The Whistle Before the Halt

The train had been moving west for three hours when the thing outside my window began keeping pace.

I saw it between stands of cottonwood, pale against the brown earth: a rider on a white horse, traveling where there was no road. The horse’s hooves struck sparks from the stones. The rider wore a broad hat and a long coat bright as bleached bone, though the afternoon sun had gone coppery and low.

I lowered my Bible into my lap.

Psalm thirty-seven waited beneath my thumb. I had read the same verse six times without carrying a word of it away. The carriage shook hard enough to rattle the glass in its brass frame, and every few seconds the rider vanished behind a rise or a curtain of trees. Each time, I expected him to fall behind.

Each time, he appeared again.

My brother had told me the West was wide enough to lose a person in. He had said it while packing my trunk, with his sleeves rolled above his elbows and the kitchen stove burning too hot behind him. Go to Saint Orison, Evie. Find work. Find decent people. The country is changing faster than we can keep up with it.

He had died two weeks later, facedown beside the mercantile stove, with blood on his shirt and a letter clenched in his hand.

I had not found decent people since.

The pistol at my waist pressed cold against my ribs. Samuel had given it to me the night before the funeral, though he had never explained why he kept checking the windows while he did so. I had fired it once behind the house. The bullet struck the fence post sideways, and Samuel had laughed until he coughed.

Now I kept my hand near it and tried to read.

A conductor passed through the carriage, calling, “Last stop before the plains! Twenty minutes!”

The passengers stirred. A mother gathered her sleeping boy. Two soldiers argued over cards. Across the aisle, a woman with silver beads braided through her hair watched me over the top of a newspaper. Her gaze rested on my black dress, my travel-stained gloves, and the pistol I had failed to conceal.

Outside, the pale rider turned his painted face toward the train.

I shut the Bible.

The train began to slow as we entered the station. The brakes shrieked, and steam rolled past the windows in thick white sheets. The platform appeared: a water tower, a leaning depot, three freight wagons, and a dozen people waiting beneath the sign for Mercy Junction.

A man mounted the last step of the moving train.

He caught the handrail with one gloved hand and came aboard without haste, though the wheels were still turning beneath him. His duster was dark with dust. A broad-brimmed hat shadowed his face, but I saw enough: pale skin, a narrow scar along his jaw, and eyes the gray of rainwater.