Nemesis

by L. J. Martin

  On the seventh day after a swim across the wide river that nearly took us all to meet our maker, I pulled up on a low rise amid sagebrush, looking down on the long ribbon of steel that was the Transcontinental, and row of poles that I knew carried the wire and Mr. Morse’s code.

  And I know that somewhere just a few miles to the east is Nemesis, and there it begins.

  Chapter Four

  Angel Sanchez lay face down on the cold stone floor of the Nemesis jail. He’d been there for well over a week, regained consciousness there after being beaten senseless when he’d confronted Sheriff Wentworth in Sally’s saloon about the killing of his father. For the third time since his incarceration, he’d been knocked senseless. This time, as he awoke, he decided that all he was doing with his sharp tongue was cutting his own throat. He slowly climbed to his feet, then stumbled to the nearby bunk and collapsed prone.

  “When you gonna get it in that chili soaked brain of your’n?” Stubby, the Sheriff’s deputy, called from across the room where he leaned back in the Sheriff’s chair, his feet on the desk, a large stogie shoved in his mouth, the local weekly paper in hand.

  “Get what?” Angel asked, without rising or even lifting his throbbing head.

  “You can’t sass the Sheriff, you dumb greaser.”

  “Sí,” Angel said. “I will not do so again. Can I go home now, señor?”

  “No, you can’t go home now. You’ve got to wait until Judge Thorne makes his rounds through here…then I’ll be surprised if they don’t haul you off to the territorial prison, threatening a saloon full of city folk like you did with that Remington.”

  “Puercos,” Angel said under his breath, referring to those who’d been in the saloon as pigs.

  “What?” Stubby asked.

  “Por favor, where is my rifle, Stubby?”

  “You can call me Mr. Stubby.”

  “Señor Stubby…where’s my rifle?”

  “Doubt if it’s still yours, but it’s here in the rack.”

  “And this gringo judge…when will he—“

  “Damn you’re a smart-ass whelp. It’s Judge Thorne to you, and he’ll be here when he’s damn good and ready. The judge is a busy man, and friends with the governor and with President Ulysses S. Grant. But then you wooly bugger boys from Mexico wouldn’t know nothin’ about any of that.”

  “So, señor, when will President Grant’s friend come to do court?”

  “When he’s a mind to, now shut your pepper hole and let me read this paper.”

  Angel was no longer in a mood, nor a condition, to argue. Sleep, sleep was what he needed, and to get well, so he could get his rifle, and take his revenge.

  *

  I let Dusty pick his way east along the track, finally cresting a small rise with the setting sun at our backs. In the distance, where the track made a bend around a small mountain that in Idaho Territory would be called a hill, I could see the outline of roofs and some smoke rising from rooftops. Folks, I figured, were fixing the evening meals as it was too damn hot, even in May, for fires for warmth. The thought of food made my mouth water and my stomach complain.

  I’d trimmed the green from the last of the elk loin just last night, and the rest of it had been so ripe that even with plenty of salt it wasn’t fit to eat, so all day my stomach had been flapping from my belly button to my backbone, wondering if I’d forgotten that food was part of the process of living.

  Still, I hated going into a strange town, a town probably full of men I’d have to kill, when I couldn’t see into the shadows. Finally, feeling some disgust, I found a small ravine, it’s bottom lined with grass for the stock, where I could at least brew the last of my coffee—I’d filled my goat guts from some potholes I figured were in the bed of the catch-as-catch-can Humbolt River just yesterday. A place where I could build a smoldering fire without it calling attention to those on the two track trail that roughly followed the Transcontinental rails. I spread my bearskin coat, lay back, and scratched the old dog’s ears. “Ranger, you stingy old hound you kept that jackrabbit you caught all to yourself. Still and all, you keep the critters at bay whilst I catch some shuteye, and I’ll find you a bone big as a donkey’s dingle on the morrow.”

  The dog lay his muzzle between his paws, content as he’d been well fed due to his own enterprise, and was asleep by his second breath.

  “Fine damn camp guard dog you make,” I mumbled, but I, too, faded in two heartbeats. My stomach would just have to do all the growlin’ needed to protect the camp until the sun was well up.

  But as always, I awoke well before the sun lined the mountains to the east. I downed a couple of mouthfuls of cold coffee from the pot, dumped the grounds, poured a little water for the dog from a goat gut, and packed up and saddled up, figuring on watering the horse and mule when I got to town. From almost a half mile away, I circled the little town, able to see down into it from the steep bank to the south.

  The rough, mostly clapboard, town lay four blocks along the rails, all of the buildings except a water tower to feed the steam engines to the north of the rails as the hill rose steeply to the south. The little berg was only two blocks deep north to south, and that just along the secondary main drag, which seemed to be a road off into the ranch lands to the north. I’d bet the road along the rails would be named Front Street. From the hill, I counted a dozen or more buildings of some consequence, and half of them were false fronts. One seemed substantial, with a sign in gold announcing it to be the Mystic Palace, and a hotel, with two stories and a cupola it rose above the rest. A corral, divided into four smaller corrals, and a railroad stock loading ramp were the main feature of the east end of town. Nemesis, although it was on the Central Pacific section, looked to be almost as fleeting as many of the hell-on-wheels towns that had sprung up along the Union Pacific as its portion of the Transcontinental marched westward.

  Gambling, pleasure ladies, and whiskey were the mainstays of those towns, and most of them didn’t last as the road moved on west. But Nemesis, built on the Central Pacific portion of the road, had, as a cinnabar—mercury—mine was discovered in the hills to the south, and enough water sprung from the earth to support substantial herds to the north, as was evidenced by the stock corrals.

  Just to be on the safe side as I’ve always been a cautious soul, I staked the mule out in a deep meadow a mile to the south of town in the sagebrush, smoketree, and tamarisk hills, giving him the last of the water from the goat guts, hid my pack and some of my weapons in a cache in a small wind cave on a steep hillside, and only then made my way into town from the east, as if I’d been following the rails west…just another California bound pilgrim who couldn’t afford the cost of a train ticket.

  No one paid me much attention as I came to Paradise Street, which was the road running out of town to the north, and where a half dozen of the primary buildings of the town rose. I’d been wrong about the street along the rails, it was named Dillon Street. One of the structures, on the west side of the street, I noticed, was the Sheriff’s office, clapboard in the front and stone in the rear, which I presumed was the jail. Only two doors down, past a tonsorial parlor separating the two, was Sally’s Salacious Parlor of Fine Food and Folderol. As serious as my mission was, I had to smile at that one. The place’s sign stretched all the way across its twenty foot wide façade, and the letters were small as saloon signs go.

  Dusty was happy to be tied where he could nose through the moss and bury his muzzle in water trough, and drew deeply on it.

  Salaciousness was not on my menu, but food was. I was pleased to see upon pushing my way through the swinging saloon doors that breakfast was being served. Ranger, in his normal way, followed me inside. I was not surprised to see that the front was false and the saloon itself had a canvas tent for a roof over clapboard side walls and a rough sawn floor. At that, it held a long bar, a fancy dark paneled back bar with carved gargoyles glaring down at the customers, a reclining scantily clad lady of the evening in oil paint over shelves lined with
liquid imbibement, and a dozen round tables with ladder back chairs peppered the place, tables I was sure would fill with town folks, gamblers, drovers, field hands, miners, railroad men, and stockmen, come afternoon or at least evening.

  Now only four other patrons enjoyed the fare. I took a seat in a ladder back chair, one of many, near a front window made up of several dozen small panes of fine clear glass, lay the 45-90 at my feet on the floor while Ranger flopped down beneath the table. I nodded in a friendly manner to the bartender, a man with garters on his sleeves and his clamp-on collar askew, who was wiping down the bar. He had a waistcoat unbuttoned and only held together by a watch fob and chain. I noted the hook at the end of the bar where a cut-away coat hung. He, had he been buttoned and collared, could be ready to go to a St. Louis opera house to enjoy Jenny Lind. He ignored me; obviously I was hiding my hunger well, and maybe didn’t suit his taste in attire.

  Finally, a young woman, stick thin with a prodigiously long swan-like neck, dressed, to my surprise, more like a house maid than a soiled dove, made her way out of another swinging door separating the front room from where I surmised was a hallway to a kitchen out back, separated from the main structure to keep the fires safely away, but with a row of cribs lining the hallway between for ‘salacious’ pursuits. It would have been typical for a pleasure and gambling house in a hell-on-wheels town.

  She carried a thirty-cup gray graniteware coffee pot, almost more than she could handle, and filled some tin mugs on her way to where I’d put my back to the clapboard wall.

  “You eatin’ or just restin’,” she asked, with a tired smile.

  “Like to be eatin’, if you recommend the fare.”

  “I do, but then I’m paid to,” she laughed, and I decided I liked her.

  “That’s a big dog,” she said, looking a little apprehensive.

  “And he’s got a big heart, to those who’ll give him a scratch on the ears.”

  She reached under the table and did so, and Ranger allowed it, even giving her hand a lick.

  “So if a fellow was to be wolf hungry?”

  “The flapjacks are hard to beat…plate big and filling.”

  “Do that, and a pile of sowbelly and two or three cackle berries if the cook has some fresh ones…basted if he has the sowbelly.”

  “You want coffee, and maybe a shot of who-hit-john to sweeten it?”

  “Sound’s like you know the wants of a man who’s been long it the saddle.” I gave her my best toothy grin.

  “Too damn well I do,” she said, and said it was if she meant it. It wasn’t often I heard a lady swear, but it didn’t sound offensive coming from her.

  I laughed. “So, you work nights as well?” I figured I could be a little forward, as the sign did say ‘salacious.’

  “Used to,” she said with a coy smile, “but the Colonel shut down the cribs, said it wasn’t Christian like and if we were to become an honest town, we had to hold our heads high. Still, a fella could find me after hours….”

  “Ain’t that something,” I said. “Coffee please,” I requested, but she was already filling a cup she’d had dangling from a finger as she’d had to carry the pot with both hands.

  “Is this Dillon of a Mormon persuasion?”

  “No, sir. Since the Mormon war and Sierra Nevada becoming a state, the Mormon’s don’t hold much sway here abouts.”

  “So this Dillon is such a moral sort he can’t abide by pleasure ladies?”

  She laughed, at little sarcastically I thought, at that. “I guess some would think he’s a moral sort, and I wouldn’t disclose it if’n he weren’t,” she said, then returned to business. “Enrique, the cook, makes a mean salsa, which comes with the eggs should you have an iron digestive tract.”

  “I’ll give it a try…always did have more courage than good sense.”

  She laughed as she headed back toward the doorway in the rear, again pouring coffee as she went. The coffee, I quickly discovered, was hot as Hades and strong enough to float a spoon.

  As I saucered and blew it to cool it, through the glass I watched a man in a cut-away coat—the town seems to be taken with fancy dress—approach the most substantial single-story building in town, the Stockman’s and Merchant’s Bank, across Paradise Street from the saloon. As he approached the doors he pulled a large key ring from his belt and opened the banks double doors. It was the only brick building I’d noticed, and was built as if someone thought the town would last. He disappeared inside.

  Just as I got the coffee cool enough to sip, a horse-backer reined up beside where I’d tied Dusty just outside the saloon door. He dismounted, pulled a lever action from its saddle scabbard, then meandered over next to the bat-wing doors of the saloon. But rather than enter, he just leaned up against the wall and kept a look on the bank. I found it a little strange, as he seemed a nervous sort, and even more so when he pulled a hog leg from it’s belt holster and checked his loads.

  About that time, another two hard looking riders, in dusters even though it was already too warm for a light coat, reined up in front of the bank and dismounted. I thought for a moment they were heading across to the saloon, but they paused at the rear of their horses, and looked up and down the street, studying it carefully, before turning back and heading for the bank doors. Both of them hoisted their side arms, making sure they rode free and easy in the holster, and one toted a sawed off double barrel scatter gun fit for a Wells Fargo coach, although he tried to keep it concealed beneath the duster.

  I guess I’ve been down to many rough roads, for all of this shouted trouble to me with a capital ‘T.’ Even as much as I can’t abide a dishonest man, one who’d take the hard earned savings of those who grub their money from the land, or a hard rock mine, or even a merchandise counter a penny at a time, I decided then and there to stay the hell out of it; then the dumb ninny who’d leaned on the wall next to the bar doors, the lookout I presume, walked over and steadied his rifle across the saddle of my horse. Damned if I was going to see Dusty shot being a leaning post and a barricade for some owlhoot of an scrubby looking outlaw.

  I could hear Ranger’s low growl coming from under the table. He didn’t seem too much like the lay of things either, or maybe he’d just noted the knotted clamp of my jaw.

  I rose just as the skinny girl appeared with my plate full of steaming flapjacks and eggs.

  “Damn,” I said, grabbing up my Sharps and jerking to my feet.

  “You don’t like the plate?” she said, looking startled.

  “Get away from the doors and windows, and get down,” I snapped at her, “there’s trouble afoot,” and her eyes grew as big as the plate she carried.

  I moved to the doors just as the bank doors threw aside and, carrying a couple of sacks, the two hard looking cobbers ran from the bank.

  Pushing through the batwings I brought the Sharps over my shoulder in a wide arc, and caught the near bandit where his thick neck met his shoulder. He went to the ground under the heavy barrel like a sack of cow dung meant for the garden. As quickly as the big rifle’s octagon barrel bounced off the old boy I kicked his rifle out into the street and shouldered mine, then had to hesitate as a fine looking woman, screaming at the top of her lungs, followed them out the double doors, only to be struck down by one of the bandits, wielding his heavy revolver. I adjusted my aim and fired at the nearest mounting bandit across the dusty road, who was clear of the woman. Unfortunately for his mount, he was standing in front of the bay he rode, and both of them went to ground in a heap—too much rifle for close work.

  The second rider, who may have killed the woman with his hard blow, fired both barrels of the scattergun in my direction, then slung the gun aside. The whole street reverberated with the blast; the window next to me blew away as if a mule had jumped through it. He managed to mount his sorrel, as I had to wait for him to be well clear of the woman, and jerked rein, giving his big horse his heels as he palmed his six shooter and let fly another lead pill in my direction.

 
; I, too, had my Colt’s in hand and stepped out away from the horses in front of the saloon, and lay down on the rider, pounding away down the dirt road leading north out of Nemesis. He had seventy five paces on me before I got the first shot off, and did not flinch, but rather hunkered down, let another shot fly back my way, and pounded on. He was getting away, with a sack full of hard-earned still in hand. As quickly as I could load and hammer back, I fired two more times, to no effect.

  I holstered the Colt’s, noticing that his retreat plan had not been well thought out as he continued straightaway out of town on a road straight as a section of Transcontinental rail.

  I dug another 45-90 cartridge from my pocket and reloaded the Sharps. Folks were starting to run from their places of business and from a couple of houses fronting on Paradise Road, then I remembered that the man I’d felled near the door had a sidearm, and it was a good thing I did. I swung on him just as he was coming to his senses and pulling his six shooter

  “Don’t do it, pilgrim,” I yelled, “or you’ll be meeting St. Peter for lunch.”

  He threw the six gun out into the road, and went back to moaning over his shoulder.

  Yelling, “Get back,” I bellowed at the top of my lungs at those filling the dirt road, and dropped to one knee as the filling street as quickly emptied. I took a deep breath, hoisted the heavy rifle, adjusted the top sight for three hundred yards, and waited another slow count of four until I figured he was that distance. Lost in the moment, I didn’t even feel the rifle buck in my hands, but, confident, rose to my feet as I saw sack and sidearm fly from the retreating offenders hands, flung away as he pitched forward and dove from the saddle.

  The sorrel pounded on unhurt, I’m happy to say.

  “A hell of a shot,” it was the bartender who’d ignored me.

  “I’ve made longer,” I said.

  “But not more important to Nemesis,” he said, a wide smile on his face. “I had two years worth of earnings in that bank.”

  I was concerned about the woman, a fine looking sandy haired lady in a pink bustled dress that had St. Louis or Chicago or New York written all over it…but two other ladies were helping her to her feet and she looked to have her senses about her.