“I believe I’ll just stay,” he told the foreman. “I like the view.” He also liked a long-legged whore named Sally Skull—at least that was what she called herself. She ran the whoring establishment for Bill Sloan, who owned the saloon. There were five girls but only three rooms, and with the herds coming through in such numbers the cowboys were in the place practically all the time. Sally had alarm clocks outside the rooms—she gave each man twenty minutes, after which the big alarm clocks went off with a sound like a firebell. When that happened, Sally would throw the door open and watch while the cowboys got dressed. Sally was skinny but tall, with short black hair. She was taller than all but a few of the cowboys, and the sight of her standing there unnerved most of the men so much they could hardly button their buttons. The majority of them were just boys, anyway, and not used to whorehouse customs and alarm clocks.
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“No, Dish, I’ve someone else in mind,” Augustus said. “Don’t run your hopes up no flagpole, though. Lorie’s apt to be skittish of men for the next few years.” “Hell, she always was,” Needle observed. “I offered her good money twice and she looked right through me like I was a glass window or something.” “Well, you are skinny,” Augustus said. “Plus you’re too tall to suit a woman. Women would rather have runts, on the whole.”The remark struck the company as odd—why would women rather have runts? And how did Gus know such a thing? But then, it was a comforting remark too, for it was like Gus to say something none of them expected to hear. Those that had night guard would be able to amuse themselves with the remark for hours, considering the pros and cons of it and debating among themselves whether it could be true.
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The thing he remembered best about Webster Witter was that he had been a tall man and they caught him out in the scrub and had to hang him to a short tree. It was that or take him back, and Call was against taking him back. Call believed summary justice was often the only justice, and in those days he was right, since they had to depend on circuit judges who often as not didn’t show up.
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“Nope,” Hutto said. “She got in that tall grass.” “Well, she could be hit,” Jim said.
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The men weren’t watching Janey—they were too intent on trying to find money in his saddlebags. While they were all ignoring her she had been quietly scooting backwards on the slick grass. Jim had his back to her and Hutto was winding Roscoe’s old pocket watch. Roscoe happened to look and saw that Janey was quietly creeping away; they had tied her hands but had neglected her feet. Suddenly she began to run. It was deep dusk and in a second she had got into the tall grass north of the gully. She made no sound, but Hutto must have sensed something, for he whirled and let go a blast with the shotgun. Roscoe flinched. Hutto fired the other barrel, and Jim turned and shot three times with Roscoe’s own pistol, which he had stuck in his belt.
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Janey was shy of people. She had keen eyesight and would usually see other travelers before Roscoe did. Often when she saw one she disappeared, darting off the trail and hiding in weeds and tall grass until the stranger passed.
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“Oh, now, John, I wouldn’t threaten these gentlemen if I was you,” Ned Tym said, appalled at what he was hearing. “This is Captain Call and Captain McCrae.” “Well, what’s that to me?” the man said, whirling on Ned. “I never heard of them and I won’t have these old cowboys coming in here and making this kind of mess.” “They ain’t old cowboys,” Ned said. “They’re Texas Rangers. You’ve heard of them. You’ve just forgot.” “I don’t know why I would have,” the man said. “I just lived here two years, miserable ones at that. I don’t necessarily keep up with every old-timer who ever shot at an Indian. It’s mostly tall tales anyway, just old men bragging on themselves.” “John, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ned said, growing more alarmed. “Captain Call and Captain McCrae would be the last ones to brag.” “Well, that’s your opinion,” John said. “They look like braggarts to me.” Call was beginning to feel annoyed, for the young man was giving them unmannerly looks and talking to them as if they were trash; but then it was partly Gus’s fault. The fact that the bartender had been a little slow and insolent hadn’t necessarily been a reason to break his nose. Gus was touchy about such things though. He enjoyed having been a famous Texas Ranger and was often put out if he didn’t receive all the praise he thought he had coming.
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July didn’t answer. Crazy or not, the tall traveler had been smart enough to figure out that the sheriff of Fort Smith was traveling with a heavy heart.
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From Roscoe, Joe had heard terrible stories about quicksand—in the stories, men and horses and even wagons were slowly swallowed up. He had suspected the stories were exaggerated, and the man and his animals proved it. All might be bogged, but none were sinking. The man wore a tall beaver hat and a long frock coat. Both animals had numerous parcels tied to them, and the man was amusing himself by untying the parcels and pitching them into the river. One by one they began to float away. To their astonishment he even threw away his bedroll.“The man must be a lunatic,” July said. “He must think that horse will float if he gets off some weight. That horse ain’t gonna float.” The man noticed them and gave a friendly wave, then proceeded to unburden the mule of most of its pack. Some floated and some merely lay in the shallow water.
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“I guess that’s the Red,” July said. “That means we’re about to Texas.” When they rode up to the banks of the river they were greeted by an amazing sight. Though running freely, the river was shallow and evidently boggy. Evidence for the bogginess was visible in the form of a tall man over toward the far bank. He was standing in knee-high water, between a gaunt horse and a little brown pack mule, both of which had sunk past their hocks in the river mud.
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Augustus waited for Allen O’Brien, who was the last to mount. He was so weak from shock, it seemed he might not be able to, but he finally got on his horse and rode off, looking back until the grave was hidden by the tall gray grass. “It seems too quick,” he said. “It seems very quick, just to ride off and leave the boy. He was the babe of our family,” he added.
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Just before the men reached the river they came out into a clearing a mile or more wide. It was a relief, after the constant battle with the mesquite and chaparral. The grass was tall. Call loped through it with Deets, to look at the crossing. Dish trotted over to Augustus on the trim sorrel he called Mustache, a fine cow horse whose eyes were always watching to see that no rebellious cow tried to make a break for freedom. Dish uncoiled his rope and made a few practice throws at a low mesquite seedling. Then he even took a throw, for a joke, at a low-flying buzzard that had just risen off the carcass of an armadillo.
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Reluctantly, Roscoe climbed up on Memphis, a horse so tall it was only necessary to be on him to have a view. “Well, I hate to go off and leave you without no deputy,” he said. “I doubt if July will like it. He put me in charge of this place.” Nobody said a word to that.
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July stood up. He wasn’t very tall, but he was sturdy. Roscoe had once seen him lift an anvil down at the blacksmith’s shop, and he had just been a boy then.
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Peach was picking her way across the main street of Fort Smith, which was less of a quagmire than usual, since it had been dry lately. She was carrying a red rooster for some reason. She was the largest woman in. town, nearly six feet tall, whereas Ben had been the runt of the Johnson family. Also, Peach talked a blue streak and Ben had seldom uttered three words a week, although he had been the mayor of the town. Now Peach still talked a blue streak and Ben was dead.
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The dreams had been so bad that he had already started sleeping with the unsheathed bowie knife in his hand, so he would be in the habit of it by the time they hit Indian country. This precaution caused certain problems for the young hands whose duty it was to wake him for his shift at night herding. It put them in danger of getting stabbed, a fact which troubled Jasper Fant particularly. Jasper was sensitive to danger. Usually he chose to wake Pea by kicking him in one foot, although even that wasn’t really safe—Pea was tall and who knew when he might snap up and make a lunge. Jasper had concluded that the best way would be to pelt him with small rocks, although such caution would only earn him the scornof the rest of the hands.
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“You don’t look like you’ve changed your mind,” he said. “I guess I’ve got to get up and go buy you a horse.” “Take my money,” she said. “Don’t get one that’s too tall.” She gave him Gus’s fifty dollars.
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Since the Hat Creek outfit had been gathering cattle and getting ready for their drive, games were handier than they had been for a while. Several cowboys drifted into Lonesome Dove, looking for work; some of them had enough snap left at night to wander in and cut the cards. A tall cowboy named Needle Nelson showed up from north of San Antonio, and a cheerful cowboy from Brownsville named Bert Borum.
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The horse Sean had been given seemed to him at least as tall as a cottage, and he felt he had good reason to worry. He had spent a long boat ride growing more and more homesick for the green land he had left. When they were put ashore at Vera Cruz he had not been too disappointed; it was only Mexico they were in, and no one had ever told him Mexico was green.
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“If this is America, where’s the snow?” he asked, to everyone’s surprise. His image of the new country had been strongly influenced by a scene of Boston Harbor in winter that he had seen in an old magazine. There had been lots of snow, and the hot backyard he found himself in was nothing like what he had expected. Instead of ships with tall masts there was just a low adobe house, with lots of old saddles and pieces of rotting harness piled under a little shed at one corner.
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“Hell, you’re tall,” he said one night. “You ought to marry her yourself. The both of you can read.” He knew Mary could read because he had been in church once or twice when the preacher had asked her to read the Psalms. She had a kind of low, scratchy voice, unusual in a woman; once or twice, listening to it made Pea feel funny, as if someone was tickling the little hairs at the back of his neck.
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“Why, Josh was just a half-pint,” Gus said frequently. “That woman needs a full pint. It’d be a blessing for her to have a man around who could reach the top shelf.” Pea had never considered that height might be a factor in relations such as marriage. After brooding about it for several months it occurred to him that Gus was tall too, and educated as well.
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Though he was content to stick with the Captain and Gus and do his daily work, he found that the problem of women was one that didn’t entirely go away. The question of marriage, about which Deets felt so free to chuckle, was a persistent one. Gus, who had been married twice and who whored whenever he could find a whore, was the main reason it was so persistent. Marriage was one of Gus’s favorite subjects. When he got to talking about it the Captain usually took his rifle and went for a walk, but by that time Pea would usually be comfortable on the porch and a little sleepy with liquor, so he was the one to get the full benefit of Gus’s opinions, one of which was that Pea was just going to waste by not marrying the widow Cole.The fact that Pea had only spoken to Mary Cole five or six times in his life, most of them times when she was still married to Josh Cole, didn’t mean a thing to a bystander like Gus, or even a bystander like Deets; both of them seemed to take it for granted that Mary regarded him as a fit successor to Josh. The thing that seemed to clinch it, in their view, was that, while Mary was an unusually tall woman, she was not as tall as Pea. She had been a good foot taller than Josh Cole, a mild fellow who had been in Pickles Gap buying a milk cow when a bad storm hit. A bolt of lightning fried both Josh and his horse—the milk cow had only been singed, but it still affected her milk. Mary Cole never remarried, but, in Gus’s view, that was only because Pea Eye had not had the enterprise to walk down the street and ask her.
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They kept two rooms in a hotel—not the finest in town but fine enough—and Tinkersley bought Lorena some pretty clothes. Of course he financed that by selling the horse and the sidesaddle, which disappointed Lorena a little. She had discovered that she liked riding. She would have been happy to ride on to San Francisco, but Tinkersley had no interest in that. Clean and tall and pretty as he was, he turned out, in the end, to be no better bargain than Mosby. If he had a soft spot, it was for himself, not for her. He even spent money getting his fingernails cut, which was something Lorena had never dreamed a man would do. For all that, he was a hard man. Fighting with Mosby had been like fighting with a little boy, whereas the first time she talked back to Tinkersley he hit her so hard her head cracked a washpot on the bureau behind her. Her ears rang for three days. He threatened to do worse than that, too, and Lorena didn’t suppose they were idle threats. She held her tongue around Tinkersley from then on. He made it clear that marriage wasn’t what he had had in mind when he took her away from Mosby, which was all right in itself, since she had already got out of the habit of thinking about marriage.
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The Captain took a ride. I guess he thought he had her sweated down. He turned his back on her and she bit a hunk out.” The mare in question was known around town as the Hell Bitch. Call had bought her in Mexico, from some caballeros who claimed to have killed an Indian to get her—a Comanche, they said. Augustus doubted that part of the story: it was unlikely one Comanche had been riding around by himself in that part of Mexico, and if there had been two Comanches the caballeros wouldn’t have lived to do any horse trading. The mare was a dapple gray, with a white muzzle and a white streak down her forehead, too tall to be pure Indian pony and too short-barreled to be pure thoroughbred. Her disposition did suggest some time spent with Indians, but which Indians and how long was anybody’s guess. Every man who saw her wanted to buy her, she was that stylish, but Call wouldn’t even listen to an offer, though Pea Eye and Newt were both anxious to see her sold. They had to work around her every day and suffered accordingly. She had once kicked Newt all the way into the blacksmith’s shop and nearly into the forge. Pea Eye was at least as scared of her as he was of Comanches, which was saying a lot.
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