Dead Man's Return by Derek Rutherford
Author:Derek Rutherford [Rutherford, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Robert Hale
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Jim Jackson had elected not to ride into the city with Rosalie and Leon. ‘It wasn’t that long ago that I was in Austin,’ he said. ‘I really don’t want to show my face there again. Not so soon.’ Instead, he’d said, he’d ride out and see how the land lay around Beecher and Smith’s yard. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for,’ he said. ‘Maybe just an idea. Maybe something I’ll know when I see it.’ It was how he’d worked back in Prairie City, where Leon had been held in the prison leasing camp. He’d gone up there and he’d ridden around, waiting and searching for an idea to form, a way to break Leon out. And lo and behold an idea did form, and it worked, too.
There’d be no harm in taking a casual look at Beecher and Smith’s operation.
Jim found the railroad tracks before he found the trail. He pulled his horse to a halt and watched a lumber train smoking slowly southwards. The locomotive, a 2-8-0, pulled dozens of flatbed wagons, each piled high with raw timber. The smell of burning coal from the smokestack filled the air and the wheels rattled over the rails. It felt like an age before the brakeman’s wagon with the red light on the back disappeared from sight.
‘Lot of timber,’ Jim said to his horse.
He squeezed his heels against her flanks and together they followed the tracks, until a mile or so later he picked up a hard-packed, wheel-rutted trail that crossed the rails, and then ran alongside them towards a distant cluster of buildings. It was a cluster that grew and grew as he approached, as did the fire and smoke, the noise of machinery and the smell of more burning coal.
He arrived at a set of huge metal gates. The gates were open, not that they were designed for anything other than show. They weren’t connected to anything. One could have ridden around them just as easily as through them. The railroad tracks entered the site just along and to the right of the gates. Looking further out, it did appear that a line of barbed-wire marked some of the perimeter of the site.
He rode around that perimeter, looking in at the vast workings, the steam engines, and the long platform from which cranes were unloading the logs the train had just brought in. The logs were floated down further into the site on water courses built behind and parallel to the platform. There was a cookhouse and several bunkhouses, a building that looked like a saloon, coal heaps and numerous fires, water tanks, and stables. As he rode leisurely around the perimeter, Jim spied a blacksmith. There was a huge office building made of bricks. He circled it all and on the far side rode up onto higher ground, where he sat looking down on the empire and wondered if his and Leon’s sweat and blood had paid for any of it.
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