Bring Me The Head of Auyeung Guangli!!

 The scarred man's half-ruined stare lay heavy on the Chinese boy's back. But the heft of a pocketed gold eagle more than offset the unpleasant weight of ugly looks and grave-dirt.

A bulls-eye lantern shined down into the hole. The beam cut directly through the night's murk and the pit's deeper darkness without giving them away to the nearby Chinaman temple nor to Promise, a railroad town further in the distance. He had no wish to answer the questions of either Chinese priests or whatever white constabulary might come to the protection of Promise's celestial population.

"What makes you so all fired sure this is where Auyeung Guangli got planted?" the scarred man asked. His voice grated like a machine, dusty from disuse.

"Because I dug it that time, too." The child's English carried the musical lilt of his native language.

"Ain't you celestials got rules against digging up dead folks?"

"The priests have a thousand rules," the boy said. "But you pay better than priests."

Uriah Bane, hunter of bounties on either men or monsters, chuckled. But the mirth came reluctantly, pried from his soul as stingily as a miser doles out his last coppers.

Nighttime sounds and the soft chuff of a shovel in earth accompanied the pair's return to silence. After several minutes, the shovel's tip hit a wooden coffin with a dull thunk. Using his hands, the boy brushed the moist, musty soil off the wooden box. When he'd made the whole casket visible, he looked up into the bright beam of light and gave Bane a blinking grin.

"Digging is cheap. Hauling heavy boxes out of deep holes costs a lot."

"Don't need the box, or much of the corpse," Bane said. He dropped into the hole, his heavy boots thumping the wooden chest loudly. The creak of leather and the jangle of many weapons accompanied the racket. "'Bring me the head of Auyeung Guangli,' my client told me. And I aim to deliver."

Handing the boy the lantern, Bane knelt and grasped the edge of the box's cover. The lid opened smoothly and with little effort, revealing its grisly contents. Finally, after six months of searching for his quarry, Uriah Bane stared into the face of Auyeung Guangli.

He'd expected a difficult search when he took the bounty. The Chinese were not well known for plain and open dealing with whites, let alone a white man hunting one of their own. Even so, six months was an unheard of amount of time for Bane to be on anyone's trail without at least getting a whiff of them. But there are fewer better ways to hide from a bounty hunter than to fall stone dead and receive burial from reticent kinsmen. So Bane could be forgiven if he sat back and savored the moment a bit.

And if the excitement in Bane's eyes – the gleam even touching the milky orb sitting at the center of a web of scars like a fat, albino spider – was a bit macabre even for him, he could receive grace for that as well. After all, Bane had never been this close to fifty thousand dollars.

This might also explain how Bane, a man well acquainted with death and dying of causes both natural and unnatural, did not immediately take note of the body's peculiar state of preservation.

Bane drew a Liston knife from along his thigh, the razor-edged steel hissing softly against the sheath's oiled leather. A doctor who knew something about removing limbs in a hurry had gifted Bane with the blade. Before Bane could cut through the corpse's throat, though, the lantern's beam wavered. The boy hissed a word in his native language.

"Hold steady, boy," Bane growled. "I lack the time or patience for you going squeamish on me now."

But the boy didn't hear him. He backed away, pointing at the corpse's crossed hands and blathering on in his melodic tongue. Though it had been a great while since Bane had thrilled to the raw song of pure terror, he knew the tune in others well and did not ignore it. Bane reached out one long arm and slapped the boy hard enough to split his lip.