Chapter 16 - The Phantom of the Pass
Clara crawled across the shifting mountain of jagged black anthracite coal as the train swayed violently around a sharp mountain bend. Sparks from the smokestack showered over her like a hail of miniature meteors, sizzling against her frostbitten skin.
Below her in the engine cab, the firebox glowed with blinding orange fury. Governor Sterling Bell stood behind the engineer, his revolver pressed against the terrified man's temple.
"Shovel more! Throw the safety valve open!" Bell roared, his face blackened by soot, his eyes wild with the hysteria of a cornered tyrant. "We hit eighty miles an hour before the bridge! We clear the gap or we all burn!"
The engineer wept, his hands blistering as he hurled coal into the inferno. "We won't make it! The trestle is fractured, Governor! It’ll collapse under the engine's weight!"
"Then we die as masters of this county!" Bell shouted.
Clara dropped from the coal pile directly onto the tender deck behind Bell.
The heavy thud of her landing made Bell whirl around. Seeing the girl in the ruined veil standing before him like an avenging wraith of the storm, he pulled the trigger.
*Click.*
The revolver’s cylinder had run dry.
With an animal snarl, Bell hurled the empty Colt at her head. Clara ducked, the heavy iron skimming her scalp, and drove her shoulder into his midsection. They crashed hard against the brass boiler gauges. Glass shattered, and a jet of superheated steam hissed into the air, scorching the Governor's cheek.
Bell screamed, his large hands clamping around Clara’s throat with suffocating force. He shoved her backward against the edge of the open cab window, the icy abyss of the canyon yawning mere feet beneath them.
"You should have stayed buried with your father, you little bitch!" Bell spat, his thumbs digging into her windpipe.
Clara gasped for air, the world spinning in shades of gray and black. Her hand slipped toward her boot. Her fingers wrapped around the bone hilt of the hunting knife.
"My father..." she choked out, her vision dimming, "...always said... never let a dog lead the pack."
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She drove the blade upward, burying the six-inch steel into the meat of Bell’s thigh.
***
