The Outcasts by Kathleen Kent Page A

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