“I miss Gus,” Pea Eye said. “I get to expecting to hear him talk and he ain’t here. My ears sort of get empty.” Call had to admit that he missed him too, and that he was worried. He had had at least one disagreement a day with Gus for as many years as he could remember. Gus never answered any question directly, but it was possible to test an opinion against him, if you went about it right. More and more Call felt his absence, though fortunately they were having uneventful times—the cattle were fairly well trail-broken and weren’t giving any trouble. The crew for the most part had been well behaved, no more irritable or contrary than any other group of men. The weather had been ideal, water plentiful, and the spring grass excellent for grazing.
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Bert was inordinately proud of his skill with a rope, the men thought. He was indeed quick and accurate, but the men were tired of hearing him brag on himself and were constantly on the lookout for things he could rope that might cause him to miss. Once Bert had silenced them for a whole day by roping a coyote on the first throw, but they were not the sort of men to keep silent long.
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The shooter kept him pinned until full dark—but as soon as it was too dark to shoot, Augustus yanked his saddle loose from the dead mount and walked west, stopping to take what bullets he could salvage from the men he had killed. None had many, but one had a fairly good rifle, and Augustus took it as insurance. He hated carrying the saddle, but it was a shield of sorts; if he got caught in open country it might be the only cover he would have.
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In the night Lorena tried to sort it out in her mind. She had been hungry so much, tired so much, scared so much, that her mind didn’t work well anymore. Sometimes she would try to remember something and couldn’t—it was as if her mind and memory had gone and hidden somewhere until things were better. Dog Face had given her an old blanket; otherwise she would have had to sleep on the ground in what was left of her clothes. She wrapped the blanket around her and tried to think back over the talk. It meant Gus was coming—it was Gus Blue Duck wanted the Kiowas to kill. She had almost forgotten he was following her, life had gotten so hard. The Kiowas had been sent to kill him, so Gus might never arrive. It was hard to believe that Gus would get her out—the times when she had known him had been so different from the hard times. She didn’t think she would ever get out. Blue Duck was too bad. Dog Face was her only chance, and Dog Face was scared of Blue Duck. Sooner or later Blue Duck would give her to Ermoke or someone just as hard. If that was going to happen it was better that her mind had gone to hide.
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Sometimes the Kiowas went with him, other days they sat around their camp doing nothing. Monkey John swore at them, but the Kiowas didn’t listen. They laughed at the old man and gave him looks of the sort they gave Lorena. It wasn’t only women they could do things to.
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It sounded like July, and it looked like July, so Roscoe was forced to conclude that he was saved. He had been in the process of adjusting to impending death, and it seemed to him a part of him must already have left for the other place, because he felt sort of absent and dull. Ordinarily he would not have stood around on a muddy prairie naked, and yet in some ways it was easier than having to pick up the pieces of his life again, which meant, first off, having to literally pick up pieces of his clothes.
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Not only could Janey keep them on the trail but she was also extremely useful when it came to rounding up grub. Once they got settled in a camp at night she would disappear and come back five minutes later with a rabbit or a possum or a couple of squirrels. She could even catch birds. Once she came back with a fat brownish bird of a sort Roscoe had never seen.
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“It’s a weak excuse,” Wilbarger said, marking his place with a grass blade and standing up. “I didn’t notice much law in Arkansas either. There’s law of sorts in New Orleans, but out here it’s every man for himself.” “Well, there’s Texas Rangers but I guess they mostly fight the Indians,” July said, wondering where the conversation would end.
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Then it occurred to Newt that he would just have to trick her. He could watch without her knowing it. That way he wouldn’t have to go back to camp and admit that Lorena didn’t want him in camp with her. If he did that, the cowboys would make jokes about it all the way to Montana, making out that he had tried to do things he hadn’t tried to do. He wasn’t even sure what you were supposed to try to do. He had a sort of cloudy sense, but that was all.
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But a runaway girl was not the sort of guide he had in mind. After all, the only reason he was looking for July was to report on a runaway woman. How would it look if he showed up with another? July would think it highly irregular, and if the folks back in Fort Smith got wind of it it could easily be made to look bad. After all, old Sam hadn’t kept her around just because she could fry a possum in the dark.
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“What’s the story on this July?” Louisa asked. “That wife of his sounds like a woman of ill fame. What kind of sheriff would marry a woman of ill fame?” “Well, July’s slow,” Roscoe said. “He’s the sort that don’t talk much.” “Oh, that sort,” Louisa said. “The opposite of my late husband, Jim.” She took a pair of men’s brogans from beside the table and began to lace them on her bare feet.
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It was the only logical explanation. No stage had passed through in the last week. A troop of soldiers had come through, going west, but soldiers wouldn’t have taken Elmira. The boat had been filled with whiskey traders, headed up for Bents’ Fort. Roscoe had seen a couple of the boatmen staggering on the street, and when the boat had left with no fights reported, he had felt relieved. Whiskey traders were rough men—certainly not the sort married women ought to be traveling with.“You better go see what you can find out, Roscoe,” Peach said. “If she’s run off, July’s gonna want to know about it.” That was certainly true. July doted on Elmira.
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“If I ain’t back in a month, you girls feel free to start without me,” Augustus said. Then he drove off, amused that Dish Boggett looked so out of sorts just from being in love with a woman who didn’t want him. It was a peril too common to take seriously.
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“Jake won’t camp with us old cobs,” Augustus said. “He’s traveling with a valet, if you know what that is.” “No, but if it’s traveling with Jake I bet it wears skirts,” Soupy said—a remark which for some reason seemed to catch everybody wrong. Or everybody but Gus, who laughed long and hard. Feeling a little confused, but happy to have been hired, Soupy went off with Pea Eye to get breakfast.“I’m going in and pry up that sign I wrote so we can take it with us,” Augustus said. “I may pry up one of my Dutch ovens and bring it too.” “Bol ain’t said that he’s going,” Call said. It was a mild anxiety. If Bol quit and they had to depend on Gus to do the cooking, the whole trip would be in jeopardy. Apart from biscuits, his cooking was of the sort that caused tempers to flare.
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“Jake, you are surly tonight,” Augustus said mildly. “I guess leaving the easy pickings around here has put you out of sorts.” Pea Eye was carefully whetting his bowie knife on the sole of one boot. Though they were still perfectly safe, as far as he knew, Pea had already begun to have bad dreams about the big Indian whose ferocity had haunted his sleep for years.
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“We had hoped to sort of ease along with the bunch of you,” Jake said, his eyes down. “We’ll make our own camp, so as not to be in the way. Might could help out a little if things get tight. The water might be a little chancy, once we hit the plains.” “If I’d liked water better I guess I’d have stayed a river-boater, and you boys would have missed out on some choice conversation over the years,” Augustus said.
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“Hell, I don’t need all this,” he said. “There ain’t a horse in town worth fifty dollars, unless it’s that mare of Call’s, and she ain’t for sale.” But he took the money, thinking it a fine joke on Gus that the money from his poke would buy Lorie a mount to ride to Montana, or however far they went. He had known perfectly well Gus would try something of the sort, for Gus would never let him have a woman to himself. Gus liked to be a rival more than anything else, Jake figured. And as for Lorie going through with it—well, it relieved him of a certain level of responsibility for her. If she was going to keep that much independence, so would he.
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“You don’t need to stand there looking out of sorts,” he said. “I won’t run off without you.” “I ain’t out of sorts,” Lorena said. “You are. You don’t want to stay and you don’t want to go.” Jake looked at her mildly. “I’ve been up that way,” he said. “It’s rough. Why don’t we go up to San Antonio and gamble for a spell?” “Tinkersley took me there,” Lorena said. “I don’t want to go back.” “You’re a hard one to please,” Jake said, getting a little testy suddenly.
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But with Jake so out of sorts there was nothing to do but go upstairs. She gave Lippy a cool look as she got up, which surprised him so it made his lip drop.
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It put her out of sorts with Lippy, for it was still hot in her room and she would rather have stayed in the saloon, where there was at least a breath of breeze.
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Instead, Jake had walked in. Lippy gave a whoop, and Xavier was excited enough that he came out from behind the bar and shook Jake’s hand. Jake was polite and glad to see them, and took the trouble to ask their health and make a few jokes, but even before he had drunk the free drink Xavier offered him he had begun to make a difference in the way she felt. He had big muddy brown eyes and a neat mustache that turned down at the corners, but of course she had seen big eyes and mustaches before. What made the difference was that Jake was so at home and relaxed even after he saw her sitting there. Most men got nervous when they saw her, aware that their wives wouldn’t like them being in the same room with her, or else made nervous by the thought of what they wanted from her, which they couldn’t get without some awkward formalities of a sort that few of them could handle smoothly.
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It was Pea’s one close exposure to an aspect of womankind that Gus was always talking about—their penchant for flyingdirectly in the face of reason. Mary was as wet on the top as on the bottom, and the flapping sheet had knocked one of the combs out of her hair, causing it to come loose. The wash was as wet as it had been before she hung it up in the first place, and yet she wasn’t quitting. She was taking clothes off the line that would just have to be hung back on in fifteen minutes, and Pea was helping her do it as if it all made some sense. While he was steadying the clothesline he happened to notice something that gave him almost as hard a jolt as the bolt of lightning that killed Josh Cole: the clothes he had rescued were undergarments—white bloomers of the sort that it was obvious Mary was wearing beneath the skirt that was so wet against her legs. Pea was so shocked that he almost dropped the underpants back in the mud. She was bound to think it bold that he would pick up her undergarments like that—yet she was determined to have the sheets off the line and all he could do was stand there numb with embarrassment. It was a blessing that rain soon began to pour off his hat brim in streams right in front of his face, making a little waterfall for him to hide behind until the ordeal ended. With the water running off his hat he only caught blurred glimpses of what was going on—he could not judge to what extent Mary had been shocked by his helpful but thoughtless act.
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The knowledge that the Captain was in the room with a whore struck Pea hard, sort of like the bullet that had hit him just behind the shoulder blades in the big Indian scrape up by Fort Phantom Hill. When the bullet hit he felt a solid whack and then sort of went numb in the brain—and it was the same with the notion that struck him as he was carrying the ax home from the saloon: Maggie was talking to the Captain in the privacy of her room, whereas so far as he knew no one had ever heard of the Captain doing more than occasionally tipping his hat to a lady if he met one in the street.
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“Nothing of the sort,” the other said.
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“Whiskey,” Jake said. “He was bull drunk. Before I even noticed, he took a dislike to my dress and pulled his Colt.” “Well, I don’t know what took you to Arkansas in the first place, Jake,” Augustus said. “A fancy dresser like yourself is bound to excite comment in them parts.” Call had found, over the years, that it only did to believe half of what Jake said. Jake was not a bald liar, but once he thought over a scrape, his imagination sort of worked on it and shaded it in his own favor.
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