The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  “Do you think a man can acquire sense, or would he have to be born with it?” he asked Call.

  “Sense?” Call asked. “Cow sense, or weather sense, or what kind?”

  “I thought I was asking the questions,” Goodnight said. “You’re known to be direct—just be direct. Are you born with sense or do you acquire it, a little at a time?”

  “I didn’t know much when I was twenty,” Call replied. “I believe I make better decisions now.”

  “I thought your best decision was to take that herd to Montana,” Goodnight said. “It was bold, because the Indians weren’t whipped. They got your partner and they might have got you. But it was a good decision, anyway. Montana was there waiting. It needed someone to come and put a herd in it.”

  Call said nothing. The man was tactless, to bring up Montana. Goodnight and virtually every adult in the West, if they were interested in the cattle trade, knew what a failure his Montana venture had been.

  “It might have been smart if I had known how to run a ranch,” Call said, finally. “I didn’t. Gus was able. He could run pretty much anything. But he died before we got started. The whole venture was a total failure.”

  “I don’t see it that way,” Goodnight said.

  “Well, it wasn’t your ranch,” Call pointed out.

  “No, it wasn’t my ranch, but I hate to see you thinking like a banker,” Goodnight said. “From a banker’s point of view, all my ventures have been failures, including this one I’m venturing now, this Palo Duro ranch. The lawyers will take it away from me, before I’m dead. Lawyers and bankers are like shit beetles. They’ll finally carry off everything I’ve built up, like they carried off your ranch up above the Yellowstone.

  “I would have liked to see the Yellowstone—I’ve heard it’s mighty fine country, up there,” he added. “If I could get around like I used to, I’d ride up to the Yellowstone, just to be able to say I’d seen it.”

  “You ought to go—it is fine country,” Call said.

  Goodnight rode in silence for several miles. He had to pop his little team of mules hard with the reins to get them to pull the wagon up the bank once they forded Cow Creek.

  “I’m no student of the ledger sheets,” he said, a little angrily, once they left Cow Creek behind.

  Call found Goodnight’s way of talking hard to follow. They hadn’t been talking of banks or ledger sheets. What did the man mean?

  “Bankers live by ledger sheets,” Goodnight informed him. “They decide you’re a failure if your balance hits zero, or if you can’t pay your note. You’re a damn fool for thinking like a banker.”

  “I don’t think like a banker,” Call assured him. “I don’t even have a bank account.”

  “It was a bold thing, driving that herd to the Yellowstone,” Goodnight said. “You went right through the Sioux and the Cheyenne. It was a bold thing. You ought not to let the bankers tell you you’re a failure because you went broke. I’ve been broke nine times in my life, and I may be broke again, before I’m through. But I’ve never been lost, day or night, rain or shine, and I ain’t a failure.”

  “I wonder if Roy Bean knows anything about the Garza boy?” Call asked.

  “He might,” Goodnight said. “He’s got a good eye for thieves, that’s because he’s tight. Roy Bean would hang a man over a fart, if he didn’t like the smell.”

  Call found the conversation tiring. He had only fallen in with Goodnight to be sociable; after all, he was the man’s guest. He trotted ahead for a bit, thinking about the seven hundred and twelve dead sheep. He had seen the bones of the Comanche horse herd, the one Colonel MacKenzie had destroyed. But those were just bones, cleaned by the winds and the sun. Seven hundred dead sheep crammed into boxcars was a different story.

  “If I was the railroad I expect I’d just burn those boxcars,” he said, when he dropped back even with Goodnight.

  “Would you accompany me, if I decide to make that trip to the Yellowstone?” Goodnight asked, as they rode up to his barn.

  “No, you’ll have to find other company, if you go,” Call said. “I’d rather be shut of Montana. You can’t miss the river, though.”

  “I told you I’ve never been lost, day or night,” Goodnight said. “I can generally locate a river.”

  “I expect so, I don’t know why I said it,” Call replied. The man was a famous plainsman. Of course he could find the Yellowstone River.

  “I am not good at conversation, goodbye,” he said, but Goodnight was already unloading the posthole diggers, and didn’t answer.

  10.

  BROOKSHIRE KNEW THE minute he walked into the telegraph office in Laredo that there was trouble—big trouble. No fewer than seven telegrams awaited him, all from Colonel Terry. Two telegrams from Colonel Terry were so unusual that it usually meant war had been declared. Brookshire had never expected to be unlucky enough to receive seven at one time. And yet it had occurred, in the hot town of Laredo.

  “Ain’t you gonna open them?” the old telegraph clerk said. His name was Johnny Whitman and he had been a telegraph operator on the border for twenty-nine years. Never before had he received seven telegrams for one person, only to have that person refuse to open them and share the excitement. Perhaps there was a war. Perhaps troops were on their way from San Antonio with orders to kill all the Mexicans. If that was so, and Johnny Whitman hoped it was, there would be rapid business for a few months.

  Brookshire knew the man wanted him to open the telegrams and share the news with him, but he didn’t care. Seven telegrams from Colonel Terry could only mean one thing. The Garza boy had struck again, before Captain Call could do his job.

  If that was the case, then at least one of the telegrams might be informing him that he was fired. In that event, he wouldn’t have to worry about Colonel Terry’s fiery temper anymore, but he would certainly have to worry about Katie’s. She did not like change, Katie. He had a job and she expected him to keep it. News that he was fired would undoubtedly cause her temper to flare up.

  It had been nippy in Amarillo. Winter was supposed to be nippy, and Brookshire hadn’t minded. Then in San Antonio, which was still in the same state, it had been hot, mighty hot. He didn’t suppose it could get any hotter than it had been in San Antonio, but after a few hours in Laredo, he was forced to admit an error. Laredo, which was in the same state, was hotter still.

  Their arrival in Laredo had been unpleasant on other grounds, too. Bolivar had begun to cry and wail. When they crossed the river into Nuevo Laredo, Bolivar knew that the Captain was about to leave him.

  “No, capitán, no!” he pleaded. “I want to go. I can ride and shoot.”

  “Yes, and you have shot,” Call reminded him. “You shot our best mule, and for no reason.”

  Bolivar had a vague memory of shooting a mule. He had shot it in the stomach with a big gun. Now, though, he couldn’t remember why. Perhaps the mule had tried to bite him; mules were known to bite.

  “I thought I was shooting the devil,” Bolivar said, in hopes of convincing the Captain that shooting the mule had been an act prompted by forces stronger than himself.

  “No, you thought it was an Indian,” Call said. “You have to stay here, Bol—you might get hurt if I take you. I’ll be back for you when I head home.”

  Soon he was handing money to a small, tired-looking Mexican woman who was not unlike the woman he had given money to in San Antonio. Brookshire decided the old man must have been a superlative cook, for the Captain to keep supporting him all these years.

  Bolivar didn’t appreciate the fact that the Captain had another decent family to place him with, though. He wanted to ride the river with the Captain, to ride and shoot, kill or be killed. At the thought that he would have to stay with the woman and the children again, he began to weep, and he was still weeping when the Captain and Brookshire rode off.

  “Be quiet, you’re old, you need to rest,” Juanita said. She was not happy to see the old man. He caused many problems. But she needed the
money. He was not a bad old man; just noisy, and sometimes a little violent to himself.

  Brookshire stumbled out of the telegraph office, pale with shock, and took the seven telegrams to Captain Call, who was talking with the local sheriff, a young man named Jekyll, who sported a walrus mustache. Call was trying to find out the local gossip about the Garza boy.

  To the surprise of both Call and the sheriff, Brookshire simply thrust the seven telegrams into Call’s hands.

  “Would you read them, please? I’m too worried,” he said.

  Call led Brookshire a little distance down the road, to a shade tree, before opening the first of the telegrams. He knew Sheriff Jekyll was dead curious about the information they contained, but he preferred to take the cautious, rather than the polite, approach. The less information got spread around, the better.

  “Well, it’s bad,” Call said, when he had read all seven telegrams. “He’s done it again, and somebody else has started doing it too.”

  He gave Brookshire the telegrams, and Brookshire read them quickly. Three more trains had been struck.

  “Three! Three, my God!” Brookshire exclaimed. Even one more train robbery would have been a calamity, but three amounted almost to a world catastrophe. News that an earthquake had leveled New York City could not have been more unwelcome.

  “I don’t see anything about a second robber—where’s that?” Brookshire asked.

  “The telegrams don’t say it—it’s the distances that say it,” Call said. “According to this, a train was robbed in Van Horn one afternoon and another in Deming, New Mexico, the next morning. Nobody’s swift enough to cover that distance in twelve hours.”

  Call methodically arranged the telegrams in order and read Brookshire the totals: two crew and three passengers killed near Van Horn, little money taken; two crew and two passengers killed near Falfurrias, little money taken; and three crew and four passengers killed near Deming, another military payroll lost.

  “O Lord, spare us,” Brookshire said. “That’s another payroll lost—the Army will be mad, for sure.”

  “It’s the passengers the Lord should have spared,” Call said. “That’s sixteen lives lost, in a little over a week, Mr. Brookshire. I fought Indians for fifteen years on the frontier and I lost six men. This is not a robber we’re after, it’s a killer—or two killers, it looks like now.”

  “If there’s two robbers, or two killers, who’s the other one?” Brookshire asked.

  “I don’t know,” Call said.

  “Well, one of them’s a robber, too,” Brookshire said. “He’s taken three payrolls and lots of trinkets.”

  “Yes, he takes the money,” Call said. “Or they take the money, because it’s there. But the killings worry me more. How many were killed before I took this job?”

  Brookshire tried to think. Three robberies had occurred before he left New York; another occurred while he was in Chicago. The one with the sheep wasn’t on Colonel Terry’s railroad, so Brookshire didn’t count it, though he supposed he ought to count the dead men. It seemed to him that there had been three or four deaths each time, but he wasn’t sure. Six had died on the sheep train, and now there were another sixteen dead. The count was in the thirties somewhere, so there was no denying it was a startling death toll. His regiment had only lost forty men, during the entire Civil War. Of course, his regiment had not been in the thickest of the action; still, the War had been carnage from start to finish and it was a shock to realize that one Mexican boy, in the course of a few months, had taken more lives than his regiment had lost in the War.

  “I doubt Wesley Hardin has killed that many people yet,” Call said. “And Wesley Hardin is a bad one.”

  Near the livery stable, where Call had encountered Sheriff Jekyll, a large log had been rolled into the shade, to make a sitting place. Two old men with only a few teeth between them were sitting on it, whittling with small pocketknives. Call went over and sat on the log too. He was annoyed with himself for not having taken the casualty figures more seriously, sooner. The numbers had been available, but numbers were usually exaggerated. He had fought several fierce battles, with both Indians and Mexicans, in which no one was killed on either side. Usually there were wounds, but fighting men were not easily killed. In the War, of course, the great engagements had left hundreds or even thousands dead, but frontier fighting was of a different order. In the worst Indian fight he had engaged in, he had only been able to say positively that two Indians were killed—he buried the two himself.

  Call rarely saw a newspaper and had not followed the Garza boy’s murdering that closely. He had assumed that the figures were exaggerated. Let one or two people get killed in a feud or a ruckus, and as the story went up and down the trail, the figure would swell until it became twenty or thirty. Before the Garza boy showed up, the most notorious outlaw in the West was Billy the Kid, who was said to have killed a man for every year of his life, when he was nineteen. But Dish Boggett, the gifted Hat Creek cowboy who was now selling hardware in Lincoln County, New Mexico, where the troubles occurred, assured Call that the boy had only killed four or five men. Goodnight, who had been in Lincoln County while the range war was going on, agreed with that figure.

  If the information in the telegrams was true, Joey Garza had quickly eclipsed Billy the Kid as a killer.

  In his conversation with Sheriff Jekyll, Call had asked if anyone knew how the Garza boy got the trains to stop. One man, working without a gang, would have to be inventive to stop a train.

  “He piles rocks on the tracks,” Sheriff Jekyll said. “He ain’t lazy. He works in the night, piling up rocks, till he gets a kind of wall.”

  “But a locomotive going full speed could bust through a pile of rocks, surely,” Call said.

  “Maybe, but the train might derail, and then you’d be in a pickle,” the sheriff replied.

  “If Joey Garza’s after you, you’re in a pickle anyway,” a lanky deputy named Ted Plunkert observed.

  “If it was me, and I was driving the dern train and I seen a pile of rocks and thought Joey Garza had piled it up, I’d pour on the steam,” the deputy added.

  Sheriff Jekyll looked startled and embarrassed by his deputy’s remark. It had never occurred to him that Ted Plunkert would venture an opinion of any kind, in the presence of the great Captain Call. Ted Plunkert had not made a comment of such length and complexity since Jekyll had hired him. What could have prompted him to wag his tongue for five minutes when he, the sheriff, was discussing serious matters with Captain Woodrow Call?

  “Ted, you were not consulted,” Sheriff Jekyll said bluntly.

  “I’ll consult him—he’s making better sense than you are,” Call said, no less bluntly. He didn’t like Jekyll’s manner, which was fawning yet superior. Many young lawmen took a similar tone with him, nowadays.

  Sheriff Jekyll blushed scarlet. Call thought the man might have a seizure, he was so embarrassed.

  “Well, the engineer can plow on, if he wants to risk it,” the sheriff said.

  “It’s run or fight, if you’re dealing with Joey,” Deputy Plunkert said. “I doubt I’d be ashamed to run, if he had the drop on me.”

  “Are you employed steady, or would you consider accompanying me?” Call asked. He liked the deputy’s dry manner and matter-of-fact outlook.

  “It’s steady, but it’s warm,” the deputy said. “I wouldn’t mind going to higher country, where there might be a breeze once a month or so.”

  “Now, Plunkert, who asked you into this conversation?” Sheriff Jekyll said. He considered it damn unneighborly of the Captain to try and hire his deputy. He didn’t much care for Ted Plunkert, but if he left, there would be no one but himself to sweep out the jail.

  Call sat on the log, by the toothless old men, and considered the situation. Survivors of the robberies claimed there was no gang. A single blond Mexican boy, well mounted, showed up and took their finer possessions. Though some of the passengers were armed, something in the boy’s manner kept th
em from using their arms in their own defense. The lost payrolls had come to almost a million dollars in cash. Dozens of watches and rings and jewels had been taken, and the people killed had not been offering any resistance. The boy stopped trains carrying a score or more passengers, robbed them, killed a few, and left, only to strike again, far away, when it suited him.

  In Call’s experience, it was unusual for criminals to have such confidence. One reason they ran in packs was because confidence was one quality they seemed to lack. It was also unusual for criminals to have much ability. When they succeeded, it was usually because they had circumstance on their side. It might be that the Garza boy was an exception—a criminal with real ability.

  Brookshire was so upset that he could not keep still. He saw Captain Call sitting on the log with the two old men. Obviously, the Captain was thinking matters over. Brookshire tried to allow him his privacy, but it was hard. Another telegram could arrive from Colonel Terry at any moment, informing them that they were both fired. The Colonel had never been loath to change help.

  Brookshire found himself edging a little closer to the log where the Captain sat. If only they could get started, he might feel a little better.

  “Ain’t we gonna start soon?” he asked. “Joey Garza could be getting farther and farther away.”

  “That’s just a guess, though,” Call said. “He might be headed back down the river toward us, for all we know.”

  “What are we going to do?” Brookshire asked. “The Colonel won’t sit still for much more of this.”

  “Nobody’s asking him to sit still,” Call said. “He can catch the next train and come out here and catch the boy himself, if he’s impatient.”

  “Oh, but he won’t want to,” Brookshire assured him. “The Colonel don’t like to leave New York—he’s too attached to Miss Cora, for one thing.”

  “Do you still want to go with me?” Call asked. He had taken a liking to Brookshire. The man was incompetent, and he usually despised incompetence, but for some reason, Brookshire’s incompetence made him likable. There was something brave in it. For a man who could neither ride nor shoot, to be willing to travel over some of the roughest stretches of the West in pursuit of a young killer who had already accounted for nearly forty lives took guts.