Free A Congregation of Jackals by S. Craig Zahler

unrolled the paper; his little ink-stained fingers clambered across the vellum like the legs of a crab. The lawmen leaned in.
    T.W. looked at the drawing, and at first he did not understand what he was looking at—the thousandsupon thousands of lines swirled with such density and fluidity that the confluence confused his eyes. Then he realized what he was looking at, snatched it from the table and handed it to Goodstead.
    “Have Rita burn that.” The deputy nodded, took the vellum from him and carried it toward the bar. “Roll it up before you give it to her. She doesn’t need to see it.” Goodstead rolled up the illustration as he walked.
    T.W. leaned in close to the Frenchman and said, “You ever do anything like that yourself?”
    “Burn other man’s possessions?”
    T.W. wanted to put his fist through the little man, but he stayed his temper.
    “What is wrong with you? Why would you draw something like that?”
    “I draw many things.”
    T.W. swept his left leg beneath the chair the little Frenchman sat on, dumping the man to the floor. The toppled foreigner stood up and straightened his jacket.
    “Don’t bother sitting. Ride out of Trailspur. If I see you again, I’ll throw you in jail for being a public nuisance and I’ll put down that pitiful horse of yours myself.”
    “The door is that way,” Goodstead said, pointing his left index finger toward the exit, his right palm pressed firmly to the butt of his holstered six-shooter.
    The Frenchman put his bowler hat back on his head and, without another word, left the saloon.
    “I can still smell him,” Goodstead remarked. T.W. nodded.
    When T.W. returned to have the late breakfast he had earlier missed, he looked at the biscuits and gravy and the pork chops but saw only the thick black lines of anillustration that detailed a young girl buried up to her neck in the sand, scalp bereft of hair, nails driven into the top of her bald screaming head.
    He did not eat.

Chapter Ten
Pickles and Ribbons
    Pickles yawned. He was usually asleep by eight o’clock (not much happened at night in Billings, Montana Territory), but tonight his errands had kept him out until ten. He scratched his bushy hair, contemplated what he was going to say before he said it (that helped him talk to white folks), raised his left hand and gently rapped upon the hotel door.
    “Who’s knockin’?”
    Pickles immediately forgot what he had intended to say. He looked at his old boots as though they might have the answers, but they did not. He then thought about how old these boots were (seven years—a third his own age) and how he would like some new ones with rattlesnake skin and pointy toes like the cowboys wore.
    “Is that you, you dumb nigger?”
    “It’s Pickles,” he said. “I ain’t dumb.”
    “You get what we sent you for?”
    “I got them, yes, though it took a while to find them and I got lost twice.”
    Pickles heard footsteps within the apartment; thetumblers in the lock squeaked as the key was turned within it.
    “I gots to oil that,” he reminded himself as he had the last time he came to this apartment (and the time before that).
    The door opened. Before the errand boy stood one of the sun-bronzed twins who tenanted this room: a tall man with oily black hair that fell to his shoulders, a prickly beard, mean eyes and a gun in his right hand more often than not.
    The errand boy asked, “You the one that can talk?”
    “Come in.”
    Pickles walked in; the man shut the door and twisted the key in the lock. Seated on the bed was the talker’s duplicate, Arthur, a small mandolin without any strings resting in his lap.
    Laid out on the three cots Pickles had brought up on Tuesday were the mule skinners who also tenanted this room; beside the youngest one laid a fat woman who had her face pressed down into a pillow and another pillow atop her head (presumably put there to muffle her snoring).
    The errand boy did not like a single person that stayed in this suite, but