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THE GHOST FLYERS By Tom Townsend
Read the excerpt below	Science Fiction Mystery of a mysterious society which built airships long before Kitty Hawk. Reading Level 5th grade and up. Published by Eakin Press ISBN 0-89015-938-6 $6.95 paperback Books By Tom Townsend Place an order home

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     Harlin Fiveash threw one more shovelful of coal into the firebox of old Engine No. 3 and then propped his shovel against the boiler. Harlin was only thirteen years old, but he was big for his age. Already he stood nearly six feet tall and. as his mother always said, he was still "growing like a weed." He stooped over and squinted his brown eyes at the fire, which was casting a cherry-red light over the maze of gauges and levers inside the engine cab.
     "Reckon that'll give ya enough steam ta get rollin'?" he asked as he pulled a dirty red handkerchief out of the hip pocket of his equally dirty coveralls and began wiping the sweat and grime from his tanned face.
     From the engineer's seat on the right-hand side of the cab, old Brushy Bill Wilcox took the cigar out of his mouth and knocked a few ashes out of his beard. He squinted first at the fire and then at the steam pressure gauge. "Not bad 'fur a youngun'. You seem to be takin' ta this here railroadin' business pretty well," he said and then stuck his head out the window. A whistle echoed in the distance and he looked at his watch. "Express is running a mite late, but I hear her crossin' Long Creek Bridge right now."
     Harlin walked to the open space between the engine and the tender, A freshening breeze had found its way down
through the pine forest and tickled through his tousled head of curly hair. Taking a deep breath, he smelled the familiar odors of coal smoke and cinders, mixed with those of the fresh cut pine logs which were loaded on two flatcars behind the locomotive. Storm clouds were piling up in the night sky, and mixed with the other odors came the smell of rain. Again, the express train's whistle moaned through the dark forest.
     " 'Bout dme ya got out to the switch, boy," Brushy Bill said.
     Harlin picked up a lantern, swung down to the ground, and started walking forward. Engine No. 3 sat waiting on a short side track where East-Tex Timber Company loaded logs and hauled them twenty miles to the sawmill at Danville. Lightning flashed somewhere in the distance. A little sigh of steam es-caped as he passed the drive wheels, and it seemed to say, "Hurry up, let's get going."
    "I'm hurryin'," he told the engine and patted the valve gear as he passed. At the switch, he stopped and waited. For a few moments he could hear the night songs of crickets and katydids around him. Then the ground began to vibrate, and the forest sounds were lost in the roar of the oncoming train. The whistle screamed again as the headlight sent shadows dancing along the track. The express train charged down at him and screamed past in a rush of panting steam and pounding steel. Twenty freight cars flashed by in the darkness, followed by the soft yellow lights from inside the caboose. From the rear platform a brakeman waved at him. And then, as quickly as it had come, the train was gone, eaten up by the night. Only a pair of small, red lights marked the caboose until they too vanished around a curve.
     Harlin threw his weight against the big, rusty lever that would throw the switch and let old No. 3 pull its short string of log cars out onto the main line. When it was done, he waved his lantern, and was answered by a short toot on No. 3's whistle.  Steam hissed and then settled down to a slow chug, chug as the train began to move. After it had crawled past, Harlin threw the switch again. He looked up at the black wall of clouds that was steadily eating up the night sky. Thunder rolled in the distance, and he started running for the engine.
     "Better feed her some more coal," Brushy Bill said as Harlin climbed aboard. For the next fifteen minutes he shoveled as fast as he could as Brushy Bill slowly worked No. 3 up to her best speed—nearly fifteen miles an hour.
     It seemed to Harlin that life in East Texas in 1897 moved along even slower than old No. 3. He had turned thirteen last year, at just about the same time that he had finished the sixth grade. Since then, he had been working for the railroad. He figured he would probably work there for the rest of his life.
     Graduating from the sixth grade made Harlin the most educated member of his entire family. Even his older brother Silas had only gone as far as the fourth. Neither Harlin nor his father could see the sense in his staying in school any longer, especially when the railroad had been ready to put him to work at a dollar a day.
     "The boy's born for workin'," his father had argued when his mother suggested that Harlin stay in school for two more years. "He's already bigger and stronger than most men, even if he ain't smarter."
     Most of the time now, Harlin worked in the engine house at Danville: oiling, cleaning up locomotives, and doing what ever odd jobs the foreman had for him. Once in a while, if one of the men got sick, or if there was extra freight to haul, he got to make a run as fireman on No. 3. Someday, he figured, he might even make engineer, and that was about the most he could hope for.
     "Reckon it's better 'n timberin'," he had told his mother when he first got the job. "Timberin' " was what his father and three brothers had always done, and what his grandfather had done before them. They cut trees in the forest, sawed them into logs, and then used mules to skid the logs out to the railroad. As near as Harlin could tell, everybody who "timbered" stayed poor all their lives.
     A full moon peeked over die bank of ragged storm clouds and silhouetted the tops of pine trees along the tracks. Against the night sky, the trees were like sharp-pointed teeth, ready to bite at the moon.
     Brushy Bill lit another cigar and puffed on it as he watched Harlin work. "Ya know, ya ought ta get yerselfback into school," he said suddenly.
     Harlin stopped short with a shovelful of coal. "Now, why would I want ta do that?" he asked, surprised by the suggestion.
     "So's ta get yerself a' education, boy. Then ya might not spend yer whole life with a coal shuttle in yer hands."
     Harlin emptied his shovel into die firebox. "Aw, heck. Bill,  This here is East Texas. What do you figure I'm gonna be—a preacher, or a schoolteacher, or maybe one of diem silly fools that makes up lies for die newspaper?"
     Bill huffed and cigar ashes blew out the window. "Yajust might be whatever ya set yer mind to."
     Harlin stirred the fire and then dosed the firebox door.
     "What I reckon I set my mind to is the dollar a day that helps feed my family when Pa and my brothers ain't timberin'."
     Without giving Bill rime to answer, he walked to the left side of the cab and looked out at the track ahead. No. 3 was puffing its way up a slight grade and swinging into a left-hand curve, which kept the engineer from seeing the tracks. The moon was directly ahead of them, centered over the tracks. A shadow crossed the moon. Harlin thought it might be a cloud, or a very large bird. He blinked, and it was gone before he was certain if he had really seen anything. Still, a sudden chill tingled slowly up his spine. He was about to ask Bill if he had seen it too, when something else caught his eye.
     Ahead was a red light, just coming into view around the curve. Harlin blinked again, believing the night was playing
tricks on his eyes. But the light stayed, and now there were two of them. The red lights of a caboose were on the tracks right in front of them!
     One more terrible second passed before he found his voice and yelled across the cab, "Reverse, reverse!"
     "What in tarn—?" Bill swore as he slammed the throttle closed and threw over the big lever which would force the drive wheels into reverse. "Hit the whistle, boy!"
     Harlin grabbed for the cord, and No. 3's whistle wailed in the night The drive wheels screamed against the tracks and the air brakes hissed. Harlin stumbled forward, hitting the rear of the boiler as the engine continued to slide while its drive wheels spun in reverse. Ahead, he saw die twin lights of die caboose grow larger and larger, like glowing red eyes on some monstrous night creature running at him.
     A train wreck was a horrible way to die, Harlin had always been told. There were stories, and even songs, about engineers being scalded to death by escaping steam or smashed into pulp by colliding steel.
     "You best jump!" Bill yelled at him, but Harlin just stared ahead, spellbound by die lights and the danger. The yellow beam of No. 3's headlight fell on the caboose. He could see that the door on the rear platform was open and there were no lights inside.

     Then suddenly, everything was quiet. A little hiss of steam was escaping somewhere, and the fire crackled in the firebox nearby. No. 3 had stopped moving. Its headlight bathed the caboose in a bright flood of light
     "Dang blast it all," Bill was cursing quietly. "Of all the fool things fur them boys ta go an' do—shutting her down right out here on the high iron an' then not sendin' no brakeman back with a lantern. They knowed good an' well we was behind 'em!    Jes' you wait till 1 find that brass-hat conductor!" By the lime his sentence was finished, he had grabbed a lantern and was on the ground, striding toward the other train.  Harlin picked up another lantern and followed him. Outside the engine, the night was strangely quiet. Crickets and katydids were nowhere to be heard, and even the wind had stopped.
     "Hey, up there!" Bill called out at the dark caboose. "What in blue blazes is goin' on?" Only silence answered him. "Must all be up at the engine," he added in a quieter voice.
     Their footsteps crunched on the gravel roadbed where their lanterns cast a dim light as they walked along the line of silent boxcars. "Dang fools," Bill continued to mutter, "We come within an inch of rammin' 'em. In all my years, that's about as dose as I ever seen it."
     Steam was hissing quietly from the locomotive's cylinder as they approached.
     "Headlight's out," Harlin said. "You reckon maybe they hit somethin'?"
     Bill grunted thoughtfully and pointed up at the cab. "Climb up there and have a look inside while I check the tracks ahead."
     Harlin was not sure that was a good idea, but he stepped cautiously onto the short ladder leading to the cab and climbed until he could see inside. Only a faint, eerie red glow was coming from the open firebox door. Otherwise, the cab was dark and there was no sign of either engineer or fireman. Taking a deep breath, he climbed on up into the cab and held the lantern above his head. A coal shovel was leaning against one side of the tender, and two unlighted lanterns were nearby. Out of habit, he looked at the steam gauge and noticed that it showed very little pressure. On one of the window arm rests was a tin cup.

     Harlin picked it up and found that it was warm and half fall of coffee.
     "Anybody up there?" Bill called from outside.
     Harlin jumped and spilled coffee on his overalls. "No," he answered, feeling another chill run up his spine. "It's like they all just disappeared. You find anything?"
     Bill took a long moment to answer. "Headlight's broke. Looks like it was shot out."
     "Shot? You think they was robbed?"
     Bill laughed nervously. "Robbed? Ain't nobody robbed a train around here since '79. Besides, ain't nothing on this train worth stealin'."
     "Maybe they broke down and started walking to Danville?"
     Bill huffed. "Don't make no sense fur all four of 'em to go an' then not leave no flare on the track fur us ta see."
     Maybe they mere all too scared to stay, Harlin started to say and then changed his mind. Suddenly, he did not want to be alone in the deserted cab anymore and he started to climb down.
     "Stay up there and walk the catwalks on back. Maybe you can see something from up on top of the cars," Bill's voice called to him.
     Harlin was not especially pleased with the thought of walking all the way back along the narrow walkways on top of the cars, but he said, "Okay," and started to climb over the tender.  His eyes fell for a moment on the sight glass, which showed how much water was still left in the tender's storage tank. "That's funny," he muttered to himself, "it's almost empty." He shrugged and climbed the coal pile to the rear of the tender. From there, he took the ladder up to the top of the first boxcar.
     The bank of black clouds looked very close, but the moon still hung just above them. The countryside was bathed in a pale, ghostly light which turned every shadow into some lurking  "night-thing." Harlin picked his way carefully along, trying to watch the right-of-way on both sides of the track. He could see above the treetops, stretching away over the gently rolling hills. It reminded him of pictures he had seen of the ocean, and suddenly he felt very, very small.
     Moonlight glinted for an instant off something moving just above the treetops, and Harlin froze. A long, dark shadow, shaped like one of Brushy Bill's cigars, glided through the air.  At first he thought it must be some low cloud, but the clouds were moving south, and this was moving north, "A ghostie," his grandmother would have called it—some evil spirit that lurked in the thickets and ate bad children for supper.
     Harlin had always tried hard not to believe in such things. "Some kinda bird," he said to convince himself. It did seem to have wings, but they were whirling and looked a little like the paddlewheels of a steamboat As he watched, the thing turned quickly and headed away from him. Lightning flashed above him and thunder cracked at almost the same instant. Black clouds engulfed the moon, and the strange flying thing vanished into the storm. A sudden wind hit his face, and rain began to fall.