“You want to what?” Alfred Barnaby stared down the length of his long bulbous nose at the disheveled, whiskey-sour stench, sorry excuse for a man, that sat across the desk from him. He already regretted bailing Silas out of jail. Alfred blew out a blue wreath of smoke from his cigar and slowly gnawed the end of it into a rag, he was that irritated and disgusted at his client. Alfred resented Silas’s very presence in his study. He resented more the circumstances that forced him to accept clients such as Silas Farthingham. Damn stupid Yankees!
Silas glared balefully at his attorney out of one good eye, the other being almost shut from the black eye Thomas Henry had given him the night before, and remained stubbornly silent. He sat forward in the comfortable leather chair and bided his time. He had already told Alfred what he wanted. Silas gave Alfred a moment to digest the news.
“You’re a damn fool, Silas,” Alfred said at last, looking like he’d swallowed something particularly disagreeable.
“I don’t pay you to have opinions about my moral character, Alfred Barnaby.”
“Isn’t it bad enough you went over to harass and threaten Ben Johnson and his family, while you were stinking drunk last night? Wasn’t it enough you made a spectacle out of yourself getting thrown in jail?”
“Hell, no, it’s not enough!” Silas Farthingham spat out in a nasally whine that went straight through Alfred Barnaby’s chest like cat claw’s sliding on a tin roof. “That whoreson of a Blacksmith knows where that bitch has gone. I intend to find out if it is the last thing I ever do.”
Alfred Barnaby laid his cigar down in a glass ashtray on his desk, and folded his hands over the comfortable paunch of his stomach. He kept his thoughts to himself about how prophetic Silas’s words might prove to be. Ben Johnson had a lot of friends. In Piney Creek, Georgia, that was of more lasting value than all of Silas’s filthy lucre.
“I’m not sure the Pinkerton Detective Agency will even consider your case, Silas. For one thing, after Allen Pinkerton uncovered that assignation plot against Abraham Lincoln back before he even became president, they have been much in demand. The president himself uses Pinkerton employees as bodyguards. Since the war, I hear they mainly work on Federal cases to the exclusion of others. I doubt seriously they’ll even consider your flimsy case. ” Alfred paused a moment to let that sink in. “If your information is correct, Rose is no longer even in the United States. She’ll be hard to find, and even harder to extradite.”
Damn, he needed a drink, Silas thought. Here he sat dying for a drink while this mealy-mouthed lawyer of his hadn’t so much as offered him a sip. Damn the weasel’s eye. Alfred was enjoying watching him suffer the pain of a hangover with no sympathy whatsoever.
Silas stared at the long-nosed lawyer with distaste. Alfred’s spectacles kept sliding down towards the end of his nose. For some reason, watching them slowly sliding down that slippery slope made Silas want to grab them off the man’s nose and sling them against the wall.
“Are you going to do it, or not, Alfred?” Silas growled irritably restraining his hands with difficulty.
“I’ll write them today, Silas.” Alfred picked up his cigar and plopped the chewed end into his mouth; needing its comfort to deal with Silas Farthingham. Not for the first time, he regretted taking Silas Farthingham on as a client.
YOU ARE READING
A Bride For The Asking -- (on hold)
RomanceRose McGregor flees the post-civil war south as a mail-order bride, with no other hope than to have a home of her own, a full stomach, and someone to take care of her. She never expected to find more pain and hardship than she's already suffe...
