The Wrecker by Clive Cussler (book club reads .TXT) 📕

As the California gentlemen were willing to rent an entire lodge to persuade me to run for president, I figured it might as well be one near him.”

“Still playing hard to get?” asked Bell, recalling their conversation at the Follies.

“Harder than ever. The moment you say yes to their sort, they think they own you.”

“Do you want the job?”

In answer, Charles Kincaid slipped a big hand under the lapel of his coat and flipped it over. A campaign button that had been hidden by the cloth read KINCAID FOR PRESIDENT.

“Mum’s the word.”

“When will you turn your button out?”

“I’m planing to surprise Mr. Hennessy at his banquet. They want you to come too, seeing as how you’re the man who saved the line from the Wrecker.”

None of this rang true to the detective.

“I’m looking forward to it,” Bell said.

The Wrecker pretended not to notice Bell’s probing gaze. He knew his presidential ruse would not fool the Van Dorn detective much longer. But he stood his ground, allowing his eyes to rove curiously over the gleaming bridge as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

“That broad plateau on the far side of the gorge,” he remarked casually, “seems the likely spot for Hennessy to build his head-of-the-line staging yards.” There were times, he thought proudly, he really should have been an actor.

“Do you regret leaving engineering?” Bell asked.

“I would if I didn’t enjoy politics so much.” Kincaid laughed. He let his smile fade as he pretended to reflect soberly. “I might feel differently if I had been as brilliant an engineer as Mr. Mowery who built this bridge. Look at that structure! The grace, the strength. He was a star. Still is, despite his years. I was never more than a capable journeyman.”

Bell was staring.

Kincaid smiled. “You’re looking at me strangely. That’s because you’re still a young man, Mr. Bell. Wait until forty overtakes you. You’ll learn your limitations and find other lines at which you might do better.”

“Such as running for president?” Bell asked lightly.

“Exactly! ”

Kincaid laughed, slapped the detective’s rock-hard arm, and vaulted into his Thomas Flyer. He engaged the motor, which he had left running, and started down the mountain without looking back. Any hint that he was concerned would only fuel the detective’s imagination.

In fact, he was exultant.

Osgood Hennessy was charging forward at full steam, obliviously putting his head in a noose. The faster the cutoff crossed the bridge, the sooner Osgood would hang. For if new staging yards at the front end of the construction represented Hennessy’s head and his torso was the Southern Pacific Railroad empire, then the Cascade Canyon Bridge was his neck.

35

ISAAC BELL PLANTED MEN IN EVERY WORK GANG TO WATCH FOR sabotage.

Hennessy had told him that holing through was just the beginning. He intended to build as far across the bridge as he could before the first snow. Even the most cowardly Wall Street banker, the railroader boasted, would be assured by the proof that the Southern Pacific was primed to continue cutoff construction when it melted in the spring.

Bell directed horse patrols to guard the route that the railroad was surveying deep into the mountains. Then he asked Jethro Watt to take personal command of his railroad police. They walked the bridge and agreed to beef up the contingents guarding the piers below and the span above. Then they inspected the surrounding area on horseback, the giant Watt mounted on an enormous animal named Thunderbolt who kept trying to gnaw the police chief’s leg. Watt subdued the animal by swatting its head, but any judge of horse-flesh knew that Thunderbolt was merely biding his time.

By nightfall that first day of frenzied activity, carpenters had erected temporary shoring in Tunnel 13 and a timber rock shed around its freshly hewn portal. Masons were following close behind with stonework. And track gangs had laid rail from the tunnel to the edge of the gorge.

Osgood Hennessy’s red train streamed through the tunnel, pushing a string of heavily laden materials cars ahead of it and up to the closely guarded bridge. Track gangs unloaded rails and work continued by electric light. Ties supplied by a timber operation upstream in the mountains were already laid on the bridge. Spike mauls rang through the night. When the rails were secured, Hennessy’s locomotive pushed the heavy materials cars onto the span.

A thousand railroaders held their breath.

The only sounds were mechanical, the chuff of the locomotive, the dynamo powering the lights, and the grinding of cast iron on steel. As the lead car, heaped with rails, edged forward, all eyes shifted to Franklin Mowery. The elderly bridge builder was watching closely.

Isaac Bell overheard Eric, Mowery’s bespectacled assistant, boast, “Mr. Mowery was the same cool as a cucumber when he finished Mr. Hennessy’s Lucin Cutoff across the Great Salt Lake.”

“But,” said a grizzled surveyor, peering into the deep gorge, “that one was a lot nearer the water.”

Mowery leaned nonchalantly on his walking stick. No emotion showed on his round face, no worry rippled his sweeping jawline, or twitched his Vandyke beard. He had a cold, smokeless pipe firmly clamped in his broad, good-humored mouth.

Bell watched Mowery’s pipe. When the materials car reached the far side without mishap and the workmen greeted it with a cheer, Mowery removed his pipe from his mouth and picked splinters of crushed stem from his teeth.

“Caught me,” he grinned at Bell. “Bridges are strange critters, highly unpredictable.”

They double-tracked the bridge by noon.

In a long burst of action, they laid dozens of sidings. Soon, the remote plateau had been transformed into a combination railroad yard and construction staging arena. Hennessy’s red special steamed across the gorge and parked on an elevated sidetrack from which the president of the Southern Pacific could oversee the entire operation. A steady stream of materials trains began crossing the bridge. Telegraph wires followed, transmitting the good news back to Wall Street.

Hennessy’s telegrapher handed Bell a wad of encoded messages.

No telegraph operator on the continent had been more closely scrutinized