“No, we better all drive,” he said. “Gus had a tent. I imagine he’s happy as a badger. They’re probably just sitting there playing cards.”
It was what he had expected, but Newt still felt chastened as he turned back to the drags. He felt he would never learn to say the right thing to the Captain.
68.
ALMOST AT ONCE, before the group even got out of Texas, Jake had cause to regret that he had ever agreed to ride with the Suggs brothers. The first night he camped with them, not thirty miles north of Dallas, he heard talk that frightened him. The boys were discussing two outlaws who were in jail in Fort Worth, waiting to hang, and Dan Suggs claimed it was July Johnson who had brought them in. The robbers had put out the story that July was traveling with a young girl who could throw rocks better than most men could shoot.
“I’d like to see her throw rocks better than Frog can shoot,” Roy Suggs said. “I guess Frog could cool her off.”
Frog Lip didn’t say much. He was a black man, but Jake didn’t notice anyone giving him many orders. Little Eddie Suggs cooked the supper, such as it was, while Frog Lip sat idle, not even chopping wood for the fire. The horse he rode was the best in the group, a white gelding. It was unusual to see a bandit who used a white horse, for it made him stand out in a group. Frog Lip evidently didn’t care.
“We oughta go get them boys out of jail,” Roy Suggs said. “They might make good regulators.”
“If a girl and one sheriff can take ’em, I wouldn’t want ’em,” Dan Suggs said. “Besides, I had some trouble with Jim once, myself. I’d go watch him hang, if I had time, damn him.”
Their talk, it seemed, was mostly of killing. Even little Eddie, the youngest, claimed to have killed three men, two nesters and a Mexican. The rest of the outfit didn’t mention numbers, but Jake had no doubt that he was riding with accomplished killers. Dan Suggs seemed to hate everybody he knew—he spoke in the vilest language of everyone, but his particular hatred was cowboys. He had trailed a herd once and not done well with it, and it had left him resentful of those with better luck.
“I’d like to steal a whole goddamn herd and sell it,” Dan said.
“There ain’t but five of us,” Eddie pointed out. “It takes more than five to drive cattle.”
Dan Suggs had a mean glint in his eye. He had made the remark idly, but once he thought about it, it seemed to make a great deal of sense. “We could hire a little more help,” he said.
“I remember that time we tried to drive cattle,” Roy said. “The Indians run off half of them, and we all nearly drowned in them rivers. Why try it agin?”
“You ain’t heard the plan, so shut up,” Dan said, with a touch of anger. “What we done wrong the first time was doing it honest. I’m through with honest. It’s every man for himself in this country, and that’s the way I like it. There ain’t much law and mostly it can be outrun.”
“Whose herd would you steal?” Jake asked.
“Oh, the closest one to Dodge,” Dan said. “Find some herd that’s just about there and steal it, maybe a day or two shy of the towns. Then we could just drive it in and sell it and be gone. We’d get all the money and none of the work.”
“What about the boys who drove it all that way?” Jake asked. “They might not want to give up their profits that easy.”
“We’d plant ’em,” Dan said. “Shoot them and sell their cattle, and be long gone before anyone ever missed them.”
“What if one run off and didn’t get planted?” Roy said. “It don’t take but one to tell the story, and then we’d have a posse to fight.”
“Frog’s got a fast horse,” Dan said. “He could run down any man who escaped.”
“I’d rather rob banks, myself,” little Eddie said. “Then you got the money right in your hands. You don’t have to sell no cows.”
“Well, you’re lazy, Ed,” Dan said, looking at his brother as if he were mad enough to shoot him. In fact, the Suggs brothers seemed to live on the edge of fratricidal warfare.
“What do you boys know of this Blue Duck?” Jake asked, mainly to change the subject.
“We know to let him be,” Dan said. “Frog don’t care for him.”
“Why not?”
“Stole my horse,” Frog Lip said. He didn’t elaborate. They were passing a whiskey bottle around and he took his turn as if he were a white man. Whiskey had no effect on any of them except little Eddie, who turned red-eyed and wobbly after five or six turns.
Jake drank liberally, for he felt uncomfortable. He had not meant to slip into such rough company and was worried, for now that he had slipped in, he could see that it wasn’t going to be any too easy to slip back out. After all, he had heard them discuss killing a whole crew of cowboys, calculating the killings as casually as they might pick ticks off a dog. He had been in much questionable company in his life, but the Suggs brothers weren’t questionable. They were just hard. Moreover, the silent black man, Frog, had a very fast horse. Escaping them would need some care. He knew they didn’t trust him. Their eyes were cold when they looked his way. He resolved to be very careful and make no move that might antagonize them until the situation was in his favor, which it wouldn’t be until they got into the Kansas towns. With a crowd around, he might slip away.
Besides that, killing could always work two ways. Gus was fond of saying that even the meanest bad man could always run into someone meaner and quicker. Dan Suggs could easily meet a violent end, in which case the others might not care who stayed or went.
The next day they rode on to Doan’s Store, on the banks of the Red River, and stopped to buy whiskey and consider their route. A trail herd was crossing the river a mile or more to the west.
“There’s one we could steal, right there,” little Eddie said.
“That one’s barely in the Territory,” Dan said. “We’d have to follow it for a month, and I ain’t in the mood.”
“I say we head for Arkansas first,” Roy said. “We could rob a bank or two.”
Jake was not listening to the palaver very closely. A party of nesters—four wagons of them—had stopped at the store, buying supplies. They were farmers, and they had left Missouri and were planning to try out Texas. Most of the menfolk were inside the store buying supplies, though some were repairing wagon wheels or shoeing horses. Most of the womenfolk were starved-looking creatures in bonnets, but one of them was neither starved nor in a bonnet. She was a girl of about seventeen with long black hair. She sat on the seat of one of the wagons, barefoot, waiting for her folks to finish shopping.
To Jake she looked like a beauty. It occurred to him that beauties were his real calling, if he had one, and he wondered what could have possessed him to start out with a rough bunch like the Suggses, when there were beauties right there in Texas that he hadn’t even met, including the one on the wagon seat. He watched her for a while and, since her folks hadn’t reappeared, decided he might just stroll over and have a word with her. Already he felt a yearning for woman’s talk, and he had only been gone from Dallas a little more than a day.
He had been lounging in the shade of the store, but he stood up and carefully dusted his pants.
“Are you fixing to go to church, or what?” Dan Suggs asked.
“No, but I fancy a word or two with that black-haired gal sitting there on the wagon,” Jake said. “I’ve never talked to a woman from Missouri. I figure I might like it.”
“Why wouldn’t they talk like any other gals?” Roy wondered.
“I heard you was a ladies’ man,” Dan said, as if it were a condemnation of some sort.
“You met me in a whorehouse, why would you doubt it?” Jake said, tired of the little man’s biting tone. “If I like that gal maybe I’ll elope with her,” he said, just to remind everyone that he was still his own man.
The closer he got to the girl, the better he liked her looks. She had fine features, and her thin, worn-out dress concealed a swelling young bosom. She realized Jake was coming her way, which agitated
her a little. She looked off, pretending not to notice him.
At close range she looked younger, perhaps only fifteen or sixteen. Probably she had scarcely even had beaux, or if she had, they would only have been farm boys with no knowledge of the world. She had a curling upper lip, which he liked—it indicated she had some spirit. If she had been a whore, he would have contracted with her for a week, just on the strength of that lip and the curve of her bosom. But she was just a barefoot girl sitting on a wagon, with dust on her bare feet.
“Hello, miss,” he said, when he walked up. “Going far?”
The young girl met his eye, though he could see that she was agitated that he had spoken to her.
“My name’s Jake Spoon,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“Lou,” she said, not much more than whispering the information. He did like the way her upper lip curved and was about to say more, but before he could get the words out something slammed him in the back and his face was in the dirt. He hit the ground so hard he busted his lip.
He rolled over, wondering if somehow one of the mules had got in a kick—it wouldn’t have been the first time he was surprised by a mule. But when he looked up and blinked the dust out of his eyes he saw an angry old man with a long sandy beard standing over him, gripping a ten-gauge shotgun. It was the shotgun that had knocked him down—the old fool had whacked him across the shoulder blades with it. The man must have been standing behind the wagon.
Jake’s head was ringing, and he couldn’t see good, though he could tell the old man was gripping the shotgun like a club—he wasn’t planning to shoot. Jake got to his knees and waited until he caught his wind.
“You git,” the old man said. “Don’t be talking to my wife.”
Jake looked up in surprise—he had assumed the old man must be her father. Though certainly a brusque greeting, it was not much more than he would have expected from a father—fathers had always been touchy when he attempted to talk to their daughters. But the girl on the wagon seat was already a wife. He looked at her again, surprised that such a fresh pullet would be married to a man who looked to be in his seventies, at least. The girl just sat there, pretty as ever, watching the scene without expression.
That Jake had deigned to look at her again infuriated the farmer more, and he drew back the shotgun to deliver another blow.
“Hold on, mister,” Jake said. One lick he might let pass, but not two. Besides, the ten-gauge was a heavy gun, and used as a club it could break a shoulder, or do worse.
When Jake spoke, the old man hesitated a second—he even glanced at the girl on the wagon seat. But at the sight of her he drew back his lips in a snarl and raised the shotgun again.
Before he could strike the second blow, Jake shot him. It surprised him as much as it did the nester, for he was not aware of having pulled his gun. The bullet caught the nester in the breast and knocked him back against the wagon. He dropped the shotgun, and as he was sliding to the ground, Jake shot again, the second shot as much a surprise to him as the first. It was as if his arm and his gun were acting on their own. But the second shot also hit the old nester in the breast. He slid to the ground and rolled partly under the wagon on top of his own shotgun.
“He never needed to hit me,” Jake said to the girl. He expected her to scream, but she didn’t. The shooting seemed not to have registered with her yet. Jake glanced at the nester and saw that he was stone dead, a big bloodstain on his gray work shirt. A line of blood ran down the stock of the shotgun he lay across.
Then nesters began to boil out of Doan’s Store—it seemed there were twenty or thirty of them. Jake felt discouraged by the sight, for it reminded him of how people had boiled out of the saloons in Fort Smith when they discovered Benny Johnson lying dead in the mud. Now another man was lying dead, and it was just as much an accident: if the old nester had just announced himself politely as the girl’s husband, Jake would have tipped his hat and walked off. But the old man had whacked him and offered to do it again—he had only shot to protect himself.
This time he was up against twenty or thirty nesters. They were grouped in front of the store as if puzzled by the situation. Jake put his gun back in its holster and looked at the girl once more.
“Tell ’em I had to do it,” he said. “That old man might have cracked my skull with that gun.”
Then he turned and walked back toward the Suggs brothers. He looked back once at the girl, and she smiled at him—a smile that was to puzzle him whenever he thought about it. She had not even got down from the wagon to see if her husband was dead—yet she gave him that smile, though by that time the nesters were all around the wagon.
The Suggs boys were already mounted. Little Eddie handed Jake his rein.
“I guess that’s the end of that romance,” Dan Suggs said.
“Dern, I just asked her name,” Jake said. “I never knowed she was married.”
The nesters were all grouped around the body. The girl still sat on the wagon seat.
“Let’s cross the river,” Dan Suggs said. “It’s that or hire you a lawyer, and I say, why waste the money?”
“That store don’t sell lawyers anyway,” Roy Suggs remarked.
Jake mounted, but he was reluctant to leave. It occurred to him that if he went back to the nesters he might bluff his way out of it. After all, it had been self-defense—even dirt farmers from Missouri could understand that. The nesters were looking their way, but none of them were offering to fight. If he turned and rode into the Territory, he would be carrying two killings against his name. In neither case had he meant to kill, or even known the man he killed. It was just more bad luck—noticing a pretty girl on a wagon seat was where it started in this case.
But the law wouldn’t look at it like that, of course. If he rode across the river with a hard bunch like the Suggses he would be an outlaw, whereas if he stayed, the nesters might try to hang him or at least try to jail him in Fort Worth or Dallas. If that happened, he’d soon be on trial for one accident or another.
It was a poor set of choices, it seemed to him, but when the Suggs brothers rode off he followed, and in fifteen minutes was across the Red River. Once he looked back and could still see the wagons grouped around the little store. He remembered the girl’s last smile—yet he had killed a man before he had even seen her smile. The nesters made no pursuit.
“Them punkin’-rollers,” Dan Suggs said contemptuously. “If they was to follow we’d thin them out in a hurry.”
Jake fell into a gloom—it seemed he could do nothing right. He hardly asked for more in life than a clean saloon to gamble in and a pretty whore to sleep with, that and a little whiskey to drink. He had no desire to be shooting people—even during his years in the Rangers he seldom actually drew aim at anyone, although he cheerfully threw off shots in the direction of the enemy. He certainly didn’t consider himself a killer: in battle, Call and Gus were capable of killing ten to his one.
And yet now Call and Gus were respectable cattlemen, looked up to everywhere they went, and he was riding with a gang of hardened outlaws who didn’t care who they killed. Somehow he had slipped out of the respectable life. He had never been a churchgoer, but until recently he had had no reason to fear the law.
The Suggs brothers kept plenty of whiskey on hand, and Jake began to avail himself of it. He stayed half drunk most of the time as they rode north. Even though he had killed a man in plain sight of them, the Suggses didn’t treat him with any new respect. Of course, they didn’t offer one another much respect either. Dan and Roy both poured scorn on little Eddie if he slipped up in his chores or made a remark they disagreed with. The only man of the company who escaped their scorn was Frog Lip—they seldom spoke to him, and he seldom spoke, but everyone knew he was there.
They rode through the Territory without incident, frequently seeing cattle herds on the move but always swinging around them. Dan Suggs had an old pair of spyglasses he had brought back from the war, and once in a while he would stand up in his s
tirrups and look one of the cattle outfits over to see if they contained enemies of his, or any cowboys he recognized.
Jake watched the herds too, for he still had hope of escaping from the situation he was in. Rude as Call and Gus had treated him, they were still his compañeros. If he spotted the Hat Creek outfit he had it in mind to sneak off and rejoin them. Even though he had made another mistake, the boys wouldn’t know about it and the news might never reach Montana. He would even cowboy, if he had to—it beat taking his chances with the Suggses.
He was careful not to give his feelings away though—he never inquired about the herds, and if the subject of Call and McCrae came up he made it plain that he harbored a grudge against them and would not be sorry to see them come to grief.
When they got up into Kansas they began to see the occasional settler, sod-house nesters, mostly. Jake hardly thought any of them could have enough money to be worth the trouble of robbing, but the younger Suggs brothers were all for trying them.
“I thought we was gonna regulate the settlers,” Roy said one night. “What are we waiting for?”
“A nester that’s got something besides a milk cow and a pile of buffalo chips,” Dan Suggs said. “I’m looking for a rich one.”
“If one was rich, he wouldn’t be living in a hole dug out of a hill up here in Kansas,” Jake said. “I slept in one of those soddies once—so much dirt leaked out of the roof during the night that I woke up dern near buried.”
“That don’t mean some of them couldn’t have some gold,” little Eddie said. “I’d like to practice regulating a little so I’d have the hang of it when we do strike the rich ones.”
“All we aim to let you do is watch, anyway,” Dan said. “It don’t take no practice to watch.”
“I’ve shot a nester,” little Eddie reminded him. “Shot two. If they don’t pay up, I might make it three.”
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 190
