1, 1893. The plan is an orphan now, but it has learned to adapt, and we have watched it with awe."

"Well, good things aren't meant to last," Sherlock pointed out. "It's why a tumbler of whiskey always mysteriously evaporates when I'm in the room. And it's why I'll stop this plan, just like I stopped the one before it."

Olivier laughed so hard that he almost lowered his revolver. Sherlock growled, "And what's so funny?"

"It's just that, until this moment, I never thought that the blasted argument about free will could be so funny. "You talk about stopping the plan as if you can, when the truth of the matter is every action you've taken since that night in Switzerland over a year ago had been predetermined by Moriarty himself, long before you got your hands on him."

"Explain. Impress me."

"The professor had anticipated a number of outcomes the night you two fought above Reichenbach Falls. In his eyes, the most likely outcome involved his death and your survival, and so he planned accordingly. The moment one of my colleagues saw you clinging to the side of the cliff, and the professor's body floating in the foam far below, that plan immediately sprang into action. Didn't you find it odd that when you reached the first tavern you could find, you shared a table with a drunken courier with loose lips concerning Moriarty? The professor knew how curious that mind of yours is, and that you would follow the messenger."

"And I did – the whole way to Florence," Sherlock said. "So, you were just toying around with me?" He shrugged. "Not a complete loss. I always wanted to visit the empty tomb honoring Dante Alighieri anyway. A man damned to never return home – I understand the feeling. But I didn't see the tomb. I did get to stumble upon a guild of assassins who took their marching orders from Moriarty. He seemed to have hated the world so much that his assassins are still killing his enemies to this day. And one of those enemies was..."

"Irene Adler," Olivier smiled.

Sherlock said with a dangerous note rising in his voice, "If I had known that Moriarty would drag her into this, I would have let him live, but he would have regretted I had."

"And that was just as he had expected!" Olivier exclaimed. "Don't you see the immense brain behind Moriarty? He knew you better than you ever would, because if you had known yourself, you would have realized that you were being lured into a trap, and this Adler lady was the bait. You robbed the world of its greatest genius, Mr. Sherlock – you should be ashamed of yourself. But tell me, what all did you learn from the assassins?"

"While I couldn't find out Ms. Adler's exact location, I did find that she was on assignment in America for Professor Moriarty and mustn't be killed until tomorrow's date. I had my suspicions for some time that Moriarty had blackmailed her into his service, and the letter had only confirmed it."

Olivier nodded. "It's true – he had blackmailed her."

"And how did he blackmail you?" Sherlock wondered out loud. "I'm assuming that's the only way anyone could ever work with that worm of a man."

Olivier looked insulted. "He never forced me into his company. I begged myself into his good graces when I had heard what he was capable of. He was a god walking amongst men, and I was his happy servant."

"You know, I've heard vicars talk less glowingly of God than you are talking of Moriarty," Sherlock said. "Just saying – maybe you should tone it down a bit."

Sherlock was trying to be a bug under Olivier's skin, to get him to make a mistake, any kind of mistake, but it wasn't working. Olivier continued, "But like I was saying, everything you've done since that night was possible only through Moriarty. Remember the customs agent in New York City when you landed there? You thought you were clever when you managed to fool him into believing you were an American who was on vacation in Europe. Little did you know that he was working for Moriarty. And then there was that case you solved while in Philadelphia..."

Sherlock remembered that one all too well. He offered to help a kind, old man whose granddaughter who had vanished during her husband's funeral. The grandfather had hired Sherlock instead of going to the police, afraid that they would find a suicide and the family's good name being shamed in newspapers across the city. But Sherlock hadn't found a suicide – instead, he found her in the crypt of the church, buried alive with her husband's corpse in a coffin meant only to hold one. Sherlock was able to rescue the widow – just barely – after suspecting that the deacon was to blame. The woman had chosen her husband over the godly man years before, and the heartbroken deacon was upset that the woman was still in love with the idea of her husband even after his death, instead of moving on to be with him. With the widow saved and the deacon having run away, the mystery was solved and the grandfather had given Sherlock a substantial reward.

"Let me guess," Sherlock said sarcastically. "Were they also accomplices of Moriarty's?"

"And everyone said that you were stupid!" Olivier gushed condescendingly. If Sherlock didn't feel murderous before, he certainly did now. "Shakespeare had it right when he said that all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Ever since that fateful night in Switzerland, every person who has given you food and money and clothing and shelter and money, they all have been playing the role of a lifetime."

"So what you're saying then is it's my world, and you all are paying rent to live in it?" Sherlock said, finding his footing again in the conversation.

Olivier looked ruffled. "No, that's not what I'm getting at..."

"And that time in Chicago? When I was arrested for public intoxication?"

Olivier smiled. "That was all you, my friend. We refuse to take responsibility for the fact that you cannot hold your liquor. We did arrange, though, for that daring escape of yours from your jail cell. After all, we needed you to reach your next checkpoint in time..."

"The safe house in Peoria," Sherlock said.

"Yes. Moriarty suspected that you were uncovering his web of business partners, and that you knew one of his closest associates, Mr. George Morrison, lived in the area. And so you burgled the house, just like we knew you would, and you found the letter tucked away in the right drawer of the desk, just like we knew you would. We watched from a distance, like an ornithologist with his birds, as you made a copy of the letter. You're too smart simply to take the letter – doing so would arouse suspicion and cause the plan to evolve. And as you copied out the letter, you learned the truth: two assassins were being put on this train with the intent of burying a bullet in Ms. Adler's brain in Cheyenne. All of that has led up to this moment."

"What, me having to listen politely as you blabber on?"

"There's no motive to acting stupid. You fully grasp what I've just revealed, that all of the pains you've endured in recent months were all a parlor game to teach you a lesson in humility. You have only succeeded because Moriarty wanted you to succeed, and you have lived only because Moriarty wanted you to live – up to this point. The professor's been playing you from the afterlife like a cheap toy, and he knew he would be bored with you by now. So, Mr. Holmes, how does it feel? How does it feel to realize that not only are you going to die today, but you're going to die useless? I'm sure there's nothing worse for a useful man such as you."

Olivier pulled back the hammer on his gun. "I almost forgot – Moriarty wanted me to pass on one more word of advice..."

"A lot of good it's going to do me if I'm about to be dead."

"You may think you're some angel walking among men, but you were still built up from the clay in the ground, and the clay is dark. Like everyone else in the world, you have a scary past you're trying to run away from. But no matter how fast you run, the second you stop, your past is there to overwhelm you. For you, your past happens to have an opera singer from New Jersey who has a talent for blackmailing those around her."

"That doesn't sound like a very accurate description of my assistant, Dr. Watson."

"Don't attempt to throw us off the trail. We know just how little Dr. Watson means to you," Olivier sneered. Sherlock had to hide a little smile – they had mistaken his respect for Watson as being utter contempt. If he wasn't going to survive the day, that perception had to. He couldn't put his only friend in danger.

"Do you feel weak, Mr. Holmes? Do you feel it in your bones, that you're about to fall off the edge of this world? Do you feel helpless, that you cannot save your love who will be waiting on a train platform for her assassin? All while Moriarty lives forever through the countless plans he set in motion?"

"My curiosity is my hope, and I still have that. I need to know how many of this train's sins were due to Moriarty's intervention. Is his ghost responsible for the murders?"

Olivier smiled, and Sherlock could have sworn he saw Moriarty in the smile. The henchman said, "You know, it's impossible to tell the difference between the professor's schemes and destiny itself, and that is just the way he would have wanted it. He read Milton's _Paradise Lost_ just the right number of times, and he saw a world that was growing too big for its gods, and the chaos that ensued. All he ever wanted was to bring us back to order, and if that meant becoming a god, then so be it."

"I seem to recall the poem very differently. Wasn't it Satan who refused to bow to mankind, saying that only God deserved the honor?" Sherlock's face brightened. "Wait, if Moriarty is the Devil in this metaphor, does that make me God? I like where this is going."

"Silence!" Olivier snapped abruptly, Sherlock having finally gotten to him. "You will not mock the idea. You must not mock the idea."

"I'll do more than mock the idea – I'm going to outlive this day and break the idea on the wheel, because I'm such an annoying person when it comes down to it."

"Enough," Olivier said, and he pressed down on the trigger. The revolver clicked and there was a thick silence in the train car.

"Well," Sherlock finally said, "I can't say this isn't awkward."

A little nervous, Olivier pressed the trigger twice more – still nothing.

"Stop it – you're embarrassing yourself," Sherlock said.

Olivier took a few steps back, his eyes flitting down as he opened the revolver's cylinder to check the bullets. This was all Sherlock needed. In one step, he was intimate with his foe and grabbed the barrel of the revolver with his left hand while cracking Olivier in the temple with his right. Olivier melted to the floor, gripping his head as it leaked pain. Sherlock looked curiously at the revolver, tossing it up and down in his hand, feeling the steel like it was the fabric of a jacket.

"It's freezing," Sherlock said as he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it snugly around the revolver. "I'm surprised you didn't catch a cold from it. Want to know what I really think of your beloved boss? He planned everything down to the last detail, but he hadn't considered the possibility that there would be a blizzard, one that would drop the temperatures as low as they are. And you know what happens to steel when it's cold? It shrinks and causes revolvers to misfire. Moriarty thought he was a god, but he couldn't even control the weather."

Olivier was finding his feet when Sherlock suddenly lashed out, whipping Olivier across the face with the barrel of the gun. Olivier folded back down to the floor, moaning, blood oozing down his torn forehead like molasses.

"See?" Sherlock said. "There's more than one way to use a revolver. You just have to get creative."

Sherlock dropped the gun to his feet and pulled up Olivier by the collar. Sherlock could see himself in the smoky mirror of Olivier's eyes, but he didn't recognize himself.

"And here's another thing that Moriarty, in all of his genius, couldn't anticipate," Sherlock said quietly.

***

Nellie sat at the edge of the wooden bench, squeezed between a burly rancher who was more bear than man on one side and nothing on the other. As she tried to keep her balance on the plank that could barely hold one of her hips, let alone two, Nellie tried to look anything but the buttocks of the man standing in front of her. The train car wasn't built to hold this many souls – as a matter of fact, it was meant to hold cargo, not people – and Nellie felt that she was breathing the air that everyone else had already taken a turn at. And everyone cramped together caused the temperature in the car to throttle, until it reached the point where Nellie wanted to jump outside and dip her feet in the beach of sandy snow.

But as many people as there were in the room, the conversations were at a murmur. She would have thought that there would be more firecrackers of excitement in the air. After all, if the rescue train hadn't shown up when it had, then they would have made the front page of every paper when their bodies were eventually found. But then she thought of her own brushes with death, and how those moments stayed with her long after, like mucus rotting away in the lungs. It would be weeks, months, years even before the fear left them, and when it did, it would be as a nervous chuckle that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

Nellie watched curiously as the sea of murmurs suddenly began to part like a mouth about to yawn. Wondering who could be working their way through the crowd, Nellie peered through the forest of arms and gave a little gasp. She stood up and sat Ian down as gently as china. Her hand shaking a little, she took a scarf from her pocket and began dabbing away the blotches of blood that stained Ian's face.

"I don't need first aid," Ian said dumbly, his eyes glazed. "It's not my blood."

"I guessed as much," Nellie said as she scrubbed away at a stubborn spot of blood on Ian's cheek. "It's just that people ask questions if they see a bearded man wearing blood like rouge." She lowered her voice a notch. "What happened?"

"I...I did something that the professor never thought I would do."

"Professor? What professor?" Nellie wondered.

Ian ignored her. "I had no choice."

"I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm not going to lie and tell you that whatever it is, it's over. One thing I've learned about you is you know what the definition of _obsession_ is."

Nellie said this, in the hopes that Ian would respond with something sarcastic. Instead, Ian looked at her for a long moment and asked, "Do you remember the story of Heracles and the Twelve Labors?"

She wasn't expecting that. "Vaguely."

"How did Heracles kill the Hydra?"

"If I remember, after he decapitated each of the heads, he cauterized the wounds so that the monster couldn't regrow them. May I ask why we're talking about this?"

"Because I just found out that I have my own Hydra I have to kill."

"And here I thought that I would never apply my knowledge of classical mythology to everyday life," Nellie said, forcing a laugh.

But Ian's mind was already elsewhere. He was ransacking his soul, desperately looking for something that he recognized. But everywhere he looked, all he saw was a crackling portrait of a grinning Professor Moriarty, his nemesis. And as Ian stepped closer and looked deep into the paint chips peeling off the canvas, he realized that they were the same color as what he saw the night before, when he was huddled in the blowing snow. It was that same, dangerous shade of white that was so dark that it was black, the lighthouse of color that tricked sailors into sailing on the rocks.

And that was when Ian reached an understanding. In the eternal night before, he had to shed his memories in order to survive, and while he did outlive the night, it had come with a terrible cost. Both Ian and Moriarty were forged from the same vein of iron: both were geniuses who had a venomous disregard for the society around them. The only thing that separated the two men was the memories that had polished Ian until he shone. It was through his encounters with people like the loyal Dr. Watson, the clever Irene Adler, his omnipotent brother Mycroft Holmes, and even Inspector Lestrade that Ian saw the heights of humanity where Moriarty could only see the lows.

With those memories gone, Ian thought, what separated him from Moriarty? And he realized that before he could save the world from the mad professor's scheme, he was going to have to defeat the evil that was rising up inside of him like bile.

Chapter 17

With every step of smoke, the train got closer to Cheyenne. There was a nervous air that stuck to the walls of the train car as native Wyomingites began to recognize the trappings of home. After their ordeal in the blizzard, they refused to believe that they were going to live. An aspiring ranch hand onboard even believed that he had actually died, and that the preacher back home didn't come close to describing just how beautiful Heaven was. In spite of the blizzard that had chewed the earth into foam behind them, the land here was fresh as a book that had never been opened. The wind breathed life into the rippling fields that were as yellow as yolk. In the distance, they could just make out a mirage of mountains that were the color of steel, swords forged by no man.

But where others felt the excitement of coming back home, Nellie was filling up with dread, drop by drop. She felt like she was walking across words to the last page of a story that she didn't want to end. Nellie couldn't have imagined herself thinking the same just a few days before. When she had first met Ian, she had found the man to be unbearable, like a thorn that digs deeper when you try to pull it out. He was an arrogant man who probably believed that he was living a second further into the future than anyone else and who certainly acted like it.

She still found Ian to be annoying – of course. It was just that after all they had been through together – the blizzard, the murders, the conspiracy – she felt that she had grown up a little bit with him. Like continents brushing against each other, there was a friction that she hadn't found before and likely never would again. It reminded her of the time when she was on assignment on Siam and had met a Buddhist nun. In broken English, the elderly bhikkuni – her head shaved and her robes stained a deep red – told Nellie that when two people live through a tragedy together, that they become the same person. Nellie hadn't understood what the nun meant until that moment, because she had never shared something so profound before. Of course, she had shared her outrage with the reading public through her pieces in the paper. But she was a journalist in those moments, and her editor once told her that journalists couldn't also be people.

She thought of this, unaware that she was sitting next to the biggest story of her lifetime. Ian still hadn't admitted to her the truth about who he really was, and he was planning on keeping it that way. He wasn't planning on telling anyone, let alone a journalist, a secret that many people would kill for. So he would have to stay Ian Hunter, professional drifter, to her, as much as he regretted it. She shared her soul with him now, and she still didn't know his secrets.

Nellie knew what she had to do next, but she was surprisingly shy about it. Finally, she leaned over on the bench and tapped Ian on the shoulder. Ian was napping, using the shoulder of a sleeping giant next to him as a lumpy pillow, and yet he was stubborn to wake up. It was only after several nudges that Ian woke up, and he made it more dramatic than it needed to be. He sat upright on the bench, his eyes wide, patting his shoulder as if he was trying to put out a fire. After a few moments, he calmed down.

"What was that about?" Nellie asked, baffled.

"I was dreaming that there was a spider crawling on me," Ian said, feeling a bit sheepish. "It was a big spider."

"Are you saying that I have big hands?" Nellie wondered. "I was trying to wake you up."

"Why? Are we there?"

"No, not yet," Nellie replied.

"Then why did you wake me up?" Ian asked, ruffled.

"It's just that – well, I have a question to ask you. How interested would you be in joining me on my trip to San Francisco?"

Ian stared at her dumbly for a few moments, and Nellie continued, "Someone who can piece together a puzzle can always be useful. And I need someone who can take a punch for me. You don't know how rough it is out there for people who can't stop asking questions. And I need someone to have a conversation with. Most people take months off my life with their small talk. So what do you say?"

As Nellie rattled through her reasons, she noticed a look that rinsed down Ian's face. She wasn't exactly sure what emotion was going through his mind at that moment. The only thing she could think of was that he was trying to express pity but he was unsure how. So before Ian even had a chance to speak, she spoke for him. "Let's be honest. You're not going anywhere in particular – you're just going wherever the breeze takes you. I'm offering a free vacation to the slums of San Francisco. From there, I'll be at the mercy of my editor. This time next year I could be in Brazil or Sweden. Personally, I prefer Brazil, but..."

"And you accuse me of wandering?" Ian asked with the sketch of a smile.

"At least there is a method to my madness," Nellie retorted.

"Isn't madness enough sometimes?" Ian said, suddenly thinking of a surveyor he once knew who went insane after trying to make a property a perfect circle. "But in all seriousness, you're right – I don't have any direction to my life. But your friend from Pittsburgh was kind enough to give me a map, in the flowery, metaphorical sense."

"You still haven't told me what happened with him."

"And we're keeping it that way. Needless to say, I thought my little adventure would end in Cheyenne. But I've come to realize that it means more than just saving a friend. I have to kill another friend, one who I thought was already dead, but who is staying alive just to spite me."

"You have the strangest friends."

"Don't we all?" Ian said distantly.

"No, most people just say that and don't mean it."

But Ian was no longer paying attention. His wrinkled brain was already onto another subject. He had to find a way to outwit the professor's ghost and soon. The clock was ticking fast like a dying man's heartbeat and it wouldn't be long before civilization fell. But while Moriarty had seemingly planned for every possible outcome, he still could not have predicted the unnatural cold that had caused his henchman's gun to misfire, sparing Ian's life. And that was the only weapon Ian had against the mad professor: unpredictability. Moriarty believed that since he understood Ian's past, that he could control him. After all, his love for Irene had almost led to his downfall hours before. No, he wasn't going to live in his past any longer. Instead, he was going to live in the future that even Moriarty himself could not see. It would be the only way that Ian could stop his Devil. And Ian knew exactly what to do next.

It was not long before the train pulled into the station. No one on board had ever been so happy to see a bunch of pieces of lumber sloppily nailed together before. Amazingly, the lazy craftsmanship managed to support the weight of what seemed like the entire town. The whole platform, from end to end, was brimming with people from all walks of life, so full that some were even in danger of spilling out onto the train tracks. Everyone had heard of the people who plumbed the abyss and came back with a story to tell. When they saw the train pull into the station, everything suddenly seemed possible.

Nellie peered through the smudged window and saw the smiling faces, strangers happy to see strangers. She turned to the bench next to her, about to make some comment about this, when she noticed that only the sleeping giant was sitting next to her. Ian had vanished.

She peered through the throng of people inside of the sweaty train car, hoping to catch sight of Ian drowning in the rolling sea of limbs. But there was no sign of the vagrant. It was at that time that the door rattled open and sunlight poured into the car like a waterfall. The people inside shielded their eyes from the sun, feeling reborn in that moment. As the people poured out of the car and mingled with those on the platform, Nellie navigated between the hugs and handshakes, trying to find Ian before he disappeared for good.

And that was when she saw him – or rather, she saw his slimy beard and thick hair, hard to miss even in a crowd of unwashed faces. Nellie gave chase, brushing away the people like curtains of vine in the jungle. She was only ten feet away when she saw something that made her stop in her tracks. She saw Ian pat a woman on the shoulder to get her attention. The woman turned as beautifully as a globe spun. Her skin the color of cream and her hair a mousey brown, she had the looks that poets hunted for in their writing. And her eyes – even through the rustling crowd, Nellie saw those blue eyes that were soft but could still pierce, like the ocean chopping down cliffs. And there was a little smirk that seemed to be dug into her face, as if she already knew the punchline to life itself. Everything about her seemed so overwhelmingly perfect that Nellie felt invisible.

The woman, who was laughing over something with an acquaintance, turned to see who was standing behind her. It took her a few moments to recognize who it was. But when she did, her laughter died away, the sound dripping from her mouth. Her eyes widened. The only language she could speak was silence.

"Ms. Adler?" Sherlock said with an exaggerated flourish of his hand. He bowed deeply. "We meet again."

"What...?" Irene managed to say after a few attempts.

"You know, I've been rehearsing this moment countless times over the past few days. All of those times, you jump on me and kiss me like you're trying to suck the venom out of my mouth. I can't say you're exactly following the script at the moment."

"I wasn't expecting you...I was expecting..."

"Trust me when I say you're clever, absurdly so. But this one time, just admit that you didn't know," Sherlock said, gently taking her by the arm and leading her away from her acquaintance. Irene absentmindedly waved goodbye to her friend as Ian continued, "I know what's been going on. I know that you were here, expecting a new assignment from Moriarty. What you didn't know was that he was sending his associates to fire you – and when I say fire, I mean fire you out of a cannon."

"Is that so?" Irene asked, finding her lost vocabulary, little by little.

"Yes, but lucky for you, I have a job offer that you might be interested in," Sherlock said casually. "Let's talk the details over dinner. What's the third-finest restaurant in town?"

"Third-finest? That sounds extravagant, coming from you. You must have stumbled onto a fortune since we last met," Irene said with a little laugh.

"Oh, I have – and it didn't involve any relatives dying under rather suspicious circumstances."

"But seriously, I accept your dinner invitation," Irene said as they stepped off the platform and onto one of the dusty streets of Cheyenne.

"Your husband won't mind, I hope?" Sherlock asked.

"My husband?" Irene said, looking confused. After a few moments, her face brightened with realization. "Ah, I forgot about our last meeting – it was when I married my mark."

"Mark? I seem to recall his first name being Godfrey."

"No, no, I meant that he was a mark – as in I was running a scam on him."

"True love," Sherlock said wistfully. He added coyly, "At least tell me the honeymoon made it all worth the trouble."

"Frankly, the honeymoon was awful. He took me to Calais for some inexplicable reason. Why go to Paris or Venice or somewhere else terribly romantic, when you can just sit in drizzly Calais and watch the ships come and go at the docks?"

"Maybe your dear Godfrey misunderstood when you said that you always enjoyed a nice port?" Sherlock offered.

Irene laughed, having finally found herself. "Perhaps."

"If it's any consolation, your marriage wasn't a complete ruin."

"What do you mean? I had married a complete horse apple of a man."

"During the ceremony, when the priest asked your husband if he took you as his wife, I whispered, 'I do.' So, in a way, we got married that day."

"Well, a pity you didn't speak up."

Sherlock looked at her for a long moment and smiled a little. "Yes," he said, "a pity. Shakespeare couldn't write tragedy this well."

Sherlock then changed the subject, asking, "So, what restaurant are you stealing me away to?"

"It's a nice steakhouse – it's just a few more blocks down."

"A steakhouse in Wyoming? What a change of pace," Sherlock said sarcastically. "If you tell me that again, I promise I'll be more surprised next time."

"Are you sure you know what you're getting yourself into?" Irene asked. "You do realize that food still costs money, right?"

"Like I said," Sherlock said, while taking out his billfold and fanning the cash, "I've come into a bit of money lately."

Irene's eyes were hungry but not for steak. It was the reaction that Sherlock was looking for. He couldn't love Irene again, because if he fell for her, he would fall into another of Moriarty's traps. His trip had suddenly become business. He needed to know what Irene knew, and nothing else mattered. And he knew that a conman was just as easy prey as their marks – everybody loves money. Sherlock knew all of this, and that was why he was waving a handful of cash in Irene's face.

But as he did that, he saw his idea of Irene wilting in his eyes. Sherlock remembered when they had first met. He had been hired by the King of Bohemia to retrieve a very incriminating photograph that Irene had in her possession. But when he had met her, Sherlock felt like the last of his species just happening to find a mate. Irene was a brilliant wit, a juice of electricity on a hot summer day. And when Irene had outsmarted him, he felt the warmth of respect for her where others would have felt insulted.

But now, things have changed. Moriarty was using her as a weapon against Sherlock, and so Sherlock had to use her as a weapon against Moriarty. And with that, any illusion of love had evaporated, and the lion realized that he was no man's pet, that his master was just another prey. She was disposable, one of the many means he had to the end, and Sherlock hated Moriarty venomously for making him think that.

Sherlock was so deep in thought that he forgot to walk and he slowly idled to a stop. Irene kept walking for a few paces, not realizing that her companion was frozen in the quicksand of his own footsteps. When she did realize that, she turned in the street and looked curiously at Sherlock.

"Sherlock," Irene called out. "If you think I'm going to bring your food to you like some housewife, you're mistaken."

"Huh?" Sherlock asked, snapping out of his train of thought.

"Are we going to talk business or what?" Irene asked, gesturing at the steakhouse that sat just ahead, seeming to take up the whole block.

"Yes."

Delaware

December 2014-July 2015

