First part of a Short Story I'm developing (looking for feedback on interest level)

[DonaldM39]

I'm writing a short western esque story set in the 1800s. what follows is the very first part of it. My plan is to have a website dedicated to this story as a short series. What I would like to know is a few things.

On a scale of 1-10 How interested are you in the setting?
On a scale of 1-10 how interested are you in the characters?
On a scale of 1-10 how interested are you in reading the rest of the story?
And finally on a scale of 1-10 how would you rate the quality of writing?

If you would like to give reasoning behind your feedback, I would love it.
Also if you completely loathe, please tell me! haha

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to read this!

RAY HARDLY KNOWS

“You done good Ray... You done good. Kept your mouth shut, pulled the trigger. You did what you were damn s'posed to. Ain't know shame in that.”
Ray Hartley sat with a gun in his holster. The sweat beading into his eyes was stinging as the sun showed through the crack in the train car door. Ray and his brother were headed to South Carolina. Bills with presidents they didn't even know the names to laid in their clothes and in their bags. Ray twiddled his Colt Revolver in his hands. He began to spin its sleek danger around his index finger. His brother, James Hartley, flinched every time the barrel spun in his direction.
“Hold it Ray, let's not lose heads fore gettin' home.”
Ray wouldn't listen, which motivated James constant patronization. If anyone understood life, by his own admission, it was Ray. He spit tobacco on scrupulous land owners, on cheating women, on bank tellers.
“You know why life is so hard James?” Ray asked. “It's hard,cause ain't enough people on God's green earth trying to break the rules. It's them rules that make it so damned hard. Think about it. Fornicate with anyone you want, with no reckoning for vows, and you'd probably keep your member focused on the one you chose, because you know the one you chose was the one for you. The money gets low when she's got a baby slung under the arm, just make a withdrawal. No hours to turn in. And no property taken from you can affect it.”
“Yeah I reckon you're right about these things.” Said James.
Ray brushed off the condescension. He looked at his revolver, and quickly unloaded five bullets, leaving one. He spun the wheel and clicked it back in. Without a moments hesitation, he stuck the barrel in his mouth, and...
CLICK.
James winced, expecting this behavior. Ray pulled the barrel out of his mouth as the Train engine roared and looked up towards heaven, crossing himself and kissing a crucifix that hung around his neck. James then put his face up to the opening in the door and watched as the green trees whizzed by at a blinding blur.

That night they made it off the train and headed up the adjacent hills under the moonlight. An old cabin sat at the top, nested in the dense woods. It had been abandoned long before Ray twirled pistols. Dank and small, it was hidden perfectly in the shadows of the night. They creeped slowly up the inclined terrain, keeping their voices hushed. Upon entering, James lit the lantern that sat by the broken window.
They counted, and counted, until their skills in arithmetic began to suffer. Ray then raised his head and gave James the most satisfied smile he had given since the one night he spent with Rachel Sue in the town Brothel. Out of the darkness of the wood came the sound of a galloping horse. Ray's smile descended into a slackened straight face. He raised his finger to his lips, because James was usually too stubborn to listen to verbal orders. Ray got up and blew out the lantern, cloaking the room in the darkest pitch of black next to an ink well.
“You think it's them?” Whispered James.
“Ray raised his pistol, pulled the hammer. And peered through the cracked and dusty window.”
A night mist had rolled in. It had begun to be illuminated by the glow of many lanterns. A crescendoing thunder of hooves began to roll upwards like a massage up a tense neck, crackling the foliage underfoot. The first to break over the hills edge was a dark figure, with a tattered and bloody white shirt, sopping wet from the nearby river.
“****.. it's a nigger.” said James.
The horses finally showed their snorting faces over the hill and surrounded the man as their owners jeered and insulted. Many showed their faces, a couple of them had hoods. There were about eight of them, with torches in hand.
“Yeehaw, looks like we've got the som***** right in the palms boys!” Said a man with a lasso.
He swung it around his head and whipped it towards the Negro's neck, latching on to him like a calf.
“****, Ray... we bout to watch ourselves a lynching.” Said James
Ray just looked out the window and started counting out the men to himself. After adding up to eight, he looked towards James, and with a said.
“You can watch if you want... I ain't one for spectatin'.”
He then cracked the most devilish smile James had ever seen.

[Charles Darnay]

It's a bit too much of a cliché of Westerns to be all that interesting. I think your overuse of jargon just reduced your characters to caricatures. Also, watch out for your spelling/grammar.

Yes, the time and (potentially) location is not one you have first hand experience with - and that is fine - but even if you are writing a Western, or a historic fiction, or even fantasy (which has no bearing on reality), the heart of the story must be real, and must come from within you. Your characters must have real sensibilities. Right now you have two guys I don't care about wandering the array of 1950s movie stereotypes.

[DonaldM39]

Good points. Thank you very much. I think you're totally right about the lack of personality. Trying to figure out what can add depth to them.

[AuntShecky]

Instead of describing this as a"short Western story," just write "short western."

Not a word, per se that can stand by itself, "-esque" is a suffix, meaning "like, used to coin an adjective from a noun or a proper name: "Kafkaesque," for example.

For the overall look of the work on the virtual page, I strongly suggest that you skip a space between paragraphs. Also keep in mind that each change of speaker requires a new paragraph.

Proofread. You wrote "know" instead of "no."

Brush up on your grammar. For instance, look up "lay/laid." Watch typos, such as the inexplicable capital "T" in train, the "B" in brothel. Avoid needless repetition, such as twice mentioning that James is Ray's brother. Be more precise in your descriptions: "
He began to spin its sleek danger around his index finger." "Danger"?

You have the general idea of opening the story in medias res, in that the trigger has already been pulled,the deed already done. One thing I've learned about composing scenes is that we should try to start them late and end them early (a trick I learned from watching the old movies of Preston Sturges.)

The idea, however, is to grab the reader's interest right out of the gate. Showing the protagonist sitting around, fiddling with his weapon, isn't quite the "action" scene that will spur us to continue reading. Perhaps the story could start with Ray's attempt at "Russian roulette." (Incidentally, did you come across this macabre practice in your research? Did outlaws in America's wild west actually do this? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but this passage seems like something lifted out of The Deer Hunter.)

Another thing early western settlers didn't do was use contemporary expressions when they cussed. Oh, they did hurl oaths and curses, all right,but the frontiermen expressed themselves in the language of their era. Even with the sanitized asterisks, your modern epithets are, like the (otherwise brilliant series)Deadwood, anachronistic.

In Ray's rant against rules, I realize that you are trying to set up his character, but the p.o.v., intended to be subtle, comes off as as ruthlessly judgemental. The passage is heavy-handed . Even if you intended it as such, it is almost as manipulative as the final scene.(More about this in a minute.)

I would be the last person to advise you to "censor" your work; in fact, it is the writer's responsibility to take risks.

However:

Mark Twain used the "n-word" because it was appropriate for the time-frame in which he was writing, and no other synonym fits the carefully-framed scenario which he created a mere two decades after slavery was abolished. The word could, I suppose, fit the time-frame of your story, BUT even in a work of fiction, the blatant use of the "n-word" in a work written today is verboten. More than that, unless you are a Faulkner or a William Styron or more to the point, a Richard Wright or a Ralph Ellison, if I were you, I'd steer clear of venturing into material you've only read about or seen in movies. Lately I've come to the opinion that no matter how imaginative a writer can be, he or she can never really replicate the experience of a victim of a lynching or enduring a life besotted by systematic racism. I wouldn't even attempt a lynching scene without first researching the topic exhuastively. What I'm saying is that sympathy is not enough to bring verisimilitude to this highly-sensitive topic. Your attempt, though earnest, comes off as derivative and not at all authentic.