Fort Kearney

The bridge at Medicine Bow had fallen into the river behind us, and the carriage had hardly settled its nerves before Colonel Stamp W. Proctor reminded it that there was unfinished business aboard. He had struck me in San Francisco. I had told him then that I would come back to America to settle the matter once my present journey was done. He did not care to wait, and on reflection neither did I. A man who is owed an answer is a man carrying a weight, and I prefer to travel light.

The guard was obliging. He proposed that the passengers vacate one of the carriages for ten minutes at the next halt, Plum Creek, so that the two of us might exchange shots in privacy and the train lose no time. I thought the arrangement very sensible. Proctor thought it American, which in his mouth was praise. Passepartout thought it an outrage and said so in two languages. Mrs Aouda, whom I had asked to remain in her seat, said nothing at all, which I found harder to bear than his protests.

01 Pistols at Plum Creek

We took our places at each end of the empty carriage, each with a pair of six-chambered revolvers. It was a few minutes after eleven in the morning. The arrangement was that we should begin firing at the first whistle of the engine. I confess I had no particular feeling about it beyond a wish that it should be quick. I had nine hours of the journey to Omaha still to make up in my head, and the colonel was an interruption to the arithmetic.

The whistle did not come. What came instead was gunfire from outside, a great deal of it, and the sound of horses running alongside the train. A large party of Sioux riders had come down on the line, some of them already climbing onto the carriage steps. The colonel and I looked at one another, put the duel aside by mutual and unspoken consent, and went out to help defend the train. He fought well. I record that in fairness to him.

I will not describe the next ten minutes at length. They were confused and dangerous, and people on both sides were hurt. Sir Francis Cromarty once told me that the account of any fight given by a man who was in it is worth very little, and I agree. What matters for this record is that the engine-driver and fireman had been struck down, the engine was running on without a hand at the regulator, and the train was carrying everyone, defenders and attackers together, past the one place where help could be had: the fort at Kearney, two miles ahead, with its garrison.

Passepartout understood this before I did. The conductor shouted that if the train did not stop at Fort Kearney it would not stop at all. Passepartout said, I am told, that he would see to it, and before anyone could object he had slipped through a door and let himself down beneath the carriage. He went forward under the train, hand over hand along the chains and the iron of the underframe, with the ground racing a foot below him and shots overhead. He reached the coupling between the baggage van and the tender and could not work the safety chain loose; a lurch of the train did it for him, and he drew out the iron pin. The engine, lightened, ran away down the line by itself. The carriages slowed and stopped within a hundred paces of the fort.

The soldiers came out at the sound of the firing, and the riders drew off. The passengers counted themselves. Several were wounded, Colonel Proctor among them, though not dangerously. Three were missing. One was Passepartout. The other two were passengers whose names I took down so that I might ask after them by name: they had been on the platforms of the forward carriages when the riders made off, and they had been carried away with them.

02 Volunteers

The train had stopped. The engine had gone. My servant, who had stopped it, had been taken away in consequence. I mention these three facts together because they presented themselves to me together, and because I noticed that the third was the only one that interested me.

I went to find the captain commanding at the fort. He was a capable officer and a cautious one, and his caution was reasonable: he had a post to hold, and the riders might come back. I told him that three men had been taken, that I intended to go after them, and that I should be glad of his soldiers but would go without them if he could not spare any. I did not raise my voice. I find a raised voice suggests one has not yet decided. I had decided.

He looked at me for some seconds. Then he called for thirty volunteers. More than thirty stepped forward. A sergeant, an old soldier with a grey moustache, picked the men, and I told them that if they brought the prisoners back alive there would be £1,000 to share among them. Whether that made any difference I cannot say. I suspect not. I think most of them would have come for nothing, and I said so to the sergeant, who did not disagree.

Before I left I went back to the carriage. Mrs Aouda took both my hands. She did not ask me to stay; she knew what it had cost Passepartout to go under that train, and she knew what it would cost me to sit in a waiting room while he was gone. I asked Mr Fix to remain with her. He agreed at once, and I believe I saw something in his face that was not entirely the face of a man who wanted me back in England. It was a little after two in the afternoon when we rode out. The snow had begun again.

I had budgeted for many things on this journey. I had not budgeted for going on without him.

03 Bringing them back

I learnt afterwards what the night was like at the station. Mrs Aouda did not go indoors. She walked the platform, and when she was persuaded into the waiting room she sat by the window with her coat on. The wind got up after dark and drove the snow across the line. Some time in the evening the engine came back: the driver had come to himself on the footplate, many miles down the line, and brought her home in reverse. The passengers' train was coupled up and made ready, and the conductor told Mrs Aouda that it could not wait for anybody. She said that she would wait. Mr Fix said that he would wait with her. The train left without them, and without me.

Mr Fix, I am told, said very little all night, and kept the stove going. I put this down to his credit. He had come four thousand miles to see me arrested in London. He had more reason than anyone to wish me lost on the prairie, and he spent the night feeding a fire for the woman who was waiting for me.

Of my own night I will say only that it was long, that the ground was frozen hard, and that we found the riders' track ten miles to the south and followed it. There was an exchange of shots near a creek before first light. The three prisoners were together and unhurt. Passepartout, I learnt later, had been holding his own all the while, and had flattened at least one of his guards in the course of the morning. When he saw me he did not say anything clever. That is how I knew how frightened he had been.

We came back into sight of the fort as the sky was paling, the soldiers riding in a long file, the prisoners on borrowed horses. Mrs Aouda saw us from the platform before anyone else did. She did not run, quite. I have thought about the expression on her face more often since than I have thought about anything else on the line, and I do not propose to set it down here.

I paid the soldiers what I had promised. I thanked the captain, who said I would have gone alone, which was true. Passepartout wished to say something to me in private and could not manage it, so he said it to the sergeant instead, at length, in French. Then I took out my notebook.

The train had left. The next would not come before evening. I had expected to be in Omaha that morning and was instead standing on a platform in Nebraska with a carpet bag, two companions and a detective, a hundred miles from anywhere. I calculated it twice. Balance: twenty hours behind.

Mr Fix then said that he knew of a man with a sledge.