Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

Lucinda boarded the train’s passenger car behind a stout, respectable-looking woman with two small children. She sat facing the little family and smiled pleasantly at them. The ride would be six hours, and she settled back on the bench to look out of the window. The train lurched twice and then slowly began to gain momentum once it had passed the abandoned cotton gin on the outskirts of town.

A few miles south, they slowed for a bridge crossing, and a man in a long frock coat and feathering silver beard walked from the underpass and came to stand near the tracks. He held up a large board as the train’s passenger cars came abreast of him. Printed with hand-blocked letters, the board read God Is Coming. But He Is Not Here Yet.

The woman clucked in agreement and, speaking with the heavy accent of some distant place, told Lucinda she was going to Houston to be married, her first husband having died the year before. She had been a lady’s maid once, but after the chaos and ruin of the war, she had been hired by an undertaker to do the hair and face-painting of the dead. Business had been very good for a few years, but of late the undertaker’s establishment had gone into a decline. She still had nightmares of the dead coming to life and grabbing her around the wrist as she worked on them, but she told Lucinda, “One does what one must to live.”

Lucinda agreed with her. The woman soon fell asleep with the rocking of the train, and Lucinda looked out the window again at the slanting light blazing the grasslands and prairies and thought, Yes, one does what one must.

Nate looked east across rolling terrain carved deep with escarpments and punctured by thorn grasses, mesquite, and cholla, the thorns of which seemed to leap off the cactus onto passing horse or man. He remembered thinking on his initial ride to Franklin that he had never seen such country. He had been through the Big Thicket and longleaf piney woods of East Texas, gone farther east into the wilds of Arkansas, with its mountains of boulders and sheer drop-away cliffs. And he’d been over the vast expanses of Oklahoma, where he was born, the surface planes of which seemed often molded to a concavity, such was the weight of its flatness.

In Oklahoma, the ground had always appeared to him to be resting. It was solid, packed firm under the hooves of countless horses, bison, and cattle, its ancient upheaval already done. Here in Texas, the ground first buckled and then plunged away, lowering to canyons or surging up into mesas, as though still in the act of formation.

The Sierra Vieja stood at his back as he watched Deerling and Dr. Tom riding a short way ahead. From the time they had left Franklin, following south the floodplains of the Rio Grande to their first supply stop at Eagle Springs, Nate had instinctively lagged behind. It seemed somehow an imposition on seniority to ride next to them, although it wasn’t only his junior status that gave him pause. It was more the sense of violating an unspoken social pact that made him loath to come within earshot.

Watching the rangers together, he was struck again by their similarity or, more to the point, their relatedness, although he knew for a fact they were not blood kin. Upon Nate’s being sworn in to the Texas State Police, Captain Drake had spoken of Deerling’s and Goddard’s long career of rangering—twenty years together, almost as long as Nate had been alive, border wars and Indian chasing for half their own lives. Drake had told Nate personally that if he chose to make a career of the law, he could do no better than attach himself to Tom Goddard and George Deerling.

On occasion, Dr. Tom would drop back and point out animal markings in the sandy loam or a weathered imprint carved into the rock. Often it was to warn Nate to look sharp, to scan the slight rises or abutments of rock for signs of movement from Mescalero Apache or even Comanche raiding south from the Llano Estacado. Earlier, Dr. Tom had taken him to task for his old Dance revolver and his Henry repeating rifle, asking when Nate would grab some sense and be reborn into the religion of Colt and Winchester. He warned Nate, “Someday when you don’t need it to happen, some piece of metal’s going to get fouled under the hammer of that cap-and-ball pistol. You wait and see.”

Nate had to admire the wicked beauty of the brass, self-contained cartridges of the rangers’ converted navy Colts. But he’d never give up his Dance cap-and-ball pistol. It had been given to him at the outbreak of the war by a man closer to him than his own father. He did, however, admit that he would gladly give over the old Henry hanging in a scabbard at his side for a .44 Winchester as soon as he had the means to do so.

The sun set in slow measure, warming their backs until the light was snuffed out and the elevated plain turned cold. They passed through Fort Davis, a dirty, mean, nearly abandoned fort manned by black soldiers left over from the war. They had been assigned to guard the coach and wagon trail routes frequently raided by Indians because of their training in conflict but also because these soldiers had nowhere else to go. No funds were available to keep the fort in good working order, so its window frames stood empty of glass, its barracks empty of doors.

Deerling did not stop at the fort but rode purposefully through the town, saying they would bedroll at Limpia Creek a half mile away. The soldiers stood quietly in groups in the alleyways, hovering around fire pits, their impassive faces turned towards their shoes.

They ate jerky and pan bread next to a fire built up from mesquite wood under an overhang. Dr. Tom pulled from his pack a much-abused news sheet and squinted at the variegated print in the half-light. Nate tossed out the last of the grounds in his cup and started to pull off his boots.

Deerling said, “Don’t do that.”

Dr. Tom pointed to the overhang. “We get a visitation, you don’t want to have to make a run for it in your stocking feet.”

Deerling lay supine on his bedroll, his shotgun cradled like a child in his arms. Closing his eyes, he said, “Tom, take first watch. Then Nate. Then wake me.”

Dr. Tom squinted hard at the newsprint, but the fire had grown too weak, and the wilted sheet was refolded and put back into the pack.

True to their word, the rangers had seen to Collie’s burial. They arranged for the local undertaker to claim the reward and sent the balance, after expenses for box and shovel were met, to Collie’s wife in Van Horn’s Wells. There had been no inquiries made in Franklin by Captain Drake or anyone else; no questions, no delays in leaving. Collie was dead by his own hand and that was that. The judge would be intercepted by a rider on the San Antonio mail road. The rangers were asked only to make their reports by telegram to Drake. Nate would do the same to the state police office in Austin.

Dr. Tom rubbed his hands together. “There’ll be snow on the ground soon. We need to be in Fort Stockton before that happens.”

Nate nodded. “My hip’s tellin’ me that’s so.”

“We’ll need to get an early start. If we don’t get held up by you repacking powder in that old Dance.”

“It shoots just fine.”

Nate pointed to Dr. Tom’s pack. “Any news of the world in there?”

“Oh, that’s old. From a Boston paper last year.” Dr. Tom leaned back and recited, “‘No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me, no waiter worships me, no boots admires and envies me.’ It’s Dickens.”

Nate shook his head, having no idea who Dickens was.

“An Englishman. A writer of books, some of them printed in newspapers. I was going to travel all the way to St. Louis a few years back just to hear him stand on a stage and read.” Dr. Tom laughed. “But the train from New York was too much of a hardship for him.”