The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [238]
Heading into the reception room after we’d laid waste to one of Mrs. Hastings’s excellent pies, everyone except Cyrus and Lucius gathered around the card table. The younger Isaacson brother was too nervous to sit still for cards, while Cyrus preferred to pass the time playing Mr. Picton’s piano. The rest of us, though, threw ourselves into our small-stakes gambling with genuine enthusiasm. The contest grew pretty heated as the evening wore on, and it wasn’t until Mrs. Hastings came down from her room to tell us that we needed to get going if we wanted to be sure of meeting the midnight train that we realized how late it’d gotten. When we did, I think everybody’s heart did a kind of fluttering jig; at least, there was a lot of pointless running around what preceded our actually getting out the door, the kind of activity that generally marks people who’ve reached some long-dreamed-of but still, in a way, unexpected point.
Our walk down to the depot was quiet enough, but I marked that there were a lot of faces at a lot of dimly lit windows watching as we passed, a very unusual state of affairs in a town that, as I’ve said, generally bedded down early. It wasn’t hard to explain the unusual behavior: the feeling that the whole community was on the eve of something that might change the way they thought about a lot of things—not least themselves—was thicker than it had been at any point during the previous five days; thicker, even, than when Mr. Picton had announced the indictment; and when we first heard the distant whistle of the midnight train echoing up from many miles to the southeast, I was sure that we couldn’t have been the only people in town who felt our bodies shiver mightily.
There were only a few other people on the train platform when we got there: the guard Henry, who’d been told by Sheriff Dunning to meet the train, along with Mr. Grose of the Ballston Weekly Journal and a couple of his employees. As for the mayor of the town, he’d been on vacation since before we came to the place, and after hearing about the indictment, he’d decided to extend his holiday: like District Attorney Pearson, he figured there was no political gain to be had from this case, only damage, and maybe considerable damage. Mr. Grose didn’t say much to any of our party, and Mr. Picton didn’t offer him anything fresh for his newspaper. Not that Mr. Grose would’ve printed such; in feet, I think he was just there on the off-chance that Dunning would show up empty-handed, or that a calamity of some kind might take place at the depot. My bet was that if everything went smoothly, the evening’s activities wouldn’t get more than a few lines in the following Saturday’s edition of the weekly paper.
Midnight came and went, causing Mr. Picton to remark that he hoped the Spanish government and people were even worse at keeping to timetables than Americans were, if our country really intended to go to war with Madrid. Finally, at about 12:15, the train’s whistle sounded again, much closer this time. El Niño hopped down and did the old Indian trick of putting his ear to the tracks, then nodded eagerly as he rejoined us on the platform. The actual noise of the train’s engine reached our ears just as a light flashed through a break in the buildings beyond the depot; and in a few more seconds the steaming locomotive and its four nearly empty cars stormed in, causing us all to take a few steps back toward the station.
Sheriff Dunning was the first man off the forward car, and even in the near darkness his face looked plainly exhausted. One of