Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

Following Dr. Tom’s spitting up blood on the second night, the doctor ordered Nate to hold him down while he forced laudanum down the patient’s throat.

After swallowing the laudanum, Dr. Tom rested more quietly, but awake or asleep, he held on to the letter Nate had returned to him, clutching it until it was wilted with sweat.

On the fourth day after his return from Harrisburg, Nate finally received a letter of his own, from his wife. It seemed it was the third letter she had written, the first two, he guessed, delivered to Austin after they had already passed through. He read the letter several times, lingering over the news about his daughter.

Mattie wears the necklace you sent day and night. She will not take it off even at bedtime. Many times she has fallen asleep with her fingers wrapped around the beads. She misses you, Nathaniel, as do I. I wear a necklace made of the time spent without you, and though the beads are invisible, they are weighty on my neck, and it grows longer by the day.

His throat closed at the last, but he imagined the delight in his daughter’s face at the moment of the necklace’s discovery. He held fast to that image, countering the memory of Deerling’s lifeless stare after he’d stopped breathing.

“You’ve still got George’s blood all over you.”

Dr. Tom’s eyes were open and Nate wondered how long he’d been watching him. Nate looked down at his coat sleeves and at the brown stains that mottled them.

Dr. Tom turned his head to better see. “You wearin’ that coat as some kind of penance?”

Nate looked away, his eyes seeking a blank wall but finding Deerling’s Whitworth propped in the corner. Dr. Tom coughed once and a grimace passed over his face. Nate started to stand to help him, but the ranger waved him down. The spasm passed, and, after the chest rattling had calmed, Dr. Tom rasped, “You’re not to blame.”

Nate did stand up then and fled the room. He walked down the street and paced in front of the dry-goods store and the post office, wiping at his eyes with his sleeves when he thought no one was looking. He considered writing his wife. He would pour out his pain to her in the hopes of gaining some relief from the guilt over Deerling’s death.

But he started walking north instead and kept going until he had come to the cemetery where they had buried the ranger. He stopped for a brief while at the grave, the clods and raw earth already settling into the spaces that the shovels had made. They hadn’t readied the headstone yet, but he knew what it would say: George A. Deerling, born 1813, died 1870, Comrade in Arms, Father, Friend .

He found his way back to the road again and continued walking.

Wagons headed for Houston passed him, the travelers inside giving him cautious looks. He was a horseless man walking on narrow, round-heeled boots and wearing a coat stained like an old butcher’s apron. His stride was still uneven from the bruising his hip had taken from the fall, but the jagged sensations somehow helped to quiet his mind.

After a few more miles, he came to a farmhouse with a rail fence, and he sat on it, facing away from the road. The fields were flat prairie land, like his farm in Oklahoma.

He thought of his wife and daughter and a feeling like a blow to the chest closed up his throat. Deerling had been right: Nate wasn’t much of a farmer. Still, the land was biddable enough, and he was young enough to learn. He could, over time, make a better farm. His true desire, though, was to begin his own herd of horses, to breed the best working animals, combining Texas cow ponies with the Oklahoma-reservation stock. But it would take more money than he could make farming, and his decision to join the Texas police had been a way to earn the seed money to begin the herd.

His mind turned round and round on these topics, like the blind pony he had bought for Mattie who knew only one route: down the path, around the field, and back to the barn. The little horse never stumbled, but he never found new ground either.

The sun had angled steeply to the west before he climbed off the fence and walked the miles back to Houston. When he entered the sickroom, he pulled off his coat and wadded it into a corner. Dr. Tom looked at him through pooled, glassy eyes, but his color was better.

Dr. Tom nodded for him to sit in the chair. When Nate had settled, he said, “You should take George’s horse. No, now, listen. That horse is too big for me, and mine is already set to my ways. I wouldn’t entrust him to anyone else.” Dr. Tom faltered and looked at the ceiling, struggling to quiet a sudden wash of grief.

He cleared his throat, wiped his face with the bedsheet. “I’m going to be in this bed for a while yet, and you need to go on to Lynchburg alone. You can’t be walkin’ the distance, and that big bay would take you to Canada if you asked him to. I want you to listen good, ’cause I’m too winded to repeat myself. You’re going only to see if McGill and his men are encamped there.” He pointed a finger at Nate. “You don’t engage. Hide your badge, keep your head down, and get back here to me.” He paused, his breathing labored. “There’s one last thing. A woman’s been traveling with McGill, and I want to know if she’s there in Lynchburg.”

“A woman?”

Dr. Tom palmed the sweat off his face. “She’s George’s daughter.”

Nate sat back in the chair and stared at Dr. Tom. “I thought his daughter was dead.”

Dr. Tom shook his head. “She turned bad and ran away. George tried bringing her home, but she always left again. A while back, she took up with McGill. George’s mission in life was to redeem her or see her in prison.”

“He would have sent her to prison?”

“She’s a grown woman involved with a man that’s killed eleven people along with two children. You saw that widow in Frost Town. What makes you think that a woman with any decency left would cleave to an evil man like McGill?” Dr. Tom paused, his hand clutching his chest as if to will himself into a calmer state.

Nate recalled that Deerling’s exact words were “I had a daughter”; he didn’t say that she had died, and Nate saw in ways that he wished he didn’t how the world could swallow a child just by spinning from one day to the next. Deerling’s single-minded mission to find McGill suddenly made sense.

Nate asked, “What about Taggert? I still don’t know why you didn’t want me to tell him about McGill in Lynchburg.”

“Nate, we’ve come too far to let a county man have McGill. That’s why I asked you to keep quiet about the telegram.”

“And Prudone?”

“First things first. We put an end to McGill, and then I’ll settle with Prudone in my own way. That son of a bitch will be going to hell already torched.”

Nate sat quiet for a moment. “I don’t know about this, Tom. It all feels too…”

“Personal?” Dr. Tom asked. He struggled to sit up in the bed. “Isn’t that what you told me that first day out of Franklin? You said, ‘Hell, it’s all personal.’ Getting to McGill was not personal just to George; it’s personal to me too. More than you could possibly know. And with you or without you, I’m settling on McGill and then Prudone.” He let Nate think on that a bit and then asked, “Why did you go after those horse thieves in Arkansas, Nate? They only took a few horses. They shot a kid, but you were just a kid yourself. Why didn’t you just let it go?” He closed his eyes for a moment, his chest moving erratically. “You didn’t let it go, because it would have eaten at you the rest of your natural life. This I know about you. You have a fire in you to make things right. Don’t you think going after George’s murderer is as right as reclaiming a few horses?”