The Outcasts Read Free

would be astonished if she hadn’t contracted malaria within a few weeks.
    Having replaced the second letter, she changed her gray suit for the lighter cotton dress she had packed and pulled on the stout walking boots and the shawl. She then picked up the bag and walked downstairs, where she informed the hotel clerk that she would be back after dark, as she was going to have supper with her brother. She strolled the few blocks to the coach and found two additional passengers, as well as the doctor, waiting for the new driver to take up the baggage.
    Before she stepped onto the foot rail, she looked to the top of the coach, catching sight of the safety man seated on the driving board. He was cradling a double-barreled shotgun and leisurely smoking. He glanced at her, stubbed out the live ashes of the cheroot against the side of the coach, and gave her a mournful nod.
    Once the coach got under way, the dust from the road followed them for miles. Lucinda pictured the German arriving in town after dark, his horse lathered almost to glue. He would look for her, eventually finding his way to the hotel. There he would bribe, or bully, his way into the room she had rented. Seeing the nightgown and comb, he would sit on the bed, hopefully for most of the night, waiting for her to return, his fists clenching and unclenching. She had cast off the heavy travel clothes as well, leaving them scattered about the room; the yellow boots she had reluctantly pushed beneath the bed.

Chapter 2
    T he horse Nate rode out of Franklin on that morning had had a man’s weight across his back only a few dozen times. It was a three-year-old gelding, narrow in the body and neck, with an ill-defined head that would have signaled to the unknowing, or the inexperienced, that the animal himself was as bland as his conformation. In fact, he had been given up for the sausage cart, viewed as unreliable and intractable by the rangers of the westernmost outpost.
    Nate knew from the beginning that he had been assigned the horse as a joke: a test for the newly sworn-in Texas state policeman from Oklahoma. The gelding had been yanked at, whipped, blindfolded, and hobbled in an attempt to break him to the saddle, to the extent that even a tightening belly cinch sent the animal into frenzied bucking.
    When Nate saw the horse—head down, ears plowed backward, feet splayed—the first thing he did was remove the saddle, blanket, and bit, leaving only a lead rope around his neck. Nate stood by the gelding the remainder of the afternoon, occasionally feeding him a bit of grain and molasses, never looking directly at him, only following close as the animal grazed. The rangers, hoping for a show, had quickly gotten bored after the first hour and wandered away to see to their own affairs.
    The second morning, Nate hand-fed the horse at regular intervals, touching him rhythmically in sweeping motions across his back and haunches, even removing his shirt to flag it gently across the horse’s line of vision. By midday there was not even a ripple of muscle across the gelding’s chest when another ranger passed by.
    On the third day, Nate spent hours slipping the rope off and on the gelding’s head and neck, snaking it across his withers, even draping it around his belly, tightening it only enough for the horse to feel the pressure. He fed the horse more grain and molasses, and the animal began to follow him around like a dog.
    On the morning of the fourth day, everyone in the entire ranger company who was not out on raid duty collected to watch Nate putting the blanket and saddle on the crazy gelding, who yielded quietly, even when the cinch was tightened. The onlookers braced expectantly for action when Nate put his foot in the stirrup, but he only leaned his weight across the saddle and then stepped down again. He repeated the action for half an hour before he fully seated himself. He touched his heels to the gelding, and the horse bucked forward but soon stopped and