***
“What do you think you’re doing?” The porter demanded.
“Back off, George, if you know what’s best for you!” Haley snapped, pointing his gun at him, a twitch of the finger away from ending the porter.
Even thirty seconds ago, the porter wouldn’t have imagined that he would find himself in this situation. He and his coworkers were huddled around one of the tables in the dining car, picking at the food that even the starving passengers wouldn’t eat. The porter was looking down distastefully at the watered-down turnip soup in front of him, trying to picture it as anything else, when the door to the dining car slammed open. As one, all of the porters looked up to see two of the marshals striding in, the wormy Haley and stiff Layton. The marshals shot like an arrow to their table, and Layton grabbed Laurence by the collar. The others stood up, loudly protesting, their chairs knocked over. At the same time, the door at the back of the car cracked open and suddenly closed.
“You’re coming with us,” Haley ordered. “We have questions for you.”
They had already been damned to a life where they were treated as less than equal. With the blizzard seeping into every crack and hole in the train, they just wanted to die like human beings. And with the way the marshals were treating them like cattle, the porters were even being denied that opportunity. And it was only after they had endured every pain possible that the porters decided to snap. And now the porter closest to Laurence was having a gun pointed in his face.
“Are you really going to shoot me, marshal?” The porter snapped. “Go ahead and do it! Take me out of here!”
“Mr. Haley…” Layton said. He had enough of death onboard that train. As a matter of fact, he had enough of death in his lifetime.
“Shut up!” Haley screamed, the gun shaking in his hand. As insane as the marshal was in that moment, the porter had never felt so determined and focused. He had never wanted to live as much as he wanted to die right then.
And it looked like Haley was about to cooperate with him. Before Haley had a chance to squeeze the trigger, a blur shot past and tackled him. As Haley felt one of his ribs crack from the impact, the blur had pushed his shooting arm towards the ceiling. There was a thunderclap as the bullet slammed into the metal above them.
When the confrontation had begun to heat up seconds before, Nellie was about to walk through when she heard the angry voices. She had rushed back to tell Ian, who was still in hiding in the coach class, what was going on. Normally, Ian approached everything logically. But when he saw Haley about to kill the porter, his instincts took over.
As both Ian and Haley collapsed to the ground in a heap, a surprised Layton struggled to pull his gun from his holster. One of the other porters was quicker, though. Layton yelped as a bowl of turnip soup was tossed in his face. As Layton stumbled backwards and connected hard with a nearby table, Laurence yanked Ian off the floor and yelled, “Get out of here!”
“Good advice, Laurence. They say that the wisest man in the world surrounds himself with smarter friends…”
“Go, now!” Laurence yelled.
“Oh, right!” Ian ran through the dining car, magnetized towards the coach cars. He slammed through the door and into the next car, startling all of the coach passengers out of their slumber. He tore down the dark aisle, past the rush of faces, as he heard the door open up behind him. Ian stole a quick glance back, hoping that the marshals weren’t in pursuit. But it was only Laurence and two of the other porters, desperately trying to flee the fight. Ian had made his way to the far end of the car, his fingers around the door handle, when he heard a shout from behind, “Where are they? Where are you hiding them?”
Ian darted to the side and hid between a bench and the wall, trying to catch his breath. For a few moments, he couldn’t hear what was going on over his heavy breathing, the blood pumping through his head. But as the world cleared up around him, he wished that it hadn’t.
Ian heard Haley call out, “Everyone in this room has two choices: either give up the men that ran through here, or get arrested for harboring suspects!”
“What’s going on?” Someone called out.
“It’s none of your business…”
“Tell him, marshal!” Another voice shouted. “Tell him that one of those no-good ranchers got what’s coming to them.”
“Was that what happened? God, I wish I was the one who pulled the trigger then,” a rough voice laughed in the crowd. Ian dared to peek around the corner of the bench and look down the aisle. He could see the two marshals in a building standoff with the angrier and angrier crowd.
“Don’t tempt me!” Haley snapped, waving his gun across the crowd. “I’ll make the papers, I swear I will!”
As crazed as the marshal felt, he didn’t have the nerve to walk into a potentially hostile crowd, especially one that outnumbered the bullets he had with him. Layton was even less interested in walking any further. As they backed up towards the waiting door, someone from the crowd jeered, “Afraid, marshals? Those rich bastards already took our livelihoods. You might as well take our lives!”
Neither marshal knew what to say. They didn’t understand how the rich ranchers had held a powerful monopoly over the poor onboard. In a world as infinite as the American West, the rich had conquered the grazing land, had rustled the cattle, and had set the prices with the markets back east to stifle competition. The poor ranchers had gone west to find their freedom, but all they found were masters at the end of the train tracks. The marshals were outsiders to this world and didn’t understand any of this. All they understood was order and the quiet, no matter how unsettling, which came with it.
Ian watched as the marshals opened the door and swept through it, back into the dining car. The second that Layton had slammed the door shut behind him, Ian had felt a hand land on his shoulder. Startled, Ian spun around, seeing Nellie standing over him, her face grim.
She asked, “Is this what a war looks like?”
Chapter 12