Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

The growing distance soon erased the individual features of the dueling men and the crowd surrounding them, turning the scene into a prosaic tableau, one without blood or bones or sweat, reducing death to the smallest speck on the horizon.

The rain had cleared away, leaving the Gulf waters calm, and the steamer made good time towards Galveston. The captain had food and drink brought to Nate and Lucinda, but he left them mostly alone, asking Nate only if he had gotten his man. Nate nodded but offered no more of the story, and the captain went back to his wheel.

Later, during the night, Nate came out on the deck, and the captain asked Nate if he should see to Lucinda, who was sitting motionless on the lower deck, staring out at the passing water.

Nate glanced at her once and answered, “I don’t give a damn one way or another.”

The captain opened his mouth as if to say something, but then seemed to think better of it and took it upon himself to cover her shivering form with a blanket.

In the early-morning hours, the steamer passed Pelican Island, and Nate raised the Whitworth and peered through the scope to scan the beach. He saw the roan standing in a small stand of trees cropping at the sea grass, and the horse raised its head at the whistle’s blast. Nate watched for a while and for the first time began to shed, like a snake’s skin, the dire anxiousness that had plagued him for weeks, and sensed in its place an expectation for a course of life not seated in fear.

He jumped when he felt someone touching the rifle and saw that Lucinda had come on quiet feet to stand with him. She tugged gently at the barrel and he realized that she wanted to look through the scope. He frowned but gave her the rifle and she raised it in one graceful motion to her shoulder and sighted through the scope towards the beach. He watched the dark flow of her hair curling into the wind and saw the mole beneath her right eye, a lone punctuation mark on a clean page. A scent from her like Mayhaw grapes filled his nostrils and he stepped abruptly away, as though she had struck him. She smiled shallowly, her eye still focused on the island, but her brow soon furrowed and she handed him back the rifle and returned wordless to her place on the deck.

In Galveston, Nate took Lucinda directly to the jailhouse, where he found Thoreau eating at his desk. Thoreau paused, a forkful of food halfway to his mouth, his eyes all worry.

Nate motioned for Lucinda to sit in a chair. “This is my prisoner, Lucinda Goddard,” he said. “I’m taking her to the mainland as soon as I’m able.”

Thoreau set his fork down. “And your man McGill?”

“Dead.”

Thoreau looked at Lucinda briefly. “And where exactly are you going to say you apprehended your prisoner?”

“Right here.” Nate crossed his arms and waited for Thoreau to weigh the consequences of refuting his story to the officials in Austin.

Thoreau picked up his fork and began eating again. “You say you apprehended her here. Then that must be where it happened. The island is a big place. Do me the kindness, though, of being on the train tomorrow morning.”

Nate assured him that they would, but he left Lucinda in a cell at the jailhouse for the night while he walked to the telegraph office next to the Republic Hotel.

The first cable was to police headquarters in Austin: Lucinda Goddard apprehended Galveston. McGill rumored dead New Orleans. Returning to Austin with haste.

He had only a moment’s flush of conscience about the lie; that the arrest be considered legal for a trial in Texas was the important thing. He didn’t care what Lucinda said. He doubted her word would count for much, if anything.

The second cable went to Harrisburg, to Marshal Prudone, and contained only a few words: McGill dead. Texas law coming.

The third and final cable went to his wife: Leaving Galveston for Austin with prisoner. Will write soon.

After a moment’s hesitation he added, my abiding love to you and Mattie.

In the morning, Thoreau accompanied them to the station, and he stood on the platform watching the train depart with relief showing plain on his dark face.

Lucinda sat next to Nate on the swaying train, leaning briefly on his arm in sleep, and he would have rolled his shoulder to wake her but for the woman across the aisle, who smiled at him knowingly, as though witnessing a lovely thing, his sweetheart resting so close to his bosom.

It made him feel low and mean, this revulsion for a woman that his partner had loved and taken for a wife. He tried to call up a feeling of connectedness to Dr. Tom through her presence and to remember the overwhelming, rushing joy that had taken him while riding the engine, but it felt like a year since the first trip to Galveston, the only things left to him a profound sense of loss of fellowship and direction and a building anger that was fueled by the limp body resting against his. It seemed impossible to him that she would not have known McGill was a killer from the very first, and his hostility towards her swelled like a canker.

He let her sleep but pulled her roughly from the train at Harrisburg. He carried the Whitworth in one hand and dragged Lucinda stumbling behind him with the other, moving through the dust towards the jailhouse, steeling himself for the confrontation with Prudone. He had practiced what he would say to the marshal, his warning to him that it wouldn’t be that day, or the next, but that someday Nate was going to shoot him dead for the murder of Deerling and there wouldn’t be a goddamn thing anyone could do to stop him. He could stand in the next county, aim, fire, and take the top of Prudone’s head off, and no one would be the wiser as to who had done it.

But he found only one young deputy in residence—not more than nineteen or so—nervously jangling a ring of cell keys, looking like nothing so much as a kid holding a rattle.

“Marshal Prudone only recently left town,” he told Nate. “Rode south yesterday tracking cattle thieves. And I have no idea when the marshal will return. He said it might not be for a good while.”

Nate considered this for a moment. He had thought about dealing with Prudone so many times that it had never occurred to him that the man wouldn’t be there. In Nate’s mind, Prudone was somehow as immutable and fixed as the clock tower over the station. But he was tired, and he looked at Lucinda and realized that his exhaustion was due in part to the hours spent in her company; her passive, hollow presence threatened to sap away his anger like vinegar sucked into a sea sponge.

Nate stepped back into the street, leaving Lucinda behind with the deputy, who awkwardly stood and offered his chair to her instead of placing her in a cell. Nate carried the rifle to the beer hall and found the same barkeep behind the bar that he and Deerling had spoken to weeks before, the barkeep, and former sheriff of Goliad, who had warned that someday someone would settle harshly on Prudone.

Nate laid the Whitworth across the bar. “Do you remember me?”

The barkeep nodded. “You were here with that ranger. Looking for McGill. Did you find him?”

“Yes. I found him. He’s dead.”

The barkeep exhaled through his teeth. He set two glasses on the bar and poured whiskey for both of them.

Nate emptied the glass and gestured to the rifle. “Would you be willing to trade this for that gold coin? I don’t know how much the coin is worth, but this gun is easily worth a thousand dollars.”

The barkeep looked at him in surprise. “Why would you want to do that?”

“A lot of people gave their lives for that coin. The ranger I was with is dead. So is his partner. I want it as a reminder of what I’ve lost.” He stuck out his hand to strike the deal, which the barkeep, after some hesitation, took in his own.