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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,