Page 99 of His Unforgettable Bride
That was Morris’s voice. He must’ve followed the conductor. Sounded like he was standing right outside the water closet.
“He’s got some aliases,” Morris went on.
Whatever the conductor said in response, it was muffled.
“He’s got light hair. Wears a beard sometimes. Ugly as sin.”
There was a tiny spotted looking glass high on one wall, and Jack glanced in it now. His nose had been broken once, a long time ago. It had the slightest bend in it. His eyes had crow’s feet from being in the sun.
He wasn’t ugly.
At least, not judging by the looks he got from the women who kept company in the saloons. He never took them up on the offers their eyes made.
Jack appeared a little disreputable, maybe, with the scruff on his chin—hadn’t seen a barber in weeks. Not ugly.
“He stole five hundred bucks from a friend of mine. I’d like to get it back.”
Jack watched in the looking glass as his reflection scowled.
He hadn’t stolen a thing from Clark Henshaw. Jack had won at the poker table fair and square—without even a card up his sleeve.
He’d learned early on how cards made more sense than people. How to predict what was coming up next—ace or deuce or anything in between.
Reading people had come later, out of necessity. He’d learned to predict when a fist might come his way and that an empty bottle meant trouble.
He was good at reading people now. And he didn’t drink much. Saw it as a weakness after what he’d been through as a child. Which meant that the longer the night went on at a poker table and the more drunk the men around him got, the sharper Jack’s senses became.
He didn’t have to cheat to win.
And the men he played could afford to lose. He didn’t play otherwise.
“I’d like to get the money back to my friend,” Morris said.
Good luck.
Jack had fifty cents in his pocket. He’d passed the winnings from Henshaw’s table to a group of widows whose husbands had died in a mine accident. Henshaw had sent men into an unsafe shaft, and they’d been lost to a cave-in. The unscrupulous owner had made no reparations to the widows left behind—women who had children to feed but no source of income. Likely those women had paid overdue bank notes or settled up accounts at the local general store.
Jack had righted that wrong.
There was no money for Morris to collect.
And Jack didn’t want to think about how the man might try to enforce the debt. He winced.
The train braked with a hiss and screech. The voices outside the water closet rose and fell as passengers disembarked.
Jack edged open the door to find the small vestibule empty.
He cautiously moved out of the water closet and tried to guess where Morris had gone. Would he get off the train at this stop?
Jack crept through the doors and back onto his original train car.
It was empty.
As he tried to guess whether Morris had gone through here, Jack rushed forward to see that both the young groom and Gray Beard were gone.
But the groom’s coat and hat were abandoned on the seat. The coat was crumpled, flower hanging precariously.
The door opened at the end of the train car, and Jack’s pulse pounded as if he’d drawn a pair of aces.
