Reaper's Fee

by Marcus Galloway

  “Just one,” he replied after seeing the engineer climb down from his cabin. “If he ain’t already dead.”

  That was all Nick needed to hear. He turned Kazys around, snapped the reins and got the horse moving toward the wreck. This time, however, he couldn’t see the other horseman or the other member of the train’s crew. Nick held his gun at the ready as he pulled back on the reins to keep Kazys from charging straight into an ambush.

  When he saw something big moving around behind the wreck, Nick reflexively fired a shot at it. He pulled his aim slightly to one side, which caused a chunk of wood fly into the air. That was enough to force the horseman out from where he’d been hiding. Just then, the third horseman swung around the other side of the wreck while firing his gun at a short fellow wearing work pants and a dirty shirt.

  Nick fired to scare the rider away from the remaining member of the train’s crew, but all he did was catch the rider’s attention.

  The rider fired a quick shot at Nick, shouting, “Go to hell with the rest of yer Chink friends!”

  Although the rider was a god-awful shot, Nick wasn’t about to stand by until he got lucky. He shifted his aim, pulled his trigger and felt the modified Schofield buck against his palm. Nick’s shot caught the rider in the chest and knocked him straight back and off his horse as if he’d been kicked by a mule.

  Seeing that was more than enough to send the other rider in the opposite direction. As he dug his heels into his horse’s sides, the rider shouted, “You’re dead, asshole! You and all those goddamn Chinks are dead!”

  Nick rode up to the man in the work clothes and offered his hand. This time, he was able to get the man somewhat situated on Kazys’s back rather than draping him over the horse like a sack of flour. “Are you hurt?” Nick asked.

  “My arm’s shot, but I’ll be all right. Just get me out of here.”

  Nick wasn’t about to argue. He brought the man back to the train. The other two were there waiting for him, so Nick asked, “What was all that about?”

  “We were just going to see about clearing the track,” the engineer replied. “The three of us headed out there to have a look when them sons of bitches rode up and fired at us.”

  “Why’d they do that?”

  “I don’t know. What I do know is that I ain’t about to sit here any longer than I have to. I’ll drive straight through that mess rather than stay put and get shot at.”

  Nick glanced around and said, “Looks like they’re gone for now, but I wouldn’t count on them staying away for long. I’ll see what I can do about that mess.”

  “You already done plenty, mister,” the conductor said as the other two men nodded in agreement.

  “Well, I’m not done yet. Neither are you men. I’ll need at least one of you to come along with me. My guess is you’re the man I’m after,” Nick said while nodding to the second man he’d brought to the train. “You don’t look wounded.”

  “I ain’t,” the man replied. “At least, not yet.”

  Nick had already replaced the spent shells in his Schofield with fresh ones from his gun belt. “Good. I’ll try to keep it that way. Come on.”

  Even though he didn’t seem too excited by the prospect of heading back out there, the worker nodded and climbed onto Kazys’s back behind Nick.

  “What’s your name?” Nick asked.

  “Earl.”

  “Hang on, Earl. I didn’t save your life just to toss it away again.”

  “I sure hope not.”

  Nick barely had to shake the reins to get Kazys moving again. Between the shooting and all the people climbing on and off of him, the horse was more than a little anxious. Using that in his favor, Nick got over to the wreck and circled it a few times in a matter of seconds.

  From what he could see, the wagon’s rear wheels were mostly intact. The garbage piled up around the wagon made it look a whole lot worse than it was, but the front axle was most definitely beyond repair.

  “Clear away that wood,” Nick said as he climbed down from the saddle.

  Earl dropped down beside him and immediately got to work. “That’s what I was doing when those assholes showed up shooting the hell out of this place.”

  “Then go ahead and commence. I think I can move this wagon a bit.”

  “It won’t have to be more than maybe five feet or so,” Earl said as he picked up another large hunk of wood and tossed it away from the tracks. “As long as the wagon’s wheels are clear, the train should be able to push the rest of it aside.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Nick led Kazys around to the back of the wagon and then took the rope that was hanging from his saddle. He looped one end of the rope several times around the saddle horn and then dropped to one knee so he could tie the other end around the wagon’s rear axle. Even though his knots were strong and Kazys had pulled loads a lot bigger than this one, Nick still wasn’t happy with the sight in front of him.

  “You think that’ll work?” Earl asked as he tossed away the last large piece of lumber and brushed himself off.

  Nick shook his head. “I don’t know, but we’ll need to do more than stand here thinking about it.”

  Just then, Nick spotted what could have been the armed horsemen riding around for another attack. One of them was slumped in his saddle as if he’d taken a hard fall, and the other was anxiously pointing toward the wrecked wagon. Unfortunately, there were more horsemen gathering around those other two.

  “If we’re gonna get this done, we need to do it quick,” Nick said.

  Earl ran around to the front of the wagon. “Come on over here,” he said as he lowered himself to get his shoulder beneath one end of the singletree, the pivoting crosspiece to which the tracings of a harness would normally fasten. “The two of us should be able to get this thing rolling.”

  Even as Nick positioned himself, he had his doubts about lifting all that weight. Then again, the wagon didn’t look half as imposing without so much extra lumber piled around it. By the time he got his shoulder in place and his feet planted, Nick realized that the wagon was about the same size as the one he’d left with Catherine.

  “On three,” Earl said. “One…two…”

  “Wait a minute,” Nick interrupted. Before Earl could ask about the delay, Nick drew his gun and fired a few rounds at the horsemen.

  There were half a dozen of them gathered not too far away and they scattered as hot lead was sent flying in their direction.

  “All right,” Nick said as he got his shoulder back into place. “Three!”

  With that, both men began straightening their legs while letting out a long, strained breath.

  Nick could feel his muscles burning under his skin as if every last one of them had been doused in kerosene and put to a match. He kept the pain going, however, by forcing his legs to straighten even more as he fought to lift his part of the wagon.

  Beside Nick, Earl lowered his head and raised the singletree just enough to cause the wheel on his side to budge. “Come on!” he shouted. “Just a bit more.”

  Knowing that he’d only have to start all over again if he gave up now, Nick gritted his teeth and raised his side some more. Fortunately for him and all of his muscles, Nick now had his side of the wagon as high off the ground as Earl’s. Nick lifted his chin and let out a gruff holler toward the back.

  Kazys responded to Nick’s voice and immediately started moving in the direction he’d been pointed. As soon as the horse took up the slack in the rope tied to his saddle horn, Kazys dug his hooves into the dirt and pulled even harder.

  With the combined efforts of one horse and two men, the wagon groaned and rumbled away from the tracks. Nick could feel his knees aching with every shuffling fraction of a step he took. Earl didn’t seem to be doing much better, but he struggled through until the wagon had rolled another couple of feet.

  “That should be…good enough,” Earl said.

  Just to be safe, Nick kept pushing for a bit longer. “All right,” he
said. “Lower it.”

  Both men stopped and eased the wagon down again. As soon as he was free from under the splintered wood, Nick ran around to let Kazys know he could stop pulling. Nick untied the rope from the saddle horn and tossed it away. By this time, the nearby horsemen had begun firing at him.

  “Is that good enough?” Nick asked.

  “Should be,” Earl said. “Now, let’s get the hell out of here!”

  Nick didn’t need to be told twice. He climbed into the saddle and Earl climbed on behind him. As he snapped the reins, Nick fired a few shots at the horsemen. He didn’t even bother to see if he’d hit anything before facing forward and urging Kazys to go faster.

  The horse got them to the train in a matter of seconds and Earl climbed up into the cab of the locomotive. Already, smoke was pouring from the pistons stack and the other men inside the engine were hurrying about their tasks.

  “If you’re coming along, you’d best hop on board,” the engineer said. “If I get going, I ain’t about to slow down until I get far away from here!”

  “Go on ahead,” Nick said. “I’ll cover your back.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yeah. Just go.”

  The engineer leaned out to quickly shake Nick’s hand. Before Nick could back away from the engine, it was already beginning to roll forward.

  Nick reloaded his gun, rode ahead of the train and crossed the tracks. Some of the horsemen were working their way toward him, but backed up as soon as they saw Nick heading in their direction. They fired a few nervous shots as they gathered their courage. Instead of waiting for them to work themselves into a lather, Nick touched his heels to Kazys’s sides and charged forward with his gun blazing.

  Nick stormed straight into the armed horsemen as if he fully intended on riding over the barrels of their drawn guns. He started by firing a few shots over their heads, which scared a few of them off. The ones who kept their composure enough to hold their ground and take aim were the first to be shot from their saddles.

  Two of the horsemen dropped before the train smashed through the rest of the refuse blocking the track. The wagon was knocked aside and rolled away as broken crates and splintered boards were sent flying.

  For a few seconds, every one of Nick’s senses felt like they were burning.

  Once the train passed, Nick was left to feel the heat of the nearby fires drifting over his face. In a strange way, he preferred that to sitting next to that damn window.

  ELEVEN

  Nick didn’t pull back on his reins until he was in town. Rock Springs wasn’t the biggest town he’d seen, but it was spread out enough for him to find a section that wasn’t in chaos. Even with the flames turning the sky a dull orange in spots, the streets where Nick came to a stop were fairly quiet. Holding his gun at the ready, Nick shifted in his saddle to look for a target.

  All he found were some frightened folks trying to hide from him.

  After holstering his gun, Nick moved along and turned a corner so he could get another look at the train tracks. Now that the train had moved on, the horsemen didn’t seem too interested in guarding the area. Before Nick could move on, however, he saw a pair of men shuffling toward the tracks. They waved at someone who was out of Nick’s line of sight.

  Sure enough, another old wagon was slowly creeping toward the tracks.

  “Son of a bitch,” Nick muttered.

  The stubborn streak inside of him wanted nothing more than to chase those men away and roll that wagon over their backs.

  The rest of him knew that another set of nameless men would probably just show up a little later to roll another old wagon into that very same spot.

  With a sigh that he’d only heard come out of his father when the old man’s patience had been stretched to its limit, Nick turned his back on the railroad tracks and rode into Rock Springs.

  “You should’ve stayed on that train, mister.”

  Nick looked toward the sound of that voice and didn’t see anyone right away. Then, after taking a second and third glance, he spotted an old woman sitting on a nearby porch. She was so small that she barely stood out as being separate from the chair she occupied.

  “It looked like you had some trouble,” Nick said. “I saw the fires.”

  “Yeah?” the old lady huffed. “What business is it of yours?”

  Nick didn’t really know what to say to that.

  “Are you one of the Federals?” she asked. Lifting her head seemed to require more energy than the old lady had, but she strained and grunted through the task anyway. After examining Nick’s face through clouded eyes, she slumped back into her chair and added, “You sure as hell don’t look like no Chinese.”

  “Some men were blocking up the railroad tracks. They were spouting off about Chinese, too. What the hell is going on here?”

  “You ain’t heard?”

  A large group of men marching down the street carrying shotguns caught Nick’s eye. His hand dropped reflexively to the gun at his side, but he didn’t clear leather.

  As the men got closer, their gaze drifted toward Nick. A few of them shifted and the barrels of their shotguns wandered in his direction, but then they looked away. Without saying a word, they kept right on moving and then finally turned a corner.

  “No need to get so fidgety,” the old woman said. “They ain’t after you.”

  “How do you know?”

  She looked up at him as if Nick had just asked her how she knew where the ground was. “Because you ain’t Chinese,” she said.

  “Hasn’t anyone around here seen a Chinaman before?”

  “They seen too many of ’em. That’s the problem,” she said, rocking back and forth in her chair. “The mining company decided to replace all the local boys with Chinese to keep their profits up. Them slope-eyed workers take less money and don’t mind putting good men out of work.”

  “Doesn’t sound like the Chinese had much of a choice in the matter.”

  The woman looked up at Nick as if she was about to spit on him. Then she shrugged and said, “Maybe not. Either way, it don’t matter much anymore. Most of Chinatown’s burnt down.”

  Looking over to the glow of flames in the distance, Nick muttered, “That’ll learn ’em.”

  “That’ll drive ’em the hell out of town is what it’ll do,” she said angrily. “And it’ll show the mining companies that we won’t sit back and let good folks get run out of their jobs just so a few cents can be saved on hiring workers that don’t belong around here no how.”

  “I heard shooting,” Nick said. “My guess is that the mining companies are letting you know what they think about your little statement.”

  “Ain’t my statement. I’m just sitting here watching how things turn out. The statement you’re hearing would be Francis Hale’s.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Used to be the foreman of some organized miners or something like that. Now, he’s the fellow that’s putting up ten dollars of his own money for every dead Chinese that’s brought to him.”

  “Jesus,” Nick said.

  The old woman shook her head and scratched her chin. “Jesus ain’t anywhere near Rock Springs, mister. Not for right now, anyway.”

  Gritting his teeth, Nick asked, “What about the railroad tracks?”

  “What about ’em?”

  “They’re being blocked. Why’s that?”

  She shrugged. “I just sit here and watch.” The old woman laughed until she hacked a mess up in the back of her throat. After spitting onto the ground, she said again, “You want my opinion, you should’a stayed on that train. What the hell would possess you to stay here?”

  Before Nick could come up with an answer, the old woman stared down at his mangled hands and grinned. Nodding, she said, “Ah, I see you been through your share of hell already. Once you been tossed into the fire, it ain’t easy to live outside of it.”

  As much as Nick wanted to refute what she was saying, he simply couldn’t. Her words struck
like a set of fangs that sank into him and only drove in deeper the more he tried to be rid of them.

  “You’ll probably want to see Mister Hale,” she said. “Most of the men who got the sand to keep walking these bloody streets want to see him. He’s at the Central Mining Office, down the street. Just head that way and make a right. You can’t miss it, seeing as how it’s one of the only damned things on that street that ain’t burned down yet.”

  Something within the old woman’s scratchy voice struck him like a kick in the backside. It was the tone used by any mother or grandmother to shoo her little ones out of the kitchen, only this time it was being used to move someone toward a riot. Before Nick could take more than a few steps away, he stopped and turned back around to face her.

  “Have there been others coming through here looking for this kind of work?” he asked.

  “What kind? Mining or shooting Chinese?”

  “The second one,” Nick replied with a distasteful snarl.

  “More’n I care to admit.” When she spoke those last few words, the old woman showed the first traces of genuine sorrow. At that moment, the fire seemed to cast her face in a deeper glow and the twitches in the corners of her eyes were perfectly timed to the gunshots being fired in the distance.

  Finding a stable for Kazys wasn’t as difficult as Nick had expected. All he needed to do was head away from the noise and flames, find a spot that wasn’t under attack and look for a livery with horses inside of it. As long as other folks had a vested interest in the place, Nick figured that was as safe as he was apt to get. Since the stable he’d found wasn’t anywhere near Chinatown, Nick hoped it would be suitable for a just a little while.

  Of course, he knew he could always keep the saddle on Kazys’s back and put Rock Springs far behind him. In fact, that’s exactly what nearly every piece of good sense in his head was screaming at him to do. Under other circumstances, he might have followed that advice to the letter. But Nick had already been shot at, chased down and nearly killed by the lunatics of Rock Springs. None of that sat too well with him and the notion of letting those assholes get away with what they were doing sat like a rock in the bottom of his gut.