The Iron Star (Part 5)

 

Chapter Five – The Price of Steel

Morning came clean and cold, as if the land were trying to forget what had happened before the sun rose.

The Iron Star sat broken beside the siding, its armored car split open and blackened, smoke still lifting from the wreckage in thin, bitter threads. Crates lay scattered across the basin, their contents twisted and useless—rifle stocks burned, barrels warped, mechanisms choked with sand and ash. Steel that would never fire again.

Eli Mercer stood at the edge of the basin, watching Red Hawk’s people move among the debris. They did not touch the weapons. They did not claim trophies. They gathered their wounded, lifted their dead, and marked the ground with stones.

Respect, not victory.

The cavalry captain arrived last, his horse picking its way through the damage, his expression tightening with every step. He dismounted near Eli, eyes moving from the destroyed freight car to the bodies, then to the distant figures already withdrawing into the prairie.

“You Mercer?” the captain asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re under arrest,” the captain said without heat. “Sabotage of federal property. Treason, if Washington wants to make it sing.”

Eli nodded. He had known this would be the price. “Understood.”

The captain studied him for a long moment. “You stopped a war today,” he said quietly. “Or delayed one.”

“Long enough,” Eli replied.

The captain looked away. “I can’t put that in a report.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to.”

They stood in silence as Red Hawk approached, unarmed, alone. He stopped a few paces away, meeting Eli’s eyes.

“The guns are gone,” Red Hawk said.

“They won’t be replaced easily,” Eli answered.

Red Hawk inclined his head. “You chose against your own people.”

“I chose against murder,” Eli said.

Red Hawk’s gaze hardened, not unkindly. “That choice has weight.”

“I know.”

Red Hawk turned and walked back toward his people. They mounted and rode west, disappearing into the land as seamlessly as they had come, leaving only tracks that the wind would soon erase.

By midday, the Iron Star was moving again—lighter now, stripped of its secret. The damaged cars were left behind, marked for salvage. Passengers rode in silence, shaken, unwilling to ask what they had been part of.

Eli did not ride with them.

The captain cut his cuffs at the edge of the basin, his face set. “I never saw you,” he said. “Ride south. Don’t test my memory.”

Eli accepted the mercy with a nod. He took a horse, one canteen, and his rifle. Nothing else.

As he rode away, the whistle of the Iron Star echoed across the plains—thin, distant, uncertain. The rails stretched westward, unbroken, inevitable. Progress would come whether anyone wanted it or not.

But not every cost would be paid today.

Eli Mercer rode into the open land, a small figure against a vast horizon, carrying the knowledge that steel always demanded a price—and that sometimes, the only victory was choosing who didn’t have to pay it.