“Must be rails someplace.” Gordon shook his head.  “No idea about the lines.  What did Topeka say?”

“Send someone out to look,”  Eastwood grumbled.  “But my yard is empty. My yard engine is in Phoenix for maintenance.  The replacement was with one of the freights.  The trail south, what they call a road, is miserable for an automobile.  If you drive it, take three sets of spare tires.  Send out a man on a  horse?  Five hours out, five hours back, or more, and stops to rest and water the horse, that only if the block is at the fifth tower.”

“We’re on a siding,” Gordon said.  “No lines are blocked by me.  See if Topeka wants me to detach and ride out for a look. If I have to back out, I don’t want fifty freight cars to my rear.”

Murphy shouted into his telephone again, then paused to listen.

“Topeka says go ahead,” Murphy announced.  “I have one flat car loaded up with supplies.  At a guess there’s been a washout, hopefully minor…yes, I know there hasn’t been any rain recently.  So you detach, hook up with the flat car and caboose full of linemen, and proceed slowly down the way.  Ignore signal lights.  Stop at each signal tower to confirm where you are.  Yes, that’s a pain in the neck, but I seem to have had several trains just disappear, and want to know where to look.  Oh, the sheriff is giving me four of his men and a Browning, a 1917, in case there was foul play.”

“A machine gun?” Gordon asked.  He shook his head.

“Sheriff Cooper is old style,” Murphy explained.  “Very old style.  He thinks the indians may have escaped from their reservation and be attacking.   But something delayed those trains, not to mention chopping all the phone and telegraph lines.  Bandits?”

Gordon considered his two visits to local Indian reservations.  The sheriff’s idea was absurd. “We can put the deputies in the caboose,” he announced.  “And if there’s a smart one, he can be in the cab with me.”

“Oh, he’s a smart one, all right,” Murphy announced, “parents had moved back east, so he went off to Harvard — that’s some school in Massachusetts — and then spent some years in Switzerland studying science.  Apparently he actually met this Einstein fellow, the guy who doesn’t understand how clocks work. But he’s very polite, doesn’t have his nose in the air, doesn’t think he knows it all, though he pretty much does, and when the sheriff called him back to pay off his college costs, since the sheriff paid for his grandson’s studies, he came right back. So he sits in the sheriff’s office, taking complaints, and he’s real good getting all the facts right.  And he reads books on being a detective, when he’s not doing his real job or doing some science thing.   That’s what the sheriff says, anyhow.”