The Silverhorn Grade

The Ferrier Railway Bureau had three rooms on the third floor of an old brick building on South Clark Street in Chicago, a block from the La Salle Street station, and on a hot afternoon in September you could hear the trains from every one of them. You could hear the Rock Island suburbans clanking out of the train shed, and the New York Central's big passenger engines breathing at the bumper posts, and under it all the switch engines in the yards, shoving cars about with short-tempered barks, all day and all night, the way they had since the Colonel opened the office in 1912.

The Colonel's name was still on the frosted glass of the door, in gold letters going brown at the edges: FERRIER RAILWAY BUREAU. Under it, in smaller letters, was the only rule he had ever bothered to have painted anywhere: WE WORK FOR THE FACTS. THE CLIENT PAYS FOR THEM.

Mara had walked under those words most mornings for two years and still read them every time.

It was Friday the seventh of September, 1951, and a little after three o'clock. The ceiling fan in the outer office turned slowly and did nothing. The switchboard girl had gone down for a sandwich. In the records room, behind a wall of oak card cabinets, Rosco Bascombe was humming to himself, which meant he was looking something up and enjoying it.

There were six agents on the Bureau's books that year, and on most days none of them were in the office. One was in Montana, on a string of boxcar thefts on a branch line. One was in Pittsburgh, testifying. One was somewhere in Texas on a case nobody was allowed to talk about. The railroads had their own police, hundreds of them, with badges and the power of arrest, and most of the time the railroads' own police were enough. The Bureau got the other cases: the ones where the railroad's own people were the suspects, or two railroads were quarreling over whose fault a thing was, or a court or an insurance company or a board of bondholders wanted somebody from outside, somebody who didn't draw a paycheck from either side. The Colonel had built the whole business on that one idea. An outsider who knows the inside. It had kept the lights on for thirty-nine years.

The inner door opened and Corinna Ferrier leaned out.

"Mara. Have you anything on your desk that can't wait a week?"

"Nothing that can't wait a month."

"Good. Come in."

Her office had been her father's, and she had changed almost nothing in it. The big rolltop was his, and the brass telegraph sounder on the window ledge, and the framed system maps of forty railroads on the walls, some of them railroads that no longer existed. The only thing in the room that was entirely hers was a typewriter, and the habit, when she was thinking, of tapping a pencil on the blotter in Morse. She had been a Western Union operator before she was anything else. So had Mara, in a manner of speaking: six years on a Kansas division, copying train orders through the night in a depot that shook every time a freight went through. It was the first thing the two of them had ever talked about, and it was still the thing they talked about when they didn't want to talk about anything else.

Corinna was sixty-four, tall and gray and spare, and she did not waste words, her own or anyone else's. She handed Mara a telegram across the desk.

DENVER COLO SEP 7 1951 1040A FERRIER RAILWAY BUREAU CHICAGO SILVERHORN AND ARGENTA RY MIXED TRAIN 3 DERAILED SIX PM THURSDAY LOST DOG CURVE MILE 44 BANDITS LOOSENED RAIL STOP COMBINE DOWN FILL STOP EXPRESS SAFE OPENED PAYROLL ARGENTA REDUCTION CO 46200 DOLLARS TAKEN STOP SHERIFF HAS NO ONE STOP REQUIRE YOUR BEST AGENT AT TECOLOTE SPRINGS SOONEST STOP ICC ABANDONMENT HEARING HERE FRIDAY 14TH MATTER MUST BE CLOSED BEFORE STOP RATES ACCEPTED GARRETT PARDEE RECEIVER

Mara read it twice. The second time Mara read it the way she had once read train orders, word by word, looking for the thing that was wrong.

"He's decided it was bandits," Mara said.

"He's decided it in a telegram. That's quick work from Denver, the morning after." Corinna's pencil went tap, tap-tap on the blotter. "The Silverhorn is a narrow gauge. Seventy-odd miles in the San Juans. In receivership since before the war, and the receiver wants out. He's asked the Commission to let him tear it up."

"And there's a hearing on Friday."

"There's a hearing on Friday." She looked at Mara over her spectacles. "I want to know what happened on that curve. All of it. Not what Mr. Pardee would like to have happened before his hearing."

Rosco Bascombe looked up from his cabinets as Mara came in, and before Mara had said a word, he had a fat brown volume open on the table: the Official Guide of the Railways, the June issue, with a slip of paper in it.

"I heard her say Silverhorn through the door," he said, not at all ashamed. "Here. Page eleven hundred and something. Silverhorn and Argenta Railway, G. Pardee, Receiver, Tecolote Springs, Colorado. Three-foot gauge. Seventy-four miles. Tecolote Springs to Argenta, one mixed train a day each way, except Sundays." His finger ran down the tiny print. "Leaves Tecolote two ten in the afternoon. Into Argenta eight fifteen at night. Six hours for seventy-four miles. That's a mountain railroad, that is."

"What else?"

"Five engines on the roster when last reported, all Mikados. One passenger car. An ore traffic that's picked up since the uranium people came in." He closed the Guide gently. "And a timetable that hasn't changed since 1938, which tells you nobody's spent a dollar on it since the receiver came. They're not running a railroad out there, Mara. They're running it down."

By half past four Mara had a ticket on the Denver Zephyr and a reservation, from Denver, on the morning airplane to the San Juan country, which was a Frontier Airlines DC-3 that stopped at Tecolote Springs on its way to Durango if anyone wanted it to.

Corinna came out to the outer office while Mara was packing the file into a briefcase. She handed over a typed card, the way she did at the start of every case. File 51-37. Client: Silverhorn & Argenta Railway, G. Pardee, Receiver. Agent: Mara.

"Wire me every night," she said. "Telephone if it's worth the money. And Mara..."

"Work for the facts," said Mara.

"Let the client pay for them." Something that was nearly a smile went across her face and was gone. "Go and catch your train."

The Zephyr left Union Station at five o'clock, all silver, sliding out through the yards and the long hot back lots of the West Side into the country. Mara ate supper in the dining car while Illinois went by flat and gold in the evening light, and then sat a long time in the observation car at the rear of the train with the telegram on her knee, reading it again while the corn turned blue and then black and the lights of the farm towns came up one by one and went past. Bandits loosened rail. The receiver had been very sure, very fast, from a hundred and fifty miles away.

At the crossing of the Mississippi, in the dark, Mara put the telegram away and went back to the sleeper. Mara lay in the berth with the blind up a few inches and watched Iowa go by in the dark, a farmhouse light, a grade crossing with its bell clanging and fading, a water tower. Years ago, in a Kansas depot at two in the morning, Mara had copied a train order that was wrong, one digit, a meeting point given as the wrong siding, and had caught it on the repeat-back and stopped two trains from meeting head-on in the dark. Nobody had ever known but Mara and the dispatcher, who had sent a box of cigars the next week and never mentioned it again. Mara still thought of it sometimes on night trains. It was the reason Mara had left the key for this work, in the end: not the near miss, but the feeling of reading a thing everyone else had read and seeing the one figure that was wrong.

Somewhere ahead, at the far end of the night and a day, there was a curve on a mountain where a train had left the rails in the rain, and something had happened there between dusk and dark that nobody had told the truth about yet.