Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

Alger sat next to him, keeping the hours by whispering a story he had been told of Jean Lafitte’s time in New Orleans and of how he had hidden gold coins within the bricks of the very buildings lining Pirate’s Alley.

Nate asked the boy if he thought the stories were true. The boy regarded him with his young-old face and answered that it hardly mattered whether they were true or not. That people would trail after the merest rumor of gold, cleaving to their worst inclinations, like the inevitable and uncontrollable shakes following a strong fever.

After that, the boy was quiet and Nate spent the remainder of the darkened hours listening to the night’s thunder and rain, rolling like bands of siege artillery in the far distance, and counting the number of miles he had traveled, beginning in Franklin months ago, and the number of bodies given to the earth in search of a treasure that most likely didn’t exist. That he should spend his last night in New Orleans in a place called Pirate’s Alley was a thing he was sure Dr. Tom would have appreciated.

Dr. Tom had once told him that no matter how purposeful a course a man chose for himself, time and circumstance would choose their own path and would, like unseen authors, rewrite a man’s life to suit their own designs. Like Dickens, he had said, pulling Pip out of a perfectly good bed and into a graveyard at night, onto the path of an escaped killer.

From the moment Nate stepped onto the pier, he had certainly felt stripped of his intentions and placed in a narrative that had already been written. Even lying at McGill’s feet with his own pistol being pointed at his belly, he had been confounded by happenstance outside of his control, terror-filled and paralyzed by McGill’s rant of the nothingness following death.

Alger disappeared at dawn to alert Gorman’s men, who would take Nate and Lucinda to the steamer at the docks, but Nate knew that even a regiment escort would not prevent a well-placed shootist on a roof with an unobstructed view from putting a bullet into his skull.

When it was full light, he took hold of Lucinda’s arm and shook her awake. Her eyes opened and she sat up, and Nate wondered how much resistance she would put up to their leaving. But she remained seated at the edge of the bed, waiting to be told how and when to move.

Within the hour Alger had returned with Gorman’s men in a wagon, and Nate sat next to Deerling’s daughter with Alger at his feet, surrounded by armed men. They rumbled down Tchoupitoulas Street towards the pier and they were almost to the docks before he realized that the warehouse workers had collected in the open bay doors as they passed and were watching their progress silently.

A crowd had started to gather, lining both sides of the narrow lane to the steamer docks, and Nate recognized some of the street denizens from the rooster shoot a few days before. The attending pickpockets and thieves were straight-faced and leaden, their necks craned warily towards a cluster of men holding shotguns, blocking the lane, and Nate knew them to be Duverje’s.

Someone from the gathering shouted, “Don’t worry, we got your back.” And another man called out, “Yeah, waaaay back.”

There was laughter from the crowd until Duverje’s men moved forward, halting the wagon’s progress, and the driver pulled up on the reins. Nate looked to the ready steamer in its dock not a hundred paces away and recognized Captain Pascal standing on the open deck, watching the crowd.

A small prim man in an expensive, tight-fitting suit stepped to the front of the cadre of armed men and smiled. He pointed at Nate and said, “You and I have something to settle. You destroyed some very valuable property, property that took a lot of time and expense to acquire, and you will repay me. One way or another.”

Nate looked towards the docks and then over the swelling numbers of bystanders; he calculated that the crowd had grown to more than a hundred. He turned to one of the men in the wagon. “Where are my horse and rifle?” he asked.

“Mr. Gorman had them placed on the steamer, as promised.”

Nate looked again at Duverje and the growing mob of spectators and, pointing to Lucinda, shouted, “I’m a policeman, appointed by the governor of Texas—”

“You are not in Texas now,” Duverje interrupted.

Nate stood up. “This is my prisoner and I’m taking her to that steamer. Anyone who obstructs in this will be shot.”

“Not if you are shot first,” Duverje said.

Nate then removed the Dance from his holster, cocked it, and waited.

The men in the wagon shifted nervously, and then, one by one, they got out and stood some distance away. Duverje’s smile began to fade and he moved behind the protective press of his own men.

Nate scanned the surrounding faces again. Gorman had told him that the demimonde had made him one of their own. But the men and women watching him were wary, and no one had made a move to come to his defense.

To the resounding quiet, he dipped his head for a moment, gathering in his mind the roan’s epic swim and agonizing climb out of the surf, and then announced, “I’m going home now.”

Nate stepped from the wagon and held his hand out to Lucinda. She stood and was helped down by suddenly solicitous men, awkward with rifles in hand. Holding her wrist with his left hand, he walked purposefully towards the dock, calling for Duverje and his men to move aside. He swiftly approached the lead man, whose gun was leveled, hoping that the man’s protective instincts would take hold and he would back away defensively, but the leader just cocked his rifle and raised it to his shoulder.

A sudden shotgun blast sounded from the dock, and the crowd turned as one towards the Annie Gillette and the captain on the elevated steering deck, who was holding a rifle leveled at Duverje’s men. Pascal called out, “Duverje, I see you, you little coon-ass. You can’t hide from where I’m standing.”

A single full-throated, harrowing yell, like a lone battle charge, erupted, and a man began pushing his way violently to the front of the crowd. Shirtless and deeply muscled with a scarred torso shining darkly with animal grease, the man broke ranks and came into the open. He bellowed his ancestry of snake, gator, and river dog, pointing the tip of his knife at Duverje’s men. He wore a frayed turkey feather in his cap and paused in his pronouncements to give Nate a nod of recognition.

The docks were still except for the multitude of eyes tracking from challengers to challenged, and an expectant sighing from the crowd began, a collective excitement like heat lightning building along the fringes of the gathering as men and women pressed forward to better see.

“Duverje,” the turkey-feather man yelled, pointing his knife like an accusing finger. “Go on back to Algiers. This is our city; your cock-rooster is gone. I’m the only bayou bully here and we say this man can leave when and how he chooses.”

An ear-shattering blast of the steamer whistle sounded then, and from every throat came a frenzied cry, and the excited crowd surged together across the lane, engulfing Duverje and his men, building a protective wall of swirling bodies.

For a moment, Nate glimpsed Alger straining angrily against the press, shouting something Nate could not make out, but the boy was soon hidden among the taller men and he never reappeared.

Nate was passed from person to person like a log in a swirling eddy, but he and Lucinda were both heaved by the street people onto the boarding ramp, and the steamer soon jerked away from the dock. Nate climbed the stairs to the captain’s deck to watch the turkey-feather man circling within the ring formed by the crowd, his knife arm rising and falling, sweeping vertically and diagonally, threatening the largest of Duverje’s men, who had drawn his own knife.