The Five Dollar Mail Book 3: The Road Home

11: A Day Late and A Dollar Short

Cover painting by Angela Taratuta. Chapter artwork of Bender by Diego Candia. 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.

There's no small worries out here, and that's the fair dinkum oil. Bender paused beside the rushing stream in high alert, scanning the trees and scrub for any signs of danger. There's either no worries or there's big worries. And right now we got big worries. Big worries with big, clanking knackers.

He swung back into Swagman's saddle, feeling the icy water draining and dripping from the hems of his trousers. He briefly thought that perhaps the decent thing to do would be to bury Galloway, but he dismissed the idea nearly as quickly as he'd thought of it. He had no way to dig a hole, and burning him on a pyre would attract attention he didn't want. And he certainly wasn't willing to trade time spent looking for Jesse on such a project. It hardly matters to this sorry whacker at this point. He's dead. He frowned, clicking his tongue and getting Swagman moving. Jesse could be dead as well. Comanche shuffled along behind on his lead, and Bender was thankful that both horses seemed calm. But I'm not giving him up till I know.

It occurred to him that he probably should be feeling a lot more worried about his own safety than he actually was. Truth be told, he was feeling the same euphoric apathy he'd felt when he'd left his life on the other side of the world. He wanted to find Jesse, dead or alive...that goal had distilled into an obsession. But if he was to take an arrow through the chest or a bullet through the skull, he really hoped that whoever shot him would at least wait until he'd completed this task. Until maybe he could lighten just a tiny bit of the guilt that buried and crushed him.

The thought that the young man had survived the caves and the waterfall only to be murdered left a sour-tasting sickness in his mouth. He was so close to me at the top of the falls. I missed grabbing him by an less than a finger-length and by half a second. The look in his eyes just before he fell... Bender felt his face grow hot, his eyes burn. I'll take that look to my grave.

Taking a deep breath, he let it out slowly. "Mate, did you cross the river?" he whispered, thinking and scanning both riverbanks. "Did you even make it this far?" He took special care to look into the tangles of roots and fallen trees bobbing along the water's edge, in case there was a second body trapped there. The faint scent of wet ash and stale woodsmoke teased his nostrils, and the the water widened, flattening out into a shallow, rocky rapid. He slid off Swagman's broad back and let the horses carefully pick their way across the moss slick stones and bubbling water. Sniffing the air again, he led the horses up the steep embankment. If he crossed, this would have been the place.

I don't have much to lose at this point. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he yelled out "Jesse! Mate!" He scanned the grass, looking for footprints, dropped items. Anything. A single dot of sky blue lay in the grass at his feet. He bent and picked it up between his fingers. It was a glass pony bead. Nodding, he accepted the inevitability of what this meant. Indians have been here recently, and they're probably hostile. Galloway's dead and scalped, Jesse's missing. Struth, we're cocked. The only good thing about this is that if Jesse's dead, then he's most likely not buried and I might still be able to find him. When that's the most optimistic thing a bloke can think of...

He gritted his teeth and headed towards a copse of cottonwoods dotting a low rise. The scent of damp ash grew stronger.

A ring of flattened grass lay before him in a clearing. He stopped, staring. It was perfectly round, the grass inside it packed flat. At its very center, a ring of blackened rocks contained the silver and black remains of a fire.

Just outside the ring was a pile of discarded clothing. Bender dismounted and walked slowly to it, his heart pounding in his ears. He lifted what was left of a wet, unbleached work shirt, slit by a razor-sharp blade down both arms and missing all of its buttons. His breath left him in a rush. The breast pocket on the remains of the shirt was sticky and stained pale pink by the red stripes left from dissolving peppermint sticks.

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