Outlaw Train Read Free

jar of your own and tell folks that’s what it is! They’d never know.”
    Raintree lifted one brow. “I admit that there have been times I have lowered myself to, er, slight deceptions for the sake of showmanship, but I am loath to fake a relic if the real thing is available and at hand, as is this one.”
    Ben had no interest in this argument. He stood. “Good day, gentlemen.” He tucked the Harpe head jar under his right arm and left unceremoniously, having paid Mutton Smith for his meal in advance.
    “If it was me, I’d have sold it to you,” Bug said to Raintree.
    “Oh, Mr. Keely may sell it to me yet. He and I havenot finished our negotiations,” Raintree returned. “I believe our next conversation will put him in a much more accommodating frame of mind.”
    “I don’t know. He’s a stubborn one, always has been.”
    Raintree smiled. “And with the stubborn, sometimes the solution is to adjust the mode of persuasion. And I can be a persuasive man.”
    “Well, don’t take too long. He’s planning to head back toward Kansas later today. Riding out on the afternoon train.”
    Raintree rose, pulled money from his pocket and left it beside his plate, and was gone.
    Bug pulled Raintree’s plate toward him and ate the remnants of his food. He slyly sneaked the money Raintree had left and slid it under the edge of his own bowl, putting Raintree’s now fully emptied trencher back where it had been.
    As Bug rose, he looked back toward the rear, where the crude kitchen was, and hollered back at Mutton Smith, “That feller with the cloth ‘round his head, he left without paying you! ‘Ja hear me, Mutton?”
    Then Bug vacated the place as quickly as he could.
    The fat diner in the corner did not betray Bug’s trickery. He had fallen sound asleep and was snoring loudly, oblivious of all.
    Ben Keely all but forgot about the odd encounter in Mutton Smith’s place before he’d ridden three miles. Just killing time now until it was time to go to the train station. The Harpe’s head crockery jar was safely ensconced in a bulging saddlebag and Keely’smind was drifting, pondering the situation in which he found himself these days.
    Odd, he pondered, how a family as close as his own had been had managed to become estranged. It was sad, but he couldn’t see how things could have gone much differently. His parents had been so devoted to each other and to the life of the mind that they shared, a life utterly different than the great majority of lives lived around them, that they’d paid only limited attention to their children. Ben and Bess Keely had grown up guided and shaped mostly by their own inclinations and natures, going their individual ways. Ben’s path had been a westward journey and a quest for independence; Bess’s path had not led her away from Kentucky geographically, but she’d gained a reputation. She was a young woman who tended to draw attention, and there had been many whispers about her, crude and impolite rumors, things Ben did not want to believe, and tried to dismiss. When he’d left home and headed west, he’d simply chosen to try to forget about such things.
    Then had come the recent news from Bess of the death of their father. Their mother had passed on years earlier, so Ben and Bess were now orphans, albeit grown ones. Ben had pondered the possibility of ignoring the message and not returning to Kentucky. His father was already dead and buried, after all, his mother was long gone, and there was nothing much to be gained by a homecoming.
    But for the sake of improving his relationship with his sister and in hope of finding at least some tangible token of his past to take back to Kansas with him, he had come home. The matter of hissister had not worked out as hoped. They were more estranged even than they had been before. But he had gained the token: this jar of crumbled, dusty bone that had been the skull of Micajah “Big” Harpe, the murderer who had been beheaded at the close of