On Rails of Gold - A Prequel to Golden Heart Read online

By the same author

  The Lazarus Longman Chronicles

  Through Mines of Deception (novella)

  On Rails of Gold – A Prequel to Golden Heart (novella)

  Golden Heart

  Silver Tomb

  Onyx City

  Celluloid Terrors

  Curse of the Blood Fiends (forthcoming)

  https://pjthorndyke.wordpress.com/

  As Chris Thorndycroft

  The Hengest and Horsa Trilogy

  A Brother’s Oath

  A Warlord’s Bargain

  A King’s Legacy

  The Rebel and the Runaway

  Novellas

  The Visitor at Anningley Hall – A prequel to M. R. James’s ‘The Mezzotint’

  Old Town

  https://christhorndycroft.wordpress.com/

  On Rails of Gold

  By P. J. Thorndyke

  On Rails of Gold

  By P. J. Thorndyke

  2015 by Copyright © P. J. Thorndyke

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  https://pjthorndyke.wordpress.com/

  I

  The saloon was one of the rougher ones in town. The tobacco-and-spit-soaked sawdust on the floorboards hadn’t been replaced in over a week. The chiseled and stained old bar hadn’t seen a lick of polish since it had been dragged in there five years ago and the four or five customers that perched on the mismatched and tatty furniture were some of the less desirables types in Tombstone. But it was the only drinking hole Clay Thompson had come across that didn’t have a ‘no colored’ sign over its door.

  Perhaps the grubby landlord who stood polishing glasses behind the bar with an even grubbier cloth didn’t care about the color of his patrons’ skins. Or perhaps the painting and hanging of such a sign was too much like hard work for him. It was irrelevant to Thompson. Almost every saloon, gambling dive and dancehall in Tombstone expressed their refusal of colored and mechanical patrons except this one, and, falling into the former category, Thompson had little choice than to use Mickey’s Saloon as his base of operations.

  The bartender had been friendly enough and had even saved Thompson from an embarrassing and potentially lethal faux pas. Thompson had remarked that he had seen a bunch of cowboys herding their stock into a slaughterhouse on the edge of town. The beef industry had boomed in Tombstone just like everything else.

  “Oh, no, Mister.” the bartender hurriedly hushed him. “We don’t call them that. It’s ‘cattlemen’, ‘ranchers’ or ‘herders’ and they don’t take kindly to anything else. You ain’t heard of the real Cowboys in these parts, I figure?”

  Thompson shrugged. He was from Louisiana and didn’t know a cowboy from a cowpat.

  “Round these parts a cowboy is a term for a common criminal,” the bartender explained. “Cattle rustlers, bandits, robbers and smugglers, there’s no end to them in Cochise County. The Clantons are the worst. They’ve got a ranch on the San Pedro River. Ike Clanton is a deputy marshal in Tombstone and he and his toughs hold up stagecoaches and smuggle in stolen cattle from Mexico without anybody able to do a damn thing about it. Just don’t let any honest cattleman hear you go and call him a cowboy, that’s all.”

  Thompson thanked him for his advice but the old man wasn’t done just yet.

  “Tombstone used to be a good clean mining camp when I first moved here. I was one of the first men to open up a saloon and I’ve seen this county go from rough but tamable land to downright dangerous territory. These days a man can’t set a foot on a beaten trail without being robbed or worse. As well as the Clantons and the McLaurys we got those damned Unionist guerillas hiding out in the mountains, still fighting for their United States.” Phoo! He spat on his own floor to prove his disgust. “Partisans, they call themselves. Nothing but common thieves if you ask me. Ain’t got no more morals than a barrel of horse manure.”

  Thompson frowned. He had no wish to discuss politics. He knocked back his whisky and slid the glass over for a refill just to distract the bartender from continuing his tirade.

  “Thirsty, huh?” he said, refilling the glass. “Don’t get many of you types in here. Just make sure you stay away from the gaming tables. I don’t take exception to colored folks, but there’s laws, y’see?”

  “Yeah. White folks don’t want us winning all their money from them,” said Thompson. It was a dangerous crack but the bartender didn’t seem to mind a bit of cynicism.

  “Well you’re all free men now,” he said. “Can’t complain too much, can you?”

  Thompson didn’t answer, but the whiskey tasted bitter as pitch to him now. The passing of the Emancipation Act by the Confederate government couldn’t wash away the memories of his childhood on a Louisiana slave plantation any more than all the whiskey in the west could and the realization that his people were only free because a newer, more efficient class of slave had rendered the Negro obsolete, only made the matter more humiliating.

  He had seen these new slaves on his way into town. There was a big call for them to pump in the silver mines which had recently struck water. They pumped day and night, did the heavy loading and any other shitty job in town that everybody else was too good for.

  Mechanicals they called them. There was little about them that was human or even alive to Thompson’s mind. Organic pilots with limbs of metal powered by steam were not only efficient but easy to repair and could be worked more or less without rest. The organic required only the bare minimum of food and never slept. The fuel needed to feed the furnace that burned in the heart of every mechanical was the ore known as mechanite; valuable in large quantities, but so efficient that a handful of chunks was all that was needed to drive any machine for a few days.

  It was said that it had been a Negro who had struck the famous vein of the stuff in California just after the war had begun. The irony hadn’t been lost on people and the man was hailed a hero by men of color across the country for inadvertently causing the emancipation of every slave in America. But what was freedom if you couldn’t drink in any saloon, eat in any restaurant or gamble with white men without some Jim Crow law putting you in jail?

  Clay and his brother Nathaniel hadn’t been freed. They had escaped before the Emancipation Act had been put into effect. Nathaniel, being the older brother, had made connections with people who could get them onto the Underground Railroad; that system of smuggling runaways to the Union in the north. They had fled that plantation one dark night and hadn’t looked back until they had reached the Land of the Free. Now Nathaniel was dead and Clay Thompson was left wondering why in the hell he was back in Confederate territory.

  “Say, if you want, I can show you a game that even coloreds can play here in Tombstone,” said the bartender with a sly wink. His voice had sunk to a low murmur as if he was imparting confidential information, wholly oblivious to his customer’s brooding passage of thought.

  Thompson didn’t really give a damn about games but the manner of his host made him curious. Soon the bartender was leading him down to the cellar where he kept ‘the only one in town! The coming thing! Something every establishment will have in a few years!’

  “I won her in a game of faro from a travelling businessman,” the bartender continued, fumbling with a set of iron keys that opened a thick door to a subterranean storeroom.

  The light inside was dim and Thompson dropped his hand to his gun, prepared for some sort of double-cross. But the bartender went in first and lit a red-shaded gas lamp. It illuminated a
poor parody of an up-market brothel. There was a chiffonier of dark wood, a tatty oriental carpet and a low double bed. Thompson didn’t notice much else for his attention was mostly taken up by the bed’s occupant.

  It was a mechanical. The gears and pistons in the limbs were a dead giveaway. Thompson wasn’t sure if he had ever seen a female one. Come to think of it, he never really considered the matter of gender when it came to these things. She had the head of a human, gaudily painted and emotionless. A wig of reddish curls adorned it. Large breasts strained against her corset. Those looked real enough and Thompson was glad that the sheets hid her lower portion for he didn’t want to know what else was real. The purplish light of her mechanite furnace shone through the thin sheets, gently burning.

  “She never tires or complains of a headache!” her owner hooted cheerfully. “She’ll outmatch the stamina of any customer, that’s for sure! Just be careful what you touch. Mechanite is fairly smokeless but it burns hotter than a hell-flame and will give you a sizzle in the worst place! Five dollars a pop! What do you say?”

  “I say you’re a sick old coot,” Thompson mumbled, unable to tear his eyes from the monstrosity. He heard the offended grumblings of his host as he was ushered from the room. Something about not needing to take ‘that tone’ and that he was ‘only trying to show him a good time’.

  They went