Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“Could get the blacksmith to fix it,” Big Zwey said. Now that he had spoken to her and not been struck by lightning, he felt a little easier.

“Did you mean just us two to go?” Elmira asked.

The question gave him so much pause that she almost wished she hadn’t asked it. He fell silent again, his eyes troubled.

“Might take Luke,” he said.

Luke was a weaselly little buffalo hunter with only a thumb and one finger on his left hand. He carried dice and gambled when he could get anyone to gamble with him. Once on the boat she had asked Fowler about him, and Fowler said a butcher had cut his fingers off with a cleaver, for some reason.

“When can we go?” she asked. It turned out to be a decision Big Zwey wasn’t immediately up to making. He pondered the matter for some time but reached no conclusion.

“I want to get out of here,” she said. “I’m tired of smelling buffalo hides.” “Get that blacksmith to fix that wagon,” Zwey responded. He stood up, picking up the tongue of the wagon and began to drag it toward the blacksmith’s shop, a hundred yards away. The next morning, the wagon, more or less patched, wassitting outside her closet. When she walked over to inspect it she saw that Luke was in it, sleeping off a drunk. He slept with his mouth open, showing black teeth, and not many of them at that.

Luke had ignored her on the trip upriver, but when he woke up he hopped out of the wagon and came right over, a grin on his weaselly face.

“Big Zwey and I have partnered up,” he said. “Can you drive a wagon?” “I guess I could if we go slow,” she said.

Luke had spiky red hair that stuck out in all directions. A skinning knife a foot long was slung in a scabbard under one shoulder. He grinned constantly, exposing his black teeth and, unlike Zwey, was not a bit afraid to look her in the eye. He had an insolent manner and spat tobacco juice constantly while he talked.

“Zwey went to buy some mules,” he said. “We got two horses but they won’t do for the wagon. Anyway, we might get some hides while you’re driving the wagon.” “I don’t like the smell of hides,” she said pointedly, but not pointedly enough for Luke to get the message.

“You get where you don’t smell ’em after a while,” he said. “I don’t hardly even notice it, I’ve smelled ’em so much.” Luke had a little quirt and was always nervously popping himself on the leg with it. “You skeert of Indians?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Elmira said. “I guess I don’t like ’em much.” “I’ve already killed five of them,” Luke said.

Big Zwey finally arrived leading two scrawny mules and carrying a harness he had traded for. The harness was in bad repair but there was plenty of rawhide around, and they soon had it tied together fairly well. Luke was quite dexterous with his thumb and little finger. He did better than Zwey, whose hands were too big for harness making.

She soon got the hang of driving the mules. There was not much to it, for the mules were content to follow the two men on horseback. It was only when the men loped off to hunt that the mules were likely to balk. On the second day out, with the men gone, she crossed a creek whose banks were so steep and rough that she felt sure the wagon would turn over.

She was ready to jump and take her chances, but by a miracle it stayed upright.

That day the men killed twenty buffalo. Elmira had to wait in the sun all day while they skinned them out. Finally she got down and sat under the wagon, which provided a little shade. The men piled the bloody, smelly hides into the wagon, which didn’t suit the mules. They hated the smell of hides as much as she did.

Big Zwey had lapsed back into silence, leaving all the talking to Luke, who chattered away whether anybody listened to him or not.

Often Elmira had a nervous stomach. The jostling of the wagon took getting used to. The plains looked smooth in the distance, but they were surprisingly rough to pass over. Big Zwey had given her a blanket to put over the rough seat—it kept her from getting splinters but didn’t cushion the bumps.

Alone with the two men, in the middle of the great, empty prairie, she felt apprehensive. In the cow towns there had been lots of girls around—if a man got mean, she could yell. On the boat it hadn’t seemed as dangerous, because the men were always fighting and gambling among themselves. But at night on the prairie there were only the three of them, and nothing much to keep anyone busy. Big Zwey sat and looked at her through the campfire, and Luke looked, too, while he talked. She didn’t know if Big Zwey considered that in some way he had married her already. She worried that he might suddenly come over and want the marriage to begin, though so far he had been too shy even to speak to her much. For all she knew he might expect her to be married to Luke, too, and she didn’t want that. The thought made her so nervous that she couldn’t eat the buffalo meat they offered her—anyway, it was tougher than any meat she had ever tried to chew. She chewed on one bite until her jaws got tired and then spat it out.

But when she went to the wagon and made the one blanket into a kind of bed, neither man followed. She lay awake for a long time, apprehensive, but the men sat by the fire, occasionally looking her way but making no move to disturb her.

Luke got his dice out and soon they were playing. Elmira was able to sleep, but awoke to the roll of thunder a few hours later. The men were asleep by the dying fire. Across the prairie she began to see lightning darting down the sky, and within a few minutes big drops of water hit her. In a minute she was wet. She jumped down and crawled under the wagon. It wasn’t much protection but it was some. Soon lightning was crashing all around and the thunder came in big, flat cracks, as if a building had fallen down. It frightened her so that she hugged her knees and trembled. When the lightning struck, the whole prairie would be bathed for a second in white light.

The rainstorm soon passed, but she lay awake for the rest of the night, listening to water drip off the wagon. It grew very dark. She didn’t know what might have happened to the men.

But in the morning they were right where they had gone to sleep, wet as muskrats but ready to drink a pot of coffee.

Neither even commented on the storm. Elmira decided they were used to hard traveling and that she had better get usedto it too.