Call was silent. Of course they could not charge a man for his own horses.
“That’s all right, Call,” Augustus said. “We’ll make it up off the Irishmen. Maybe they got rich uncles—bank directors or railroad magnates or something. They’ll be so happy to see those boys alive again that they’ll likely make us partners.”
Call ignored him, trying to think of some way to salvage the trip. Though he had always been a careful planner, life on the frontier had long ago convinced him of the fragility of plans. The truth was, most plans did fail, to one degree or another, for one reason or another. He had survived as a Ranger because he was quick to respond to what he had actually found, not because his planning was infallible.
In the present case he had found two destitute travelers and a herd of recently stolen horses. But it was still four hours till sunup and he was reluctant to abandon his original ambition, which was to return with a hundred Mexican horses. It was still possible, if he acted decisively.
“All right,” he said, quickly sorting over in his head who should be assigned to do what. “These are mainly Wilbarger’s horses. The reason they’re so gentle is because they’ve been run to a frazzle, and they’re used to Texans besides.”
“I’d catch one and ride him home, if I could find one that paces,” Jake said. “I’m about give out from bouncing on this old trotter you boys gave me.”
“Jake’s used to feather pillows and Arkansas whores,” Augustus said. “It’s a pity he has to associate with hard old cobs like us.”
“You two can jabber tomorrow,” Call said. “Pedro’s horses have got to be somewhere. I’d like to make a run at them before I quit. That means we have to split three ways.”
“Leave me split the shortest way home,” Jake said, never too proud to complain. “I’ve bounced my ass over enough of Mexico.”
“All right,” Call said. “You and Deets and Dish take these horses home.”
He would have liked to have Deets with him, but Deets was the only one he knew for certain could take the Wilbarger horses on a line for Lonesome Dove. Dish Boggett, though said to be a good hand, was an untested quality, whereas Jake was probably lost himself.
“Gus, that leaves you the Irishmen,” he said. “If they can ride, you ought to catch up with these horses somewhere this side of the river. Just don’t stop to play no poker with them.”
Augustus considered the situation for a minute.
“So that’s your strategy, is it?” he said. “You and Newt and Pea get to have all the fun and the rest of us are stuck with the chores.”
“Why, I was trying to make it easy for you, Gus,” Call said. “Seeing as you’re the oldest and most decrepit.”
“See you for breakfast, then,” Augustus said, taking the lead ropes from Newt. “I just hope the Irishmen don’t expect a buggy.”
With that he galloped off. The rest of them trotted down to where Pea and Dish were sitting, waiting.
“Pea, you come with me,” Call said. “And you—” looking at the boy. Though it would expose Newt to more danger, he decided he wanted the boy with him. At least he wouldn’t pick up bad habits, as he undoubtedly would have if he’d been sent along with Gus.
“All you three have to do is get these horses to town by sunup,” he added. “If we ain’t back, give Wilbarger his.”
“What are you planning to do, stay here and get married?” Jake asked.
“My plans ain’t set,” he said. “Don’t you worry about us. Just keep them horses moving.”
He looked at Deets when he said that. He could not formally make Deets the leader over two white men, but he wanted him to know that he had the responsibility of seeing that the horses got there. Deets said nothing, but when he trotted off to start the horses he took the point as if it was his natural place. Dish Boggett loped around to the other point, leaving Jake to bring up the rear.
Jake seemed largely uninterested in the proceedings, which was his way.
“Call, you’re some friend,” he said. “I ain’t been home a whole day and you already got me stealing horses.”
But he loped off after the herd and was soon out of sight. Pea Eye yawned as he watched him go.
“I swear,” he said. “Jake’s just like he used to be.”
• • •
An hour later they found the main horse herd in a narrow valley several miles to the north. Call estimated it to be over a hundred horses strong. The situation had its difficulty, the main one being that the horses were barely a mile from the Flores headquarters, and on the wrong side of it at that. It would be necessary to bring them back past the hacienda, or else take them north to the river, a considerably longer route. If Pedro Flores and his men chose to pursue, they would have a fine chance of catching them out in the open, in broad daylight, several miles from help. It would be himself and Pea and the boy against a small army of vaqueros.
On the other hand, he didn’t relish leaving the horses, now that he had found them. He was tempted just to move them right past the hacienda and hope everyone there had gone to bed drunk.
“Well, we’re here,” he said. “Let’s take ’em.”
“It’s a bunch,” Pea said. “We won’t have to come back for a while.”
“We won’t never come back,” Call said. “We’ll sell some and take the rest with us to Montana.”
Life was finally starting, Newt thought. Here he was below the border, about to run off a huge horse herd, and in a few days or weeks he would be going up the trail to a place he had barely even heard of. Most of the cowpokes who went north from Lonesome Dove just went to Kansas and thought that was far—but Montana must be twice as far. He couldn’t imagine what such a place would look like. Jake had said it had buffalo and mountains, two things he had never seen, and snow, the hardest thing of all to imagine. He had seen ridges and hills, and so had a notion about mountains, and he had seen pictures of buffalo in the papers that the stage drivers sometimes left Mr. Gus.
Snow, however, was an entirely mysterious thing. Once or twice in his lifetime there had been freezes in Lonesome Dove—he had seen thin ice on the water bucket that sat on the porch. But ice wasn’t snow, which was supposed to stack up on the ground so high that people had to wade through it. He had seen pictures of people sledding over it, but still couldn’t imagine what it would actually feel like to be in snow.
“I guess we’ll just go for home,” Call said. “If we wake ’em up we wake ’em up.”
He looked at the boy. “You take the left point,” he said. “Pea will be on the right, and I’ll be behind. If trouble comes, it’ll come from behind, and I’ll notice it first. If they get after us hot and heavy we can always drop off thirty or forty horses and hope that satisfies them.”
They circled the herd and quietly started it moving to the northwest, waving a rope now and then to get the horses in motion but saying as little as possible. Newt could not help feeling a little odd about it all, since he had somehow had it in his mind that they were coming to Mexico to buy horses, not steal them. It was puzzling that such a muddy little river like the Rio Grande should make such a difference in terms of what was lawful and what not. On the Texas side, horse stealing was a hanging crime, and many of those hung for it were Mexican cowboys who came across the river to do pretty much what they themselves were doing. The Captain was known for his sternness where horsethieves were concerned, and yet, here they were, running off a whole herd. Evidently if you crossed the river to do it, it stopped being a crime and became a game.
Newt didn’t really feel that what they were doing was wrong—if it had been wrong, the Captain wouldn’t have done it. But the thought hit him that under Mexican law what they were doing might be a hanging offense. It put a different slant on the game. In imagining what it would be like to go to Mexico, he had always supposed the main danger would come in the form of bullets, but he was no longer so sure. On the ride down he hadn’t been worried, because he had a whole company around him.
/> But once they started back, instead of having a whole company around him, he seemed to have no one. Pea was far across the valley, and the Captain was half a mile to the rear. If a bunch of hostile vaqueros sprang up, he might not even be able to find the other two men. Even if he wasn’t captured immediately, he could easily get lost. Lonesome Dove might be hard to locate, particularly if he was being chased.
If caught, he knew he could expect no mercy. The only thing in his favor was that there didn’t seem to be any trees around to hang him from. Mr. Gus had once told a story about a horsethief who had to be hung from the rafter of a barn because there were no trees, but so far as Newt could tell there were no barns in Mexico either. The only thing he knew clearly was that he was scared. He rode for several miles, feeling very apprehensive. The thought of hanging—a new thought—wouldn’t leave his mind. It became so powerful at one point that he squeezed his throat with one hand, to get a little notion of how it felt not to breathe. It didn’t feel so bad when it was just his hand, but he knew a rope would feel a lot worse.
But the miles passed and no vaqueros appeared. The horses strung out under the moonlight in a long line, trotting easily. They were well past the hacienda, and the night seemed so peaceful that Newt began to relax a little. After all, the Captain and Pea and the others had done such things many times. It was just a night’s work, and one that would soon be over.
Newt wasn’t tired, and as he became less scared he began to imagine how gratifying it would be to ride into Lonesome Dove with such a large herd of horses. Everyone who saw them ride in would realize that he was now a man—even Lorena might see it if she happened to look out her window at the right time. He and the Captain and Pea were doing an exceptional thing. Deets would be proud of him, and even Bolivar would take notice.
All went peaceful and steady, and the thin moon hung brightly in the west. It seemed to Newt that it must be one of the longest nights of the year. He kept looking to the east, hoping to see a little redness on the horizon, but the horizon was still black.
He was thinking about the morning, and how nice it would be to cross the river and bring the horses through the town, when the peaceful night suddenly went off like a bomb. They were on the long chaparral plain not far south of the river and were easing the horses around a particularly dense thicket of chaparral, prickly pear and low mesquite when it happened. Newt had dropped off the point a little distance, to allow the horses room to skirt the thicket, when he heard shots from behind him. Before he had time to look around, or even touch his own gun, the horse herd exploded into a dead run and began to spread out. He saw what looked like half the herd charging right at him from the rear; some of the horses nearest him veered and went crashing into the chaparral. Then he heard Pea’s gun sound from the other side of the thicket, and at that point lost all capacity for sorting out what was happening. When the race started, most of the herd was behind him, and the horses ahead of him were at least going in the same direction he was. But in a few seconds, once the whole mass of animals was moving at a dead run over the uncertain terrain, he suddenly noticed a stream of animals coming directly toward him from the right. The new bunch had simply cut around the chaparral thicket from the north and collided with the first herd. Before Newt even had time to consider what was happening, he was engulfed in a mass of animals, a few of which went down when the two herds ran together. Then, over the confused neighing of what seemed like hundreds of horses he began to hear yells and curses—Mexican curses. To his shock he saw a rider engulfed in the mass like himself, and the rider was not the Captain or Pea Eye. He realized then that two horse herds had run together, theirs headed for Texas, the other coming from Texas, both trying to skirt the same thicket, though from opposite directions.
The realization was unhelpful, though, because the horses behind him had caught up with him and all were struggling for running room. For a second he thought of trying to force his way to the outside, but then he saw two riders already there, struggling to turn the herd. They were not succeeding, but they were not his riders, either, and it struck him that being in the middle of the herd offered a certain safety, at least.
It quickly became clear that their herd was much the larger, and was forcing the new herd to curve into its flow. Soon all the horses were running northwest, Newt still in the middle of the bunch. Once a big wild-eyed gelding nearly knocked Mouse down; then Newt heard shots to his left and ducked, thinking the shots were meant for him. Just as he ducked, Mouse leaped a sizable chaparral bush. With his eyes toward the gunfire Newt was unprepared for the leap, and lost a stirrup and one rein but held on to the saddle horn and kept his seat. From then on he concentrated on riding, though he still occasionally heard shots. He kept low over his horse, an unnecessary precaution, for the running herd threw up so much dust that he could not have seen ten feet in front of him even if it had been daylight. He was grateful for the dust—it was choking him, but it was also keeping him from getting shot, a more important consideration.
After a few miles the horses were no longer bunched so tightly. It occurred to Newt that he ought to angle out of the herd and not just let himself be carried along like a cow chip on a river, but he didn’t know what such a move might mean. Would he be required to shoot at the vaqueros if they were still there? He was almost afraid to take his pistol out of its holster for fear Mouse would jump another bush and he’d drop it.
While he was running along, trying not to fall off and hoping he and the horses wouldn’t suddenly go over a cutbank or pile into a deep gully of some kind, he heard a sound that was deeply reassuring: the sound of the Captain’s rifle, the big Henry. Newt heard it shoot twice. It had to be the Captain because he was the only man on the border who carried a Henry. Everyone else had already switched to the lighter Winchesters.
The shots meant the Captain was all right. They came from ahead, which was odd, since the Captain had been behind, but then the vaqueros had been ahead, too. Somehow the Captain had managed to get to the front of the run and deal with them.
Newt looked back over his shoulder and saw red in the east. It was just a line of red, like somebody had drawn it with a crayon, over the thick black line of the land, but it meant that the night was ending. He didn’t know where they were, but they still had a lot of horses. The horses were well spread by then, and he eased out of the herd. Despite the red in the east, the land seemed darker than it had all night; he could see nothing and just exerted himself to keep up, hoping they were going in the right direction. It felt a little odd to be alive and unharmed after such a deep scare, and Newt kept looking east, wishing the light would hurry so he could see around him and know whether it was safe to relax. For all he knew, Mexicans with Winchesters could be a hundred yards behind him.
He wished the Captain would shoot again; he had never been in a situation in which he felt so uncertain about everything. Squint as he could, Newt could see nothing but dark land and white dust. Of course the sun would soon solve the problem, but what would he see when he could see? The Captain and Pea could be ten miles away, and he himself could be riding into Mexico with Pedro Flores’s vaqueros.
Then, coming over a little rise in the ground, he saw something that gave him heart: a thin silver ribbon to the northwest that could only be the river. The fading moon hung just above it. Across it, Texas was in sight, no less dark than Mexico, but there. The deep relief Newt felt at the sight of it washed away most of his fear. He even recognized the curve of the river—it was the old Comanche crossing, only a mile above Lonesome Dove. Whoever he was with had brought him home.
To his dismay, the sight of such a safe, familiar place made him want to cry. It seemed to him that the night had lasted many days—days during which he had been worried every moment that he would do something wrong and make a mistake that meant he would never come back to Lonesome Dove, or else come back disgraced. Now it was over and he was almost back, and relief seemed to run through him like warm water, some of which leaked out his
eyes. It made him glad it was still dark—what would the men think, if they saw him? There was so much dust on his face that when he quickly wiped away the tears of relief his fingers rubbed off moist smears of dirt.
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.
Down the river aways he could see Pea, sitting on the rangy bay they called Sardine. Of the hostile vaqueros they had met there was no sign. There were so many questions Newt wanted to ask about what they had done and where they had been that he hardly knew where to begin; yet, when he rode up to the Captain, keeping Mouse far enough away from the Hell Bitch that she wouldn’t try to take a bite out of him, he didn’t ask any questions. They would have poured out of him if it had been Mr. Gus or Deets or Pea, but since it was the Captain, the questions just stayed inside. All he said, at the end of the most exciting and important night of his life, was a simple good morning.
“It is a good one, ain’t it?” Call said, as he watched the huge herd of horses—well over a hundred of them—pour over the low banks and spread out down the river to drink. Pea had ridden Sardine into the water stirrup deep to keep the herd from spreading too far south.
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 140
