The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  The four dark men who had been waiting to lower the cage immediately took their machetes and trotted away. Ahumado was still back at the crater, where the feast was being held, waiting on his blanket; he would have heard the shot.

  “There, you Cincinnati fool, I warbled you to death,” Scull said.

  His situation had improved dramatically. He had a knife and a gun, and five bullets. On the other hand he was in a flimsy cage, on top of a five-hundred-foot cliff, and he was naked.

  The bindings that held the mesquite cage together were hardened rawhide. Scull began to hack at them but the knife was dull and the rawhide hard as iron. Tudwal’s horse stood near. If he could cut himself free he might have a chance, but the rawhide was so resistant and the knife so dull that it might take an hour to free himself—and he didn’t have an hour.

  “You goddamned fool, why didn’t you sharpen your knife?” Scull said. “Not only did you have a Cincinnati voice, you had a goddamned weak Kentucky brain.”

  It annoyed him. He had worked a miracle, killed his captor, and yet he wasn’t free. Then, with a moment to breathe, he remembered another of Papa Franklin’s fine sayings: “Haste makes waste.” He looked more closely at the jointure of the wrappings. He didn’t need to hack the cage apart—if he could just break the wrappings at one corner of the cage he could squeeze out and run. He still had five bullets; it seemed good policy to sacrifice one or two of them to free himself. He immediately tested the decision and was well pleased with the result: two bullets and the wrappings blew apart, and he squeezed through and stood up.

  His fighting spirit rose; by God, he was out! He squatted briefly over the body of Tudwal, but found only two more bullets, in a pocket of the man’s dirty tunic. But the man at least wore clothes; Scull hastily stripped him and pulled on his filthy pants and tunic. They were too large, but they were clothes!

  The paint horse stood not thirty feet away. Its ears were up—it looked at Scull nervously. Steady the yardarm, light on the throttle, Scull told himself. Haste makes waste. He had to approach calmly and slowly; he could not afford to spook the skittish animal. Without the horse the dark men would soon run him to earth.

  The fact that he wore Tudwal’s clothes was an advantage. The man’s smell lingered in the filthy garments; he could plainly smell it, and no doubt the horse could too.

  “Bible and sword, that’s good of you, boy,” he said, walking slowly toward the horse. “Be a good nag now, be a good nag. You’re an ugly nag but I’ll overlook that if you’ll just carry me to Texas.”

  The horse pawed the ground once, but did not retreat. Scull came on, steadily, and soon had the bridle rein in his hand. In another moment he had Tudwal’s rifle out of its scabbard and was in the saddle. Then, to his intense annoyance, the horse began to crow-hop. Scull had no skill with broncos, as the Texans called bucking horses. He had to grab the horse’s mane, to keep from being thrown, and in the process, to his intense vexation, dropped the rifle. Finally the crow-hopping stopped but by then Scull was not sure where the rifle was—he saw a line of men on the horizon and knew that he had no time to search for the gun. He sawed the reins until he had the paint pointed north, and then urged him into a dead run. I’m gone, he thought—I’m gone. But then he heard the whirl of bolas as the dark men rose up from behind a low ridge. The running horse went down hard—Scull flew a good distance and lit on his shoulder. As he rose, more bolas were flying at him. One wrapped around his legs. He quickly shot two of the dark men but a third dashed in and hit him on the head with the flat side of a machete. The sky swirled above him as it might if he were on a fast carousel.

  This time Ahumado supervised the caging.

  The three other cages were pulled up and the pecked-at corpses in them flung over the cliff. Scull was put in the strongest cage. He was dazed from the blow to his head and made no resistance. Ahumado let him keep the clothes he had taken from Tudwal.

  “I have no one to put in these cages,” the old man said. “You will be alone on the cliff.”

  “It’s a fine honor, I’m sure,” Scull said. His head rang so that it was a chore to talk.

  “It is no honor—but it means that many birds will come to you. If you are quick you can catch these birds. You might live a long time.”

  “I’ll be quick but you ain’t smart, señor,” Scull said. “If you were smart you’d ransom me. I’m a big jefe. The Texans might give you a thousand cattle if you’d send me back.

  “Your people could live a good spell on a thousand cattle,” he added.

  Ahumado stepped close to the cage and looked at him with a look of such contempt that it startled Inish Scull. The look was like the slice of a machete.

  “Those are not my people, they are my slaves,” Ahumado said. “Those cattle in Texas are mine already. They wandered there from Jaguar’s land, and Parrot’s. When I want cattle I go to Texas and get them.”

  He stopped, and stepped back. The force of his contempt was so great that Scull could not look away.

  “You had better try to catch those fat pigeons when they come to roost,” the old man said. Then he gestured to the dark men, and turned away.

  The dark men put their shoulders against the cage and nudged it outward, over the lip of the great cliff. Slowly the men who stood at the post began to lower it into the Yellow Canyon. The cage twisted a little, as it was lowered; it twisted and swayed. Inish Scull held tightly to the mesquite bars. The height made him dizzy. He wondered if the rope would hold.

  Far below him, great black vultures soared and sank. One or two rose toward him, as the cage was lowered, but most of them pecked at the remains of the corpses that had just been thrown off the cliff.

  13.

  AUGUSTUS MCCRAE, brokenhearted because of Clara’s marriage, resorted much to the bottle or jug as the six rangers proceeded west in search of Captain Inish Scull. It was vexing to Call—damn vexing. He was convinced they were on a wild goose chase anyway, trying to find one man in an area as large as west Texas, and a man, besides, who might not appreciate being found even if they did find him.

  “It’s two men, Woodrow,” Augustus reminded him. “Famous Shoes is with him.”

  “Was with him—that was a while ago,” Call said. “Are you too drunk to notice that time’s passing?”

  They were riding through the sparsely grassed country near the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos, well beyond the rim of settlement. They had not even come upon a farm for over a week. All they saw ahead of them was deep sky and brown land.

  “I ain’t drunk at all, though I would be if there was whiskey to be had in this country,” Gus said. “I doubt if there’s a jug of whiskey within two hundred miles of here.”

  “That’s fine,” Call said. “You were drunk enough to last you while it was available.”

  “No, Woodrow—it didn’t last,” Gus said. “Maybe Clara didn’t really marry. She likes to joke, you know. She might have just been joking, to see what I’d do.”

  Call didn’t answer. The conjecture was too foolish to dignify. Augustus had lost his girl, and that was that.

  The other rangers were jolly, though—all except Long Bill, who had not expected to leave his Pearl so soon. Imagining domestic delights that he was not at home to experience put Long Bill in a low mood.

  Young Jake Spoon, though, was so jolly that he was apt to be irritating. The mere fact that he had survived two weeks in the wilderness without being scalped or tortured convinced him that rangering was easy and himself immortal. He was apt to babble on endlessly about the most normal occurrence, such as killing an antelope or a cougar.

  The weather had been warm, which particularly pleased Pea Eye; he did most of the camp chores with will and skill, whereas young Jake had adequate will but little skill. The third morning out he girthed Gus’s young horse too tightly. Gus was too hung over to notice; he mounted and was promptly bucked off, a circumstance that didn’t please him. He cussed young Jake thoroughly, plunging the young man into
a state of deep embarrassment.

  Deets, the black man, was the happiest and least troublesome member of the troop. Deets liked being a scout far better than he liked being in town, the reason being, Call suspected, was because in town there were always men who might abuse him because of his color.

  “Why are you so dern hard to convince, Woodrow?” Gus asked. “I’ve known you forever and I’ve never been able to convince you of a single thing.”

  “No, you’ve convinced me of one thing for sure,” Call said, “and that’s that you’re foolish about women.

  “I expect Clara turned you down because she knew you were too fond of whores,” he added.

  “Not a bit of it!” Gus retorted. “She knew I’d give up whores in a minute if she’d marry me.”

  Nonetheless, the thought that what Call said might be true made Augustus so unhappy that he wanted to get down and beat his head against a rock. They had only been in Austin two days: what happened with Clara happened so fast that, when he thought back on it, it was more like a visit in a dream than something real. He wanted to believe that when they returned to Austin again, things would be as they had always been, with Clara in her father’s store, unmarried, waiting for him to rush in and kiss her.

  Long Bill Coleman rode up to the two captains in hopes of getting some things clarified. He had quickly come to regret his gallantry in allowing himself to be conscripted for the new expedition. Adjusting to the racket of domestic life was hard for him, after a long trip; it might have been a little quieter had Pearl not insisted on keeping her chickens in the kitchen, but Pearl couldn’t stand to be parted from her chickens; so there was the racket to contend with, on top of which Pearl was a fervent woman who liked to make up his absences by lots of fervor—an overwhelming amount of fervor at times, in fact. Thus Long Bill was subjected to conflicting feelings: part of him wanted Pearl and her fervor, while another part longed for the peace of the prairies.

  For the moment he seemed to have the peace of the prairies, though there was no guarantee that the peace would hold. Several times, moving west along the rivers and creeks, they had struck Indian sign—enough Indian sign to make Long Bill nervous. His opinion of the matter, now that he was too far west to do much about it, was that he ought to have stayed with his wife. The chickens, after all, could be tolerated; better chickens than Comanches.

  “Shut up, Bill—I don’t know where we are and neither does Woodrow,” Gus said, when he saw Long Bill riding up, an interrogative look on his face.

  “I never asked a question,” Long Bill pointed out.

  “No, but you were about to—I seen it in the way you was holding your mouth,” Gus said.

  “I just wanted to know when we give up on finding the Captain,” Long Bill said. “I got chores to do at home.”

  “You’re a ranger and that comes first,” Gus said tartly. “Your wife’s big and stout. She can do the confounded chores.”

  “Well, but she’s got a baby in her—that will slow some women down,” Long Bill said.

  “Rather than arguing, we need to be paying attention to the trail,” Call said. With Augustus in such an uncertain temper he wanted to cool things before the argument became a fistfight.

  “What trail?” Gus said. “There’s no trail. We’re just following our noses and our noses are pointed west.”

  “That’s what it looks like to me,” Long Bill said. “Captain Scull’s got clean away. When do we go back?”

  “I guess we’ll go back when we’ve gone far enough,” Call said, aware that it was no answer.

  “Well, but what’s far enough?” Jake Spoon asked, thrusting himself into the conversation—and not for the first time, either. Pea Eye Parker would never have intruded when his elders were talking. Pea Eye offered an opinion only when asked for one, which was seldom. He tried to determine correct procedure by watching his elders. Jake Spoon didn’t think in terms of elders or superiors. It never occurred to him that there were times when the two captains might not want to be bothered with a youngster. Jake just barged in and asked his question.

  “We’re not to the Pecos yet,” Call said. “If we don’t strike his trail between here and the Pecos, I expect we ought to go back.”

  “I think we ought to look in Mexico, myself,” Augustus said.

  “Why?” Call said. “We had no orders to look in Mexico.”

  “No, but there’s whores and tequila in Mexico,” Gus said. “Bill and me, we could drown our sorrows.”

  “I ain’t going all the way to Mexico just so you two can drown your sorrows,” Call said.

  “Woodrow always changes the subject when the talk turns to women,” Augustus said.

  “I didn’t know the talk was even about women,” Call said. “I thought we were talking about when to give up on the Captain and go back home.”

  Long Bill Coleman, to his own surprise and Call’s, suddenly burst out with an opinion that he had been holding in for months.

  “A man ought to marry, Captain,” Long Bill said. “It’s a lonely life not having no woman to hold on to when you bunk down at night.”

  Call was so startled by the remark that he hardly knew what to say.

  “I’m usually working at night, Bill—I don’t spend much time in a bunk,” he replied, finally.

  Long Bill’s Adam’s apple was quivering and his face was red. Call had seen him fight several fierce engagements with the Comanches and exhibit less emotion.

  “I don’t know that little Maggie Tilton too well, but I do know she wasn’t meant to be no whore,” Long Bill said. “She was meant to be a wife and she’d make a fine one.”

  Then, embarrassed by what he had said, he abruptly shut up and rode away.

  “Amen,” Gus said. “Now you see, Woodrow—the sooner you marry Maggie, the happier the rest of us will be.”

  Call was amazed—here they were in the middle of the wilderness, on a dangerous assignment, and Long Bill Coleman, the solidest man in the troop, had seen fit to deliver a public lecture, urging him to get married! Surely the decision to marry was a private matter that need only be discussed between the couple who were thinking of marrying.

  Worrying about it while patrolling the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos struck him as highly inappropriate. It would only distract them from the business at hand, which was rangering. While on patrol he liked to give his full attention to the landscape, the men, the horses, tracks, sign, the behavior of the birds and animals they spotted, anything that might help keep a troop of men alive in a country where a Comanche raiding party could swoop down on them at any moment. It was no time to be clouding the mind with issues of marriage or lustful thoughts—and the mention of slim Maggie Tilton did lead to lustful thoughts. Many a night, on guard, he had been distracted by the thought of Maggie. It was just good luck that he hadn’t come under sudden attack at such a moment.

  Long Bill, embarrassed by his own impertinence, avoided Call for the rest of the day. Augustus, as surprised by Long Bill’s statement as Call had been, thought it best to avoid the subject of marriage for the rest of the day.

  That evening, as soon as he’d had coffee and his bite, Call walked away from the campfire and sat by himself all night.

  “I doubt he’ll marry her, Gus,” Long Bill whispered to Gus McCrae.

  “I doubt it too,” Gus said. “He ought to, though. You’re right about that, Bill.”

  14.

  IN THE MIDDLE of the next afternoon they heard the crack of gunshots from some low, rocky hills to the north. Then a dog bayed, a hound of some kind. They had just watered their horses at a thin trickle of creek, with a few wild plum bushes scattered along it. While the horses were taking in water and the men relieving themselves of it, Deets hurried up and down the little creek, looking at the plum bushes. Of course it was too early in the year for plums yet, but he liked to make note of such things in case they passed that way in June, when the sweet plums would be mature.

  When the shots rang out, Deets c
ame hurrying back. There were two shots and then silence, except for the hound.

  Since the party was so small, Call and Augustus decided they had best stay together. They could not afford to send one man to scout—he might be surrounded and cut down.

  “That ain’t a real hound,” Augustus ventured. “It’s a damn Comanche, imitating a hound. They can imitate anything, you know—Indians can.”

  All during his years as a ranger, Augustus had been prone to anxiety because of the Indians’ well-known ability to perfectly mimic birdsongs and animal sounds. He had never actually caught an Indian imitating a bird, but he knew they could.

  Long Bill Coleman shared this particular anxiety.

  “That’s Indians for sure, Captain,” he said. “They’re trying to make us think there’s a hound over in those rocks.”

  Call didn’t share the anxiety. Deets himself could mimic several animals and most birds—he could perfectly imitate the snuff an armadillo makes when startled, and Deets wasn’t an Indian. Besides, there was an abundance of wildlife, birds and animals, that did an excellent job of making their own sounds.

  The ridge of shaley rock where the shots had come from looked uninviting, though. The ridge wrinkled the prairie for miles and could easily shelter an ambushing war party.

  “They’re there, Woodrow,” Augustus said. “They’re just waiting till we get closer. Look to your weapons, boys.”

  Young Jake Spoon was so terrified that he felt frozen. He put his hand on his pistol but was too scared to pull it out. If an Indian did come running at him Jake felt the fright alone would kill him. He realized he had been wrong not to stay in town. He felt as good as dead and just hoped the termination would be as quick and painless as possible.