THE OVERLAND LIMITED had come to a stop with a metallic shriek of brake shoes and the clank of couplings in the narrow pool of electric light beside the low brick Rawlins Depot. Most of her passengers were asleep in their beds. The few who were not stepped onto the platform to stretch their legs only to retreat from the stink of alkali springs mingled with coal smoke. The train crew changed engines while provisions, newspapers, and telegrams came aboard.

The porter, the former slave Jonathan, approached Isaac Bell in the deserted observation car, where the detective was contentedly sprawled on a couch reminiscing with Kenneth Bloom about their days in the circus.

"Telegram from Ogden, Mr. Bell."

Bell tipped the old man a thousand dollars.

"That's all right, Jonathan," he said, laughing. "I got lucky tonight. The least I can do is share the wealth. Excuse me a moment, Ken." He turned away to read the wire.

His face turned cold even as hot tears burned his eyes.

"You all right, Isaac?" asked Ken.

"No," he choked out, and stepped onto the rear platform to try to fill his lungs with the acrid-smelling air. Though it was the middle of the night, a shunt engine was moving freight cars about the yards. Bloom followed him out.

"What happened?"

"Weber and Fields ..."

"Vaudeville? What are you talking about?"

All Isaac Bell could say was, "My old friends." He crumpled the telegram in his fist, and whispered to himself, "Last thing I told them was to watch their step. I told them the Wrecker is poison."

"Who?" asked Bloom.

Bell turned terrible eyes on him, and Bloom retreated hastily into the observation car.

Bell smoothed the telegraph flat and read it again. Their bodies had been found in an alley, two blocks from the office. They must have spotted the Wrecker and tailed him. It was hard to believe that a single man could have taken both veteran detectives down. But Wally had not been well. Maybe it had slowed him. As chief investigator, as the man responsible for the safety of his operatives, he should have replaced him--should have taken a vulnerable man out of danger.

Bell's head felt like it would explode, it was so filled with pain and fury. For what felt like a very long time, he could not think. Then, gradually, it struck him that Wally and Mack had left him a dying legacy. The man they had tailed must have looked enough like the man in the lumberjack's sketch to raise their suspicions. Otherwise, why would they have followed him into an alley? That he had turned on them and killed them proved that the sketch of the Wrecker was accurate, no matter how much it reminded people of a matinee idol.