Starbuck wondered why no signal had been readied to tell everyone to withdraw. A series of gunshots would have served much faster than a damp scramble up the gorge’s side to deliver the messages, but he knew this was no time to ask the Colonel a question that would doubtless be construed as critical, and so he simply climbed the gorge’s eastern flank, then crossed the trestle bridge to find that Sergeant Truslow had made a huge barricade of felled pine trees to block the line’s western approach. Captain Hinton, a short and cheerful man, had been content to let Truslow manage affairs. “I suspect he’s stopped trains before,” he explained to Starbuck, then proudly showed how, beyond the barricade, the rails had been ripped up and hurled down toward the North Branch. “So the Colonel’s ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pity. I would rather have liked to have robbed a train. It would have been a new line of work for me, but horribly complicated.” Hinton explained that the Truslow method of train robbery demanded that the thieves wait some distance from the barricade, then leap aboard the passing locomotive and its cars. “If you wait for the train to stop before climbing aboard then you’re likely to have pesky passengers jumping off with guns and then everything gets rather untidy. You also have to have men on each car to wind the brakes if the train is to stop properly. It seems there’s quite an art to these things. Ah well, will you go and fetch the rogue, Nate?” Truslow, with the remainder of Hinton’s squad, was a quarter mile down the track, evidently prepared for the complicated business of stopping a train. “Off you go, Nate,” Hinton said, encouraging Starbuck.

But Starbuck did not move. Instead he stared down the line to where, beyond the shoulder of the hill, a sudden plume of white smoke was showing. “A train,” he said dully, as though he did not really believe his own eyes.

Hinton wheeled round. “Good God, so there is.” He cupped his hands. “Truslow! Come back!” But Truslow either did not hear or chose to ignore the summons because he began running west, away from the barricade and toward the train. “The Colonel will just have to wait.” Hinton grinned.

Starbuck could hear the train now. It was coming very slowly, its bell clanging and pistons laboring as it climbed the slight gradient toward the curve and the waiting ambush. Behind Starbuck a voice shouted from the gorge, urging him to hurry the withdrawal, but it was all too late for any haste to be of any help. Thomas Truslow wanted to rob a train.