“That one’s barely in the Territory,” Dan said. “We’d have . to follow it for a month, and I ain’t in the mood.” “I say we head for Arkansas first,” Roy said. “We could rob a bank or two.” Jake was not listening to the palaver very closely. A party of nesters—four wagons of them—had stopped at the store, buying supplies. They were farmers, and they had left Missouri and were planning to try out Texas. Most of the menfolk were inside the store buying supplies, though some were repairing wagon wheels or shoeing horses. Most of the womenfolk were starved-looking creatures in bonnets, but one of them was neither starved nor in a bonnet. She was a girl of about seventeen with long black hair. She sat on the seat of one of the wagons, barefoot, waiting for her folks to finish shopping.
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“It’s a good thing they found you, we ain’t had time to look,” Soupy said. “If we’d gone on north, it would be sixty miles to water, the Indians say. Most of these cattle wouldn’t make no sixty miles.” “Nor most of these men, either,” Dish said.
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For all the talk, they saw neither Indians nor cowboys for days on end. They saw no one—just an occasional wolf or coyote. It seemed to Newt that the sky got bigger and the country emptier every day. There was nothing to see but grass and sky. The space was so empty that it was hard to imagine that there might ever be towns in it, or people.
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For all the talk, they saw neither Indians nor cowboys for days on end. They saw no one—just an occasional wolf or coyote. It seemed to Newt that the sky got bigger and the country emptier every day. There was nothing to see but grass and sky. The space was so empty that it was hard to imagine that there might ever be towns in it, or people.
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By the time the sun was beginning to thin out the mists, they had had their coffee and a bite of bacon and were horseback. The herd was in sight, spread out over the plain for three or four miles, thousands of cattle in it. Neither July nor Joe had ever seen a herd so large, and they paused for a moment to look at it. The morning plains were still dewy.
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They rode east, back in the direction they had come from. Joe didn’t ask any questions, nor did July give him the chance.
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“He stopped and introduced himself,” Augustus said. “Over at Jake’s camp.” Call could hardly credit the information. He looked at Gus closely to see if it was some kind of joke. Blue Duck stole white children and gave them to the Comanches for presents. He took scalps, abused women, cut up men. What he didn’t steal he burned, always fleeing west onto the waterless reaches of the llano estacado, to unscouted country where neither Rangers nor soldiers were eager to follow. When he and Call quit the Rangers, Blue Duck had been a job left undone.
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Strangely, neither Pea nor Mr. Gus was much concerned. The mules had regained their feet and stood in the shallow water, swishing their tails and looking sleepy. Call rode up about that time. He had been at the head of the herd, with Dish Boggett.
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Mainly Fowler talked of Indians, for whom he had a pure hatred. He had been a buffalo hunter and had had many run-ins with them. When the buffalo ran out he began to traffic in whiskey. So far neither he nor any of his men had offered Elmira the slightest offense. It surprised her. They were a rough-looking bunch, and she had taken a big gamble in getting on the boat. No one in Fort Smith had seen her leave, as far as she knew, and the boatmen could have killed her and thrown her to the turtles without anyone’s being the wiser. The first few nights in her cubbyhole she had been wakeful and a little frightened, expecting one of the men to stumble in and fall on her. She waited, thinking it would happen—if it did, she would only have her old life back, which had been part of the point of leaving. She would stop being July Johnson’s wife, at least. It might be rough for a while, but eventually she would find Dee and life would improve.
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“No, she’s fine,” Augustus said. “The fresh air agrees with her, I guess.” Dish said no more, and Augustus decided not to tease him. Occasionally the very youngness of the young moved him to charity—they had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits. The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour. Young Dish, skilled cowhand that he was, might not live to see the whores of Ogallala, and the tender feelings he harbored for Lorena might be the sweetest he would ever have.
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“You didn’t assign me no duties, nor yourself either,” Augustus pointed out.
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“I have et okra,” Jasper replied, “but I have never yet et no gourd.” So far neither Newt nor the Rainey or Spettle boys had been allowed to play. The men felt it would be little short of criminal to bankrupt young men at the outset of their careers. But sometimes when nobody was using the deck, Newt borrowed it and he and the others played among themselves. Sean O’Brien joined in. They usually played for pebbles, since none of them had any money.
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“Ain’t no fifty or sixty cattle going to be on top of me,” Needle replied, unruffled. “Nor no dern horse neither.” Bert Borum thought Needle was hilarious—he thought pretty near everything was hilarious. He was one of those menwho have a laugh you like to hear.
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Still, when there was nothing to see around him but a few horses sucking water, he could always rest himself by watching the moon and the sky. He loved clear nights and hated clouds—when it was cloudy he felt deprived of half the world. His fear of Indians, which was deep, was tied to his sense that the moon had powers that neither white men nor black men understood. He had heard Mr. Gus talk about the moon moving the waters, and though he had glimpsed the ocean many times, by the Matagorda, he had not been able to get a sense of how the moon moved it.
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Tinkersley had had clean fingernails, but Jake wasn’t arrogant like Tinkersley, and he gave the impression of having nothing but time. Most men crawled on top of her at once, but Jake just sat on the bed, smiling at her. When he smiled, her confidence returned. With most men, there was a moment when they moved their eyes away. But Jake kept looking at her, right in the eye. He looked at her so long that she began to feel shy. She felt more naked than she had ever felt, and when he bent to kiss her, she flinched. She did not like kissing, but Jake merely grinned when she flinched, as if her shyness was funny. His breath was as clean as his hands. Many a sour breath had ruffled her hair and affronted her nostrils, but Jake’s was neither rank nor sour. It had a clean cedary flavor to it.
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IF WILBARGER WAS IMPRESSED at the sight of so many horses, he gave no sign of it. The small herd had already been penned, and he and Deets and the man called Chick were quietly separating out horses with the H I C brand on them. Dish Boggett worked the gate between the two corrals, letting Wilbarger’s horses run through and waving his rope in the face of those he didn’t claim. Jake Spoon was nowhere in sight, nor was there any sign of Augustus and the Irishmen. The new herd was far too large to pen. Call had always meant to fence a holding pasture for just such an eventuality, but he had never gotten around to it. In the immediate case it didn’t matter greatly; the horses were tired from their long run and could be left to graze and rest. After breakfast he would send the boy out to watch them.
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In a few minutes more, as the herd neared the river, the darkness loosened and began to gray. The red on the eastern horizon was no longer a line but spread upward like an opened fan. Soon Newt could see the horses moving through the first faint gray light—a lot of horses. Then, just as he thought he had brought the flood within himself under control, the darkness loosened its hold yet more and the first sunlight streamed across the plain, filtering through the cloud of dust to touch the coats of the tired horses, most of whom had slowed to a rapid trot. Ahead, waiting on the bank of the river, was Captain Call, the big Henry in the crook of his arm. The Hell Bitch was lathered with sweat, but her head was up and she slung it restlessly as she watched the herd approach-even pointing her keen ears at Mouse for a moment. Neither the Captain nor the gray mare looked in the least affected by the long night or the hard ride, yet Newt found himself so moved by the mere sight of them sitting there that he had to brush away yet another tear and smudge his dusty cheek even worse.
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He could hear the singing plainly, which only increased his puzzlement. The voices weren’t Mexican, nor were they Texan.
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“Why, hell, if we was to start to Montana with cattle like these, we’d be there in a week,” Augustus said. “A horse couldn’t keep up with them, nor a steam locomotive neither.” “The big camp, Captain,” Deets said, “it’s over the ridge.” “We don’t want the camp, we want the horse herd,” Augustus said in his full voice.
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“You’ll have us the laughingstock of this whole county,” Call said. “Suppose somebody come up to Deets and asked him to prophesy?” Deets himself thought that was an amusing prospect. “Why, I could do it, Captain,” he said. “I’d prophesy hot and I’dprophesy dry and I’d charge ’em a dime.” Once the names were settled the rest of the sign was a simple matter. There were two categories, things for rent and things for sale. Horses and rigs were available for rental, or at least horses and one rig, a spring buggy with no springs that they had bought from Xavier Wanz after his wife, Therese, had got smashed by it. For sale Augustus listed cattle and horses. As an afterthought he added, “Goats and Donkeys Neither Bought nor Sold,” since he had no patience with goats and Call even less with donkeys. Then, as another afterthought, he had added, “We Don’t Rent Pigs,” which occasioned yet another argument with Call.
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“Josh,” he said, one night after supper, to the surprise of everyone. “Why, I’m Josh. Can you write that, Mr. Gus?” “Josh is short for Joshua,” Augustus said. “I can write either one of them. Joshua’s the longest.” “Write the longest,” Deets said. “I’m too busy for a short name.” That made no particular sense, nor were they ever able to get Deets to specify how he happened to remember that Josh was his other name. Augustus wrote him on the sign as “Deets, Joshua,” since he had already written the “Deets.” Fortunately Deets’s vanity did not extend to needing a title, although Augustus was tempted to write him in as a prophet—it would have gone with the “Joshua,” but Call had a fit when he mentioned it.
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Jake grinned his slow grin. “You boys,” he said. “You got me down for lazier than I am. I ain’t no lover of cow shit and trail dust, I admit, but I’ve seen something that you haven’t seen: Montana. Just because I like to play cards don’t mean I can’t smell an opportunity when one’s right under my nose. Why, you boys ain’t even got a barn with a roof on it. I doubt it would bust you to move.” “Jake, if you ain’t something,” Augustus said. “Here we ain’t seen hide nor hair of you for ten years and now you come riding in and want us to pack up and go north to get scalped.” “Well, Gus, me and Call are going bald anyway,” Jake said. “You’re the only one whose hair they’d want.”“All the more reason not to carry it to a hostile land,” Augustus said. “Why don’t you just calm down and play cards with me for a few days? Then when I’ve won all your money we’ll talk about going places.” Jake whittled down a match and began to meticulously pick his teeth.
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He himself had a linen tablecloth which he brought out once a year, on the anniversary of the death of his wife. His wife had been a bully and he didn’t miss her, but it was the only occasion sufficient to provide an excuse for the use of a tablecloth in Lonesome Dove. His wife, whose name had been Therese, had bullied horses, too, which is why his team had run off and flung themselves and the buggy into a gully, the buggy landing right on top of Therese. At the annual dinner in her honor Xavier proved that he was still a restaurateur of discipline by getting drunk without spilling a drop on the fine tablecloth. Augustus was the only one invited to the dinners, but he only came every three or four years, out of politeness; not only were the occasions mournful and silly—everyone in Lonesome Dove had been glad to see the last of Therese—they were mildly dangerous. Augustus was neither as disciplined a drinker as Xavier nor as particular about tablecloths, either, and he knew that if he spilled liquor on the precious linen the situation would end badly. He would not likely have to shoot Xavier, but it might be necessary to whack him on the head, and Augustus hated to hit such a small head with such a large pistol.
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The town was not roaring with people, nor was it bright with lights, though a light was on at the Pumphreys’, whose daughter was about to have a baby. The Pumphreys ran a store; the baby their daughter was expecting would arrive in the world to find itself fatherless, since the boy who had married the Pumphrey girl had drowned in the Republican River in the fall of the year, with the girl only just pregnant.
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