Chapter 8
Miss Sadie's Divining Parlor, May 29, 1936
- The next morning, Abilene discovers that the bar in the saloon-half of Shady's home has a secret panel that can be moved to hide any traces of drinking. Whoa.
- Alcohol is still against the law here, even though Prohibition ended a short time ago, but that doesn't stop the bootleggers.
- Abilene is used to seeing alcohol, though, since she's grown up around a bunch of men going through hard times.
- She decides to sneak back to Miss Sadie's Divining Parlor to get her compass, but when she gets there, it's been taken down. Talk about rotten luck.
- She creeps inside to see if she can find it, but just then, Miss Sadie, the Hungarian fortune-teller, comes in.
- You'd think she'd be all like, why are you in my house, kid? But instead, she offers to tell her fortune.
- Abilene declines, but pays her a dime anyway, hoping that'll get her to cough up her compass.
- Suddenly, she blurts out a request after all. She says she's looking for her daddy.
- Miss Sadie asks if she has something that he's touched.
- Abilene decides to see just how good this medium really is, and gives her the old letter she found at Shady's.
- It seems to get Miss Sadie all worked up, and she starts telling Abilene a story about a boy on a train.
Chapter 9
Triple Toe Creek, Crawford County, Kansas, October 6, 1917
- Now here's where the storytelling starts to get a bit complicated. This chapter begins the story that Miss Sadie tells Abilene. Notice how the chapter title has jumped back in time to 1917?
- A 13-year-old kid named Jinx jumps out of a train and lands near a teen couple having an argument.
- Okay, seriously, what is the deal with people jumping out of trains? Is it like an obsession with them?
- So anyway, the girl storms off, and the guy, Ned, stays to mope there with the fish he just caught.
- Jinx starts trying to sell him a bottle of "Eskimo glacial water" that he swears up and down will make him more attractive to the ladies.
- The poor kid actually buys it—with the fish he caught. He tells Jinx all about the awesome "Wiggle King" lure he used to catch it with.
- After he leaves, Jinx just lazes around in the woods, waiting for another train to hop.
- It turns out he's got some sort of dark past, involving a death. His uncle Finn had told him it'd be better if they split up, so he's on his own now.
- While he's lying around, Ned comes back, furious. All that "glacial water" did was make him stink.
- But before they can get into a fight, they hear a gunshot, and run off to hide together in the woods.
- Looks like they've run right into a Ku Klux Klan meeting.
- Oh, man. This is not good.
- They try to sneak past the loud group, who are all gathered around a huge bonfire.
- As they walk, they overhear the men talking about how much they hate foreigners, and they see two of the guys take their hoods off.
- Ned tells Jinx that the guys are Arthur Devlin, who owns the mine in town, and Lester Burton, the pit boss.
- They're so powerful in town, they don't feel like they need to hide their identities under the white hoods.
- They're talking about plans to rough up some of the Irish, French, and Italians in Manifest.
- Jinx asks Ned where he's from, but Ned doesn't know—he came to Manifest on a train as a child and was adopted by the Gillen family there.
- Suddenly, Jinx gets an idea.
- He sneaks over to retrieve two discarded white hoods and robes, and he and Ned put them on.
- Then they walk casually through the crowd, trying to make their escape. Brilliant.
- But uh-oh—out of nowhere, Lester Burton is blocking their path.
- Jinx thinks fast, stays cool, and tells Lester that the last KKK rally they went to was much bigger.
- It's enough to fool Lester, so they head over to the outhouse. The outhouse? Really? Is this the best time?
- As a parting shot, Jinx replaces the newspaper scraps they had for toilet paper with… poison ivy.
- After this lovely little prank, they make a clean getaway.