The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [66]
"Where do I find this work?"
"As a matter of fact, brother, I can tell you exactly. They're still putting in the spur line between Phoenix and Prescott through the Pea Vine; I hear tell there's tunnels to dig and canyons to trestle aplenty, enough to keep a double shift crew working round the clock for another year."
"Where?"
"North-northwest. You can hop a night freight to Phoenix over yonder near the swing bridge, leaves around midnight, have you there by morning."
"The Santa Fe Prescott and Phoenix Railroad."
"That's the outfit; you'll find their offices right there at the Phoenix rail station. Sure they can set you up nicely—work's scarce most places these days, but a fella with a handy skill like yours is always in demand. Here's wishing you and your ancestors good fortune." Denver Bob raised his tin can of hooch and drank a toast, thinking: You got your marching orders, friend, now remove your spooky ass from my yard.
The man offered no acknowledgment or gratitude and directed his look back to the bonfire. Then something speared the man's attention; he sat up stiff as a bird dog on a scent.
Before Denver Bob could react, the night air around them split with a chorus of piercing whistles; that could only mean one thing, and the cry went up throughout the shantytown.
"Bulls!"
Railroad cops and Pinkerton men had been running rousts through the hobo camps since the Pullman railroad strike in Chicago that previous May; violent, head-busting rampages, setting fire to the shanties and scattering whatever bums they didn't toss in prison to the winds. Through the summer, the bulls had worked their way down through St. Louis and along the tracks out toward the western camps, preceded by survivors' eye-popping accounts of the indiscriminate and malicious mayhem directed at their brothers. No more free rides, that was the new company policy. Seemed the railroad barons wanted their rails and stations sanitized so as not to offend the refined sensibilities of the middle-classers migrating westward and upon whose traveling dollar the Trust had decided the future fortunes of their railroad depended.
Fifty tramps basking in the numb glow of an alcoholic haze and the bulls burst in from behind a line of boxcars before a single one of them could reach his feet. Twenty head-busters, sneaking in like thieves; an ambush, nightsticks and sawed-off baseball bats in their hands, and they go right to work— most of these bums had endured a brick yard beating or two in their day but this was a whole new game. These boys meant business.
Two cops with torches set fire to the tinderbox shacks; the bulls had made their rush from both flanks, stampeding the hobos into the center of the yard, falling, colliding over each other, trapped as minnows in a net. Most knew enough to go to the ground, shelter their heads and absorb as much trouble as they could with the meat of their backs. Any man who tried to run was cut down around the knees and pummeled viciously. Scalps split open, collarbones cracked, blood flowed into pools.
Denver Bob fell at the first whistle, wrapped himself around the spool he'd been sitting on and waited for the blows to rain down on him. He looked back at the Chinaman, ready to yell and tell him to grab some dirt but the man was gone.
A big yard-bull raised his bat to swing at the tramp standing by the handcar, holding on to his long bundle. The bum gestured as the bat arced down at him and the blow never connected. The bull looked down in surprise; he clutched only the handle of the bat in his hands, sheared off, a clean cut just above his knuckles. As he looked up, the bum swung his arms around again—a chink, fer Christ's sake—and the bull felt something go haywire with his left leg; he tried to take a step and the leg split in two above the knee; his whole leg from foot to mid-thigh tipped away from him and flopped onto the ground; an instant later, the man's balance gave out and he toppled like a felled pine.
This makes no sense, thought the bull. The chink has a sword in his hand.