But the most telling piece of paper Thomas had was one that didn’t exist, the reply to his second telegram, which Thomas had sent from St. Louis, and which had never been answered. So Thomas had already been cut out of the loop, and would be on his own when he arrived.
Thomas put Cates’s telegram away, and again looked out the smudged window.
The shorn trees of winter had been replaced, not by snow, but by the beginnings of Texas desert. This was a place he knew. A mere two hundred miles west lay Abilene, and another hundred miles to the south and west of that lay Fort Davis, which had been his home in the Army for so long.
He found himself sitting straighter, clearing the smudged window so he could look out. Already, west of Fort Worth, the trees were changing to desert oak, cottonwood, and mesquite brush. Winter had been left behind. Remembrance, and longing, flooded through him, and it occurred to him just how much he had missed this landscape. This land was like his soul, sparse and clean, and all the clutter of the East had only contributed to the crowding of his mind and the softening of his spirit. It was as if a spigot had been opened, letting out all the tarnish that had built up in him over the past five years, leaving only cold steel behind. He felt, if not young, then at least himself again.
He was home.
With a satisfied sigh, he turned away from the window and pulled out another copy of the Strand magazine from his bag. It was a story he had read many times before, the first installment of “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” but he didn’t care.
In the next hours, as light turned brighter with noon and then dimmer with evening, obliging him to hold the pages of the magazine to the window as he read, he was lost in a world that he loved and knew, and the words steel yourself did not enter his mind, because there was no need.
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