Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

“It spooks Carter but he says to Grant, ‘We have your daughter. You don’t tell me where that treasure is, I’m goin’ to kill her myself.’

“Grant is crawlin’ on his hands and knees cryin’. Says there is no treasure. Never was one. That’s when Carter leans over the old man and shoots him in the belly. He stands for a while just watchin’ Grant die. Then he rides away. I stayed hidden for a good long while before I had the legs to go get help. I’ve seen some bad things, but I never saw anyone so keen on watchin’ someone die before.”

Tobias pulled a derringer out of one pocket and handed it to Dr. Tom. “Mr. Elam’s gun. I know that boy was a cripple. I never saw him so much as move a finger, but he reared up out of those weeds and died to help Mr. Grant.”

Dr. Tom nodded his thanks to Tobias and pocketed the derringer. He stood at the river’s edge, the water reflective but cloudy like mercury glass. Nate joined him and they watched the oily, humpbacked shapes of darkly speckled fish feeding just below the surface and the armored leathery shapes with eyes swimming at the far side of the river.

“Goddamn it,” Dr. Tom said. He pulled the familiar flask from his back pocket, an inch or so of liquid staining the bottom, and drained it dry. He pitched the flask into the water, watched it as it was caught up in a circular current. “That’s us. Travelin’ in circles, like water down a drain. I don’t even think I remember how to ride in a straight line. I’m about played out, Nate. And it’s not just the pleurisy.” He gingerly pressed one hand along his ribs. “There’s somethin’ else growin’ in here…” He looked at Nate. “I sound like an old woman.”

“You’re gonna need more medicine.” Nate hoped that someone in the settlement would have more “banishment in a bottle,” as Dr. Tom called it. Unless his partner stayed behind, now was not the time for him to try to quit the opiates.

Dr. Tom put a hand on Nate’s arm. “I need you to stay resolved if you’re going to help me end this. Resolved as in no hesitations and no second-guessing, which means that you’d shoot through me to get to McGill if that was the only shot you could take.” His fingers loosened their grip on Nate’s arm and he ran them across the top of his head. “My thoughts aren’t as they should be…”

Nate, keeping his eyes away from Purdy’s corpse, said, “The Grant woman talked about Morgan’s Point. That’s Galveston, I’m thinking. You gonna make it?”

“I’m not going anywhere on a boat. The only thing I’m afraid of is deep water. We can ride like hell and take the bridge train from Houston. Load the horses on a cattle car. We need to find him before he leaves the island and heads for somewhere else.”

“Tom, I’ll say this one more time. We need someone else on this. Local sheriff, maybe.”

“And I’ll say this one more time. George and me started this and I plan to be the one who kills that evil son of a bitch before he leaves Texas. It’s just McGill now.”

“You think he’s not gonna hire more men?”

“Not without money, he’s not. I think he was counting on that gold. He hasn’t pulled a job in a while, which means his getting-around funds are low.”

“You know your way around Galveston?”

Dr. Tom ducked his head briefly. “I know my way some. We leave now, we’ll make it.”

Nate looked over at Tobias and asked, “Anything else you need to tell us?”

Tobias’s hand searched the scar on his face in a thoughtful way. “Miss Carter? She’s somethin’ more than a schoolteacher, if you take my meaning. She talked to me about goin’ to New Orleans.”

Nate cast a cautious eye at Dr. Tom and he nodded.

“She’s a smart woman; had all these people eating from her hand,” Tobias said. “But she’s not gonna live long with that killer.”

Nate thanked Tobias and mounted his horse, then waited patiently for Dr. Tom to clear a coughing fit and mount his own. They headed off for Houston—rushing past the astonished settlers still gathered uncertainly around the wagon—and when they arrived, they sold the saddle off the grulla mare and then the horse itself to a cotton trader with more money than sense. Then they bought the tickets for the train to the island.

Using the last of Mrs. Landry’s money, Lucinda took a room at the Republic Hotel in Galveston. She had arrived that afternoon off the train from Houston and gone to wait at the hotel, as she had been told to, for Bill to arrive. It was extravagant, but what did it matter? There would be gold enough to see them in comfort for a long time, perhaps years.

She bathed and washed her hair, leaving it down to dry in the warmth from a small corner stove, and through the window, she watched the traffic up and down the Strand. A block away she could see the burned-out shell of the old Tremont Hotel, still standing in partial ruins five years after the fire that destroyed a good part of the town.

She opened the windows, letting in the sharp damp air and the sounds from the wide, evenly spaced streets below. Earlier, she had stepped from the train and walked westward a few blocks to the pier, where she stood looking out at the bay. The island behind her and to the south was flat, devoid of even small hillocks, so that when she confronted the water, the horizon appeared alarmingly elevated and it seemed impossible that the ocean would not rush to overtake the land and everything perched on it.

She watched the ships crowding the harbor: steamers; sailing vessels of every color, size, and dimension; and pilot boats ferrying passengers and crates to and from larger ships anchored far from shore. Stretching her arms along the hand railing, extending them fully to either side, she constructed in her mind a line from her right arm taking her towards New Orleans and from her left towards Mexico. After a while she closed her eyes, feeling the bracing wind at her back and the lowering sun on her face, and imagined herself a kind of polestar drawing Bill to her. “Azimuth,” she murmured, refining her thoughts. I am the bearing of the polestar from which the surveyor takes his plotting.

Then she had walked back through town, stepping quickly alongside the men and women, native-born and immigrant, who spilled over the sidewalks into the streets. She watched the progress of two Celestials burdened with massive bundles, the men’s braids swinging in tandem, until they disappeared into an alley. Entering the hotel lobby, she heard half a dozen languages, and she made mental notes of which new style of hat and waist cincher she would have created once they had settled in New Orleans.

A clock tower down the street gave the time as four o’clock and she had begun to doze when she heard a key in the lock. The door opened, and there was the customary pause that Bill practiced before walking into any room. He passed through the doorway and looked at her before turning his head, searching, and finding no one else there. He knows , she thought, without even asking, that May is gone.

He took off his coat, draped it onto the bed, and sat in a nearby chair, observing her. Crossing his legs, he then stared out the window, his chin resting on the back of one hand, his fingers curled. She looked closely for whitening or tension around the knuckles, but found none.

Through the window came the sound of a boy calling the newspaper headlines from the afternoon paper. “Edward Rulloff, Bavarian Butcher, hanged in New York! Ulysses S. Grant says Georgia to rejoin Union!”

Bill stood up, retrieved his coat from the bed, and abruptly walked from the room. No words had been exchanged. Lucinda had instinctively waited for him to speak before speaking herself, and when he’d sighed once, exhaling softly over his folded hand, she thought he would tell her his own news. He had brought no bags into the room, and there was no indication that he had anything other than the dirt-streaked clothes on his back. His boots were thickly coated with old mud and he left bits of it on the floor, like a trail.