AFTER A THOUSAND-MILE RUN from Chicago on awful roads, Harry Frost’s sixty-horsepower, four-cylinder Model 35 Thomas Flyer touring car was caked in mud, gray with dust, and festooned with towropes and chains, extra gas and oil cans, and repeatedly patched spare tires. But it was running like a top, and Frost felt a kind of freedom he never experienced on a railroad, even steaming on his own special. Like Josephine used to prattle on about flying in the air—on the air, she called it, insisting that air was almost solid—in or on, a man could auto anywhere he pleased.

Thirty miles from Fort Worth, a meatpacking city that was smudging the sky with smoke, Frost ordered a halt on a low rise. He scanned the scrub-strewn prairie with powerful German field glasses he had bought for African safaris. A mile off was the railroad. A freight car sat all by itself on a remote siding that had once served a town since wiped from the map by a tornado.

“Go!”

Mike Stotts, Frost’s mechanician, cranked the Thomas’s motor. Three hours later, twenty-five miles on, they stopped again. Frost sent Stotts ahead on a bicycle, which they had stolen in Wichita Falls, to scout the territory and establish contact with Frost’s men in Fort Worth.

“You want I should go with him?” asked Dave Mayhew, Frost’s telegrapher.

“You stay here.” He could always get another mechanician, but a telegrapher who was also handy with firearms was a rare animal. Stotts was back sooner than Frost had expected. “What’s going on?”

“Picket line. They’ve got men on horses patrolling.”

“You sure they weren’t ranch hands?”

“I didn’t see any cows.”

“What about in the city?”

“Police everywhere. Half the men I saw were wearing deputy stars. And a fair portion of those who weren’t looked like detectives.”

“Did you see any rail dicks?”

“About a hundred.”

Frost ruminated in silence. Clearly, Isaac Bell was operating under the assumption that the Colt machine guns stolen from Fort Riley were in his possession.

There were other ways to skin a cat. Frost sent Mayhew up a pole to wire a Texas & Pacific Railway dispatcher in his employ, then headed west, skirting Fort Worth.

After dark, the Thomas Flyer climbed the embankment onto the railroad, straddled the tracks, and continued west. Frost ordered the mechanician to watch behind them for locomotive headlamps. He and the telegrapher watched ahead. Five times in the night, they pulled off the tracks to let a train pass.