Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

Call had been expecting the move for two or three days and had made Pea Eye help him watch. Big Tom tried to make a dash for it, and Call shot him off his horse. Cowboys ran out of their house in their long johns, at the shot. Even wounded, the boy proved full of fight—Call had to rap him with the barrel of his Henry before he could be tied. This time he was summarily hung, though he wept again and begged for mercy.

“It’s wasted on horsethieves,” Call said, before kicking the boy’s horse out from under him. None of the men said a word.

“Should have hung him in the first place, although he did shoe them horses,” Pea Eye commented later.

Call had begun to think of Gus, and the promise he had made. It would soon be spring, and he would have to be going if he were to keep the promise, which of course he must. Yet the ranch had barely been started, and it was hard to know who to leave in command. The question had been in his mind all winter. There seemed to be no grave danger from Indians or anything else. Who would best keep things going? Soupy was excellent when set a task, but had no initiativeand was unused to planning. The men were all independent to a fault and constantly on the verge of fist fights because they fancied that someone had attempted to put himself above them in some way. Pea Eye was clearly the senior man, but Pea Eye had contentedly taken orders for thirty years; to expect him to suddenly start giving them was to expect the impossible.

Call thought often of Newt. He watched him with increasing pride all winter. The boy was the only one left in the crew whom he enjoyed being with. The boy’s skill and persistence with horses pleased him. He knew it would be chancy to leave a seventeen-year-old boy in charge of a group of grown men—yet he himself had led men at that age, and that had been in rougher times. He liked the way the boy went about his work without complaint. He had filled out physically during the year and could work all day energetically and accomplish more than most of the men.

Once, watching the boy cross a corral after having worked with one of the mustangs, Pea Eye said innocently, “Why, Captain, little Newt walks just like you.” Call flinched, but Pea Eye didn’t notice—Pea Eye was no noticer, as Augustus had often said.

That night, sitting in Wilbarger’s little tent, Call remembered the remark. He also remembered Gus’s efforts to talk to him about the boy. With Gus pressing him, it was his nature to resist, but with Gus gone he didn’t find it so distasteful to consider that the boy was his son. He had certainly gone to his mother, hateful as the memory was. Maggie, of course, had not been hateful—it was the strange need she induced in him that he disliked to remember.

He started taking the boy with him on every trip he made to the forts, not merely to familiarize him with the country but to let him participate in the selling and trading. Once, as a test, he sent Pea and the boy and the Raineys to Fort Benton with a sizable bunch of cattle, stipulating that the boy was to handle the details of the sale and bring home the money.

Newt did well, as well as he himself could have done. He delivered the cattle safely, sold them for a fair amount and brought the money home.

It didn’t sit well with Soupy Jones that Newt was being given such authority. It seemed to Soupy that he should have taken the cattle, and possibly received a commission, in his capacity as top hand. Soupy was rude to Newt from time to time, and Newt ignored him as best he could. Call did nothing, but two weeks later he let it be known that he was preparing to send the boy to the fort again—at which point Soupy boiled over. He took it as a slight and said he would draw his wages and go if that was how things were going to be.

Call promptly paid him his wages, much to Soupy’s astonishment. He had never imagined such an outcome. “Why, Captain, I don’t want to leave,” he said plaintively. “I got nothing to go to back down south.” “Then give me back the money and behave yourself,” Call said. “I decide who’ll do what around here.” “I know, Captain,” Soupy said. He was aware that he had chosen a bad moment to make his scene—right after breakfast, with many of the hands standing around.

“If you have other complaints, I’m listening,” Call said. “You seem to be mad at Newt.” The words made the hairs stand up on the back of Newt’s neck. It was the first time he could ever remember the Captain having spoken his name.

“Well, no, I ain’t,” Soupy said. “He’s a fair hand, but it don’t seem right a fair hand should be put over a top hand unless there’s a reason.” “He’s young and needs the training—you don’t. That’s the reason,” Call said. “If I tell you to take orders from him you will, or else leave. They’ll be my orders, at second hand.” Soupy reddened at the disgusting thought of taking orders from a boy. He stuffed his wages in his pocket, planning to leave, but an hour’s contemplation caused him to mellow and he gave Call back the wages. That night, though, he suddenly stuck out a foot and tripped Newt, when Newt walked past with a plateful of food. Newt fell on his face but he rose and flung himself on Soupy in a second, so angry at the insult that he even held his own for a few licks, until Soupy could bring his weight and experience into play—after which Newt got thoroughly pounded, so thoroughly that he was not aware when the fight stopped. He was sitting on the ground spitting blood, and Soupy had walked away. Call had expected the fight and watched impassively, pleased that the boy had fought so hard. Winning would have been beyond his powers.

The battle won Soupy no friends; he had assumed so many airs once Dish left that he had few friends anyway, whereas Newt was popular. Reaction was so unfavorable that a few days later Soupy drew his wages again and left, taking Bert with him. They had concluded they could make Texas, if they went together.

Call was worried for a few weeks about being short-handed, but then three young men he had seen at the fort decided to quit soldiering and try their hand at ranching. All three were from Kentucky. They were inept at first but industrious. Then two genuine cowboys showed up; lured all the way north from Miles City by the news that there was a ranch on the Milk.

They had given up cowboying for mule skinning the year before and concluded they had made a bad mistake. Then a tallboy named Jim wandered in alone. He had been with a wagon train but had lost interest in getting to Oregon.

Soon, instead of being short-handed, Call found that he had almost more men than he needed. He decided to start the branding early. Several hundred calves had been born since they left Texas; many were yearlings, and a struggle to brand.

A few of the men questioned the necessity, since they were the only cattle outfit in the Territory, but Call knew that would soon change. Others would come.

The roundup took ten days. The cattle had spread themselves wide over the range between the Milk and the Missouri in their foraging during the winter. Then the branding took a week. At first the men enjoyed the activity, competing with one another to see who could throw the largest animals the quickest. There was also much disagreement over who should get to rope and who should work on foot. Newt improved so rapidly as a roper that he was soon sharing that task with Needle Nelson, the only one of the original crew skilled with a lariat.

With the branding ended, and the spring grass spiking through the thin May snows, Call knew the time had come for him to fulfill his promise to his old friend. It was awkward—indeed, it seemed absurd—to have to tote a six-months-old corpse to Texas, but there it was.

Yet May wore on and June approached, and still he had not gone. The snows had melted, all down the plains, he imagined, and yet something held him. It wasn’t work. There were plenty of men to do the work—they had even had to turn away three or four men who came looking to hire on. Many times Call spent much of the afternoon watching Newt work with the new batch of horses they had bought on a recent trip to the fort. It was work he himself had never been particularly good at—he had always lacked the patience. He let the boy alone and never made suggestions. He liked to watch the boy with the horses; it had become a keen pleasure. If a cowboy came over and tried to talk to him while he was watching he usually simply ignored the man until he went away. He wanted to watch the boy and not be bothered. It could only be for a few days, he knew. It was a long piece to Texas and back. Sometimes he wondered if he would even come back. The ranch was started, and the dangers so far had been less than he feared. He felt sometimes that he had no more to do. He felt much older than anyone he knew. Gus had seemed young even when he was dying, and yet Call felt old. His interest in work had not returned. It was only when he was watching the boy with the horses that he felt himself.

In those hours he would lose himself in memory of other times, of other men who had lived with horses, who had broken them, ridden them, died on them. He felt proud of the boy, and with it, anguish that their beginnings had been as they had. It could not be changed, though. He thought he might speak of it sometime, as Gus had wanted him to, and yet he said nothing. He couldn’t. If he happened to be alone with the boy, his words went away. At the thought of speaking about it a tightness came into his throat, as if a hand had seized it. Anyway, what could a few words change? They couldn’t change the years.

Newt was puzzled at first when the Captain began watching him with the horses. At first he was nervous—he felt the Captain might be watching because he was doing something that needed correcting. But the afternoons passed, and the Captain merely watched, sometimes sitting there for hours, even if it turned wet or squally. Newt came to expect him. He came to feel that the Captain enjoyed watching. Because of the way the Captain had been behaving, giving him more and more of the responsibility for the work, Newt came to feel that Mr. Gus must have been right. The Captain might be his father. On some afternoons, with the Captain there by the corrals watching, he felt almost sure of it, and began to expect that the Captain would tell him soon. He began to listen—waiting to be told, his hope always growing. Even when the Captain didn’t speak, Newt still felt proud when he saw him come to watch him work.

For two weeks, through the spring evenings, Newt was very happy. He had never expected to share such a time with the Captain, and he hoped the Captain would speak to him soon and explain all that had puzzled him for so long.

One night toward the end of May, Call couldn’t sleep. He sat in front of the tent all night, thinking of the boy, and Gus, and the trip he had to make. That morning, after breakfast, he called Newt aside. For a moment he couldn’t speak—the hand had seized his throat again. The boy stood waiting, not impatient. Call was annoyed with himself for his strange behavior, and he eventually found his voice.