The morning of the third day, Nate waited at the door of the post office for a half an hour before it opened at eight o’clock. He was disappointed not to find any mail from his wife, but he convinced himself that he had outpaced the mail wagon from Oklahoma. He posted one long letter to her describing all he had seen in Austin, Dr. Tom’s illness, and the incident with the snake, knowing she would be pleased with what he had learned from her. He also added instructions for her to send all future letters to Houston.
In closing, he wrote,
The city is filled with building works and wonders of comfort for man and beast. Yesterday, in a dry-goods store, I saw a device with serrated teeth, which, when cranked, will cut off the top of a tin can in a moment flat. But the city is not at peace with itself. The governor is roundly hated. Everyone is bristling with firearms, ready at a moment’s notice to begin shooting at any imagined threat or cross word, and though Governor Davis has given me a policeman’s job, I will be happy to be on my way to Houston. My love always to you and Mattie.
Inside the letter he placed a braided horsehair necklace strung with a few colored beads for his daughter. He had bought it from a dignified black woman, her cart of beaded wares set up at the first light of morning. The sign on the cart read For the Wheatville Girls School. She accepted his quarter with long, graceful fingers, smiling broadly when he tipped his hat to her.
He walked to Scholz Garden on San Jacinto Street and paid for a beer, the first beer he had ever drunk alone. He eyed the hard-boiled eggs floating in clouded water in a large glass jar and declined the bartender’s offer of them, even though they were free to drinkers. He picked up an old discarded newspaper left on the bar and read about events that had happened a full year ago: “John Wesley Hardin Kills Three Soldiers,” “Treaty of Medicine Lodge Violated by Comanche,” and one article about a knife fight in an Abilene saloon headlined “You Are a D—d Liar, Sah!”
The saloon was dark and quiet, and he reflected on his uncertain position with Deerling. After the incident with the snake, the ranger had continued to ignore him, but true to his word, after they had drawn their month’s pay, he left the barracks abruptly and returned an hour later with an early-model Winchester rifle. He handed it to Nate, saying only “Pay me when you can.”
Nate heard a whooping noise from outside the beer hall, followed by the clattering sounds of a group of riders approaching. He walked with the bartender and the few other patrons to the shaded porch and watched the thirty or so men approaching on horseback.
The riders wore long robes, bed linens or lengths of sewn muslin, all of it white; their faces were covered with hoods, holes cut out for their eyes. A few had conical caps shaped like inverted funnels on their heads, and Nate turned, openmouthed, to look questioningly at the bartender by his side.
The bartender spat a long stream of tobacco juice into the dirt. “The Klan has made it all the way from Tennessee. There won’t be a nigger safe from here to Uvalde County.” He turned and walked back inside, and Nate watched the riders being cheered down the length of San Jacinto.
Returning to the barracks, he did not see the black woman with the cart.
He entered the bunk room quietly but saw that Dr. Tom was sitting up reading with a flannel wrapped around his throat. Nate told him what he had seen on San Jacinto.
Dr. Tom shook his head. “Grown men wearing bedsheets.” He put his book aside and looked closely at Nate, who was sitting on a chair, frowning, chewing at his bottom lip.
“You’re still worrying on George’s good opinion of you, aren’t you? Well, the thaw is coming. You’ll see. Although a little bravado on your part might grease the wheels.”
“Bravado,” Nate said.
“Some action that shows some nerve. The snake in the bucket was a good beginning.”
“Actually,” Nate began and then paused. “I want to know how it sits with you, Captain Deerling shooting that Indian back on the Government Road.”
Dr. Tom tightened the flannel around his neck and regarded his hands, clasped in his lap. “You know I don’t make commentary on my captain’s decisions.” He looked at Nate. “It’s disloyal.” He let that sink in and then added, “But son, you want to believe me when I say you would not have wanted to meet those horse thieves on the other side.”
Nate nodded and stood, but Dr. Tom gestured for him to stay. “You know,” he said, “it occurs to me that I know nothing about you, and here I’ve been chewing your ear off for weeks. George said you’re a wonder with horses.”
Nate sat back down, acknowledging the change of tone.
“Hold nothing back,” Dr. Tom said. “I’ve got nothing to do and all day to do it.”
So Nate began to tell him of his past, of how he’d been born in Oklahoma to a mission-raised mother and a father who worked with horses and knew no other way than to break them hard, as his own father had done. And when a man gets accustomed to roping and tying a horse with a mean-set mouth and an unforgiving hand, he often gets used to treating his family in the same fashion. When Nate was fourteen, he left home and came down through Texas to Lancaster and began working with the renowned Steel Dust horses, learning from the trainer who could ride a green colt with only a rope bridle and lead after fifteen minutes of just talking to it.
Nate broke off telling his story and looked to Dr. Tom, half expecting him to be bored or restless, but the ranger smiled and nodded for Nate to continue.
The man’s name in Lancaster was McNally, Nate said, and in 1862 he joined with McNally for the Confederate cause and rode into Arkansas. Hundreds of Texans on horseback went with them that summer out of East Texas, the July that Nate turned sixteen. He rode a Steel Dust colt on a Mexican saddle he had earned with his pay and carried with him the only weapon he had, a Dance revolver given to him by McNally.
They rode through country so wasted by drought that McNally exclaimed that the horses could have found better forage from the ashes in a cookstove, and if not for the numerous rivers that were too wide and deep to disappear, the stock would have dried down to hide, teeth, and manes. The heat was murderous, pitching dozens of men from their saddles, men who then lay on the ground senseless, as though felled by a cudgel to the head.
There were uneasy rumors that Helena, the center for Confederate operations in Arkansas, was now in the hands of the Unionists, and that dysentery, typhoid, and malaria raged through the soldiers’ ranks, regardless of anyone’s loyalties. It was also put about that if the Confederate officers in charge had been more attentive to the well-being of their men instead of to cotton speculation, Helena would not have fallen.
In Hot Springs, McNally and Nate were attached to the Nineteenth Texas Cavalry, but many of the other Texans were quickly dismounted to serve in the infantry with other divisions. Some of the horseless riders, men deemed too young or too old to fight, were sent back to Texas.
Nate was released from service, but dysentery laid him low for weeks before he could depart. McNally nursed him as best he could between his own training and foraging for food. He told Nate that he considered himself most fortunate to remain mounted, as the Texans afoot were to be sent farther east, to the meat grinder of the Southern battlefields.
One night, McNally sat next to Nate as he lay on his hospital cot and told him that the Union had surrendered Little Rock; the Confederate army, along with the governor, would be reclaiming the capital. An order had gone out that three hundred army horses, the best of the herd being Steel Dust horses, had been requisitioned and would be driven up to Fort Smith and placed with the Confederate cavalry, who were determined to contain the boys in blue in Missouri.
“Nate,” he said. “I’ve got some pull with the quartermaster and have put you forward for the job. You’re not officially enlisted anymore, so what I’m about to ask you to do isn’t actually treason. Our whole future is in the bloodline of those stallions. We send them north, and we’ll never see them again. I want you to drive all three hundred horses back to Texas.??
?
He placed his hand on Nate’s shoulder. “Will you give me your word, as a son to a father?”
Nate made his promise, and when he was well enough to ride, he left Hot Springs with a dozen Texas boys his own age and headed with the herd northward, as though he were following the ordered plan: to go along the Arkansas River Valley, between the Boston and Ouachita Mountains, to Fort Smith. But then he drove the horses instead across the Ouachita River and headed south on mountain trails toward the Caddo Narrows, through thick forests of pine and white oak.
The herd was led by an old hammerheaded stallion with still enough fight in him to matter, and the line was sometimes strung out single file for miles. The drovers were mostly farm boys used to sleeping rough; they were decent enough in the saddle, but a few had only ever seen a horse from behind a plow. Unlike driven cattle, the herd was quiet, and Nate devised a series of whistle calls to signal trouble. For the first few days, there were signals only that all was well. On the third day, though, one stallion ran afoul of another in front and was kicked off a ledge. By the time Nate had worked himself against the line to see, the horse was dead in a ravine. He was glad he hadn’t had to try to shoot it through the tree line, but he thought it a poor start to the journey.
They came to the narrows after four days and crossed the Caddo River at a mill. Almost every homestead they passed had been deserted, the fields abandoned, but as the first dozen horses forged the Caddo, a man came out onto his porch and called out, “Any horse that shits while crossing and fouls my stream is mine.” Nate rode forward to talk to him, but the man had seen that all the drovers were young, and he challenged Nate, accusing him of stealing the horses. Nate kept the line going even when the man brought out a shotgun.
Nate told him, “All these boys can shoot. You kill me, you better go on and drown yourself in that river before they come after you.”
After a time, the man went back into his house, but Nate followed at the rear of the herd, looking over his shoulder, for the rest of the day.
They followed the Caddo River to its tail end and, where the mountains skirted behind them, came upon an open valley. The horses spread out to pick at the meager, yellow-white grasses. A horse struck on the cheek by a rattler the size of a man’s arm spooked the rest of the herd and they scattered for miles, galloping until they were tired, their heads lowered, stained with the heat and dust. Before long, the hide and hair around the wounded horse’s snakebite began to slough away, but the horse lived and there were no more stampedes.
South of Acorn, close to the Oklahoma border, Nate came upon three men on horseback sitting in a small copse of trees. He didn’t see them until he was almost on them, and the way they studied the herd prompted him to whistle a warning to the drovers.
The three riders approached, their mouths tense, their eyes searching, like men used to being guarded and watchful at all times. The leader was a spectral-faced man in a coat too weighty for the heat, and when he smiled, Nate rested his hand over the Dance.
“The name’s Hettrick,” he said, draping his hands easily over the saddle horn. His voice, pushed through thin lips, was high-pitched and constricted, like he was being slowly strangled by his own collar. “Been with Quantrill in Missouri these past few months. Harassing the Union.” He looked at Nate’s horse while he spoke, then rubbed his hand over his chin and smiled, showing more gum than teeth. “Our horses are played out. We’re in need of fresh ones.”
A few of the boys had ridden up behind Nate, and he told the man, “These horses aren’t for sale.”
Hettrick grinned wider and said, “I’m not offering to buy them.”
One of the drovers, a redheaded boy named Connie, moved closer to Nate, spat, and said, “Bushwhackers.”
From somewhere in the recesses of the man’s coat, the barrel of a revolver appeared and flashed, and Connie lay behind his horse on the ground. If Nate had blinked, he would have missed it.
Hettrick next pointed the barrel at Nate. “Hate a fresh-mouthed kid. Anybody else have anything to impart?” He looked around, sweeping his gun at the collected boys, and settled his eyes back on Nate. “I’ll start with taking the horse that you’re on. Unless you’ve got something you want to say to me.”
Nate got off his horse; the leader then ordered his men to pick out two horses each, and they rode away before Connie had stopped bleeding.
They buried the boy in a creek bed in soil soft enough to part under a shovel. Nate took two drovers who could shoot, wild-wooded cousins from Tyler who had joined the Confederacy together, and the three of them, riding stumpy-legged horses that could climb and wouldn’t tire easily, followed the raiders north through the Ouachita forests. They trailed the men for days before Nate would risk an attempt to retrieve the horses.
On the third morning, Nate on horseback was scrambling up a steep embankment, the two cousins following after, when the three raiders rose from their hiding place on the ridge above and began firing on them. Nate’s horse was shot in the neck and it reared and plunged back, pinning Nate in the mud of an old streambed below. More shots were fired and Nate witnessed the younger cousin riding to his left fall and then heard a strangled cry from his horse. Nate couldn’t see where the other boy was, but there was no sound apart from the pebbles sliding down the embankment.
The spectral-faced man thudded a stone onto Nate’s horse. “Hey, I believe your back may be broken. Hell of a fix. I’ll shoot ya if you ask me to. No? All right, then.”
The faces of the raiders disappeared from sight, and Nate lay panting and staring at the sky, his legs caught beneath the horse, in a hot agony of pain the center of which seemed to be in his middle, and yet when he put his mind to any one part of his body, the pain seemed to swell like a grinding of glass into the flesh and muscle down to the marrow of his bones.
Another face appeared over him and Nate threw up a defensive hand until he saw it was the older cousin, Owen. The boy had a bullet hole low in the crown of his hat. He was crying, and a thin trickle of blood ran onto his forehead.
“Goddamn,” he said. “Goddamn, but they like to’ve shot me in the head.”
It took a rope tied to the dead gelding’s legs and then wrapped around a tree for leverage for the boy to pull the animal off Nate. He could move all his limbs but he was certain from the pain that he had broken his hip. The younger cousin had not been so lucky and had taken a bullet in the chest. They covered him over with rocks and branches so they could find him again and pressed on, with Nate riding the dead boy’s horse.
After a day’s ride, they discovered the raiders at an encampment on the Forche la Fave River; the rushing waters masked the sounds of their approach. Hours after the three men had settled under their sleeping rolls, Owen whispered to Nate, “Blood for blood.”
He showed Nate his hunting knife and his determined, vengeful face, and then he crept toward the man sleeping closest to them. Nate watched the boy crab-crawling slowly over the ground and held his revolver ready, uncertain he could hit the other two men in the dark at that distance if they woke, uncertain as well if he could again stand after lying on the ground for so many hours, his broken hip tyrannizing his legs to jerks and spasms. The sky was clear; the three-quarter moon shone with unnatural brilliance off the river, and it revealed Owen’s profile in sharp detail.
The boy bent over the closest bedroll and, with little hesitation, made a jab and then a hard sweeping motion with his knife over the man’s neck. The man kicked his legs as though in restless sleep and then lay still, and Owen waved his arm for Nate to come on. The boy then pulled his cap-and-ball pistol from his belt, and when the second raider stirred and sat up, Owen shot him.
Hettrick reared from his blanket like he’d been yanked vertical by a rope. He pulled from his heavy coat two pistols and began firing blindly at Owen, who scrambled across the ground towards cover, the bullets carving out pieces of dirt and rocks surrounding him.
Nate pulled himself up to standing, and, suppo
rted by a tree, he took aim. Some sound, the creaking of wood or the cocking of the pistol or Nate’s own agonized breathing, brought Hettrick’s attention away from Owen, and he jerked a shooting arm towards Nate. Nate fired once, and the remaining raider fell as quickly as he had risen.
Nate collapsed to the ground, his hip no longer able to support him, and crawled cautiously to where the leader lay motionless, facedown, his coat spread out around him like shabby wings. Nate turned the body over and saw that his one shot had hit the man squarely in his forehead; he figured he would probably never be able to make a shot like that again, not even at half the distance and in full daylight.
A brief, exultant surge from the most primal part of himself, fueled by fear and pain, made him yelp out a call, a poor rendition of the rebel yell he had heard from men in the battlefield but a tribute all the same to the reflex that had moved his arm to fire at the exact killing spot.
In the morning, the two gathered together the stolen horses, and after giving Owen’s cousin a more fitting burial, they rode for days back to the herd and the drovers waiting for them at the Oklahoma border. They traveled south to Texas through Indian territory unhindered, and were even accompanied some distance by the First Choctaw Regiment of the Confederate army.
On the twenty-seventh of August, the hottest day anyone could remember, the drovers, led by Nate, entered Dallas and herded the two hundred and ninety-eight horses down the main street. And every boy who had made the ride and could boast of surviving stampedes and snakebites and horse-thieving raiders rejoined the war when he was able.
Nate’s broken hip, further fractured by a week more in the saddle, took a year to heal, and after that he was considered unfit to serve. He stayed in Lancaster training Steel Dust horses but heard from returning Texans of the fates of his friends, and every young drover to a man was killed in some battle or another.