Reaper's Fee (7 page)

“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.

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.

As much as he would have liked to preach the
loftier motives, Nick knew there was one thing in particular that kept him from leaving Rock Springs. That town had a major railroad line rolling right through it. Without that railroad line, it could be months before Nick found his way back home again. Riding back to California wasn’t impossible, but it sure as hell wouldn’t be ideal, and it could very well be the last ride of Kazys’s life.

Keeping those things in mind, Nick patted the horse’s nose as he shut the gate on the stall Kazys was forced to share with another stallion. The Arabian in there with Kazys was a fine animal and wouldn’t have been left there unless his owner had some confidence in the facility. He didn’t seem to mind Kazys being in there with him, so that’s where Nick left him.

Nick stuck his head outside to make certain nobody had seen him enter the stable, just in case there were some looters who weren’t interested in Chinatown. As far as he could tell, the streets were empty.

Retracing his steps so he could follow the directions the old lady had given him, Nick moved from one street to another. He could feel the heat from the raging fires on his skin. The sound of the flames was a constant roar that reminded him of how the sea had sounded from within the battered hull of a ship. For the moment, the screams had faded away. The gunshots, however, erupted every so often like a pack of firecrackers that had been tossed into the street.

Nick’s eyes narrowed to try and focus on some shapes that were moving within a darkened building across the street. Turning on the balls of his feet, he crouched down and slapped his hand against the grip of his modified Schofield. As much as he tried to see more, all Nick could make out was a pair of figures crawling toward the front. Nick moved cautiously toward them.

“Don’t kill us!” one of the men said. “Please. We will leave. Just don’t shoot again.”

“I never shot the first time,” Nick said. “What happened to you?”

The man fought to move forward another few steps, reached out with one hand and then fell face-first onto the boardwalk just outside the door.

Nick could hear repressed sobbing coming from behind the unmoving figure. He stepped forward and only had to look at the face of the person lying on the ground to know there was nothing he could do to help him. He’d seen plenty of Chinamen in his day, but Nick Graves had seen even more dead men. The figure lying in the doorway was both.

Kneeling over the body, Nick looked further into the shadows and spotted the second figure huddled against a wall. “What happened?” Nick demanded. “Who did this?”

“You know who did it!” the woman shouted as she snapped her head forward just far enough for her to be seen. “You come here to take his body for money! Just take it and take me, too, if that’s what you want.”

Nick found himself backing away from the dead man.

“Take him!” she screamed.

Suddenly, from deeper within the building, there came the sound of wood cracking and splintering under what sounded like the blow of a large hammer. Heavy steps thudded through the room, causing the woman to sob and scramble on all fours away from the sound.

Stepping over the dead body, Nick found himself inside a modestly decorated home. There were a few pieces of furniture here and there, as well as a couple of exotic statues and small paintings. Nick recognized the style of the decorations as Chinese, but didn’t know much more about them than that. He didn’t have to know a thing about the Chinese woman cowering on the floor to know she was scared out of her mind.

Her mouth was moving but no words came out. Her eyes were clenched shut and she was curled up in a ball as if every single one of her muscles had seized up.

“There you are,” said a man who walked into the room from somewhere in the back of the house. “I knew you wouldn’t leave this place all by yourself.”

The man who spoke had a face full of stubble and a thick, untrimmed mustache hanging down over his lip. His voice filled the room like swamp gas and was tainted by a thick Louisiana accent. “Who might you be?” he asked Nick.

“I’m new in town,” Nick said.

“Heard the commotion, did ya?”

“Sure did. My train was stuck here and I needed to make sure it keeps moving along.”

“Yours too?” he asked with a surprised look on his face. “My train got stopped not too long ago. Then again, with all that’s been happening, it’s kinda hard to say just how long I been here.”

Nick had spotted the gun in the man’s hand the moment the guy entered the room. Now all he wanted was to position himself between the gun and the Chinese woman before they were introduced to each other in a violent fashion.

“That one dead?” the man asked as he nodded toward the body lying half in and half out of the house.

“Yeah,” Nick replied.

“Good.” Without another word or even a shift in his expression, the man brought his arm up an inch or so and fired a shot into the Chinese woman’s head. “You carry the heavier of the two and I’ll split the reward with you.”

Nick wanted nothing more than to draw his gun and put that killer down like the mad dog he was. He kept himself in check, though he was shocked at what he’d just seen. Although the other man’s gun arm had been fast, what had caught Nick off guard even more was the complete lack of expression on the gunman’s face. He killed that woman as if he was just stretching his arm, before Nick could do a damn thing about it.

Unfortunately, it was too late to save either of the Chinese people lying on the floor. Their killer was obviously in on whatever insanity was going on in Rock Springs, which made Nick want to play along to see what more he could do than just take a shot at this one man.

The man nodded and grinned when he saw Nick stoop down to heft the Chinese man’s body over his shoulder. “Don’t worry about splitting the reward. There’s plenty more of them Chinese runnin’ about.”

“I’d like to know who I’m splitting it with.”

“Name’s Alan Kinman. Pleased to meet ya.”