Augustus was not one to stand patiently and be ignored by a bartender. “I’d like a shot of whiskey and so would my companion, if it ain’t too much trouble,” he said.
The bartender didn’t look around until he had finished polishing the glass he had in his hand.
“I guess it ain’t, old-timer,” he said. “Rye, or what will it be?”
“Rye will do, provided it gets here quick,” Augustus said, straining to be polite.
The young bartender didn’t alter his pace, but he did provide two glasses and walked slowly back to get a bottle of whiskey.
“You dern cowboys ought to broom yourselves off before you walk in here,” he said with an insolent look. “We can get all the sand we need without the customers bringing it to us. That’ll be two dollars.”
Augustus pitched a ten-dollar gold piece on the bar and as the young man took it, suddenly reached out, grabbed his head and smashed his face into the bar, before the young man could even react. Then he quickly drew his big Colt, and when the bartender raised his head, his broken nose gushing blood onto his white shirtfront, he found himself looking right into the barrel of a very big gun.
“Besides the liquor, I think we’ll require a little respect,” he said. “I’m Captain McCrae and this is Captain Call. If you care to turn around, you can see our pictures when we was younger. Among the things we don’t put up with is dawdling service. I’m surprised Willie would hire a surly young idler like you.”
The cardplayers were watching the proceedings with interest, but the young bartender was too surprised at having suddenly had his nose broken to say anything at all. He held his towel to his nose, which was still pouring blood. Augustus calmly walked around the bar and got the picture he had referred to, which was propped up by the mirror with three or four others of the same vintage. He laid the picture on the bar, took the glass the young bartender had just polished, slinging it lazily into the air back in the general direction of the cardplayers, and then the roar of the big Colt filled the saloon.
Call glanced around in time to see the glass shatter. Augustus had always been a wonderful pistol shot—it was pleasing to see he still was. All of the cardplayers scurried for cover except a fat man in a big hat. Looking more closely, Call remembered him—his name was Ned Tym, and he was a seasoned gambler, too seasoned to be disturbed by a little flying glass. When it stopped flying, Ned Tym coolly took his hat off and blew the glass from the brim.
“Well, the Texas Rangers is back in town,” he said. “Hello, Gus. Next time I see a circus I’ll ask them if they need a trick shot.”
“Why, Ned, is that you?” Augustus said. “My old eyes are failing. If I’d recognized you I’d have shot your hat off and saved a glass. Where do you keep your extra aces these days?”
Before Ned Tym could answer, a man in a black coat came running down the stairs at the back of the saloon. He wasn’t much older than the bartender.
“What’s going on here, Ned?” the man asked, prudently stopping by the card table. Augustus still held the big pistol in his hand.
“Oh, nothing, John,” Ned said. “Captain McCrae and Captain Call happened in and Captain McCrae gave us a little demonstration with his pistol, that’s all.”
“It ain’t all,” the bartender said, in a loud voice. “The old son of a bitch broke my nose.”
With a movement so graceful it seemed almost gentle, Augustus reached across the bar and rapped the bartender above the ear with his gun barrel. A tap was enough. The bartender slid out of sight and was seen no more.
“Why’d you do that?” the man in the black coat asked. He was angry, but, even more, he seemed surprised. Call glanced at him and judged him no threat—he sipped his whiskey and left the theatrics to Augustus.
“I’m surprised you have to ask why I did that,” Augustus said, holstering his gun. “You heard the name he called me. If that’s city ways, they don’t appeal to me. Besides, he was a dawdling bartender and deserved a lick. Do you own this place, or what’s your gripe?”
“I own it,” the man said. “I don’t allow shooting in it, either.”
“What became of Wee Willie Montgomery?” Augustus asked. “You didn’t have to whack the bartender just to get a glass of whiskey when he owned it.”
“Willie’s woman run off,” Ned Tym informed them. “He decided to chase her, so he sold the place to Johnny here.”
“Well, I can’t say that I think he made a good choice,” Augustus said, turning back to the bar. “Probably chose bad in the woman department too. Maybe if he’s lucky she’ll get plumb away.”
“No, they’re living up in Fort Worth,” Ned said. “Willie was determined not to lose her.”
Call was looking at the picture Augustus had fetched from behind the bar. It was of himself and Gus and Jake Spoon, taken years before. Jake was grinning and had a pearl-handled pistol stuck in his belt, whereas he and Gus looked solemn. It had been taken in the year they chased Kicking Wolf and his band all the way to the Canadian, killing over twenty of them. Kicking Wolf had raided down the Brazos, messing up several families of settlers and scaring people in the little settlements. Driving them back to the Canadian had made the Rangers heroes for a time, though Call had known it was hollow praise. Kicking Wolf hadn’t been taken or killed, and there was nothing to keep him on the Canadian for long. But for a few weeks, everywhere they went there was some photographer with his box, wanting to take their picture. One had cornered them in the Buckhorn and made them stand stiffly while he got his shot.
The young man in the black coat went over behind the bar and looked at the fallen bartender.
“Why did you have to break his nose,” he asked.
“He’ll thank me someday,” Augustus said. “It will make him more appealing to the ladies. He looked too much like a long-tailed rat, as it was. With no better manners than he had, I expect he was in for a lonely life.”
“Well, I won’t have this!” the young man said loudly. “I don’t know why you old cowboys think you can just walk in and do what you please. What’s that picture doing on the bar?”
“Why, it’s just a picture of us boys, back in the days when they wanted to make us senators,” Augustus said. “Willie kept it on the mirror there so when we happened in we could see how handsome we used to look.”
“I’m a notion to call the sheriff and have the two of you arrested,” the young man said. “Shooting in my bar is a crime, and I don’t care what you done twenty years ago. You can get out of here and be quick about it or you’ll end up spending your night in jail.” He got angrier as he spoke.
“Oh, now, John, I wouldn’t threaten these gentlemen if I was you,” Ned Tym said, appalled at what he was hearing. “This is Captain Call and Captain McCrae.”
“Well, what’s that to me?” the man said, whirling on Ned. “I never heard of them and I won’t have these old cowboys coming in here and making this kind of mess.”
“They ain’t old cowboys,” Ned said. “They’re Texas Rangers. You’ve heard of them. You’ve just forgot.”
“I don’t know why I would have,” the man said. “I just lived here two years, miserable ones at that. I don’t necessarily keep up with every old-timer who ever shot at an Indian. It’s mostly tall tales anyway, just old men bragging on themselves.”
“John, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ned said, growing more alarmed. “Captain Call and Captain McCrae would be the last ones to brag.”
“Well, that’s your opinion,” John said. “They look like braggarts to me.”
Call was beginning to feel annoyed, for the young man was giving them unmannerly looks and talking to them as if they were trash; but then it was partly Gus’s fault. The fact that the bartender had been a little slow and insolent hadn’t necessarily been a reason to break his nose. Gus was touchy about such things though. He enjoyed having been a famous Texas Ranger and was often put out if he didn’t receive all the praise he thought he had coming.
; Gus held the picture out so the young man could see it.
“You have to admit that’s us,” he said. “Why would you keep our picture propped up behind your bar and then expect us to stand there and be treated like spit when we walk in?”
“Oh, well, I never even noticed them dern pictures,” John said. “I ought to have thrown all that old junk out, but I never got around to it. Just drink your drink and skedaddle or be ready to go to jail. Here comes the sheriff now.”
Sure enough, in about a minute, Tobe Walker stepped into the bar. He was a heavyset man with a walrus mustache who looked older than his years. Call was amused to see him, for what the angry young man didn’t know was that Tobe had been in their Ranger troop for four years, just before they quit. He had only been sixteen then, but he made a good Ranger. Tobe had looked up to both of them as if they were gods, and was an unlikely man to arrest them. His eyes widened when he saw them.
“Why, can it be?” he asked. “Captain Call?”
“Well, Tobe,” Call said, shaking his hand.
Augustus, too, was highly amused by the turn of events.
“ ’I God, Tobe,” he said, “I guess it’s your duty to handcuff us and march us off to jail.”
“Why would I do that?” Tobe asked. “There’s times when I think I ought to jail myself, but I don’t know why I’d want to jail you two.”
“Because you’re hired to keep the peace and these old soaks have been disturbing it,” John said. The fact that Tobe obviously recognized them only made him more testy.
Tobe became immediately frosty. “What’s that you say, John?” he asked.
“I guess you heard me, Sheriff, unless you’re deaf,” John said. “These men came in here and broke my bartender’s nose. Then one of them shot off a gun for no reason. Then they pistol-whipped the bartender. I offered them a chance to leave, but since they haven’t, I’ve a notion to file charges and let the law take its course.”
He said his little say so pompously that it struck the three of them as funny. Augustus laughed out loud, Call and Tobe smiled, and even Ned Tym chimed in with a chuckle.
“Son, you’ve misjudged our reputation,” Augustus said. “We was the law around here when you was still sucking a teat. So many people think we saved them from the Indians that if you was to bring charges against us, and any of the boys that rangered with us got wind of it, they’d probably hang you. Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain’t much of a crime.”
“John, I’d advise you to stop your name-calling,” Tobe said. “You’re acting too hot. You’d best just apologize and bring me a whiskey.”
“I’ll be damned if I’ll do either one,” John said, and without another word stepped over the fallen bartender and went back upstairs.
“What’s he got, a whore up there?” Augustus asked hopefully. He was beginning to feel restive and would have liked some female company.
“Yes, John keeps a señorita,” Tobe said. “I guess you’ll have to excuse him. He’s from Mobile and I’ve heard it said people in those parts are hotheaded.”
“Well, it ain’t a local prerogative,” Augustus said. “We’ve got hotheads in our crew, and ain’t none of them from Mobile, Alabama.”
They got a whiskey bottle, sat down at a table and chatted for a while, talking of old times. Tobe inquired after Jake, and they carefully refrained from mentioning that he was on the run from the law. While they were talking, the bartender got up and staggered out the back way. His nose had stopped bleeding but his shirt was drenched in blood.
“Hell, he looks like he’s been butchered,” Tobe said cheerfully.
Ned Tym and his friends soon resumed their card game, but the other players’ nerves were shaken and Ned soon drained them of money.
Tobe Walker looked wistful when they told him they were taking a herd to Montana. “If I hadn’t married, I bet I’d go with you,” he said. “I imagine there’s some fair pastures up there. Being a lawman these days is mostly a matter of collaring drunks, and it does get tiresome.”
When they left, he went off dutifully to make his rounds. Augustus hitched the new mules to the new wagon. The streets of San Antonio were silent and empty as they left. The moon was high and a couple of stray goats nosed around the walls of the old Alamo, hoping to find a blade of grass. When they had first come to Texas in the Forties people had talked of nothing but Travis and his gallant losing battle, but the battle had mostly been forgotten and the building neglected.
“Well, Call, I guess they forgot us, like they forgot the Alamo,” Augustus said.
“Why wouldn’t they?” Call asked. “We ain’t been around.”
“That ain’t the reason—the reason is we didn’t die,” Augustus said. “Now Travis lost his fight, and he’ll get in the history books when someone writes up this place. If a thousand Comanches had cornered us in some gully and wiped us out, like the Sioux just done Custer, they’d write songs about us for a hundred years.”
It struck Call as a foolish remark. “I doubt there was ever a thousand Comanches in one bunch,” he said. “If there had been they would have taken Washington, D.C.”
But the more Augustus thought about the insults they had been offered in the bar—a bar where once they had been hailed as heroes—the more it bothered him.
“I ought to have given that young pup from Mobile a rap or two,” he said.
“He was just scared,” Call said. “I’m sure Tobe will lecture him next time he sees him.”
“It ain’t the pint, Woodrow,” Augustus said. “You never do get the pint.”
“Well, what is it, dern it?” Call asked.
“We’ll be the Indians, if we last another twenty years,” Augustus said. “The way this place is settling up it’ll be nothing but churches and dry-goods stores before you know it. Next thing you know they’ll have to round up us old rowdies and stick us on a reservation to keep us from scaring the ladies.”
“I’d say that’s unlikely,” Call said.
“It’s dern likely,” Augustus said. “If I can find a squaw I like, I’m apt to marry her. The thing is, if I’m going to be treated like an Indian, I might as well act like one. I think we spent our best years fighting on the wrong side.”
Call didn’t want to argue with nonsense like that. They were nearly to the edge of town, passing a few adobe hovels where the poorer Mexicans lived. In one of them a baby cried. Call was relieved to be leaving. With Gus on the prod, anything could happen. In the country, if he got mad and shot something, it would probably be a snake, not a rude bartender.
“We didn’t fight on the wrong side,” Call said. “What’s a miracle is that you stayed on the right side of the law for as long as you have. Jake’s too cowardly to be much of an outlaw, but you ain’t.”
“I may be one yet,” Augustus said. “It’d be better than ending up like Tobe Walker, roping drunks for a living. Why, the man nearly cried when we left, he wanted to come so bad. Tobe used to be quick, and look at him now, fat as a gopher.”
“It’s true he’s put on weight, but then Tobe was always chunky built,” Call said. On that one, though, he suspected Gus was right. Tobe had looked at them sadly when they mounted to ride away.
43.
AS FAR AS ROSCOE WAS CONCERNED, travel started bad and got worse. For one thing, it seemed he would never find Texas, a fact that preyed on his mind. From all indications it was a large place, and if he missed it he would be laughed out of Fort Smith—assuming he ever got back.
When he started out, he supposed that the easiest way to find Texas would be just to ask the settlers he encountered, but the settlers proved a remarkably ignorant lot. Most of them seemed never to have been more than a few hundred feet from the place they happened to be settled. Many were unable to give directions to the next settlement, much less to a place as remote as Texas. Some were able to point in the general direction of Texas, but after riding a few miles, dodging thickets and looking for suitable crossings on the many creeks, Roscoe cou
ld not be sure he was still proceeding in that direction.
Fortunately the problem of direction was finally solved one afternoon when he ran into a little party of soldiers with a mule team. They claimed to be heading for someplace called Buffalo Springs, which was in Texas. There were only four soldiers, two horseback and two in the wagon, and they had relieved the tedium of travel by getting drunk. They were generous men, so generous that Roscoe was soon drunk too. His relief at finding men who knew where Texas was caused him to imbibe freely. He was soon sick to his stomach. The soldiers considerately let him ride in the wagon—not much easier on his stomach, for the wagon had no springs. Roscoe became so violently ill that he was forced to lie flat in the wagon bed with his head sticking out the back end, so that when the heaves hit him he could vomit, or at least spit, without anyone losing time.
An afternoon passed in that way, with Roscoe alternately vomiting and lying on his back in the wagon, trying to recover his equilibrium. When he lay on his back the hot sun beat right down in his face, giving him a hard headache. The only way to block the sun was to put his hat over his face, but when he did that the close atmosphere in the hat, which smelled like the hair lotion Pete Peters, the barber back in Fort Smith, had used liberally, made him sick to his stomach again.
Soon Roscoe had nothing left in him to throw up but his guts, and he was expecting to see them come up any time. When he finally sat up, feeling extremely weak, he found that they had come to the banks of a wide, shallow river. The soldiers had ignored his illness, but they couldn’t ignore the river.
“This is the Red,” one soldier said. “That’s Texas right across yonder.”
Roscoe crawled out of his wagon, thinking to ride Memphis across, but found he couldn’t make the climb into the saddle. Of course, Memphis was a tallish horse, but normally the saddle was reachable. Suddenly it wavered in the heat. It wasn’t that the saddle was rising, it was that Roscoe’s legs were sinking. He found himself sitting on the ground, holding to one stirrup.
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 165
