Free A Congregation of Jackals by S. Craig Zahler Page B

cabin swung wide and in the billowing steam loomed two triangles. The exhaust dissipated and the shapes resolved into a pair of hoop dresses, one dark green, the other striped blue, each filled out by a fine-looking woman. Dicky’s stomach sank as he looked upon the face of the black-haired, blue-eyed woman on the left—it was Allison Bayers.
    Godfrey, his back to the door, saw Dicky’s reaction, slid his hand under his valise where he kept his ten-shooter and said, “Are we in trouble?”
    “No,” Dicky said. Upon further inspection, he realized that the woman was not Allison, just a very pretty doppelganger. “I thought I recognized . . . one of the women who just boarded. It is not her.”
    “Some girl you got drunk and took advantage of?”
    “I don’t need to get a woman drunk.”
    Dicky watched the women sit on the opposite side of the passenger cabin; a hunched Negro with gray hair carried two valises over to them. The one who looked like Allison counted out three coins and handed them to the porter, who was so pleased with his tip that hedropped to one knee and genuflected like an English knight and departed singing about sunshine and licorice.
    The raven-haired woman set her blue coat upon the chair opposite her and yawned, covering her mouth with her gloved left hand.
    “Don’t,” Godfrey said to Dicky.
    The conductor called out indecipherably; the train lunged forward, glided a few yards, jerked abruptly and then chugged along the steel rails in earnest. With much steadier locomotion than the train’s, Dicky traversed the cabin to join the two seated women. The one who looked like Allison from afar looked less like her from the distance of only one yard, but still she was lovely, and the similarity was beyond passing.
    “May I sit with you for a moment?”
    “My husband probably wouldn’t approve of you joining us.”
    “Don’t underestimate him.”
    The brunette laughed, but the raven-haired focus of his attention did not.
    She said simply, “We are not looking for company at this present time. Thank you.”
    Rebuffed, Dicky tilted his head forward, grinned, said, “Good afternoon,” swung back around the car and landed in his seat opposite Godfrey.
    The plump man said, “She must have cataracts.”
    “Matrimonial.”
    The plains of Iowa undulated outside their window. Little black bugs that were animals to be someday slaughtered or men to be someday buried stood at the edges of prairies, watching the locomotive roar past. The funnel belched exhaust into the blue sky and the steam domes hissed.
    Dicky thought of Allison. He remembered her sleepyeyes in the morning, her long cool fingertips on his chest and the kind way she corrected words he mispronounced when he read to her in an effort to improve his powers of elocution. Something burned the edges of his eyes like the bites of fire ants; his vision began to blur.
    “You’re taking this a lot worse than I expected,” Godfrey said. “You could always go for her friend—she’s glanced this way a couple of times since the one with black hair dozed off.”
    “I am thinking about something else.”
    “You want to talk about her?”
    “I do not.”

Chapter Twelve
The Idiocy of Guards
    Oswell sat in the illuminated dining car, the sheaf of incriminating papers laid in his lap. He glanced at Addy two tables away. The colored woman sewed holes in socks she had pulled from the feet of her two children, both of whom were absent, presumably tucked in their beds within the servants’ car. The rancher looked through the window to his left: lumps of west Iowan hills crept by like turtles. The rest of the train was quiet with slumber.
    The well of sleep had claimed Oswell the previous evening, but tonight he was wide awake, determined to finish the letter he had thrice contemplated burning. He removed the tablecloth and put down the newspapers Addy had given him in case the ink bledthrough again. He set his missive atop the old gazette and