A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(19)

“If I wanted to, I could pass as something besides Seneca, and so could you—at least outside New York, where everyone’s used to seeing Haudenosaunee people. Having black hair and a dark complexion opens up a lot of possible ethnic identities. But I don’t forget who I am. And when the clan mothers say I’m the one to do something, I know who they are too.”

“Janie, you’re not still a true believer in the old religion, are you?”

“What I believe in these days is pretty much dominated by what I learned in science classes. But I sometimes like remembering that I’m not just one person. I’m part of a group of people like me. And I’ve never heard anything to make me think the old people were stupid.”

“I get you,” he said.

They kept trotting along the stream bed for a time, and then they both heard a faint hoot of a train’s horn, then another. They moved on, making their way downhill. As the stream bed flattened and no longer kept them hidden, Jane altered her course a little. The train horn sounded again, this time a long wail, then another hoot.

“There must be a town down there,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“They’re blowing their horn for a crossing—two short, one long, one short. They’re warning the vehicles that might not see them coming.”

They ran on for a few minutes and then saw, stretched across the bottom of the valley below, the train tracks. The double line of steel rails was coming out of a small town to their right. Jane stopped running and walked through a stand of trees, keeping herself in the foliage.

She followed the tracks with her eyes, moving her gaze from the spot where they emerged from the cluster of buildings at the edge of a grid of streets, stretched across a level field that looked like wheat, and then reached the hillside where they began to wind and go upward. She pointed. “Right over there—where the tracks turn and climb—I’ll bet a train would have to slow down to practically a walk.”

“Are you planning to jump a train?”

“I’m considering it,” she said, and watched Jimmy for a reaction. He said nothing.

She said, “Thank you for not mentioning Skip Walker.” Skip was a harsh nickname for a boy they had both known when they were young. At some point in early childhood he had decided to hop a train. He had run along beside it, then either tripped or been unable to hang on to a handhold after he’d made his leap. The train wheel had rolled over his leg and amputated it. “Skip” was a reference to the way he walked on his prosthetic leg, with a limp and a little hop. He had been one of those boys that everyone’s mother cited to scare them out of taking risks.

Jimmy shrugged. “Skip was seven or eight when he did that. We ought to be able to keep from being hurt that bad.”

Jane was still tracing the tracks with her eyes, walking along the hillside to see where the tracks went after the first turn. “It looks to me as though the tracks go mostly north,” she said. “If we jumped the train, our trip home might be a whole lot quicker.”

Jimmy said, “Let’s head for that place right over there, where it takes another turn and climbs at the same time. If they have people watching at the front and the back, they won’t see us if we pop out in the middle and climb aboard.”

They trotted along the hillside, staying among the trees but heading for the spot where the tracks turned and disappeared into thick woods. It took them a few minutes to run from their hill to the one where the tracks were. When they arrived they could look down above the tracks to see a place where the rails bisected the town. On one side they could see four church steeples, a row of long, flat-topped buildings that were probably stores and offices, and farther out, dozens of small houses with pitched gray roofs. On the other side of the tracks were a number of old brick buildings with rows of dirty, barely translucent windows, smokestacks, and railroad sidings. Beyond them there were metal Quonset huts that were either warehouses or garages.

A train snaked around the hill on the far side of the valley and sounded its horn as it came into town at the first intersection—two short, one long, one short blare, still somewhat faint. At each spot where the tracks crossed a road, they could see red lights begin to flash, and then a black-and-white barrier came down, and the train came through. Now they could see that the train had a big yellow engine in front and one right behind, and more and more freight cars appeared behind them from around the hill.

“It’s a big train,” said Jimmy. “I’ll bet it’s a hundred cars.”

“That’s got to be good for us,” Jane said. “Let’s get closer.”

They came down through the trees just as the front of the train passed, moving along at a slow, steady rate. There were hoppers, tank cars, boxcars, flatbeds laden with big loads of pipes or thick packs of flat material like wallboard or plywood, all strapped down tightly. There were gondolas full of coal or slag. The names blazoned on the cars were familiar from their childhood—Canadian National, Georgia Central, Chicago and North Western, Erie Lackawanna.

Jane stopped beside the tracks. The engines were at least twenty-five cars ahead of them now. Jane looked ahead toward the place where the tracks turned and climbed upward, and looked back to the curve where the next part of the train was still to appear, rolling toward them. She looked back up the hillside through the trees. She said, “I’m ready. Are you up to this?”