Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

Deerling said, keeping his eyes shut, “Your talking is a hardship for me at this very moment.”

Dr. Tom nodded to Nate to take to his bedroll and sleep. When Nate was awakened a few hours later, he emerged from his stiffened blanket, feeling with the naked palms of his hands and the soles of his boots the crusted mantle of frost covering the ground. He heard the horses stamping and chuffing in the dark air against the thin dusting of ice crackling away from mounds of basket grass under their hooves. After arranging the blanket around his head and shoulders, he pulled two of the horses together and stood between them for warmth, his carbine downturned against one thigh, the revolver tucked into his belt. Having no pocket watch or any light to see it by even if he’d had one, he counted the passage of hours in the movement of the moon toward the ranges to the west. He heard once the discontented flight of a bird breaking free of brush atop the overhang but no other sound that would have signaled a threat.

He revisited the accounts Deerling had given him earlier that day, of McGill’s murderous path through Missouri, Kansas, and Texas. He had killed both men and women, a sixteen-year-old boy, and even two lawmen who had been on his trail. Most of them had been shot during the course of a robbery or at a card game gone bad. But a few of the killings had seemed random and pointless: a careless word, an incautious step, a shadow thrown over the killer at just the wrong time. And now, after the murder of the settlers in Houston, McGill could add two children to his tally.

To dispel those images, Nate thought of his wife in the garden, her fingers smelling of fall okra, green and tender-hulled, and he decided to post a letter to her from Fort Stockton. He thought of the stories of raiding Comanche and Kiowa and ruminated on the wisdom of carrying cyanide.

Just before dawn, he walked to Deerling’s bedroll to wake him. But the man’s eyes were already open and cleared of all sleep, as though the ranger had been wakeful in the dark for some time.

The three riders entered Fort Stockton, sixty miles on from Fort Davis, to acquire food and ammunition. As with Fort Davis, buffalo soldiers supplied the bulk of the outpost troops. But where the former station was poorly situated, Fort Stockton was armed and well provisioned, behind stone walls and stockade fences with lookouts.

Dr. Tom nodded with approval. “They don’t call this Comanche Springs for nothing.”

The officer, a young, tubercular-looking white man in a too-large Union coat, warned them that raiding parties had been seen in increasing numbers through the Edwards Plateau, following the Pecos River Valley.

“Fort Lancaster is completely unmanned now,” he said. “If you are engaged, there can be no help for you.”

Deerling thanked him and they rode on to the nearby town of St. Gall for a bath and a decent bed for the night.

They tossed a coin for first to the bath, Dr. Tom winning both throw-downs. He clapped his palms together, smiling. “Dress and delight, boys,” he called out to them as he pulled a clean shirt from his pack and headed for the door. “Dress and delight.”

Nate called after him to ask when they’d be riding out in the morning, and Deerling, sitting in a chair pulling at his boots, gave Nate a hard eye.

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Dr. Tom answered, nodding towards the chair where Deerling sat. “George is rather touchy on the subject of keeping the Lord’s day.” He closed the door and walked down the hallway, hitched and flat-footed.

“Don’t you go to church?” Deerling asked Nate.

“It’s been some time since.”

“Didn’t your mother raise you up to it?”

“She was raised with a mission church. She wasn’t too fond of it.”

“You a Catholic?” The hard eye returned.

“No,” Nate said, standing up from his place at the floor, where he had been sorting through his pack. “Baptist.”

“A Baptist?”

“Yes, an Oklahoma Baptist, if that’s all right.”

“Well… all right.”

“Glad you can accommodate that.” Nate turned his back to Deerling and kneeled down to resume looking for a less soiled shirt. After a while he added, “It seems to me that a man’s beliefs are his own affair.”

Behind him from Deerling he heard a grunt, although whether it was a noise of assent or merely of physical exertion he couldn’t be certain, as it was followed by the sound of a boot clattering to the floorboards.

Nate sat on the bed with a piece of paper and a stub of pencil and commenced writing to his wife.

Dear Beth,

We have arrived in St. Gall, having safely passed through Forts Davis and Stockton. The countryside is mostly scrub and desert and a hardship to our horses as, at times, they were fed only cactus pears with the thorns knocked off. We have seen no Comanche, but buffalo soldiers aplenty posted on the Government Road for the protection of all and for the gain of everyone but themselves. There is early frost on the ground out west, and snow in the sierras, which turn blue at night and orange with the sunrise.

The two rangers I am commissioned with, Tom Goddard and George Deerling, are experienced men of resolute purpose, but I fear their years on the borderlands have made them at times…

Here he paused, searching for the correct word. He didn’t want to seem disloyal, but the memory of Maynard Collie’s death still pulled at him. He thought about writing unheeding of due process but decided it would alarm his wife and wrote, instead, hasty.

Tom Goddard is a medical man from back East but knows more than any man I’ve ever met about the ground we walk on, its history and its beginnings. He is a reader of books and can imitate any bird or animal by breathing through his clasped fingers. His cougar call is a wonder and would make you blanch to hear it.

George Deerling has personal reasons for wanting to capture or kill the murderer William McGill, but what those reasons are, I cannot guess.

We are following McGill to Houston, which will take the better part of a month. But be assured that I will write you as often as circumstances will allow.

Send my love to Mattie. My hope is to see you both in early spring.

After consideration he added a postscript telling her to write him in care of the postmaster in Austin and saying that he would be attending church in the morning, knowing it would bring a slow creeping smile to his wife’s face.

When it was his turn, Nate paid for a half bath, the price of the full bath being too steep. The bathhouse was a large tent behind the main house with a tub, a washstand, and a small mirror nailed to a support post. He washed standing up and then combed his hair and shaved at the mirror. He observed that his hair was too long for ranger service and would soon need cutting. Since the war, he had worn it full, in pride of the Confederacy, but also because cropping it, he felt, would make him appear too young and inexperienced.

He scraped the razor over his cheek, breathing in the mustiness of the canvas sides, and realized that the tent had most likely been used in the field. He turned to observe the spray of darkened stains on the lower half of the far wall; it told him the tent had been in hospital service. When he turned back to the mirror, he saw reflected on the mottled glass what his naked eye had missed: one rust-colored blot on the canvas, vaguely the shape of a man’s palm. He stared at the reflection for a good while, the razor poised in his hand, and thought of the field hospital in Arkansas in which he had spent some time, and of the men lying in it, suffering typhoid and dysentery and pneumonia, men and boys who had yet to see battle or even fire a gun but who were dying just the same.