Call knew that it had been rare luck, running into the four Mexican horsethieves and getting most of the horses they had just brought over from Texas. The Mexicans had thought they had run into an army—who but an army would have so many horses?—and had not really stayed to make a fight, though he had had to scare off one vaquero who kept trying to turn the herd.
As for the boy, it was good that he had picked up a little experience and come through it all with nothing worse than a dirty face.
They sat together silently as the top half of the sun shot long ribbons of light across the brown river and the drinking horses, some of whom lay down in the shallows and rolled themselves in the cooling mud. When the herd began to move in twos and threes up the north bank, Call touched the mare and he and the boy moved out into the water. Call loosened his rein and let the mare drink. He was as pleased with her as he was with the catch. She was surefooted as a cat, and far from used up, though the boy’s mount was so done in he would be worthless for a week. Pea’s big bay was not much better. Call let the mare drink all she wanted before gathering his rein. Most of the horses had moved to the north bank, and the sun had finished lifting itself clear of the horizon.
“Let’s ease on home,” he said to the boy. “I hope Wilbarger’s got his pockets full of money. We’ve got horses to sell.”
12.
IF WILBARGER WAS IMPRESSED at the sight of so many horses, he gave no sign of it. The small herd had already been penned, and he and Deets and the man called Chick were quietly separating out horses with the H I C brand on them. Dish Boggett worked the gate between the two corrals, letting Wilbarger’s horses run through and waving his rope in the face of those he didn’t claim. Jake Spoon was nowhere in sight, nor was there any sign of Augustus and the Irishmen.
The new herd was far too large to pen. Call had always meant to fence a holding pasture for just such an eventuality, but he had never gotten around to it. In the immediate case it didn’t matter greatly; the horses were tired from their long run and could be left to graze and rest. After breakfast he would send the boy out to watch them.
Wilbarger paused from his work a moment to look at the stream of horses trotting past, then went back to his cutting, which was almost done. Since there was already enough help in the pen, there was nothing for Newt to do but stand by the fence and watch. Pea had already climbed up on what they called the “opry seat”—the top rail of the corral—to watch the proceedings. His bay and Newt’s Mouse, just unsaddled, took a few steps and then lay down and rolled themselves in the dust.
Call was not quite ready to rest the mare. When Wilbarger finished his sorting and came over to the fence, it was her, not the Captain, that he had his eye on.
“Good morning,” he said. “Let’s trade. You keep them thirty-eight splendid horses I just sorted out and I’ll take that mean creature you’re astraddle of. Thirty-eight for one is generous terms, in my book.”
“Keep your book,” Call said, not surprised at the offer.
Pea Eye was so startled by what he was hearing that he almost fell off the fence.
“You mean you’d give up all them horses for the chance of having a hunk bit out of you?” he asked. He knew men fancied the Captain’s mare, but that anyone would fancy her to that extent was almost more than he could credit.
Dish Boggett walked over, slapping the dust off his chaps with a coiled rope.
“Is that your last word on the subject?” Wilbarger asked. “I’m offering thirty-eight for one. You won’t get a chance like that every day of your life.”
Dish snorted. He fancied the gray mare himself. “It’d be like tradin’ a fifty-dollar gold piece for thirty-eight nickels,” he said. He was in a foul temper anyway. The minute they had the horses penned, Jake Spoon had unsaddled and walked straight to the Dry Bean, as if that were where he lived.
Wilbarger ignored him too. “This outfit is full of opinion,” he said. “If opinions was money you’d all be rich.” He looked at Call.
“I won’t trade this mare,” Call said. “And that ain’t an opinion.”
“No, it’s more like a damn hard fact,” Wilbarger said. “I live on a horse and yet I ain’t had but two good ones my whole life.”
“This is my third,” Call said.
Wilbarger nodded. “Well, sir,” he said, “I’m obliged to you for getting here on time. It’s plain the man you deal with knows where there’s a den of thieves.”
“A big den,” Call said.
“Well, let’s go, Chick,” Wilbarger said. “We won’t get home unless we start.”
“You might as well stay for breakfast,” Call said. “A couple more of your horses are on their way.”
“What are they doing, traveling on three legs?” Wilbarger asked.
“They’re with Mr. McCrae,” Call said. “He travels at his own pace.”
“Talks at it, too,” Wilbarger said. “I don’t think we’ll wait. Keep them two horses for your trouble.”
“We brought in some nice stock,” Call said. “You’re welcome to look it over, if you’re still short.”
“Not interested,” Wilbarger said. “You won’t rent pigs and you won’t trade that mare, so I might as well be on my way.”
Then he turned to Dish Boggett. “Want a job, son?” he asked. “You look all right to me.”
“I got a job,” Dish said.
“Running off Mexican horses isn’t a job,” Wilbarger said. “It’s merely a gamble. You’ve the look of a cowboy, and I’m about to start up the trail with three thousand head.”
“So are we,” Call said, amused that the man would try to hire a hand out from under him with him sitting there.
“Going where?” Wilbarger asked.
“Going to Montana,” Call said.
“I wouldn’t,” Wilbarger said. He rode over to the gate, leaned over to open it, and rode out, leaving the gate for Chick to close. When Chick tried to lean down and shut the gate his hat fell off. Nobody walked over to pick it up for him, either—he was forced to dismount, which embarrassed him greatly. Wilbarger waited, but he looked impatient.
“Well, we may see you up the trail, then,” he said to Call. “I wouldn’t aim for Montana, though. Too far, too cold, full of bears and I don’t know about the Indians. They may be beat but I wouldn’t count on it. You might end up making some a present of a fine herd of beef.”
“We’ll try not to,” Call said.
Wilbarger rode off, Chick following at the rear of the small horse herd. As Chick rode past, Dish Boggett was greatly tempted to rope him off his horse and box his ears as a means of relieving his feelings about Lorie and Jake Spoon—but the Captain was sitting there, so he merely gave Chick a hard stare and let him go.
“By gosh, I could eat,” Pea Eye said. “I sure hope Gus ain’t lost.
“If he’s lost I don’t know what we’ll do for biscuits,” he added, since nobody commented on his remark.
“You could always get married,” Dish observed dryly. “There’s plenty of women who can make biscuits.”
It was not the first time Pea had had that particular truth pointed out to him. “I know there is,” he said. “But that don’t mean there’s one of ’em that would have me.”
Deets gave a rich chuckle. “Why, the widow Cole would have you,” he said. “She’d be pleased to have you.” Then, well aware that the widow Cole was something of a sore spot with Pea, he walked off toward the house.
Mention of Mary Cole made Pea Eye very uncomfortable. From time to time, throughout his life, it had been pointed out to him that he might marry—Gus McCrae was very fond of pointing it out, in fact.
But once in a while, even if nobody mentioned one, the thought of women entered his head all on its own, and once it came it usually tended to stay for several hours, filling his noggin like a cloud of gnats. Of course, a cloud of gnats was nothing in comparison to a cloud of Gulf coast mosquitoes, so the thought of women was not that bothersome, but it was a thought Pea would
rather not have in his head.
He had never known what to think about women, and still didn’t, but so far as actions went he was content to take his cue from the Captain, whose cue was plain. The Captain left them strictly alone, and had all the years Pea had been with him, excepting only one puzzling instance that had occurred years before, which Pea only remembered once every year or two, usually when he was dreaming. He had gone down to the saloon to get an ax someone had borrowed and not returned, and while he was getting the ax he heard a young woman crying out words and grievances to someone who was with her in her room.
The woman doing the crying was the whore named Maggie, Newt’s mother, whom Jake Spoon took such a fancy to later. It was only after Pea had found the ax and was halfway home with it that it occurred to him that Maggie had been talking to the Captain, and had even called him by his first name, which Pea had never used in all his years of service.
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.
Overhearing that snatch of conversation was an accident Pea was slow to forget. For a month or two after it happened he went around feeling nervous, expecting life to change in some bold way. And yet nothing changed at all. They all soon went up the river to try and catch some bandits raiding out of Chihuahua, and the Captain, so far as he could tell, was the same old Captain. By the time they came back, Maggie had had her child, and soon after, Jake Spoon moved in with her for a while. Then he left and Maggie died and Gus went down one day and got Newt from the Mexican family that had taken him upon Maggie’s death.
The years had gone on passing, most of them slow years, particularly after they quit rangering and went into the horse-and-cattle business. The only real result of overhearing the conversation was that Pea was cautious from then on about who he let borrow the ax. He liked life slow and didn’t want any more mysteries or sharp surprises.
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 Joe 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 Joe. 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 Joe 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 Joe 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.
“Why, Joe 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.
“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.
Gus vehemently denied that he would be a suitable mate for Mary Cole. “Why, no, Pea, it wouldn’t do,” he said. “I’ve done been wrung through the wringer of marriage twice. What a widow wants is someone fresh. It’s what all women want, widows or not. If a man’s got experience it’s bound to be that he got it with another woman, and that don’t never sit well. A forthright woman like Mary probably considers that she can give you all the experience you’re ever likely to need.”
To Pea it was all just a troublesome puzzle. He could not remember how the subject had come up in the first place, since he had never said a word about wanting to marry. Whatever else it meant, it meant leaving the Captain, and Pea didn’t plan to do that. Of course, Mary didn’t live very far away, but the Captain always liked to have his men handy in case something came up sudden. There was no knowing what the Captain would think if he were to try and marry. One day he pointed out to Gus that he was far from being the only available man in Lonesome Dove. Xavier Wanz was available, not to mention Lippy. A number of the traveling men who passed through were surely unmarried. But when he raised the point, Gus just ignored him.
Some nights, laying on the porch, he felt a fool for even thinking about such things, and yet think he did. He had lived with men his whole life, rangering and working; during his whole adult life he couldn’t recollect spending ten minutes alone with a woman. He was better acquainted with Gus’s pigs than he was with Mary Cole, and more comfortable with them too. The sensible thing would be to ignore Gus and Deets and think about things that had some bearing on his day’s work, like how to keep his old boot from rubbing a corn on his left big toe. An Army mule had tromped the toe ten years before, and since then it had stuck out slightly in the wrong direction, just enough to make his boot rub a corn. The only solution to the problem was to cut holes in his boot, which worked fine in dry weather but had its disadvantages when it was wet and cold. Gus had offered to rebreak the toe and set it properly, but Pea didn’t hate the corn that bad. It did seem to him that it was only common sense that a sore toe made more difference in his life than a woman he had barely spoken to; yet his mind didn’t see it that way. There were nights when he lay on the porch too sleepy to shave his corn, or even to worry about the problem, when the widow Cole would pop to the surface of his consciousness like a turtle on the surface of a pond. At such times he would pretend to be asleep, for Gus was so sly he could practically read minds, and would surely tease him if he figured out that he was thinking about Mary and her scratchy voice.
Even more persistent than the thought of her reading the Psalms was another memory. One day he had been passing her house just as a little thunderstorm swept through the town, scaring the dogs and cats and rolling tumbleweeds down the middle of the street. Mary had hung a washing and was out in her backyard trying to get it in before the rain struck, but the thunderstorm proved too quick for her. Big drops of rain began to splatter in the dust, and the wind got higher, causing the sheets on Mary’s clothesline to flap so hard they popped like guns. Pea had been raised to be helpful, and since it was obvious that Mary was going to have a hard time with the sheets, he started over to offer his assistance.
But the storm had a start on both of them, and before he even got there the rain began to pour down, turning the white dust brown. Most women would have seen at that point that the wash was a lost cause and run for the house, but Mary wasn’t running. Her skirt was already so wet it was plastered to he
r legs, but she was still struggling with one of the flapping sheets. In the struggle, two or three small garments that she had already gathered up blew out of her hand and off across the yard, which had begun to look like a shallow lake. Pea hurried to retrieve the garments and then helped Mary get the wet sheet off the line—she was evidently just doing it out of pure stubbornness, since the sun was shining brightly to the west of the storm and would obviously be available to dry the sheet again in a few minutes.
It was Pea’s one close exposure to an aspect of womankind that Gus was always talking about—their penchant for flying directly 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 Joe 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.
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 141
