On the Wrong Track Read Online Free Page A

The Southern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and a slew of local lines all join up just west of town, their tracks tangling together at the foot of the massive brick mountain called Union Station. We’d skirted the snarl on our way into Ogden the day before, but now we were riding right into the heart of it.
    As we drew close enough to hear the whistling, clanging, and chugging of the trains, the horses grew jittery … and so did my brother. He had a twitchy look about him—a jumpiness he tried to wipe away with his handkerchief as we entered the station.
    “Change your mind?” I asked him.
    “Just feelin’ a touch poorly, that’s all.” He dabbed at his face a second time, for it was already slick with sweat again. “Maybe you oughta do the talkin’ when we find this ‘Col. Crowe’ feller. I wouldn’t be at my best, augerin’-wise. And my best ain’t half as good as yours anyhow.”
    “Oh, I don’t know—that was some pretty good blarney you laid out just now.” (When my brother comments on my flair for balderdash, it’s usually not to offer his appreciation.) “Anyway, I’d hardly be at my best tryin’ to wrangle a job I don’t even want.”
    “Still … you’re the talker, Otto. I need you to handle this.”
    I looked over at Old Red and found him gazing back at me, his eyes saying the word he couldn’t quite bring himself to put on his lips.
    Please .
    My brother was placing his dream in my hands. I couldn’t very well drop it, no matter how peeved I might be.
    “Alright,” I grumbled. “Gimme Lockhart’s note.”
    Gustav clapped me on the back, something he feels moved to do not once in a blue moon but more like once in plaid one. There’s another word he and I rarely use with each other, and he used it then.
    “Thanks.”
    When we found the Southern Pacific office tucked away in a quiet wing of the station, I asked to see Colonel Crowe with all the breezy confidence of an old pal.

    “Got a message for him from Burl,” I told the pimply young clerk who’d greeted us with a quizzical stare. “Lockhart.”
    The clerk loped off down a hallway, and I took the opportunity to shoot another peek at my brother. He seemed less fidgety now that we were away from the smoke and bustle of the depot, yet so much color had drained from his face he looked like a pillar of salt with a red mustache. He’d taken a nasty wound a couple months before—a gunshot courtesy of someone his deducifying had displeased—and I started thinking he might not be as healed up as I’d assumed.
    “Down the hall, last door on the right,” the clerk told us when he returned, flashing a smile that didn’t offer friendliness so much as advertise his amusement at some private joke. “He’s waiting for you.”
    I’d pictured Colonel Crowe as a stout, barrel-chested Ambrose Burnside type. But the puny fellow we found awaiting us hardly had the chest for a mug of beer, let alone a barrel. Whichever regiment the colonel had served with, I could only assume his commanding officer had been General Tom Thumb.
    Runty as he might have been, Crowe didn’t lack for lung power. When he snapped out “Close that door behind you,” the words cracked at us like a whip.
    “Now,” he said with only slightly less snip once I’d complied, “who are you and what do you want?”
    “Otto Amlingmeyer’s the name,” I replied with (what I hoped was) imperturbable smoothness. “This here’s my brother Gustav. Burl Lockhart sent us to you with this.”
    I pulled out the note and placed it on the desk before Crowe. He flipped it open, grunted, then crumpled the paper into a ball and jammed it into a pocket of his dark suit coat.
    “Either of you have experience as lawmen? Guards? Gunmen? Anything like that?”
    I put on a cocky grin and patted my holstered Colt, thinking I’d concoct some suitable flummery about our careers as pistoleros. But I could see in the squinty pucker of Crowe’s face that he was on guard for the