The Outcasts (4 page)

N
ate 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.”

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.

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.

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.

Finished shaving, he quickly dressed, giving his work shirt to the boardinghouse lady to be washed. When he returned to the room, the two rangers looked awkward, as though their conversation had been cut off abruptly upon his entering.

Dr. Tom stood up from the bed. “Well, Nate. We thought you’d run off with the woman of the house.”

The three of them walked the short distance to the public house to eat dinner, a meal composed of pot squash and steaks of indeterminate origin. They ordered three whiskeys and all stared for a long moment in appreciation of the warm oaky color and burned-barrel scent before draining their glasses.