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Page 2.

The two railroad policemen folded away their posters and stepped out to the edge of the platform, each carrying a dark and ornately decorated cloth valise. Gray-Eyes’ was dark green with maroon swirls, while Beard’s was dark blue with gold lines in a Romanesque motif. The train was growing louder now, and its smoke filled the sky in quick, energetic bursts. The smoke stack on the front of the dark-green locomotive was a wide cinder-catcher type, designed to prevent hot ashes from flying back and setting the cars on fire. Meanwhile, the grating in front was designed to toss aside the carcass of any stray cow unlucky enough to be wandering on the tracks. The train emitted a series of piercing steam-whistle notes, rising and falling, while the wheels chattered happily until the last mile or so, when they started to slow and the train started sounding tired. The old black man came from the stable, in that same lethargic middle-of-nowhere walk, and pulled the hose pipe around on a high wooden water tower. A trio of young Indian lads, wearing good cotton shirts and Levi Strauss work pants with suspenders, and a variety of top hats with feathers and beaded designs, pulled a wagon of coal and wood along a narrow-gauge side track nearby.

A Mexican vendor appeared on the platform with cigars, sandwiches, and fruits, while his wife and children struggled alongside with a clay coffee urn and tin cups. The train’s great steel wheels screeched on the steel rails as the train chuffed slowly to a halt on air brakes. The engineers leaned from their cab, and a conductor in a dark blue uniform waved to them. The two detectives looked like traveling salesmen as they quietly boarded amid two dozen or so passengers milling about, some getting on, others getting off. A woman cried and waved her hankie as she spoke in Spanish to two brown-skinned boys with big eyes in school uniforms. A young wife waved to her Army officer husband who leaned from a window throwing kisses. Arms reached out to the Mexican, placing coins in his hand and accepting coffee, food, tobacco, even tiny paper flags with local motifs for souvenirs.

Coaled and watered within a half hour, the train emitted a shrill whistling sound. The engine pumped, and chuffed, and began its pile-driver rhythm to propel tons of steel and wood back to speed. The two detectives deposited their satchels in the railroad caboose at rear, and started a leisurely walk down the train. They kept their coats buttoned to conceal the purpose of their journey. There was no rush now. The several hundred passengers were safely imprisoned in a world of hurtling upholstery and dusty glass windows. Mesilla Valley cotton acreage passed by outside, looking like fields of snow. The sky was a cloudless darkish blue, raked by the summer sun and hot desert winds. Low mountains looked as if they had white cake-patterns baked into them. The rocking motion of the train was steady and hypnotic. The men sidled among passengers who crowded the aisle outside First Class and Second Class compartments. They moved through the bar coach and into the restaurant.

Suddenly, Beard gripped Gray-Eyes’ sleeve. They froze in place, looking over the heads of a school of dark-haired children, toward a row of dining seats. Two black men in white coats served coffee and cakes to a white family seated around a long table. Beyond them, seated together in a corner, were the Morgan couple. They were unmistakable from their pictures—he with the slightly bulbous, pale head and short dark hair; she with the piercing black eyes and rather plain features. She did not have a pretty face, but she had the scintillating gaze and golden tongue of a first-class seductress. Their clothing was dark, thin for the summer, and dusty. Under a plaid blouse and ankle-length tan cotton skirt, her figure was full and robust, promising much to a gullible and slightly inebriated man looking for a place to shed his dollars. She wore a little gold locket around her neck, which she often fingered and then stuck down into her blouse for its protection. Her husband, the sibling in their brother-sister act, had the strong, wiry lean build of a Midwest farmer. He had probably been a towheaded youngster, Beard thought as he and Gray-Eyes withdrew into the shadows of the new leather accordion connectors between cars. Morgan glanced toward them for a second, then looked away.

“We’ll split up,” Beard said quietly. Something in that man’s eyes made him nervous. The woman’s were just as unsettling. Gray-Eyes nodded. They would be less conspicuous apart. The couple weren’t supposed to be dangerous, and the bounty on them would be relatively small. If the detectives could apprehend them, especially in the act, with a witness and complainant, they could turn them in at the sheriff’s office in some town up the road and then continue looking for bigger game.

“We’re in luck,” Beard said in the same low voice. “You go back to the rear and get some rest. We’ll spell each other.” Gray-Eyes nodded and walked leisurely off without looking around. Beard picked up a discarded, folded newspaper, and shadowed the couple as they made their way forward to an empty first-class carriage. This car did not have wood or glass dividers, but the compartments had fine, plush blue-gray seats with high backs that served like dividers. Half the coach was, in fact, a sleeper with darkened, empty bunk slots. Beard sat in a corner booth and opened his paper on the table. He watched from a distance, in window reflections, as a bottle appeared on a small window table and Tom Morgan set up his gambling ruse. Kate, meanwhile, wandered in search of just the right man with a few itches to scratch. As she passed by, Beard looked up from his newspaper and exchanged looks with her. He made himself seem distant, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. She languidly raked him with a carnal gaze. A chill ran up and down his spine. He felt as if he were being licked by a snake. He shuddered and looked away.

She passed him by because he had not radiated toward her the spark of hunger and gullibility for which she was looking. After a few minutes, he rose. Folding his newspaper under one arm, and pruning a cigar with his pocket knife, he wandered after her. The bar car was crowded with mostly men, a few women joining their husbands at window seats. Women were not allowed at the bar.

Beard watched as Kate approached a fortyish, plump man with short, graying hair parted on one side, and a checkered vest. The man was reading a Denver newspaper and tossing back shots of whiskey while fingering a coffee cup to one side and keeping a cigar going in the smoky car air. The man was florid and had little watery blue eyes as he began to notice Kate. She pretended to be looking for some acquaintance. They caught each other’s eyes, and spoke to one another. She probably said she was looking for her ‘brother.’ After a few more words, he eagerly rose and offered her a seat opposite him at the small table. He was very solicitous, putting his cigar out and using his napkin to dust the glass counter top. He bowed slightly and said something, probably offering her a drink or coffee, and she protested, but he protested more, and she relented as he signaled for a waiter. Soon, one of the black stewards in starchy white linen vest brought a tea service for her, and another stiff drink for him.

Beard sauntered back to get Gray-Eyes. He picked up his step as soon as he was out of sight, and was fairly trotting by the time he hurried through the crowded third class coaches with their teeming families of all races. Entering the caboose, which smelled of sawdust and machine oil—no passenger comforts—he went down the row of canvas bunks hanging on steel poles. He found a bunk with Gray-Eyes’ jacket curled as a pillow and still warm —but no Gray-Eyes. A Chinese porter happened by, wearing a chignon and round black hat, and an ankle-length blue apron. Beard pointed to the bunk. The porter pointed to the locked toilet door in a corner and grinned. Beard pounded on the door. “They’re starting.”

The other shouted back distantly: “I’m going to be busy here for the next few minutes. That Mexican food is going through me like a train.”

“Hurry up,” Beard said, laughing. “I can hear your train whistle.”

“Oh shut up and go do your job.”

“Join me when you’re able.” Beard took his time walking forward to the eerily deserted Tom Morgan coach. He passed through the bar and restaurant coaches. He’d wait for Gray-Eyes to join him. The Morgans would need a while to work their cardsharp game. The trick would be in the timing—they needed the victim as a willing witness.

Beard watched Kate sipping her tea and making pleasant conversation with her mark. Beard studied her, trying to figure out how she worked her magic. It was rather chilling, he found. She was a bit homely, but she could turn up this warm, radiant smile that made her eyes and lips sparkle. She also moved her foot close, so that the man’s ankle brushed against hers. The man, for his part, was rapt. He sat forward, with his arms folded under his flabby chest in that suit, and seemed to be inhaling the very essence of her smiles and sweet words. Beard saw the ankle-action and thought to himself: I wonder if he’s wondering if she’s doing it on purpose, or if she doesn’t know, and he’s wondering just how far she’ll let him go with her, and how much it’s going to cost him.

Then, after about twenty minutes of that, they rose and she followed him out of the bar car. Then, in the corridor, she stepped ahead to guide him. He was a heavy man, and leaned a bit with one hand against the wall as he navigated in his cups. At one point, he reached out and tried to touch her rear end in its hoop skirt, but stumbled and almost fell on his face. She turned with a look of phony concern and took his arm. With this new, seemingly innocuous body contact, she lured him to the compartment where Tom sat waiting. Beard noticed a reddish bruise on one cheek, as if Morgan had given his wife a black eye recently. Morgan looked the type, Beard thought, a flinty-eyed, mean-spirited confidence artist.