Page 5 of A Convenient Heart
The conductor was calling out, and several people stood up in this train car, moving toward the door.
The brakes weren’t screeching yet, but Jack could feel the slowing motion.
Looking down the car, he recognized the head of dark hair beneath a ten-gallon hat, the matching dark-brown mustache. The man was a head taller than most other travelers in the train car, and his lined face showed hard living.
Morris.
Jack turned to go back the way he’d come. He didn’t have any desire to bump into Morris.
But two passengers blocked his way back into the other train car, and the only exit was to slip into the water closet.
Jack latched the door behind him.
He had a revolver at his hip, though he’d only had occasion to use it shooting cans off a branch or fence post. It was mostly for show, to keep other poker players from trying to rob him.
But Morris was a hired gun for the owner of a silver mine back in Colorado. Jack had judged him as unpredictable the last time he’d seen him.
The conductor called out again, his voice sounding just outside the water closet door. He must be returning through the compartment and re-entering the car Jack had left.
“I’m looking for a man named Jack Easton.”
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.
