Free Showdown at Dead End Canyon by Robert Vaughan

bleak landscape, from horizon to horizon. The tracks gave as little comfort as the barren sand, rocks, and low-lying scrub brush of the great empty plains, but Hawke was certain that a train would be coming through before sundown.
    “Oh,” Pamela said. “I don’t believe I have ever walked this far in my entire life.”
    “You did well,” Hawke said.
    “Well? Ha! That’s because you don’t see the bruises and blisters I have on my feet now.”
    “No, I mean you did well because you didn’t complain all the way here,” Hawke said. “You’re a strong woman, Miss Dorchester.”
    “It’s the Brit in me,” Pamela said. “And the fact that my father would have it no other way.” She sat down and gingerly unlaced her moccasins.
    “Your father must be quite a man.”
    “Brigadier Emeritus of the Northumberland Fusiliers, Sir James Spencer Dorchester, Earl of Preston, Viscount of Davencourt,” Pamela said as she rubbed her feet.
    “That’s quite a mouthful.”
    “Of course, here in America he is simply Mr. Dorchester. He gave up his title and his holdings when we left England.”
    “And your title too,” Hawke said.
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “You would be Lady Dorchester. No, that’s not right, it’s your father’s title, not your husband’s, so it would be Lady Pamela.”
    Pamela tilted her head and looked up at Hawke with a quizzical expression. “Oh, my, I’m very impressed, Mr. Hawke. How is it that you know such a thing?”
    “I picked it up somewhere,” he replied.
    “I’m beginning to suspect that you are not quite the itinerant you appear to be.”
    Hawke chuckled. “Thanks. I think.”
    “I don’t suppose you have a watch?”
    “As a matter of fact I do,” he said, and pulled his watch from his pocket. “It is lacking fifteen minutes of seven.”
    “Ah, very good. We shall have no more than a fifteen minute wait.”
    “You carry a timetable in your head, do you?”
    “In a manner of speaking. The westbound train reaches Green River at nine P.M . every day. We are forty miles from Green River, and the train proceeds at a velocity of twenty miles each hour. Therefore, it will be here at seven o’clock.”
    “I can’t argue with that logic.”
    As Pamela had predicted, fifteen minutes later they saw a train approaching. Hawke knew that it was running at a respectable enough speed, but because of the vastness of the prairie, it appeared to be barely moving. Against the great panorama of the wide open spaces, the train seemed very small, and even the smoke that poured from its stack made but a tiny mark on the big, empty sky.
    He could hear the train quite easily now, the sound of its puffing engine reaching him across the wide flat ground the way sound travels across water. He stepped up onto the track and began waving. When he heard the steam valve close and the train began braking, he knew that the engineer had spotted him and was going to stop. As the engine approached, it gave some perspective as to just how large the prairie really was. The train that had appeared so tiny before was now a behemoth, blocking out the sky. It ground to a reluctant halt, its stack puffing black smoke and its driver wheels wreathed in tendrils of white steam that purpled as they drifted away in the fading light.
    “Perhaps you had better stay down here until I call you,” Hawke cautioned.
    “That’s all right by me,” Pamela agreed. “I don’t feel like walking, or even standing up, until I have to.”
    The engineer’s face appeared in the window, backlit by the orange light of the cab lamps. Hawke felt a prickly sensation and realized that someone was holding a gun on him. He couldn’t see it, but he knew that whoever it was—probably the fireman—had to be hiding in the tender.
    “What do you want, mister? Why did you stop us?” the engineer asked.
    Hawke knew that his appearance was not all that reassuring.
    “My horse went down,” he explained without going into detail. “I