"What was that?" she said.
Gabriel rose to a crouch and looked through the hole. The train was gathering speed, lightened, running free. Back down the line, a quarter-mile and growing, the old wooden express car sat alone and motionless on the rails, small already, smoke drifting from its forward end. Two men on horseback came up out of a dry wash beside the track and galloped alongside it, slowing as they reached it, one already swinging down from the saddle.
"Someone just uncoupled us," Gabriel said.
He watched the riders reach the car. He watched one of them pull something from a saddlebag, a can, square, the kind that holds coal oil. And he understood, all at once and completely, that the masks and the guns and the hands in the air had never been the robbery. The robbery was back there. The robbery was a fire.
II.
"They're going to burn it," he said.
"Burn what?" The young woman was on her feet. She had caught the back of the seat to steady herself, and her glove came away grey. "What is in that car?"
"A book," Gabriel said. "Forty-one families. Eight years of payments." He put the Schofield back inside his coat because there was nobody left in the car to point it at, and because his hand had begun, very slightly, to shake. "We have to stop this train."
"The engine is six cars forward."
"Then we'd best walk."
She was already moving. She went past him up the aisle with her skirts gathered in one fist, and he followed. The drummer in the bowler was still holding his hands in the air. The woman in brown had found her knitting and was clutching it to her chest like an infant. "Madam," Gabriel said as he passed her, "there's a boy up front alone. Would you sit with him?" She stared at him, then nodded, and rose, and went.
The forward door opened onto a narrow swaying platform and the next car's door, a yard of roaring air between, the ground pouring past beneath the iron plates. The young woman did not hesitate. She stepped across as if it were a hearth rug. Gabriel went after her.
They went through a second coach full of people standing, shouting, asking what had happened, and a smoking car where a card game had frozen in mid-hand, and then the baggage car, where a clerk with sleeve garters backed against a stack of trunks with a coal shovel raised.
"Put that down," the young woman said. "I am Louisa Kittredge. Where is the conductor?"
The clerk lowered the shovel an inch. "Miss—Kittredge?"