Walker of the Secret Service/Chapter 2
II. The Holdup
I slept that morning in the hay beyond the horse stalls.
It was afternoon before I wakened. I had gotten into the town just as the circus was unloading, and, as it happened, the road upon which I approached came first to the switch on which the horse cars were standing.
The one thing about which I had any knowledge, in the whole circus, was horses.
I stopped at the car and helped the man get the horses out. It was doubtless a fortunate coincidence, because I fell in as a sort of assistant to the man who had charge of the horse car, and it gave me a kind of connection with the circus. I helped him get the animals over to the field and under the horse tent, and when they had been cared for I went to sleep.
I had now some money in my pocket and I sauntered about on that afternoon, pleased with everything.
The experience, of robbing my first train did not seem to affect me. It was a sort of adventure whose elements of danger I had escaped, and it was now ended. I seemed not to realize that there was any further peril about it.
I saw Mooney in the afternoon in his canvas chair. He paid no attention to me. White I saw a little later. It was at the evening performance. I was helping to take away the horses that appeared in the ring. I was not in the main circus tent but in an attached tent in which the performers mounted.
I was bringing out a horse for one of these riders when White came up.
There were two persons standing near the horse: a young girl dressed like a fairy—dainty and lovely, I thought, in her gauze skirts and gilded butterfly wings—and a little woman. This woman was small and dark haired with narrow eyes and flat ears set close to her head. She turned viciously on White when he came up.
“Don’t go near her!” she cried. “Don’t even look at her!”
“You are a fool, Maggie,” he said. “I want to speak to the boy.”
She turned suddenly toward me as though she had not noticed me before.
“Where did you come from?” she said. Then she laughed. “It don’t matter. I know where you are going.”
And she went out toward the entrance to the circus tent, following the big white horse that carried the fairy.
White said only a few words to me when she was gone.
“Hang along with the circus; we have got straight dope on that Mexican money and we’ll pick it up in a few days.”
I traveled with the circus as one might travel with a fairy caravan. Everything was of the deepest and newest interest.
But the greatest wonder was the girl who rode the white horse. The little, determined, black-haired woman was always with her. I saw her only when I helped her into the saddle and took away the horse.
She stood between the girl and everybody.
There was no exception, but she did not seem to consider me. Once or twice I saw her looking curiously at me when I brought the horse to help the girl into the saddle.
Sometimes she talked with Mooney.
I suppose a week passed in this fashion; then one evening, as I was helping to bed down the horses, White came into the tent. The evening performance had ended and it was perhaps midnight.
“We are going to take a little motor ride,” he said. “Come along.”
I went with him.
We made a detour of the circus field and came into the border of the town. It was a residence street of the better class of houses. It was late and the lights of the street had been put out. We stopped finally before a garage in a lot between two houses. The door to the garage was locked and White turned the lock with some implement which I could not see.
Then we went inside and carefully pushed the car out into the street.
White locked the door again behind us. We pushed the car along the street for perhaps a hundred yards before we got in. The man understood the motor perfectly and we slipped along the street and out of the town.
At a bridge on the outskirts we picked up Mooney. He had his bundle as on our first adventure.
White ran the car at great speed for perhaps two hours; then we pulled up by the roadside and stopped.
Before we got out of the car I had an explanation of Mooney’s occult device against the bloodhound.
There was a mist of fog. It had begun to gather over the lowland. We had noticed it—a white blanket lying on the fields as we came along. It was now rising, but it came up slowly as though it were a sort of impalpable stratum formed mysteriously out of the earth and extending, under some mathematical direction, upward. It was like a piece of enchantment in the manner in which the thing arose. It now lay on the world about us extending to the macadam road.
Mooney took a flash light out of his pocket.
It was not the usual cylinder affair. It was, rather, a little squat lantern with a bull’s-eye bulb; thick—necessarily so, I imagine—for there was a powerful light concentrated on the small disc and it, therefore, required a considerable battery.
He looked at the clock on the motor.
“We shall have some time to wait,” he said, “but the fog may increase and we ought to look over the ground.”
I got up to get out of the car, when he put his hand on my arm.
“My son,” he said, “the bloodhound will be no friend of ours; let us think of him before he thinks of us.”
He went on in a drawling voice.
“Every little sheriff,” he said, “has fitted himself out with one of these trailing beasts.”
Then he laughed.
“They will be valuable, no doubt, for Little Eva and the ice, but for us they will hardly constitute a menace.”
He reached into his pocket and took out a flask of what one might imagine to be brandy.
“I have here,” he said, “a lotion to confuse his nose.”
He drew out the stopper, poured the liquid into his hand, and rubbed it carefully over our shoes. I knew on the instant, by the odor, it was turpentine. Mooney was very careful about this thing. The whole of our shoes were carefully painted with the turpentine. He explained the theory of the thing while he was at work.
“It makes me laugh,” he said, “to think how our brethren of the road have been chased about by dogs. … It is ridiculous to be chased by anything, especially a creature depending on its nose. It is the fine discriminating sense of odors that distinguishes the bloodhound. If our foot-weary predecessors had only thought about it they might have saved themselves the walking.
“How does one destroy a delicate odor?
“The solution is simple—by laying down over it a heavier, gross one. And here one must consider the instinct of the bloodhound. He will follow the trail of a man, that is, something living, a thing which he has observed to move, but he will not follow the trail of a pine tree. Turpentine, to the dog’s sensitive nose, is a tremendous stench that he will walk away from.”
The road, as I have said, ran parallel to the track. We got out now and went directly across the field to the railroad. Here, close beside the track, Mooney set up a piece of rotten cross tie. It was to be a signal, as I later discovered; and we should return this way.
Then he walked back along the track. I was perhaps at something more than half a mile that we came to a semaphore. It was only in the knowledge of future events that I understood what we were about to do; and it is in the light of this knowledge that I am able to describe what happened.
The men had determined to hold up the through passenger train from Washington to New Orleans. Their original intention was to stop this train at a water tank but for some reason they gave up this plan; I think it was because knowledge of the other train robbery made them fear that the usual stopping places would be watched. So they determined upon another device. A macadamized road paralleled the railroad track and they decided to commandeer a motor car, follow the track to some isolated point, and there stop the train.
This road had what is known as the block system of signals; that is to say, every mile along the track there was a semaphore which informed the engineer whether or not there was another train in the same block or on the same track.
In the day this signaling is done by painted arms and at night by red, green, and white lights: the red light meaning to come to a full stop until the white light is shown; the green light meaning that the train is in the block and half through it; and the white light meaning that the train is through the block and is at least a mile distant.
It was Mooney’s plan to short circuit two of the wires of the semaphore and make such connection that the red light would show.
When we were on the ground before the track, White, who seemed the mechanic, tried to accomplish this. But the semaphore arm kept turning around and around and would not stop.
It was the ingenious Mooney who found a way out of this difficulty.
“Take off the short-circuit wire,” he said; “climb the semaphore pole and tie the red arm down so it will show all the time.”
When White found out that the semaphore could be thus managed he left it as it was, restoring its proper connections.
Mooney had practically the same outfit we had used on the previous occasion, except that he had invented a new kind of mask. This mask was made so that it was placed in the hat and could not be seen. It had a hem at the bottom, entirely around, and filled with shot so that, immediately on lifting the hat, the mask dropped over the face and stayed there.
There were no holes in it except two round ones for eyes.
We got into our disguises and waited for the train.
In order to make no mistake, it was the plan of this man to sit fast until we heard the through train blow for a station, two miles away. That would give us time to fix the semaphore.
It seemed a long time as we sat there in the darkness waiting for the train; but it was perhaps, in fact, less than half an hour. Directly we heard the whistle in the distance and we went down to the track; White had got a piece of fence wire and he now climbed the pole and tied the red semaphore arm down over the green and white lights. Mooney went about fifty yards along the track in the direction from which the train was coming, and waited at the place where he thought the engine would stop. White and I hid ourselves where he thought the baggage and express cars would stop.
But our calculations were not accurate.
Instead of the engine stopping where we thought it would, it ran on for at least a hundred yards past the red light. There was a fog, and the engineer did not see the red signal soon enough. The train roared past us. We knew the engineer had thrown on the emergency, “goosed the air” as White called it. The fire from the brake shoes grinding on the wheels showed up red along the whole train. The engineer reversed and brought back his engine to the point where Mooney was hidden behind a tree on the right of way. The engineer was following a rule of the road that one must not under any circumstances run past a red light.
We jumped at once.
Mooney climbed into the engine and took charge of the fireman and engineer. They made no resistance to the masked man with a weapon in his hand. White rushed in and uncoupled the mail and express cars from the rest of the train.
Now, on these through first-class passenger trains, a power velocipede, or what is known in the dialect of the road as a “gasoline speeder,” is always carried in the baggage car. It is an emergency vehicle in order to enable one of the crew to get to a telegraph station in case of a wreck or any accident. When the engine stopped under this unexpected red light of the semaphore a negro porter, seeing two masked men, ran to the baggage car and got the vehicle out on the ground. He was lifting it on his shoulder.
I did not understand what the thing meant at the time, but I called to White and he came out from behind the two cars.
The porter found himself before the round end of an automatic.
“Put that thing back,” said White, “or I’ll blow your head off.”
The man turned with the vehicle in his hands, thrust it back into the baggage car and dropped where he stood, his face down, by the side of the track.
By this time the passengers began to come off to see what had happened to the train.
I don’t know precisely what I did, but to White there was no confusion. He ordered every one back into the train and began to fire along the sides to hurry them into the covering of the cars. In the meantime, Mooney had brought the engineer and fireman back to the mail car and had taken the mail clerks out of the car.
There had been no resistance to this man.
He shot out one or two of the windows to add emphasis to his directions, but it was an emphasis that had not been needed. No thought of resistance had occurred to anybody. Mooney sent the trainmen to the rear. He impressed upon them that any man appearing outside of the train would be killed.
In the whirl of these events I seemed to be little more than a spectator.
To the train crew I was the third menacing figure, masked and armed, but I am not certain what benefit I would have been to the two men in a sudden emergency. It was my direction to stay with White and I now ran with him to the engine. Mooney took charge of the end of the train where White had cut it off. He stood on the platform of the mail car.
We climbed up into the engine, White and I, and at once I saw that this man knew precisely what to do. He threw the air brake into release, dropped his reversing lever forward, opened the throttle and started out like a skilled engineer.
He put me to shoveling coal into the engine.
“Make a green fire,” he said. “We shall stop shortly, and if we need to start again we shall have a heavy fire ready.”
I did not know at the time what he meant by a green fire, but I knew that he wished coal shoveled into the engine; I followed that direction. We pulled down the track perhaps a half mile until we reached the piece of rotten cross tie that Mooney had set up. Then we stopped.
In every detail White handled the engine with skill.
Long afterward I realized fully what he was about. Before we got down he put on the injector and filled the boiler with water up to the third gauge so there would be no danger of its running dry and burning out the crown sheet. He wished that train to go on and he did not propose to disable it.
When we were on the ground he gave me definite orders.
I was to stand beside the engine and if anybody appeared in any direction of the track I was to fire the automatic. He even stopped to show me how the weapon worked, slipping back the top of it with his hand so that, cocked and released, I had only to pull the trigger with my finger.
Then he went down the side of the train to the express car.
I did not know until afterward the trouble in that car.
The men could find nothing of value. They ripped open the sealed express, but they got little. As it afterward developed there was, in fact, forty thousand dollars in currency in the car. But the express messenger had taken a precaution against a holdup.
He had wrapped the packages of currency in old newspapers and laid them on the floor of the car.
When it came out in the newspaper reports of the holdup White cursed viciously; he had kicked these packages out of the way, with his foot, when he and Mooney had searched the car.
The two men were gone a long time; disappointed in the express, they had searched the registered mail.
As I stood there on the track before the engine I had a strange sensation. It was very still; there was a ghostly fog, and somewhere beyond me, as though out of the sky, I heard whispering voices.
I strained my ears to listen, standing as one does on tiptoe.
But I could not be certain. No word was audible to me nor any decided voice, but now and then there seemed to be a murmuring in the fog, and, what was beyond understanding, it seemed behind the engine in the clouded sky.
What human creatures could thus whisper in the sky?
Mooney and White returned presently in no very pleasant mood. I think the time taken with the thing made them uneasy. White had the loot sack and we started along across the field, to where we had left the automobile on the road.
It was then that I got the explanation of the mysterious voices.
There were three hobos riding on the top of the mail car. They had been witnesses of everything that had occurred. They sat there like immense buzzards outlined against the dim light of the sky. Mooney stopped a moment. He seemed to reflect, turning his weapon about in his hand. Then he spoke to the derelicts on the top of the car.
“If they pinch you for this job,” he said, “write me a letter.”
And he went on.
I thought for a moment that he intended to shoot the men, but no such idea was passing through his mind. It had occurred to him that, perhaps, these unfortunate derelicts would be charged with the robbery.
And, as it happened, they were in very grave danger.
The posse that gathered, seeing them on the top of the car, opened a fusillade. It was very lucky that the idea occurred to Mooney, for, as it happened, these men drew all the suspicion of the officials. Three men had held up the train. They were three men. They were afterwards tried before the District Court of the United States and very nearly convicted. No doubt they often recalled those significant words of Mooney’s. But unfortunately he had left them no address to which their communication could be sent.
When we got to the car Mooney again turned his lantern on the clock. He swore softly; then he stood back a moment in reflection.
“We’re late,” he said, “I don’t see how we could have taken up so much time on this job; it was the cursed mail.”
White did not speak and I remained silent, standing by the little man now motionless in reflection.
I suppose it must have been five minutes ticked off by the clock while he stood there. Then suddenly he came to a conclusion.
“Give me the spook faces,” he said.
He meant the masks under the hats. I handed him my hat, pulling the mask up over my face. He seized White’s, drew off his own, and disappeared in the direction of the track from which we had just come.
I did not understand what the man was about, and I think White was equally in the dark. But it was clear that the unexpected lateness of the hour had put some of his calculations out of joint. White got into the car and sat down at the wheel. The loot sack was already in the tonneau and I got in beside it.
The fog had now come up thinly above the road.
It seemed to me that we had scarcely occupied the time it required to get into the car when Mooney returned. He seemed to appear as an apparition out of the mist. He got at once into the car and spoke to White.
“Here’s the engineer’s cap,” he said. “I got it out of the box under the seat in the engine.” He put it on.
“Now swing her round and step on her.”
He meant for White to turn the car and go back at the greatest speed he could. The man, as I have said, was an expert with a motor. He was only a moment at the turn and we were presently racing along the road.
I did not understand what Mooney meant.
We all wore the blue jackets and overalls in which we had held up the train. It was the distinguishing uniform of the train crew, and now with Mooney wearing the engineer’s cap it seemed to me that we had simply marked ourselves for certain identification.
But it was the reflection of inexperience.
Mooney, when he looked at the clock, foresaw what we were certain to meet on the road and he skillfully prepared for it. Two miles down the road was the station.
We raced toward it.
Suddenly, it seemed to me, a light loomed in the road, and another, and in a moment we had come into a crowd of motor cars, trucks, and the like, packed with men. It was the posse that Mooney knew would come out from the town in the unexpected lapse of time. He foresaw that the train crew would get the information of the holdup to the town and it was this posse that we must be prepared to meet. If we had got away earlier we could have passed the town before the posse had assembled, but having taken so much time it was certain to be on the way.
Had I been in control of the party, or White or any man of lesser resources than this clever bandit, the search for the train robbers would have ended there in the road.
But this person, called Mooney, was an extraordinary human creature.
It was not the bloodhound alone that he was able to outwit. When he found the posse must be met, he prepared to meet it in the only way certain of success.
He leaned over and whispered some direction to White when the lights appeared, and we pulled up into the very crowd of motors.
My heart seemed to rise and fill my throat.
I saw, in a sort of confusion, the vehicles in the road; a motor just a little ahead of us with some men; a truck before us driven by a negro; a man in a hunting coat with a shotgun and two dogs—the bloodhounds for which we had prepared; a a low roadster almost beside us.
It was the posse keeping together.
They had seen our lights and were prepared to stop us. The men stood up with their weapons in their hands, an array of indiscriminate fire arms. Our motor did not entirely stop. We slowed down, running into the crowd of men. Mooney got on his feet, shouting:
“We have ’em surrounded in the express car. Get there as fast as you can; we’ve got to go into the town for gasoline. … Don’t stand here. Hurry!”
To the posse the explanation was complete.
We were a party of the train crew; one could clearly see that. What Mooney said coincided with the report that had come in to them.
We did not wait for these men to reflect about it. We ran on past, Mooney shouting to them to make haste; that there was a man in the road with a lantern to stop them.
“Let your cars out,” he cried, “for God’s sake.”
And we went on.
It was the only adventure on the way. The road skirted the town, and once past it Mooney considered the peril ended. We took off the trainmen’s uniforms and put them into the sack.
The fog increased, it seemed to me, but its very density covered the close of our adventure. We ran along the street to the garage from which we had borrowed the car. White handled it with skill. He entered the street with a spurt of speed, then he cut off the engine and we glided almost noiselessly along to the very door of the garage. We got down. White unlocked the door and we pushed the car in; then he locked it again carefully.
I don’t think he had a key; I think he manipulated that lock with a bent nail. But at any rate we walked away, having restored the car to its house, Mooney with the loot sack on his shoulder. It was Saturday night and the circus remained over until Sunday in the meadow beyond the town.
Only the top of the great tent stood now above the sheet of fog as we set out across the field toward it.