Free The Curse of Iron Eyes by Rory Black

descended the flight of stairs into the large room
where men were still drinking and gambling and females were still
plying for trade.
    He
walked to the back of the building and saw the dozen or more men
gathered in the rear room of the saloon. Big Jack Brady raised a
hand and signaled for him to join them. The outlaw obeyed. He felt
uneasy even though he recognized half the faces within the room
gathered around Big Jack Brady.
    Something was just not
right.
    He tried not to yawn as
Brady gestured to an empty chair next to him at the large circular
table.
    ‘ Now we can
start, boys,’ Brady announced to the gathered assembly of equally
stunned and confused outlaws.
    Calhoon rubbed his face
with both his hands and glanced at the larger man.
    ‘ What are you
talking about, Big Jack?’
    Brady grinned. It was
like the man himself. Big.
    ‘ I kinda
hoodwinked you earlier,’ he told Calhoon. ‘You see, I’ve been
hoping that you would turn up today because it makes the whole job
a lot easier. I had the other boys all stashed away in other hotels
and saloons around Calico for the last few days but without you,
Harve, we could not act.’
    ‘ I don’t
understand, Big Jack.’ Calhoon sighed. ‘If you were waiting for me
before you could get this job rolling, why didn’t you tell me
earlier?’
    ‘ Because you
were not the final piece in the jigsaw,’ Brady answered, ‘but you
are the most important.’
    Harve
Calhoon was still no wiser. ‘What the hell are you talking
about?’
    Brady pointed across
the table at a small man who resembled a lizard. Calhoon looked at
the skittish man but did not recognize him.
    ‘ This,
gentlemen, is Black Roy Hart. He’s the final piece of my jigsaw
puzzle. He only arrived in town an hour or so back and he brought
the ingredients to enable us to accomplish the job that I’ve been
planning for the last six months.’
    Calhoon stared at the
unsmiling Hart.
    ‘ What did you
bring that’s so darn important, Black Roy?’
    ‘ Dynamite sticks
and all,’ Hart replied.
    ‘ We had the
dynamite man but not the dynamite itself, Harve.’ Brady pulled out
a scrap of paper from his vest pocket and laid it on the table. He
unfolded it and every eye around the room stared at the seemingly
meaningless hand-drawn map.
    ‘ But I got me
some dynamite in my saddlebags,’ Calhoon said. Big Jack laughed.
‘Not enough, Harve. This is a real big job and needs a real lot of
dynamite.’
    ‘ How
much?’
    ‘ A wagonload,
boy,’ came the reply.
    Calhoon looked around
the table and began to recognize the faces of some of the other
outlaws. Each was an expert in his own field and slowly Calhoon
began to understand the enormity of what Brady had planned.
Anything that required such a prodigious amount of explosives had
to be beyond anything he had ever tackled before.
    ‘ What did you
mean when you said that you were glad that I turned up today and
not in a couple of days’ time, Big Jack?’ he asked.
    Brady tilted his
enormous head.
    ‘ Now we can ride
tonight and get this job done. If you had been a tad slower
reaching Calico, we would have had to wait for another three
months.’
    Harve Calhoon
frowned.
    ‘ What is this
job?’
    Big
Jack Brady turned the scrap of paper around and pointed to the
crude drawings. He watched as Calhoon’s eyes looked down at the
place at which the finger was aimed. A picture of a train and a
long, sturdy wooden bridge spanning a wide valley seemed to jump
out at the still-tired outlaw.
    Calhoon looked up at
the face of the man beside him.
    ‘ You want me to
blow up a train?’
    Brady shook his
head.
    ‘ Not the train.
The bridge! You gotta blow up that bridge so the train has to stop
and when it stops, we attack it, kill every critter that stands in
our way and then take three months’ worth of gold coin headed for
Fort Dixon.’
    ‘ The army
payroll?’ Calhoon queried.
    ‘ Yep. The army
payroll. All three months of it. Do you have any idea how much that
is,