The Five Dollar Mail Book 3: The Road Home

70: The Land of Opportunity

Cover painting by Angela Taratuta. Chapter artwork of Hezikiah Stone created by meshing a bunch of found images by me. All graphics by me.

Book 1: The Green, Book 2: Lynch's Boys, Book 3: The Road Home, and the Riders & Kickers Anthology are available on Amazon under the name Regina Shelley. So if you hate waiting for chapter posts and/or want a more polished read, the finished product is available now.

I dearly love antique photographs of all sorts, particularly ambrotypes, tintypes, and daguerreotypes. I'm really dating myself here, but I used to work in a darkroom restoring this stuff, back before computers. Now, I'm using computers to take modern "found" photos and dirty them back up again. I do as a fun distraction.

I have a bunch of these on my website. WP isn't going to let me post a link, but if you go to Five Dollar Mail dot com and look under "Artwork", you see the collection if you scroll down to the bottom. 

Anyways, this is actor William Shockley as Hezekiah Stone. You may remember him as Hank from Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. He's aged beautifully. 

-gina

Hezekiah Stone stood up, his hand dropping instinctively to his holstered pistol when he heard voices in the darkness, coming closer as they approached camp. He realized it was Red Horn and his men, and he frowned, wondering why they were back so early. Shoulda taken them longer than that to toss that homestead around...unless it didn't end up gettin' tossed.

He listened, straining his ears as stumbling footfalls approached. Someone's coming. Red Horn stalked over to him, scowling in his war paint and holding a blood-soaked rag to his forehead. Blood drying in browning, cracking stains streaked his face and shirt, and clotted in his long hair. He was limping slightly, clutching his side with his free hand.

Hezekiah huffed, taking his hand off his pistol. "The hell happened? Why are you back already?"

"They were ready for us," Red Horn spat. His bloodied face was ghastly in the wavering orange glow from the fire. "They got bluecoats out here."

Hezekiah digested this bit of unwelcome news. He wasn't surprised to hear it, but he wasn't happy about it, either. Damn it. Now we got real problems. "How the hell did they know where we were gonna be?"

"I don't know." Red Horn squatted down on the opposite side of the fire, taking away the rag on his face and gingerly feeling the gaping, still-weeping cut. His forehead was a smeared chaos of clotted blood and flaking war paint. "Maybe they didn't," he muttered, inspecting the soaked rag in his hand. "Maybe they got men at all the homesteads now. It wasn't a whole lot of them..." He grunted unhappily and re-applied the rag to his brow. "But we weren't ready for them, and they were enough. They had Crow dogs with them. We barely made it out of there."

Hezekiah sat back down, thinking hard. I thought this might happen eventually. "Damn it.'

"We need more men," Red Horn muttered. "I didn't agree to fight blue coats for you."

"You telling me you can't handle it?" Hezekiah goaded him. "The notorious Red Horn is defeated by a handful of soldiers and their Crow whores?"

"I handled it better than you did," Red Horn snapped. "You sat on your ass right here while it was happening. You think you're paying us enough for this shit?" He spat into the fire, glaring at him through the flames.

"You know I can't be seen," Hezekiah said. "Somebody sees me, we're done. None of us are getting paid if the railroad gets wind of this. Shut up and let me think."

He rubbed his eyes and ran his fingers through his beard. If the railroad knew what was going on, that he had no intention of actually paying anyone to sell their land to Union Pacific, it would be over. If they were to find out he was burning homesteads with Union Pacific money fattening his own pockets, he figured they'd do a fair sight worse than just fire him.

And then there was the matter of the His Horses and his Lakota. Scaring some families off their land was not difficult. But trying to uproot an entire Lakota village was another problem entirely. He hadn't counted on His Horses having a white squaw man in camp that could read. That mouthy son of a bitch better hope I never have an opportunity to kill him. Because first time I do... He scratched the back of his neck. And that damn two-spirit in the dress, too. Him I'd kill just to see if I have to kill him twice. Even if they eventually agreed to move, which seemed unlikely, it was still going to cost him a large portion of the payout money. And that, Hezekiah had decided some time ago, would be wasteful. Intolerably wasteful.

And now I have the army here fouling things up. He stared absently at Red Horn, all painted and scarified, trying so hard to appear as some larger-than -life monster,

Red Horn was talking, his words buzzing like annoying bees around Hezekiah's ears. "I'm not fighting the army," he was saying. "Not over this stupid shit. And I'm not fighting the Sioux, either."

"Shut up," Hezekiah said. " I have a new plan. If it works...you won't have to fight either of them."

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