The Majestic 311 Read online

  The Majestic 311

  (A Very Weird Western)

  By

  Keith C. Blackmore

  The Majestic 311

  (A Very Weird Western)

  By

  Keith C. Blackmore

  Copyright 2019 Keith C. Blackmore

  Edited by Peter Gaskin [email protected]

  Cover by Karri Klawiter artbykarri.com

  Formatted by Polgarus Studio (polgarusstudio.com)

  The Majestic 311

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  Table of Contents

  1 - The Wait

  2 - The Interview

  3 - The Boarding

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  Afterthoughts

  About the Author

  1

  The Wait

  A cloud stretched as tight as a hangman’s rope cut across a full moon. Stars hung in brilliant tatters around that radiant face, and their combined celestial might illuminated the wintry countryside with a beauty that would make the day ache with envy. White-capped mountains had their faces shaded, but their craggy shoulders glowed under the night sky. Snowy slopes ended in thin collars of fir and spruce. Farther down the high country, patches of white shone through a thickening cloak of forest. Snow blanketed the wilderness towards the mountain base, whitening everything and burying most of the known passes.

  Down in one gully, nestled between a series of frostbitten hills, eight men sat upon horses. They waited, faces set, their shoulders hunched like vultures. Some of them studied the midnight lustre of the sky, their thoughts deep and private, while others stared at the stretch of railway tracks before them, almost entirely obscured by snow. They wore clothing of the season, heavy coats of leather over double sets of wool pants and shirts, thick scarves and gloves. Their hats were prairie felt and, though similar, not the fancy Stetsons that were gaining popularity down south.

  Not a breeze disturbed the riders. The mountain air was so crisp, so pure, that to breathe it in tasted like a sip of chilled holy water.

  “This is horseshit,” Eli Gallant grumbled, breaking the silence, loud enough for the others to hear.

  A smirk stretched across Nathan Rhode’s face, one concealed by a scarf pulled up so high, only his eyes peeked out.

  For moments, no one said anything.

  “You cow fuckers hear me?” Eli spoke again, a touch louder. “Horse. Shit. All horseshit. I must be out of my goddamn mind to come up here. Waiting in this forsaken ass crack of the world, on a goddamn horse in the middle of goddamn winter. Horseshit. That’s what I think, by Christ.”

  No one said anything for several seconds.

  “Go on back if you want,” Leland Baxter said with quiet indifference. “We can make do.”

  “Oh, I’m thinking about it,” Eli said, rising in his saddle and making the leather creak. “Goddamn right I’m thinking about it. And right now, I’m thinking it’s all horseshit, Leland Baxter. All horseshit. You put that in your fancy fuckin’ pipe and make curls out of it.”

  Silence then, as Leland Baxter—the leader of the group—refrained from commenting, allowing those last few words to sink into the heads of the other men. That was Leland’s way. If there was grumbling to be done, let the malcontents grumble. Let them moan. Give them time to bitch, and let them bitch until the bitchin’s done.

  But always, always, make the effort to hear them out.

  Or, at the very least, appear to be hearing them out.

  “Why do you say that?” Leland finally asked.

  Nathan lowered his head. He cringed at the foulness of his breath trapped within the folds of his scarf. He hadn’t known Baxter for long, having only met the man two weeks prior, but in that short time sharing the ex-miner’s company, Nathan learned that the man was willing to listen to his men’s complaints. He might not do anything about the complaining, mind you, but he would definitely listen, sure as God above.

  “Why do I say that?” a confounded Eli Gallant finally blurted. “Why the fuck do I say that? Your eyes frozen in your head, Leland? I mean can you not see the shit on them tracks? Them rails are goddamn covered in ice, for Christ’s sakes. Covered. I mean, look. Just look at them. Ain’t too dark to see you can’t see them things. Look!”

  Nathan glanced to his left, where Leland Baxter sat astride his brown gelding. In the deep reckoning shadows rolling off the majestic Rockies, the outlaw leader didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. A profound silence surrounded the man from Fraser Valley, and he didn’t disturb it. His gloved fingers wrapped about the saddle horn as if he were some judge presiding over a longhorn court. Like them all, Baxter had a thick scarf around his neck and shoulders, but he hadn’t pulled the wool up over his mouth. His mustached face stared ahead, the profile as dignified as marble stone, while a right eye twinkled, not yet dried out by the winter air.

  Leland had a scar up his right cheek, a deep cut made by a ring, earned in a fistfight with some drunken bastard from Saskatchewan, delivered when a killer of an uppercut missed his jaw by a hair.

  But the ring left its mark.

  Cut me like a hot knife through butter, Leland had declared, his mouth hidden by the monstrous dust collector that sprouted from his upper lip.

  The outlaw leader looked toward the icy tracks, inspected them, and lifted his face to the night.

  “Well?” Eli demanded.

  “They are indeed glazed with ice,” Leland agreed. “You are correct in that. However, there’s nothing I can do about their frigid state.”

  That stark assessment stunned Eli Gallant into silence, but not for long. “Sweet Christ Almighty, Leland. It’s fuckin’ cold up here. Them tracks got a coat of ice on them thicker than your pecker, and I’m willing to bet the twenty dollars I got in my pocket that your train… ain’t coming this way tonight. No sir. That big ol’ chunk of pig iron ain’t coming this way ever.”

  Baxter exhaled, answering with steam, and searched the heavens for what, Nathan did not know.

  “Why ain’t the train coming this way, then?” asked Milton Floss, his words muffled by his own thick scarf, and his eyes peeking over that crust of bullet-stopping cotton. Milton was a cattle thief from Big Muddy Valley, looking to branch out into other fields. He figured robbing trains sounded promising.

  “It ain’t that the train ain’t coming this way,” said fellow rustler Mackenzie Cass.
“It’s the incline of the slope.”

  “The grade,” ‘Shorty’ Charlie Williams supplied with a low, contrary rumble.

  “The grade,” Mackenzie said. “Exactly. Thank you kindly, Shorty. The ice will make it so that the grade is slippery. But they got fixtures these days. To apply to the front of a steam engine in heavy snow and ice. I heard tell of it a while back. Big plows they attach to the front. Scoops up the snow and slings it two hundred feet into the air. Designed by a dentist out of Toronto.”

  That was met with silence once again.

  “Horseshit,” Gallant finally scoffed.

  “Ain’t horseshit,” Mackenzie countered in a calm, distracted tone probably inflicted by the cold and the beauty of the night sky. As far as Nathan could tell, in the short time they’d all been together, where Milton was something of a simpleminded soul, quick to laugh and to fight (but not in an evil way), Mackenzie was different entirely. Both were in their late twenties, but Mackenzie was no simpleton wrangling cattle herds. The man knew things, or at least sounded like he knew things, and wasn’t afraid to share that knowledge when the opportunity presented itself.

  “Ain’t horseshit a’tall,” Mackenzie repeated, while Milton glared a warning at the mouthy Gallant. “Fella’s name is… hold on now… Elliott… J.W. Don’t ask me what the J and W stand for. He invented the thing. From what I hear, his first design didn’t take with the railway folks, so he partnered up with another man. Guy by the name of Orange Mull. Or wait… maybe that’s Jull. Yeah, I think it’s Jull. Anyway, together they got it right.”

  Leather creaked as Eli turned and leaned in his saddle, fixing his disbelieving wrath upon Mackenzie. “You tell me that a goddamn dentist made up a plow? For a train?”

  “I’m just saying. S’up to you if’n you believe it or not.”

  “Horse… shit,” Eli stated in a defiant voice. “A goddamn dentist rigging up a train to shovel snow. The hell he know about shoveling snow, huh? The hell he know about trains for that matter?”

  “It doesn’t shovel snow. It scoops it. Then slings it.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve shoveled enough bullshit in my time to know it when I smell it.”

  “You’re gettin’ on my nerves, Gallant,” Milton warned.

  “Think for a minute, then,” Eli Gallant challenged. “A dentist. From Toronto. Thinking up a plow… for a train? When he’d come up with that? While he was yankin’ teeth outta folks’ faces? Huh? Christ Almighty, what’s next? Clergy inventing boxes that help you converse with the dead? Hm?”

  “Already got them fancy buggies that go on without a team of horses,” Mackenzie said.

  “You’re a goddamn fancy buggy yourself, Mackenzie.”

  Neither Milton nor Mackenzie appeared to like that. In Nathan’s mind, Mackenzie was an educated man, but that didn’t mean he allowed himself to be pushed around by foulmouthed bloodsabitches like Eli Gallant. Especially not in times of growing duress, as what they all were being currently subjected to.

  “Don’t you worry,” Leland Baxter declared, quieting the whole works of them before fist fights broke out. “Not one bit. That train’s coming this way. I know it.”

  That greatly interested Eli, and he traded looks with his own companion, an Albertan rancher-turned-gun runner by the name of Gilbert Butler.

  “The tracks are covered in ice, Leland, goddamnit,” Eli stressed with poisoned contempt. “You know what’s gonna happen? I’ll tell you what’s gonna happen. On the other side of them mountains there, the train’s gonna come on through the underpass. Cut straight on through ‘til it pops out on this side. Then it’s gonna hit all that…” Eli swept a gloved hand at the snow-covered tracks. “And then it’s gonna start spinning wheels. Spin, spin, spin. After that, that train is gonna slip right back down that tunnel. Just like a slick piece of shit going back into an asshole.”

  Nathan grimaced at the image.

  “You have a way with your similes,” Leland Baxter said.

  “My what now?” Eli asked.

  “Similes.”

  “‘Similes’?”

  Leland sighed.

  “Speak fucking English for a change, Leland,” Eli barked. “I get goddamn mesmerized between the likes of you and Mackenzie over there. One talking about ‘similes’ and the other talking about goddamn dentists clearing snow from railways. Try and speak simple like, for the simpleminded among us. And for those who might not know what a goddamn ‘simile’ is.”

  “Or for those able to say it,” Nathan muttered.

  A moment’s silence then as Eli shut up, absorbing the insult. Leather groaned again as he leaned forward to direct a murderous scowl at the last speaker, a look that made the night that much colder. “I wasn’t talking to you, Nathan Shit-flinger Rhodes. So you just shut your shit mouth before I do. Understand?”

  Nathan scowled back. He didn’t rightly know Eli Gallant’s reputation except for a few stories from the others, but Nathan was positive Eli didn’t rightly know his reputation either. Or what he was capable of doing when he got his anger up.

  Because Nathan Rhodes was capable of a lot.

  “Oh someone’s feelin’ scrappy,” Eli declared with steamy breath, his eyes narrowed. “Don’t he look scrappy to you, Gilbert?”

  “Looks scrappy and then some,” Gilbert agreed.

  “Goddamn right he does.”

  Nathan didn’t look at Gilbert, who probably only went to the shitter when Eli Gallant okayed it. Instead, he continued giving the evil eye to Gallant.

  “Stop it,” Leland said, his level voice booming in that snowy mountain gulley. “Right now. That’s an order.”

  That got Eli’s attention. “Yeah? Or what?”

  A resounding silence followed the question. Then, “Or I’ll have Shorty deal with you both.”

  ‘Shorty’ Charlie Williams rode the biggest horse of them all. A big black breed, some seventeen hands high, with a head broad enough to punch through a wall. The animal was more suited for heavy labor than long riding, but no other animal could support Shorty’s size. The man towered over the collection of rogues and scoundrels Leland Baxter had gathered to his fell purpose, a full head in some cases, and Nathan wasn’t a small man. On top of that midnight horse, Shorty was every bit as ominous as a black garbed hangman, just waiting for a word from his employer. Broad of shoulder and of face, quiet, with an unruly chin rug that might’ve been ripped off a grizzly’s ball sack, Shorty wasn’t one for conversation. In fact, Shorty didn’t rightly speak unless spoken to, unless when supplying a thought needing to be aired. Nathan couldn’t say if the man could fight or not, but the big man certainly exuded the willingness to partake in violent confrontations, if someone felt brave enough to challenge him.

  Or if Leland Baxter gave the word.

  And Leland Baxter seemed on the verge of doing just that.

  Eli considered the threat, gauged Shorty as being more than willing, and, with a shadowy glare at Nathan, he settled back into his saddle. Nathan didn’t look at Shorty, but he felt the man’s heavy attention upon him. Snorting steam, Nathan straightened and gazed ahead, content to be done with the matter.

  The situation had diffused itself.

  Nathan considered the snow-white patchwork of fir and spruce that covered the mountains, illuminated by a moon so bright he could almost tell one tree from the other. Stars dusted the heavens, producing a glitter that could mesmerize a man. He looked for the constellations, remembering that his mother knew them all. She even tried teaching him the names of those constellations, but most never took to his memory. Not that his mother minded. She never minded much when it came to her only son, and Nathan loved her for that. She’d died in her house upon the Saskatchewan prairies, where a terrible winter had blown into her lungs and struck her with a powerful bout of pneumonia. Nathan’s father died shortly after, of a broken heart. That left a thirteen-year-old boy alone and sick with misery, to deal with his two passed-on parents for the remainder of the winter months. />
  And, somewhere around that time, a part of Nathan died as well.

  Winter. He considered the railroad tracks and saw that they were indeed icy, and wondered if the train might slip after all.

  “Have no worries, Nathan,” Leland Baxter said with a calmness that was pleasing to the ear. “The plan hasn’t changed. Fact is, the plan’s only gotten better.”

  “How’s that now?”

  “Well,” Leland carried on. “What do you think will happen when the train starts to climb the slope?”

  Nathan thought about it, glad to be distracted. “Slow down?”

  “That’s right. And if the train does indeed slip on the rails, what do you think the engineer will do? The same man charged with getting the train and all its passengers and cargo to its final destination?”

  Nathan had to think about that one, too. “Apply the brakes?”

  “Well done, Nathan.” Leland said, clearly impressed. “You’re a thinker, after all.”

  The compliment straightened the young man’s back.

  “Yes,” Leland resumed. “The engineer will apply the brakes, and that’s all the better for us. We were planning on stopping the train anyway, until our business was concluded. This snow only works in our favor. Understand now?”

  Nathan nodded.

  “Understand, Eli?”

  “Yeah, I understand,” Gallant grumped as if he’d just lost a fist fight and a few teeth besides.

  “What was that?”

  “Said I understand,” Eli huffed. “Christ Almighty, Leland.”

  “Not so worried now, are you?” Leland asked.

  “Guess not.”

  “Never doubted me at all, did you?”

  That was pushing his luck, but with the likes of Shorty watching you, Eli Gallant decided to be smart. “Guess not.”

  That satisfied Leland. “Good.”

  “Just saying I think it’s horseshit a dentist made up a plow for a train,” Eli muttered. “That’s all.”