The Outcasts Read Free Page A

stood still, only his ears twitching. Nate got off and on the saddle a few more times, led him around by the bridle, got back on, and tapped the horse into an easy canter away from the post. He was gone for twenty minutes, and when he returned, the gelding was lathered but calm. The rangers who had stood around making bets that the horse would come back riderless gave him backhanded compliments and pressed him for information on how to subdue their own uncooperative and clod-footed mounts.
    When the captain, a veteran ranger by the name of Drake, asked him how he was able to break the horse, Nate shrugged and told him that working with a horse was like raising up a child. “You build on trust and little tries,” he said.
    At dawn on the fifth day, he was given the gelding, which would replace his own worn mount, and a commission to ride westward an hour distant to find two rangers in the field, Captain George Deerling and Tom Goddard, and bring them back to Franklin. A killer named William McGill had reappeared in Houston after some absence from Texas, to murderous effect. A man that Captain Deerling, for personal reasons—reasons Captain Drake did not elaborate on—had been chasing for years.
    Nate rode west for more than two hours until he saw the irregular bands of gray smoke from a campfire and came upon three men seated together in a companionable arrangement, drinking coffee. If he hadn’t seen the leg irons on the man sitting in the middle, he wouldn’t have known which one was a prisoner and which ones were rangers.
    The only one smiling was the ankle-bound man, his hair poking up in unruly spikes, as though he’d slept with a blanket pulled tight over his head. The rangers must have heard Nate coming from a long way off, otherwise they would have had their Colts drawn and cocked.
    He legged himself down from his horse and walked to the fire.
    “You George Deerling?” he asked. He addressed himself to the closer ranger, but the man shook his head and pointed to his older companion.
    From a middling distance, the two rangers looked remarkably alike, even beyond the sameness of their dress. Hatless, they both wore top boots over home-sewn denim and shirts dyed an approximate indigo. The younger ranger was black-haired with a black mustache, the edges of which drooped into his coffee cup, requiring him to make a backhanded sweep after every sip. The one he had pointed to was an older man, silver-haired with a gray mustache, also of impressive width.
    Their hair was cropped serviceably short, and every bit of exposed skin on the two rangers—wrists, necks, faces—and even the color of the eyes seemed sun-blasted to a dunnish brown. The man sitting between them was fully dressed in the same hard-ridden way but was bootless, owing to the bulk of the leg irons.
    Nate shifted his good leg so he could stand more comfortably. His hip hurt something awful, but of a certainty he didn’t want to appear weak-limbed on his first field day.
    He said, “I’m Nathaniel Cannon. Nate.” There was no nod of assent or motion of recognition. He added, “Sent by Captain Drake.” The last word lilted upwards and came out sounding, to his ears, like a question.
    The older ranger said, “I’m George Deerling. My partner”—he motioned sideways with his head—“Tom Goddard. Dr. Tom.”
    The man in the middle said, “And I’m the goddamn queen of the desert.” He yukked and grinned, showing all his teeth, top and bottom.
    Deerling, in a sweeping motion, brought his gun out of its holster and applied the butt of it sharply to the prisoner’s head. Through the yowling and protestations of foul play, Deerling said, “This mannerless yahoo is Maynard Collie.”
    Dr. Tom set his cup down and motioned for Nate to sit. “You here to help us bring old Maynard in?”
    Even the voices of the two rangers were the same, Nate thought. The top notes slightly breathy and clipped, like air exhaled through short, fibrous reeds.
    Dr.