Chapter Two

Life on the railroad was like being in a hothouse where plants were thrust into swift growth; a place where the normal careful nurturing with water and minerals, the slow cycle of light and dark, and sun and rain, were abandoned for the pressures of a constant heat and a certain humidity; a place for forcing an early start to tender plants started from seed. Charles wasn't much of a gardener, but he understood the value of the hothouse in propagating and experimenting with new plants and varieties.

In the case of the train, it was acquaintanceships that seeded themselves quickly and were pushed into an early flowering. The trick would be knowing which to cultivate and which to allow to wither on the vine.

Lancer's manners were those of a gentleman. He couldn't be more than twenty-five, but he had all the assurance of someone who'd been 'out' in society all his life. Without doubt, a scion of some Boston Brahmin family—a side-shoot maybe since Charles didn't recognise the name—Lancer was rich, leisured and languid, affable and sociable. But more to the point, he was well educated and well read. They discussed art and music and by the time that they had roamed over the theatre, poetry (Lancer had read Goethe while at Harvard, a definite point in his favour) and the modern novel, they found that they had a lot in common despite the difference in age. Young Mr Lancer would make an amusing and sympathetic travelling companion. He was certainly an intelligent one.

They had dissected the modern novelists, with some pithy observations on the best and worst of them, when Lancer asked the pertinent question. "Are you a writer, sir?"

Charles admitted to his career having taken a journalistic turn, and admitted also to the journalist's usual aspiration to write his novel one day. He even confessed, wryly, that in the interim his job was to extol the virtues of the new Great Transcontinental route and promote the idea of travelling it for pleasure on family vacations.

Lancer cast a speaking glance at the tribe of young heathens squabbling over their dessert, and they both laughed. It had been a pleasant dinner with good conversation. Charles could have done a lot worse when it came to someone to share it with. Still, he would have to see how well Lancer's company wore over the next few days. Those were beautiful manners and Lancer wasn't standoffish, precisely, but something did distance the young Bostonian from the people around him.

Time for a little probing of his own. Charles refilled Lancer's glass before his own. "Do you travel for business, pleasure or family, sir?"

Lancer admitted to all three. "But perhaps principally the latter."

"Excellent! They'll be delighted to be reunited with you, of course. And this wonderful new railroad will get you there all the sooner. Their own journey west must have been a most uncomfortable experience by comparison, whether by land or sea. The railroads will, I'm sure, be a remarkable tool for bringing together loved ones once separated by the great breadth of our mighty continent—"

Charles let the platitudes he'd penned earlier flow, his gaze flickering around the carriage to see why a lady two tables away laughed, or to watch the low-voiced waiter conferring with the fussy, elderly gentleman at the corner table, or whatever other little scene caught his eye. Good lord, that was a handsome woman, the one with the pleasant laugh. Her companion would have to be a clod not to appreciate the light in her eyes and the way her pretty shoulders were emphasised by her well-cut travelling dress. Charles nodded with approval when the lady's companion raised his wine glass to her in silent homage. Despite looking like a contented married couple, it seemed they were still lovers. Charles envied him. She was a very handsome woman. On the other hand, the elderly gentleman talking to the waiter looked dyspeptic and cross and alone. Snuff powdered on his cuffs and across his coat front. Charles could weave a dozen stories about the old man's life and disappointments in love and business.

And then, young Lancer. Why would he travel all the way across the continent alone? For action and adventure, or for love or for business—

Charles' mouth continued the flow of words while his hand drifted to the breast pocket of his jacket and the comforting bulk of his notebook. Damn the proprieties that prevented him from openly jotting these people down to use later.

And as if to prove that the truth about people was even more interesting than speculation, the little twist to Lancer's mouth became bitter as he listened to Charles rhapsodising. And wasn't that intriguing!

"Oh, I'm not visiting close family, sir," said Lancer. The bitter curve of the mouth tightened. "We meet somewhere in the family Bible, if there is such a thing, but we have not met anywhere else."

Well, well, well. There was a story behind this lone journey and that cool bitterness, that was certain. Charles smiled. He liked a good mystery. They were all the more fun to unravel.

.

.

The train's hothouse effect came from thirty people sharing the close confinement of the parlour car. That a man was never more than three or four feet from his neighbour, said Charles to Scott Lancer, meant either the blooming of friendship or deep mutual aversion. At all times, the occupants of the car pressed hard upon each other, always conscious of the others' occupations from dawn until dusk, trapped together as close as damned souls in Hades. Charles rose the next day under the bland gazes of a dozen sets of eyes. He took his turn to wash and trim his beard in too-close proximity to three gentlemen with whom he was only imperfectly acquainted but whose bodily peculiarities were obtruding too closely on his notice to be ignored. He would spend his day in the presence of thirty fellow human beings: he would eat with them, read his books with them, talk with them, try to nap with them, even (out of a sense of self-preservation) help entertain their bored children. And at night he would be forced to share quarters with the aforesaid three gentleman, with nothing but a curtain between them and the rest of the car's occupants, lying all night serenaded by rustling, sighs and snoring.

He had to find a way to endure, he told Lancer at breakfast, to admit these people as more than mere strangers, or the very sound of a train would be likely to bring on homicidal tendencies for the rest of his life. As it was, he was fast developing a sense of social claustrophobia.

"Why do you think I decided to take one of the staterooms?" asked Lancer, smiling as the waiter arrived with fresh coffee and a plate of fried eggs. The waiter, having brought them together at dinner the previous evening, apparently now considered them joined at the hip. Lancer had been ushered to Charles's table and had a menu put into his hands before the two had had time to do more than nod a greeting to each other.

"All the way through to California?" Charles forked crisp bacon onto his plate and set to with relish.

"Every train en route and every last inch of track."

Charles sighed. "I am deeply envious. The staterooms are small, of course, but they looked delightfully comfortable."

"Oh, they are. Delightfully." There was no mistaking Lancer's amusement, or the wicked glint in his eye.

Charles sighed again. "I may have to revise my impression that you are a gentleman, sir. It's unseemly to gloat."

Lancer laughed aloud and, as some sort of compensation, offered Charles the coffee.

They arrived at Council Bluffs at around 8.30, just as breakfast finished, and transferred across the Missouri to Omaha. Lancer strolled along with Charles as their valises were whisked away into a large shed to be reweighed.

"They'll be trying to charge us extra poundage, I suppose." Charles glanced around the shed and the dozens of people crowded into it, spotting several that he recognised from the platform at Jersey City.

"I should tell them that I'm a shareholder," murmured Lancer. "My grandfather has extensive interests in the railroads."

Charles laughed at the wry tone, and watched the crowds as they waited their turn at the ticket booth, listening with half an ear to almost as many languages as there were people. The slow poetic speech of Goethe and the distant Fatherland made him turn; that the speaker was merely ordering her brood to be still and silent was of no moment. It was still a joy to hear her.

"They all have such a lot of hope and energy." Lancer was so quiet that Charles had to strain to hear him.

He was envious, Charles realised, a little surprised. A healthy man of Lancer's age should be brimming with energy and ambition, but he was leaning against the counter as if it were all that were holding him up. The very picture of the languid young Brahmin, in fact. But no man that young should look so weary. There was a history there, a dark history: there was something shadowing Scott Lancer's eyes. It would be interesting to find out what.

He opted for a little platitude. "They're on their way to a new life."

Lancer frowned. "Yes."

"My father brought me here from Prussia when I was fifteen. My mother had died the year before and he wanted to get away, to make his fortune here. It was exciting, landing in New York and seeing everything so different to little Erwitte, where I was born . I don't think he regretted it. I know that I don't. This land has been very good to us."

Lancer offered a crumb of information. "My father came here from Scotland. Possibly he too thought he could make his fortune."

"You never asked him?" Charles kept his tone bright and light, as if it were a casual enquiry of no importance.

"Never met the gentleman." Lancer's mouth twisted into that bitter little line again.

Interesting.

Charles gave him a sharp look, but Lancer stared back coolly, giving nothing away. Lancer was a private man, even more reserved than Charles would have guessed from the easy society manners that the younger man used as armour. So Charles forbore to enquire further. Instead he caught the ticket agent's attention and, on behalf of Lancer and himself, used his credentials from the railroad companies to get it established that they were through travellers of some importance and therefore entitled to be amongst the first to be assigned their berths.

"I think, though," said Lancer as they boarded the train, still speaking in that same quiet voice, "that I'd rather like to know what brought him here."

"And if he found what he was looking for, if he achieved his dream of... what? Independence? Riches? Freedom?" Charles nodded. "In your place, I'd like know what he gained from coming to America."

"Yes." Lancer spoke slowly, thoughtfully. He glanced down the length of train, looking west, and swung himself abruptly up onto the car platform. "And what may have been lost upon the way."

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.

The railroad ran out of Omaha across prairies so flat that the world seemed nothing but yellow-green grass and a sky vast enough to weigh down on the land. The track sliced across the boundless land like a knife blade.

Charles's three sleeping companions were through travellers too, and were playing cards at another seat. Charles had taken the opportunity to stretch out and get comfortable. He closed his eyes for a moment to rest them.

Lancer woke him when he joined him before lunch. He seemed fascinated by the wide vista outside the train and they spent some time gazing out and discussing their progress.

Lancer's hands—he had narrow, patrician hands, Charles noted—played idly with the cord of the window blind. "We're travelling so swiftly over land that only a generation or so ago was traversed with so much pain and travail. I don't think that we appreciate it enough."

Well, now. Every now and again the Brahmin exterior cracked a little and another interesting facet of the man was revealed. This yearning for a past that Lancer saw as what? Nobler? Simpler? More romantic? Well, perhaps there was more to the man than the rich Bostonian gentleman.

"It reminds me of the sea. There's something as relentless about it, as measureless and as hungry." It had been many years since Charles had spent any time at sea, but for a moment he seemed to feel the heave of the deck under his feet. "Watch how the wind bends the grasses, like the swell of waves."

"Are you a sailing man, sir?"

Charles laughed. "I may not look it now, but I spent almost ten years at sea, on a merchantman. I've sailed all over the world."

Lancer's eyes widened, and he looked astonished in a way that Charles considered a touch unflattering. It was true that Charles was a little older and, well, sturdier these days, and he knew that his was now a sedentary life, but surely it wasn't completely beyond the realms of possibility that he'd once been young and active? He was barely in his prime as it was.

Lancer had been to Europe. Before the War, he said, on a trip with his grandparents. He'd been a boy then, but he'd enjoyed London despite its dirt, and Paris despite its hauteur.

"My grandfather offered to go with me again, now. Now that I'm of an age to appreciate it better, I mean. He'd have preferred that to—" Lancer's mouth did that little twist again. "Well. Perhaps some other time."

"London and Paris will still be there," said Charles. "Did you travel far on the continent? I'd like to return to Germany one day, I think. Only to visit, though. New York is home now and I can't see Mrs Nordhoff taking kindly to being a Hausfrau. German society is a little too paternalistic for her tastes, I think."

They spent a happy half hour trading stories of their travels. But throughout it all, Lancer's gaze strayed to the window and the wide lands beyond. Charles let the conversation lapse for a moment, watching and waiting until Lancer remembered he was there.

Lancer reddened when he realised, and waved a hand at the glass. "Seeing this, I could believe that the world is flat. Couldn't you?"

Science, opined Charles, took all the romance and adventure from life, insisting on telling us that the world was a globe. "It looks flat enough out there, but it's illusory and the track's starting the long climb to the mountains. That should be a splendid sight. Even if science likes to pretend it knows how the earth and rocks were bent and folded to make them, it can't rob mountains of their grandeur."

Lancer's flush became one of eagerness, Charles thought. He leaned forward. "Science is a topic we haven't yet touched upon, sir. I assume that you have read Darwin? I'll admit that when the book was first published I was rather more interested in baseball than either biology or religious philosophy, but when I was old enough to read it, my grandfather told me of the stir it caused. And then, when I got to Harvard, one of the more radical professors allowed us to study it, although that caused a little controversy and our studies weren't prolonged or, to my mind, very deep. I'd be interested in your views on his theory."

And they were off... By the time they repaired to the dining car for luncheon, they had reviewed the remarkable advances humanity had made in knowledge in the last fifty years and were hotly debating whether or not that had gone hand in hand with a spiritual decline. They reached the informality of using each others' surnames over coffee and a dessert of peaches and cream.

Dessert was excellent. The company even more so.

.

.

Shortly before three-o'clock, while it was still light, the train juddered to a halt. Lancer glanced up from Nelson's guidebook—he'd brought the more detailed Crofutt's guide and they'd swapped for a while. Charles was enjoying Crofutt. It was the better guide of the two.

"A stop for coal, I expect," said Charles. When this was confirmed by the conductor he marked his place in Crofutt and suggested going to see what was going on. Several gentlemen and several men who didn't quite meet that definition were already out on the prairie, stretching their legs after the confinement of the cars. Lancer agreed readily, although when it came to it he didn't want to walk as far as the front of the train, where the train crew were doing something arcane and fascinating. Charles left him watching the play of the wind on the grasses, walking up the length of the train to the depot while trying to get his notebook out of his pocket.

The coaling depot wasn't very large. A couple of cabins, a huge pile of coal and a water tower, with the foundations for a proper coaling tower being laid beside the track. It would be ready in a few months, the depot agent said. Six at the most, when the labour of getting the coal into the tender wouldn't be as intense. What's more, the railroad was selling all the land round about to farmers. Cheap, too. A bargain. Indeed, a couple of the farming families had disembarked from the train and were standing in the lee of one of the cabins, looking small and bewildered in the midst of all their baggage.

"There'll be a town here, soon," said the agent. "And then we'll make it a proper stopping place." He turned his head and spat out a wad of brown tobacco.

Charles nodded, smiled and moved upwind. He was no scientist, but he calculated that spittle would find it harder to reach him against the prevailing breeze. He had no objection to a good cigar but chewing tobacco... He suppressed a shudder of disgust and turned away to watch the refuelling. He took copious notes, watching as the train's stoker oversaw the transfer of tons of shiny coal nuggets from the wagons relaying it to the track from the depot.

A soft shriek from one of the farming families warned him. He turned quickly. His heart thumped once, hard. He hadn't expected this. He really hadn't expected this.

Five of them, riding thin, ill-kempt ponies through the long grass. Bare chested, with strings of beads worn like breastplates; leggings and moccasins of some sort of soft looking suede; black hair in long braids framing dark faces that showed no expression. They rode in single file, passing within a few yards of train cars where dozens of pale faces pressed against the glass to see them go. They rode as if the train weren't even there, for all the notice they gave it.

"Hold your ground." The railroad agent spoke softly, from the corner of his mouth, not shifting his gaze from the Indians as they approached. "There won't be any trouble."

Großer Gott! Charles hoped the man was right. At the edge of his vision he saw one of the railroad men go swiftly to join the farming families, heard a quiet voice talking to them, calming them. One of the women had fallen to her knees. She made a soft keening noise.

The Indians rode at a steady pace. They'd pass within a few feet of Charles and the agent, but the agent didn't move.

"Stay still," warned the agent. He straightened up, shoulders tense. His hands went to his belt. He had a gun in a holster on his left hip, the butt pointing forward. His hand was near, yet not so near as to be threatening. "Don't move."

Not that Charles could move. He could barely breathe. He thought perhaps that he'd been struck down with a paralysis, as some sort of biblical punishment for the journalistic sin of curiosity. He wouldn't be the first.

Not one of the Indians looked at Charles, but the one riding last, the one that rode a horse a little better than the others and had maybe more clay and turquoise beads looped around him—that one glanced at the agent. The agent nodded back.

That was all.

A moment later and the Indians had ridden past the cabins and disappeared. It was astonishing how quickly the grasslands swallowed them up, but the agent pivoted and watched them out of sight.

"Crow," he said to Charles. "They were Crow."

Charles had to swallow a couple of times. It was also astonishing how dry these arid lands made a man. "Are they much trouble?"

The agent smiled, an odd, tight smile. He shrugged one shoulder and spat out another morsel of wet, chewed tobacco before turning away and striding through the grass to where the refuelling operation had restarted as though nothing had happened.

"Ah," said Charles. He looked west, the way the Indians had gone, but he couldn't see anything. The farmer's wife was crying quietly, her husband at her side talking to her... Bohemian, it sounded like. Charles settled his shoulders back, found that he could move again and walked, briskly, back to the car where he'd left Lancer.

"Did you see them?" he demanded, as soon as he got within speaking distance. Lancer stood with his back against one of the car wheels. "Did you ever see anything like those wild savages, Lancer? They passed within a yard or two of me, up there at the depot, and it's lucky that I'm not a nervous man! Did you ever see anything so wild? What an encounter! Something to write about, I fancy!"

Lancer started. He had been staring the way the Indians had gone, and now he seemed to come back to himself. "Encounter, Nordhoff? They went past us as if we weren't here, as if we were below their notice. I don't think that was much of an encounter. And yet..." His voice trailed away.

"That's not much of a story, though," protested Charles. "I need something a little more exciting than five Indians taking an afternoon ride."

"I was thinking. I was thinking how much they looked as if they belonged to the land here, a part of it." Lancer slapped the side of the car with one hand. "Not like this. This scars the land it runs across; the Indians haven't left a trace of their passing."

Oh ho. Then there was a romantic then, beneath that cool Brahmin exterior. "It's our way, to want to put our stamp on the world, to change it."

"They belong here in a way we don't."

"It's a different way. We don't change the way we live to suit the land; we change the land to suit the way we live. The farmers will do that here, claim this place for us."

"Yes. But don't you think that that though we might gain the land, we lose as much as the Indians do? In a different way, of course. I know they can't win, not against this." Lancer shrugged, indicating the train and all it stood for. "But we lose something, too, if they pass away and are gone from the world. There's a story there."

Charles shook his head. "Not one that anyone would read or I could convince my editor was a good one to tell. The people who want the land won't read it. They don't think that Rousseau was right, you know, that there's more morality in natural Man than in you or I. They see the Indian as something that gets in the way of progress, of a bigger and brighter future."

"And that isn't a story."

"No," said Charles. "Not one I could use. We change or die, Lancer. They're of the past, you know, and they don't change."

Lancer nodded.

"Well, then, don't make the mistake they do. Don't cling to the past at the expense of the present, and certainly not by sacrificing the future."

Lancer gave him an odd look, a thoughtful look. "No," he said. "I won't do that."

'

'

They finished the day over brandy in Lancer's stateroom, mellowed and tired and, Charles believed, pleased with each other's company.

Charles liked Lancer, very much. He'd found the younger man to be intelligent and sociable, easy-mannered and good-humoured. There was a core of something underneath that Charles had seen glimpses of but hadn't yet been able to tease out into the open; but the social animal, the young gentleman of means and education, was a very pleasant companion indeed.

Pleasant, but a man with a strong sense of privacy. Lancer must have paid a considerable premium to have to himself one of the two private cabins at the end of the carriage, but it was a charming little room. There was space enough for a pair of armchairs set before the large windows, and even after the chamberman had converted the long couch into a comfortable-looking bed, it was spacious enough for Lancer and Charles to sit and enjoy their brandies.

Charles's own accommodation was comfortable, if a little cramped. "It's a little like sleeping in a small closet. Everyone snores and rustles all night, with only a curtain between my modesty and the other twenty-nine occupants of the car and as I said this morning, I'm forced into an unholy intimacy with strangers." Charles rubbed at his nose, pushing his spectacles back up into their proper place.

"I don't envy you that. I've shared close quarters in the past, and I've no desire to repeat it."

Charles suggested that the accommodations were perfectly adequate if one weren't an out and out sybarite.

There it was again, the thing that Charles couldn't quite define; the whatever-it-was that shadowed Scott Lancer's eyes. But all Lancer did was smile and incline his head. "Guilty as charged, Nordhoff; guilty as charged. Have another brandy."

'

'

They breakfasted at the Cheyenne stop the next morning, where according to the guidebooks, a bustling little city was growing fast around the spot where the railroad crossed Crow Creek, high up on the edges of the Rocky Mountains. Charles had been right about the long, subtle climb up out of the plains. They were very high up now, the line they'd travelled switchbacking up the foothills like a metal snake.

"And by bustling little city, the guidebooks mean a row of mean shacks with the most peculiar false fronts on them." Charles prodded the front of the Union Pacific Railroad Store as he spoke. "This is a mendacious building, Lancer. There's nothing behind this but a barn, and yet this frontage shows real glass windows."

"Probably shipped here at huge expense, too. It doesn't auger well for those of us used to the eastern cities."

"It most certainly does not." Charles sighed. "This is going to be rather hard to extol to the great travelling American public. 'Come to the West and eat in a barn.' Not a message I can see will go down well."

All the same, he had to pry Lancer out of the small store later. Breakfast had been indifferent, served at a communal (although spotlessly clean) table and insanely expensive at a dollar-fifty, but Lancer's complaint had died on his lips when he saw the shelf of books for sale. He'd been rummaging amongst them for quite ten minutes by the time that Charles lost patience, but he was good-humoured about being prodded into making a selection. Lancer pushed the books, thin and cheap-looking things, into the pocket of his suit, and followed Charles back to the train as the conductor rang his bell and shouted exhortations to the passengers to "Hurry along now!"

When they were back in their seats, Lancer offered him a choice of books. The train lurched forward as Charles picked through them, gathering speed as it headed towards Laramie.

"Good grief." Charles blinked at the lurid covers. "Dime novels!"

Lancer laughed. "Aren't they ridiculous? I thought you might find some lively copy in there, Nordhoff. A few anecdotes about these more colourful characters, perhaps." He flourished a book at Charles. "This one, for example. It recounts the trouble that someone called Wes Hardin is finding on something called the Pecos." He frowned. "I believe I've heard of Hardin. I assume he's real."

Charles admired the cover of the book he held, illustrated with a skilful drawing of a moustachioed villain in a sombrero, shooting an Indian at close quarters while a scantily dressed saloon girl cowered behind him, her hand upraised as if to ward off a blow. "I'm charged with attracting the visitors to the West in droves, Lancer, not frightening them into running home to hide under their beds. I hardly think that someone who calls himself the Border Hawk is quite the ambassador the railroad companies are looking for." He opened the book to take a closer look at it. Purely as research, of course. "It looks as though everyone in the West finds trouble, and that is not the sort of message we want our readers to take away from the articles."

"I suspect the only trouble I'll have will be tearing myself away from the delights of San Francisco to go south."

"I hope so, Lancer." Although it had to be said that if San Francisco was like the other western towns Charles had seen so far, then there may not be many delights and his article for Harper's would be short indeed. "The last thing any man needs is to meet one of these shootists. Good grief! This one is a murderous scoundrel by the sound of it." Charles looked at the illustrations with disfavour and remarked that swarthy men with moustaches were obviously born to be villains.

But Lancer, already deep in the adventures of Mr Hardin, waved a negligent hand. The books would while away the time until Laramie, at least, where the conductor had promised to take Charles along to the emigrant car for an hour or two. Lancer had begged to come along. Charles, magnanimous as ever, agreed and young Lancer, the cultured and elegant Brahmin, had brightened at the prospect of such a treat. What a sheltered life these Society types led!

Charles smiled and turned back to the first page, and lost himself in that timeless classic, Johnny Madrid, the Border Hawk; Trouble Along The Cimarron.