The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  That Newt would someday bear his father’s name was the one hope Maggie would not relinquish, though she came to realize that no effort of hers would make it happen. Her hope, she felt, lay with Newt himself—as the boy grew, his own sweetness might have an effect on Woodrow that she herself had not been able to have. All the rangers liked Newt; they kept him with them whenever they could. They sat him on their horses, whittled him toy guns, let him pet the crippled possum that Lee Hitch found in the hay one morning and adopted. As Newt grew they taught him little skills, and Newt was a quick pupil. All of them, Maggie was convinced, knew he was Call’s.

  Now, in the strong sunlight, the crowd followed the wagon with the coffin in toward the green cemetery by the river. Maggie heard, all about her, murmurs about the war. She scarcely knew herself what it meant; she longed for a moment with Woodrow, so he could explain it. But he had not, as she hoped, dropped back to walk with her. Instead, it was Jake Spoon who dropped back, when they were almost to the graveyard. Jake had a habit of touching her in public that Maggie despised; she worked in a store now, she had a respectable job, but even if she hadn’t she would not have wanted Jake to touch her in public. Even in private her acceptance of him had some reluctance in it. When he attempted to touch her arm Maggie drew away.

  “You oughtn’t to be winking at Newt—not at a funeral,” she reproached him.

  Jake, though, could not be managed. He turned to Newt and winked again.

  “Why, the preaching was over,” he said. “There’s no harm in a wink. Nobody noticed, anyway. All they can think about is the war. It’s a wonder anybody even came to see Nellie buried.

  “Gus does have poor luck with wives,” he added. “If I was a woman I’d think twice before hitching up with him—it’d be a death sentence.”

  “I wish you’d be nice,” Maggie whispered. “I just wish you’d be nice. You can be nice, Jake, when you try.”

  Maggie knew that Jake Spoon wasn’t really bad; but neither was he really good, either. Though he was capable of sweetness, at times, she often felt that she would be better off having no man than a man like Jake; but, if she sent him away, Newt would be the lonelier for it. She never completely turned Jake out, though she was often tempted to. It vexed her that she was spending so much of her energy on a large child, when there was a better man, one she had long loved, not one hundred yards away—yet, there it was.

  “I see Deets,” Newt whispered, as the procession reached the little graveyard. Sure enough, Deets and two other Negroes, men who had worked for Nellie McCrae or her family, stood deferentially, waiting, near a grove of trees.

  Newt was wondering if Graciela had died of the snakebite, in which case they might have to bury her, too, when they got back home. He did like Graciela; she gave him honey cakes and taught him how to tie little threads on grasshoppers’ legs and make them pull sticks along, like tiny wagons. But if Graciela had died and they had to go through the singing and praying again, it would be a long time before he got to play. Besides, the brown coat his mother was so proud of scratched his neck. There was more singing, and the grownups all gathered around a hole in the ground. Newt seemed sleepy—the brown coat made him hot. He held his mother’s hand, put his head against her leg, and shut his eyes. The next thing he knew, Deets, who carried him home, was setting him down in his own kitchen. Graciela, who was still alive, helped him take off the scratchy coat.

  5.

  ONCE HE HAD become a rich man, Blue Duck began to think of killing his father. Getting rich had been easy—the whites were on the roads in great numbers, and they were careless travelers. They traveled as if there were no Comanches left—most of these whites did not even post guards at night. Blue Duck supposed they must be coming from lands where the Indians were tame, or where they had all been killed. Otherwise the whites would long since have been robbed and killed. They drank at night until they passed out, or else lay with their women carelessly. They were easy to kill and rob, and even the poorest of them had at least a few things of value: guns, watches, a little money; some of the women had jewels hidden away. Often there would be a horse or two Blue Duck could add to the herd he was building at his camp near the Cimarron River.

  Few of his father’s band hunted that far east; Comanches didn’t bother him, nor did the Indians to the east, the Cherokees or Choctaws or other tribes that the whites had driven into the Indian Territory. Those Indians were not raiders anyway: they tried to build towns and farms. They hunted a little, but they had few horses and did not go after the buffalo. A few renegades from those tribes tried to join up with Blue Duck, but the only one he allowed into his band was a Choctaw named Broken Nose, who was an exceptional shot with the rifle. Blue Duck wanted only Indians who were skilled horsemen, like his own people, the Comanches. Sometimes he liked to strike deep into the forested country, where the whites had many little settlements; for such work he needed men who could ride. He wanted to raid as the Comanches raided, only in the eastern places, where the whites were numerous and careless.

  Blue Duck had five women, two who were Kiowa and three white women he had stolen. There were many other stolen women that he let his men play with for a while, and then killed. He wanted the whites to know that once he had one of their women, the woman was lost. Ermoke, the first man to join up with him once he had left his father’s band, was very lustful, so lustful that he had to be restrained. Blue Duck wanted wealth but Ermoke only wanted women—he would raid any party if he saw a woman that he wanted.

  Soon there were fifteen men in the camp on the Cimarron; they had many guns, a good herd of horses, and many women. Sometimes Blue Duck would get tired of all the drinking and quarreling that went on in the camp. Once or twice he had risen up in fury and killed one or two of his own men, just to quiet the camp. He had learned from his father that the way to deal death was to do it quickly, when people were least expecting death to be dealt. Blue Duck kept an axe near the place where he spread his robes. Sometimes he would spring up and kill two or three renegades with his axe, before they could react and flee.

  At other times he would simply ride away from the camp for a few days, to rest his mind, and when he left he always rode west, toward the Comanche lands. It rankled him that he had been made an outcast. He would have liked to ride again with the Comanche, to live again in the Comanche way. He missed the great hunts; he missed the raids. The renegades he commanded seldom took a buffalo, or any game larger than a deer. Once or twice Blue Duck rode north alone and took a buffalo or two—he did it for the meat, but also because it reminded him of a time he had gone hunting with Buffalo Hump and Kicking Wolf and the other Comanche hunters. The knowledge that he had been driven out, that he could never go back, filled him sometimes with anger and other times with sadness. He did not understand it. He had done no worse than many young warriors; he had only been trying to prove his bravery, which it was right to do.

  Blue Duck decided that the real reason for his exile was that the old men feared his strength. They knew he would be a chief someday, and they feared for themselves, just as the renegades on the Cimarron were afraid for themselves.

  He decided too—one night when the sleet was blowing and he was eating buffalo liver, far north of the Canadian River—that his father also feared his strength. Buffalo Hump was older; soon his strength would begin to fade. But he had been war chief of his band for a long time; he would not want to surrender his power, to a son or anyone. His power would have to be taken, and Blue Duck wanted to be the one to take it.

  In the cold morning he skinned the buffalo he had killed and took the hide back to the camp on the Cimarron, for the women to work. Only the two Kiowa women knew how to work with skins; the stolen white women had no such skills. The women were inept and so were many of the men. They were adequate when raiding white farmers, travelers with families, and the like, but in battle none of them were equal to the Comanches. They had no skill with any weapon except the rifle, and most of them were cowards, as well. A f
ew Comanche warriors could make short work of them, a thing Blue Duck knew well.

  He meant to kill his father, but it was not a thing he would attempt hastily. His father was too alert, and too dangerous. He might have to wait until his father weakened; perhaps an illness would strike Buffalo Hump, or a white soldier kill him; or perhaps he would just grow careless when on a hunt and die of an accident.

  As the years passed Blue Duck’s fame spread, thanks to his random and merciless killings. He was a wanted man in the eastern country, the country of trees. In Arkansas and in east Texas or Louisiana his name was feared by people who had never heard of Buffalo Hump; people who had no reason to fear a Comanche attack feared Blue Duck. He became expert at working the line between the wild country and the settled. He knew where there were effective lawmen and where there were not. Many of his renegades were shot, and not a few captured, tried, and hung, but Blue Duck shifted away. He robbed at night, then went north into Kansas; few white lawmen had ever seen him, but all knew of him.

  His restlessness did not leave him, or his frustration. He was a Comanche who was not allowed to live as a Comanche, and the injustice rankled. Many times he went back to the Comanche country, sometimes camping in it for days, alone. He was careful, though, to stay well away from his father’s people. He didn’t fear Slow Tree, but he knew that if he gave Buffalo Hump enough provocation Buffalo Hump would come after him and hunt him to death, if he could.

  Blue Duck, cool in the attack, but impatient in most other aspects of life, knew that he needed to be patient in the matter of his father. He was the younger man; he had only to wait until time weakened his father, or removed him. Now and then his hot blood urged him not to wait, to challenge his father and kill him. But in cooler moments he knew that was folly. Even if he killed Buffalo Hump there were other warriors who would hunt him down and kill him.

  In the east, among the forests, the name of Blue Duck was most feared. Even on the much-traveled army roads few travelers felt safe. The gun merchants in Arkansas and Mississippi sold many guns to travelers who hoped to protect themselves from Blue Duck, Ermoke, and their men.

  Many of those travelers died, new guns or no; Blue Duck’s wealth grew; but, despite it, he still went back, every few months, to ride the comanchería, the long plains of grass.

  6.

  THE MORNING AFTER Nellie’s funeral, Augustus McCrae disappeared. He had been seen the night before, drinking in his usual saloon, but when morning came he was nowhere to be found. His favorite horse, a black mare, was not in the stables, and there was no sign that he had been back to the room where he had lived with Nellie.

  Call was surprised, and a little disturbed. When Geneva, his first wife, died, Gus had sought company wherever he could find it. He stayed in the saloons or the whorehouses for over two weeks, and was hardly fit for rangering duties once he did resume them. On a trip to Laredo, where banditry had been especially rife, he had been thrown from his horse three times, due to inebriation. The fact that he had chosen a half-broken, untrustworthy horse for the ride to Laredo was evidence that his mind was not on his work. Augustus had always been careful to choose gentle, well-broken mounts.

  Call was annoyed by his friend’s sudden disappearance. Even allowing for grief, and Gus had seemed sadly grieved, it was unprofessional behavior in view of the unsettled state of things. Call supposed, himself, that the war fever would soon abate at least a little. Texas wasn’t in the war yet, and when the eager volunteers discovered how far they would have to travel to get into a battle, many of them, he suspected, would develop second thoughts. Many would elect to stay at home and see if the war spread in their direction. It wasn’t like the Mexican conflict, where men could ride south for a day or two and join in battle.

  Still, it was a war, and the Governor’s concern about the local defenses was justified. Governor Clark had an assistant, a man named Barkeley, a small man who fancied that he was a large cog in the machinery of state government. Augustus McCrae had promised the Governor an answer regarding his intentions, and Mr. Barkeley wanted it.

  “Where’s McCrae? The Governor’s in a hurry and so am I,” Barkeley wanted to know, presenting himself at the ranger stables with an air of impatience.

  “He’s not here,” Call said.

  “Where is he, then? This is damned inconvenient,” Barkeley snapped.

  “I don’t know where he is,” Call admitted. “He just buried his wife. He may have wanted to take a ride and mourn a little.”

  “We’re all apt to have to bury wives,” Barkeley replied. “McCrae has no business doing it on state time. Can’t you send someone to find him?”

  “No, but you’re welcome to go look yourself,” Call said, piqued by the man’s tone.

  “Go look, what do you mean, sir?” Barkeley said. “Look where?”

  “He was here yesterday, I expect that means he’s still somewhere in the state,” Call informed the man, before turning on his heel.

  By midafternoon, with Augustus still gone, Call became genuinely worried. He had never married and could not claim to know the emotions that might torment a man at the loss of a wife; but he knew they must be powerful. In the back of his mind was the sad fate of Long Bill Coleman, whose wife had not even been dead. Long Bill had seemed to be a troubled but stable man, only the day before he killed himself—and Augustus, if anything, was a good deal more flighty than Long Bill. The thought kept entering Call’s mind that Augustus might have done something foolish, in his grief.

  The Kickapoo tracker, Famous Shoes, the man so trusted by Captain Scull, lived with his wives and children not far north of Austin. Though Famous Shoes preferred the country along the Little Wichita, the Comanches had been violent lately in that region, killing several Kickapoo families. Famous Shoes had brought his family south, for safety. The army, hearing of his skill, tried to hire him to track for them on several expeditions, but their present leader, Colonel D. D. McQuorquodale, insisted that all scouts be mounted, a form of travel that Famous Shoes rejected. Colonel McQuorquodale refused to believe that a man on foot could keep up with a column of mounted cavalry, despite numerous testimonials to Famous Shoes’ speed and ability, one of them by Call himself.

  “He not only keeps up, he gets three or four days ahead, if you don’t keep him in sight,” Call assured the Colonel. “He’s the best I’ve ever seen at finding water holes, Colonel.”

  “You’ll need the water holes, too,” Augustus said. He had a contempt for soldiers, but had been eavesdropping on the conversation while whittling on a stick.

  “I have every confidence in my ability to find water, sir,” Colonel McQuorquodale said. “I run the scouts, and they’ll travel the way I tell them to, if they expect to work for Dan McQuorquodale.”

  On the Colonel’s next expedition west, sixteen cavalry horses starved to death and several men came close to it, saved only by a heavy spring rain. Despite this evidence of the variability of water sources on the western plains, Colonel McQuorquodale refused to relax his requirements, and Famous Shoes continued to refuse to ride horses, the result being that he was in his camp, surrounded by his wives and children, when Call and Pea Eye sought him out. Call wanted to know if Famous Shoes was available to conduct a quick search for Augustus. When they arrived Famous Shoes was holding the paw of a small animal of some sort, studying it with deep curiosity. His wives were smiling as if they shared some joke, but Famous Shoes was only interested in the paw.

  “We’ve lost Captain McCrae,” Call said, dismounting. “Are you busy, or could you find the time to go look for him?”

  “Right now I am wondering about this paw,” Famous Shoes said. “It is the paw of a ferret my wives killed, but they cooked it when I was away. I did not get to look at the ferret.”

  “Why would you need to look at it, if it was tasty?” Pea Eye asked. Over the years he had grown fond of Famous Shoes—he liked it that the Kickapoo was curious about things that other men didn’t even notice.

 
“This ferret did not belong here,” Famous Shoes informed him. “Once I went to the north and I saw many weasels like this near the Platte River. This ferret was black, but all the ferrets around here are brown. This is the kind of ferret that ought to be up by the Platte River.”

  Famous Shoes’ penchant for diverting himself for days in order to investigate things that didn’t particularly require investigation was one of the things that tried Call’s patience with him.

  “Maybe it was just born off-color,” Pea Eye suggested. “Sometimes you’ll see a litter of white pigs with one black pig in it.”

  “This paw is from a ferret, it is not a pig,” Famous Shoes said, unpersuaded by Pea Eye’s suggestion. He saw, though that Captain Call was impatient—Captain Call was always impatient—so he put the ferret’s paw in his pouch for future study.

  “Captain McCrae went by this morning early,” Famous Shoes said. “It was foggy here. I did not see him but I heard him say something to his mare. He is on that black mare he likes, and he is going west. I saw his track while I was looking for some more of these ferrets.”

  “His wife died, I expect he’s just grieving,” Call said. “I’d be obliged if you’d track him and see if you can get him to come back.”