He had packed the trestle with explosives, Bell realized. The attack he had planned had been twofold: shoot Josephine out of the sky, and blow Preston Whiteway’s train to Kingdom Come—along with every Van Dorn riding on it.

Bell forced the Eagle down and straddled the rails with the skids. He hit so hard, the machine bounced and tried to rise again. It would have been safer to pour on the power and take her up again, but there wasn’t a moment to lose. He drove the machine down hard and felt the skids shatter on the crossties. Splintering wood, shrieking metallic protest, the Eagle slid along the railroad tracks. Bell leaped and hit the ground running.

The smoke was racing ahead of him, picking up speed as it closed with the trestle. Bell ran faster, gaining on it, and was within yards of stomping it out when it slipped over the lip of the gorge and under the trestle where he couldn’t reach.

“Back your engine!” he shouted, running onto the trestle. “Back off the bridge.”

There was no time for that. He saw the engineer gaping from his cab and his detectives running to help him, not realizing the danger. He saw Dashwood among them.

“Dash!” he shouted. “There’s a detonator fuse under the tracks. Shoot it.”

Bell climbed over the edge and down through the wooden timbers beneath the track. He saw the fuse strung timber to timber, burning brightly. Dash was quick—he, too, went over the side, scrambled among the timbers, and spotted the dot of fire fifty feet away. Clinging to a timber with one arm, the young detective drew his long-barreled Colt, took aim, and fired. The bullet threw splinters. The fuse kept burning. Dash fired again. The fuse leaped and jumped, and kept burning.

Bell pulled himself along under the tracks, jumping from timber to timber. Ahead, in the shadow of the locomotive, he saw bundled dynamite—dozens and dozens of sticks, enough to destroy the trestle, the train, and everyone on it. Dash fired again. The fuse fire danced on.

Isaac Bell leaped onto a horizontal cross timber, drew his Browning smoothly from his coat, and fired once.

The dancing flame vanished. A wisp of smoke stood in its place, wavered in a puff of wind, then drifted away as if the fuse had been a candle snuffed out to end a pleasant evening.

Bell scrambled back up on the tracks and ran to the train to issue orders.

Josephine’s Van Dorn mechanicians were good men but city men, next to useless out of doors. “Crank Whiteway’s roadster,” he told them, “and run it down the ramp. Defuse the dynamite under the bridge. Then fix the skids so my machine can fly.