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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.
    Dear Beth,
    We have arrived in St. Gall, having safely passed through Forts Davis and Stockton. The countryside is mostly scrub and desert and a hardship to our horses as, at times, they were fed only cactus pears with the thorns knocked off. We have seen no Comanche, but buffalo soldiers aplenty posted on the Government Road for the protection of all and for the gain of everyone but themselves. There is early frost on the ground out west, and snow in the sierras, which turn blue at night and orange with the sunrise.
    The two rangers I am commissioned with, Tom Goddard and George Deerling, are experienced men of resolute purpose, but I fear their years on the borderlands have made them at times…
    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.
    Tom Goddard is a medical man from back East but knows more than any man I’ve ever met about the ground we walk on, its history and its beginnings. He is a reader of books and can imitate any bird or animal by breathing through his clasped fingers. His cougar call is a wonder and would make you blanch to hear it.
    George Deerling has personal reasons for wanting to capture or kill the murderer William McGill, but what those reasons are, I cannot guess.
    We are following McGill to Houston, which will take the better part of a month. But be assured that I will write you as often as circumstances will allow.
     Send my love to Mattie. My hope is to see you both in early spring.
    My love always, Nathaniel
    After consideration he added a postscript telling her to write him in