Chapter 15: Tracking the Train
(Abalone, Kansas, July 1883)
"Move!" Dipper shoved Mabel—hard—and she stumbled and fell backward, hitting the ground with a loud oof! He dived and landed flat on his face right beside her in the tall grass.
And a steam locomotive barreling along at full speed, its whistle screaming, wheels rumbling, roared right through the patch of air where the two had stood not five seconds earlier. "Wah!" Mabel clapped her hands over her ears and, kicking frantically, scuttled on her back, scrambling further from the railroad. They had been standing right beside the tracks—without knowing it—and the train would have smacked them fatally had Mabel's brother not reacted quickly.
As soon as the caboose rattled and clattered past and into the distance, the red and green running lights fading, Dipper asked, "Mabel, are you OK?"
"Yeah, I think so," she said. "But I landed hard, and that hurt! Also, my ears are still rumbling. Ouch! I hit right on my butt!"
"Would've hurt a lot worse if you hadn't landed," he said. "Mabel, I think I know what happened. Do you remember that letter from Blendin that showed up just before we left Gravity Falls the summer we were twelve? A lawyer guy told Stan it had been left in their office for a hundred and thirty years, but the envelope said to deliver it to the Pines Twins at the Mystery Shack in August, 2012. I pasted it into Journal 3, remember?"
Mabel said, "Yeah, I do. It had that real old photo of Blendin with a big walrus mustache with it. But it was in that weird codey thingy—"
"—right, and I didn't crack the cipher for a couple of months, yeah," Dipper agreed. "But by that time, I mean, by the time we could actually read it, Blendin had already showed up on the bus as we were heading back to Piedmont, and we helped him save Time Baby from being disintegrated by Bill, so when I finally got around to figuring out the cipher, I thought it didn't mean anything because he was back. But it really meant he'd swerved off the time line because he was scared, and now he's stuck and we've got to, uh, unswerve him."
"See, this kind of talk is that makes me get impatient with time travel," Mabel said. "But that's what Lolph told us, sort of, so I guess I agree. Help me up."
Dipper got into a kind of crouch and offered her his hand. He hauled as she lurched.
Mabel grunted, pushing herself up and then turning in a tight circle and slapping herself. "I'm covered with grass and dirt. Feels like I'm wearing old-timey jeans and boots," she said. "And maybe a linen shirt or something?"
Dipper stood beside her. "Yeah, I think I'm in about the same kind of outfit. Rough-textured shirt, too, and a bandana around my neck. Boots. No hat, but I think I may be a cowboy."
"Do you have a gun? I want a gun, too!" Mabel said. "Pew! Pew! Take that, you varmint. Is it varmint? That's a funny word, varmint."
Dipper slapped both of his sides. "No six-shooter, sorry. But the important thing is, I think we wound up close to where Blendin landed."
Mabel sounded as if she should have been wearing her skepticles. "Huh? How do you figure that? There's no way to know where we are, let alone when. We can't see anything, hardly!"
Dipper picked a few scratchy wisps of prairie grass from his collar. "The letter said that when Blendin was trying to hide out, he came to the Old West and materialized on or near some railroad tracks, remember? And the train rain over—"
"His time tape!" Mabel finished. "Oh, yeah! I do remember. That's how he got stuck. I see—you think this is probably the same railroad. Maybe even the same train!"
"But not the same time," her brother pointed out. "Otherwise, we would've run into Blendin."
"Yeah," Mabel grunted. She heaved an elaborate sigh. "It's never that easy. What do we do now?"
As though answering her, a long roll of thunder grumbled its way across the flat earth. "I think a storm's coming up. We need to find somewhere to shelter. And since there's nothing around but prairie and the railroad, I guess we follow the railroad."
In the flicker of lightning, Mabel stared toward the parallel dark iron tracks. "Which direction?"
"Follow the train," he suggested. "It must be bound for someplace."
"Gah," Mabel said. "We gotta walk? After France and San Francisco, I feel like I'm shell-shocked and have PTAS, and now this—"
"Parent-Teacher Association Syndrome?" he asked.
Sounding annoyed, Mabel said, "No, that other thing. PTSD. And I'm so hungry! And tired. And I haven't had anything to eat since World War I!"
"Let's go," Dipper said. "Sooner we find someplace, the sooner you can eat."
Of all the things that crawl, hop, glide, run, roll, or amble on the face of the earth, a train should be the easiest one to follow. No matter the terrain, it always leaves tracks behind it. It's different, though, and much more difficult on a completely overcast night with only intermittent lightning showing you the rails. Fortunately, one advantage of the prairie they were on was that it stretched flat and almost level, and the tracks lay pretty much ruler-straight, steel ribbons binding the horizon behind them with the one straight ahead. Dipper said, "If this is Kansas, it should be a straight shot. I read somewhere than the Eastern border of the state's only four inches taller than the Western one."
"Then if you put a marble on the Eastern border," Mabel said slowly, "it should roll all the way across Kansas. That would be fun!"
The lightning came and went, sometimes intense, sometimes distant flickers. Once they got caught in a quick splatter of rain—not much, only a minute's worth or so, but enough to leave them uncomfortably damp—and more than once when the weather turned worse, as it did in spells, they grimaced and flinched as a nearby lightning bolt shook the world. They slogged on for close to four hours, Mabel beginning to limp. In a worn-out tone, she said, "Is it just my imagination, or is it getting a little lighter?"
"I think it must be close to sunup," Dipper replied. "But it's really cloudy, so it's darker than normal." Now he could make out the ominous, pendulous lobes of storm cloud overhead. He didn't tell Mabel, but their looks worried him. They looked as though they seriously wanted to develop funnel clouds and send tornadoes spinning and dancing across the prairie.
Once they came to a broad, slow river. The railroad crossed it on a trestle, but there was no other bridge and neither twin felt like swimming for it. "We have to walk across the railroad bridge," Dipper told Mabel.
"I can't stand heights." Mabel took a deep breath. The intermittent lightning showed that the river was not all that far below—but the trestle was at least twenty yards across. "I guess we have to do it," she said, gulping hard. When the lightning flashed, you could see the river below the bridge, glimpsed through the gaps between the cross-ties.
"Hold my hand. We'll do it together."
Halfway across, Mabel whspered, "What if a train comes?"
"We jump in the water, I guess."
"Ugh. Can we go faster?"
They couldn't, not much, because they had to be careful about not stepping into a gap, but they picked up the pace a little. Mabel began counting their steps. When she got to forty, they reached the end of the trestle. No train had showed up. "Hope that's the last bridge," she said.
They walked on for another forty monotonous minutes, and the morning continued to lighten, nearly imperceptibly. But by then they could at least make out the dark slashes of the rails against the paler prairie grass.
Finally, finally, Mabel spotted a light far ahead—very dim, yellow, and distant, but a steady light. "Maybe it's a streetlight," she said hopefully.
"Don't think so. It looks like maybe an oil lamp shining through a window."
They came in the gloomy darkness to a sign standing on two posts off to the side of the rails. They could make out the shape, but couldn't see the words. "I need a flashlight," Dipper said, reaching into his pocket. He came up with a short, stubby one, the kind that works on one AA battery. "Have to get rid of this once we use it," he said. "We can't bring modern tech into the Old West." He turned on the beam and shined the beam at the sign.
"Abalone, Kansas," Mabel read aloud. "Pop 3230. What makes it pop?"
"That's short for population." He turned off the flashlight, hesitated, and then said, "Take this back to when it came from, please," and dropped it into his pocket. It vanished. "Huh. Didn't know it would do that. Lolph really should have given us an instruction manual."
"Let's go," Mabel said. "Maybe we can get some breakfast in Abalone."
"I'm not sure we read that name right. I think it might be Abilene," Dipper told her. "No, wait, I think that's In Texas. No, no, Kansas, I think. Doesn't matter. We'll find out when we come to the town. Let's go."
About a quarter of a mile farther on, the railroad depot came into view, and, sure enough, the sign on the front of the porch read ABALONE. The station was locked up tight, but a lone oil lantern hung on a tall pole and gave just about enough light to make the sign readable.
"Strange name for a Western town," Dipper said. "I mean, they should raise cows, not seafood."
"I think you're right, Brobro. Smells like cows," Mabel said, sniffing loudly.
"Makes sense. Kansas was a big cattle-raising state back in the nineteenth century."
They heard mooing and lowing before long and soon enough passed an enormous corral where a nervous herd of longhorn cattle stood and milled about in the early morning. The occasional lightning made them skittish, and every time thunder boomed, they broke out with fresh, anxious moos. "Should be a watchman around," Dipper muttered.
But if there was, they didn't find him. Past the corral the dirt street finally led to buildings, about a dozen or fourteen of them, all dark. The town seemed to exist along one street, stores with high, square false fronts. Behind the stores on one side they could glimpse what had to be houses—none of them showing a light. A wooden boardwalk ran the whole length of the block of stores, but the street was unpaved and blotched with dark places—as the lightning showed—that turned out to be horse and cattle droppings.
"I didn't think the old West would be so smelly," Mabel complained. "Where is everybody, anyway?"
"Guess we're too early," Dipper said. They passed a livery stable and then on the outskirts of town, standing all alone by itself on the right side of the street, the Sheriff's Office and attached jail. Finally, they'd come to a building with a light in it. One window showed dim and yellow, a rectangle against the dark loom of the building.
They tried the door and found it unlocked. Inside and near the desk, a man had stretched out on a cot and was snoring. On the littered desk an oil lantern sat, its wick turned low and its flame reddish-yellow. "Hi!" Mabel said. "Good morning!"
The man jerked and looked up. He was fully clothed—well, pants, shirt, and socks—and he rolled on his side, yawning and blinking. "Who're you?" he asked, swinging his legs off the cot and reaching for his boots.
"We're new in town, and we're looking for somebody," Dipper said. "Is there a watchmaker and watch repairman here in town? One guy who does both, I mean?"
"Ben Bland? Fat guy? That who you're lookin' for?"
Dipper thought, That's a terrible alias. But then, he thought, It's exactly the kind of fake name Blendin Blenjamin Blandin would think up. "That's him," he told the man.
"Yeah, he's in town all right. Temporarily," the man said, yawning and stretching. Then he grinned, very unpleasantly. "You got a watch needs fixing, boy, you better hurry up, is all."
"Why?" Mabel asked.
The man took a pocket watch out of his vest and looked at it, holding it close to the oil lantern on the desk. "'Cause right now it's just turned four in the morning, and in four hours we're gonna take the watch feller out and hang him."