Short Stories & Tall Tales
Wilton Yawbloc, Railroad Detective
Tom Sheehan
He didn’t know how many times he had seen a broken telegraph wire out the window of The Villager, #2 passenger car of the train, Union Pacific Line, heading across Utah. Maybe two or three times? He wasn’t sure. It was his first time on a train. Trees rushed by. Gullies. Wadies. Ravines. And rock, as bold as the old Earth herself, coming through on ledges, canyon beginnings, and now and then beside a stream or a rush of water catching the sunlight; then, as if in pardon, all the other parts of imagination came along in their flow. Glare from the slanting sun at times on the car window spoiled his vision. But he knew the unsettling feeling crawling up from nowhere --- something was not right. A notion asserted itself, saying he had to pay heed, read into his observations, make judgments, and spur action. Detectives, not born but made, like he was, must be like this, get off the mark when the heat is on. Find out what’s going on, expose what’s hidden.
Or else.
Wilton “Willie” Yawbloc, first day working as a railroad detective, a job granted him by a gracious president of the line who Yawbloc had saved from side trail brigands. Yawbloc figured it was nerves of the “new boy” on the job, seeing the line broken. The telegraph line, strung along the rail, dipped and followed the contour of the land as well as the vegetation. In many places the wire went from trimmed tree to pole to tree to pole to tree, the crude and early construction of the telegraph system in open country, a quick stretch across the region, shortcuts galore to “Carry the word! Carry the word.”
Forevermore he was part of it all. Steadfast, true to his word, iron in his gut, trying to be the observable hawk in flight, he was now a railroad detective, an enforcer of railroad rights, guardian of passengers, deterrent to train robberies or thefts of any kind or size.
On call.
It meant something.
His grandfather and father had infused certain beliefs in him: Nothing stands still in any kind of progress. Here, in the spreading west, winds came, tornadoes on occasion, and branches fell or whole trees were uprooted, with the elemental wire coming down, needing to be reattached. Patch crews, on horseback, wagons or propelling themselves on handcars located at most stations of a line, worked out of those stations in whatever direction failure was noted --- an endless task in the early days of rail and wire.
Or were these broken wires he was now aware of, intentional drops?
Out of foreign stock that had fought off Tartars and Mongols, and even the Roman hordes, Yawbloc was as tough as one could get, but born to be a horseman like his Central European ancestors.
Fear was a thing to be feared, and therefore “never allowed on the premises.”
His grandfather used to giggle when he said that, a light laughter, an honest eye accompanying the laughter, but a firm hand on the boy’s arm signaling all his attention was needed, that what he was saying surmounted the giggle in his throat. It was his grandfather’s way of communicating, stressing what he was saying for the boy’s future, trying to fix and form the boy’s make-up, and the man he’d become.
All that had come upon him when he waded into the small band of brigands demanding “money or your lives” from the party of the railroad president out for a casual horseback ride with a few friends on a free weekend. Yawbloc had scattered the hold-up men by his mad entrance, guns firing away with rapid fire, his great black stallion thundering into their midst like some monster on the loose, screams coming from the deepest part of his body.
Their resolve melted at his hellacious and heroic intrusion.
This new job was his payment, his reward, for being so fearless.
He came quickly alert when the train slowed its speed. The conductor earlier had said a water stop was ahead.
But such was not the case.
The track was blocked by a huge tree directly across the rails; it obliterated any further vision down one side of the track, it was so large. A gang of bandit horsemen was strung along the side from which the tree had toppled. A quick glance from Yawbloc, out the window of the car, counted at least more than a dozen men astride horses aligned in a row as if they were an army cavalry unit. But a motley bunch they were, a ragged looking bunch that screamed deprivation and ganged cowardice, which leaped to a plus on his side in a quick calculation.
He scrambled to the door of the car on the opposite side, away from the gang. He had his rifle, his two side arms, and a full load of ammunition in a bandolier he had quickly thrown over his shoulder. He moved fast. In a matter of minutes, silent minutes as he supposed guns were being trained on the crew from the forward cars, and some passengers, he was up a slight crevice and mounting an incline through craggy rock and short, stumpy brush clinging to slight crevices.
One shot was fired; one single, echoing shot. The sound was deafening, a yell came upward, and then a harsh and unintelligible cry followed by moments of quiet. He thought it to be a rather obscene silence. It told Yawbloc that someone, alive moments before, was most likely now dead; dead for no cause, but dead. He thought the engineer or the conductor, a labeled man, a leader of sorts in his own territory. He waited for something else to click into place even as he moved.
Scrambling among granite outcroppings, ledges cut by forever, probably a river once alive in prehistoric times that created this steep gully, Yawbloc sought the best position from which he could impose penetrating fire into the gang. In a narrow crevice, between rock and a scraggly pine perhaps 100 years old, he found a spot to his liking. Behind him was a spacious crevice that reduced the possibility of ricochets from returning fire hitting him on the backside.
He settled in, took a deep breath, and scanned with an unfailing eye the men of the gang. One man, dark gray Stetson on his head, black shirt and vest, was sitting straight up in the saddle, waving his arms, demonstrative as if his was the sole voice of command. Yawbloc assumed that man to be the leader.
The old warrior himself, his grandfather, had made a point once in a discussion about enemy forces and lines of power: “Remember this, without his head, the snake’s tail is useless; without his tail, the snake can still spit at you, strike you, bring you down.” The eyes of the old man, sometimes hard with experience, had softened in that delivery. His hand touched the lad on the shoulder as if a blessing, or a challenge, had been imposed along with the intelligence. The whole image was alive in Yawbloc, floating across a bright but momentary space in his mind.
The words tumbled out of his past as Yawbloc set his goal. Across his arm resting on an exposed root of the tree he laid the rifle, its butt under one armpit, his eye on the scope, his finger on the trigger. Slowly he sighted on a thigh of the man; crucial better than deadly, better than on his heart or on his chest. Then his father’s words jumped up at him also, like another echo: “Disable the leader of any group, and you cut off the head or the best arm, or the thinking itself. That is how you draw the upper hand.”
Ponderous thoughts hit Yawbloc as he sighted closer on the man’s thigh; had those venerable old gentlemen, those formidable warriors of Central Europe, seen all this that was now upon the next in the line? Did they know, in tandem, where their progeny would be taken, into what danger, into what circumstance that a lesson beforehand would do him a world of help in his time of need?
Down below the band of men broke off in two groups and set off on their planned attack. One group dismounted and entered the first car, from which came the sound of yelling and then gunfire. The second group raced down along the train and fired a fusillade of rounds into the windows of two other passenger cars. They were exerting manifold pressure on the occupants.
The leader was still yelling from his position, two other mounted men beside him.
Yawbloc sighted again, squeezed slowly and deliberately, holding his breath as he did so, and put a round into the upper thigh of the leader. The shot took him right off his horse. With second and third shots, before any returning fire came his way, the new detective, not liking what he did, shot a horse, a gorgeous looking great gray animal, out from under one man and hit his comrade with a round high in the chest. The wounded man’s horse bolted down the trail ahead of the train, the man undoubtedly riding into his death.
Thrashing on the track bed, the wounded leader of the gang was immobilized, one arm flung out and caught under his body, as if he had tried to protect himself in the fall, the hand on the other arm searching the wound, and finally grasping the fabric of his trousers.
Spasmodic fire came up into the area about his position, rounds crackling off rocky surfaces and winging into the wide space behind him; the sound told him first and then no rounds ricocheting his way. Gang members might have tried to come up after him if there was a good route, a safe route, and if someone in command told them to do so. With the leader down and out of it, at least as a command figure, neither of those possibilities was available.
Yawbloc, without haste, waiting for a second wave of bullets to come his way, hearing none and seeing no chips of rock flying about, fired three quick rounds into riders on the far side of the train, hitting one man, one horse, and shattering one window on the last car of the train. He hoped no one was hurt by that wild bullet.
Continuing from below, like a chorus of shouting and screaming and orchestration of noise, came the commotion and sounds of men and horses and weapons in successive exchanges of gunfire and shattering glass and lead flying off the face of harder steel as wild rounds hit railroad tracks or large train wheels or cumbersome and massive connections between cars of the train. Iron and steel, he recognized, have echoes of their own, and out here, in the wild and growing western part of this new land, a new sound coming off a manufactured surface, one which is other than flesh, human or animal.
Reloading, sighting on the gang’s horses grouped with one man who held the reins, he almost shot the hand off the man, and the loose horses bolted down the tracks. Flight was near impossible now for all the bandits who had dismounted entered the lead car, making Yawbloc assess again his position. If they were to come and try to get behind him, it would take them across a clear line of fire for him. He had a clear view alongside the train up and down the line of tracks. Some of them would make it to the cliff, he surmised, but some would not; he was sure of that. He’d take his chances staying where he was, imposing his own hurt on them.
Then, in a moment of surprise, a hail of gunfire issued from the third passenger car as passengers, mustered by someone with a presence of mind, angry, suddenly protective, had reacted to their plight and taken a stand. A rain of gunfire, through shattered windows, penetrated the ranks of gang members still mounted.
Yawbloc had no idea of what passengers were in that car; he had not as yet walked through it as he had earlier planned, determining who was who and where on his first train ride as a detective.
But Yawbloc, at last, was not alone in his fight. One of his bullets took another man out of his saddle and he fell right onto the tracks. Not far from him, a horse stumbled, its leg broken, and threw its rider down the far embankment. And in the midst of the now punctured force, the fusillade of friendly fire made a singular and distinctive change in the opposition of powers. Another round of fire came from the third car, as if they were being commanded by one person, a knowledgeable person. Yawbloc sent a blessing that way, a simple nod of his head though no one could or would see it. It was a testimonial.
It did not take long for the situation to be entirely reversed from its onset.
Gang members, still mounted, fled down the tracks and off into a tract of trees. Those members of the gang still in the forward passenger car, seeing the change in whatever manner they could, measuring their chances, piled out of the car in a mad rush and headed off into the same tract of trees. To a man, they disappeared from Yawbloc’s sight.
Out of the third passenger car, wildly waving his arms, a figure and face familiar to Yawbloc the president of the railroad, Markland Lester Quimby, fighter, quick organizer of sundry forces, scholar, entrepreneur, who had, with great foresight, commissioned Wilton “Willie” Yawbloc on his first assignment as detective, guardian, enforcer of things railroad, as he saw them.
It did not take long for the victory celebration, as Quimby hailed Yawbloc from his impenetrable slot in the rocky cliff face, hugged him on arrival at track level, introduced him to his sundry friends, and promoted him on the spot to chief of security for the entire railroad line.
Then, all matters cleared up, fixed to satisfaction, Quimby saw his new chief of security to a place of comfort in the third passenger car, his personal car, and then, with aplomb, went up into the cab of the engine, put on an engineer’s deep blue cap, completed true motions of the position, and started the train back on its route to destination.
In the third car, meanwhile, Willie Yawbloc looked back over the years and saw other familiar faces, heard familiar words again, the way echoes are supposed to come up in one’s memory when they are needed.
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