So he stayed on and did his work, neither truly content nor bitterly discontented. He still dreamed of Elmira and felt an aching sadness when he thought about her.
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Lorena sat at the kitchen table with the girls, playing draughts. July watched, but could not be persuaded to take part in the game. Even Betsey, his favorite, couldn’t persuade him, and Betsey could usually get July to do anything she wanted him to do. Lorena’s presence made him shy. He enjoyed sitting and looking at her in the lamplight, though. It seemed to him he had never seen anyone so beautiful. He had only seen her before on that dreadful morning on the plains when he had had to bury Roscoe, Joe and Janey, and had been too stricken to notice her. Then she had been bruised and thin from her treatment by Blue Duck and the Kiowas. Now she was neither bruised nor thin.
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A little later, while Clara was frying the chicken, Call came up from the lots. He wanted to buy some horses and had found some to his liking, but neither Cholo nor July would make the deal. They had shown him the horses readily enough, but informed him that Clara made all the deals. It seemed irregular to him: two grown men right there, and yet he was forced to do business with a woman.
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Bob, though, hadn’t died—neither had he recovered. His eyes were open, but he could neither speak nor move. He could swallow soup, if his head was tilted a certain way, and it was chicken broth that had kept him alive the three months since his accident. He simply lay staring up with his large blue eyes, feverish sometimes but mostly as still as if he were dead.
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He lay awake all night with his head on his saddle, thinking of Lorie—not sleeping, nor even wanting to.
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Frog Lip just looked at him, neither smiling nor frowning. The insolence of the look was so great that for a moment Jake contemplated gunplay. He wanted to shoot the look off the black man’s face. But instead he touched his horse lightly with the spurs and followed the Suggs brothers across the plain. He felt angry—the barber and the whore he had been looking forward to had been put off. Soon he heard the black man’s horse fall in behind him.
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“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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