Death on the Rails

A historical thriller of a short story set during the Great Depression

Jack Delano / Library of Congress

I dragged awake in the dark with the feeling that there had been voices in my ears. I lay huddled down between the grain sacks and listened rigidly to the rocking and clattering of the boxcar wheels beneath me. I was used to the noise and movement of a train now, and could sleep through it. But I had the feeling that something different, and close by, had woken me.

I sat up carefully, pulling my cap down tight on my head to keep it on, and felt at the wall of heavy sacks beside me. I’d jumped plenty of moving freights, but I liked it even better if I could sneak aboard a half-filled boxcar before the train started and hide among the sacks and crates where the brakeman or the railroad bulls wouldn’t see me if they did a last inspection. There were good points to being smaller. Likely some other hoboes had swung aboard my boxcar at a brief stop while I was asleep; it had happened before. I didn’t want to let them know I was there, but something about the strange thumping of my heart from the way I’d been woken up made me want to see who was in the car and what they were doing.

By stretching a little I could get my eyes to a gap between two sacks in the top layer. The inside of the boxcar was dark, but it was a moonlit night, and in the broad rectangle of dim light from the open door I saw the black shape of a man hunched over on his knees, and some other bulky object in front of him. He rose from his knees to a crouch, and I realized that the shape at his feet was another man, dead or sleeping, an inert lump on the boxcar floor. The first man had been going through his pockets. He got hold of a limp arm and dragged the heavy motionless body toward the boxcar door in a couple of short, scraping pulls, and got down on his knees again; there was a scraping, tumbling sound, and he heaved the body out the door. The train was probably twenty yards ahead before it even hit the embankment.

The man got up and leaned in the doorway, breathing hard. He coughed once, the harsh, rattling cough of a man with phlegm in his lungs.

I let myself down noiselessly among the sacks and lay still, my heart thumping harder in fear. He’d just murdered somebody, and I’d seen him do it—or at least seen him get rid of the body. If he found out he wasn’t alone in the boxcar before the next stop I was as good as dead.