Larry McMurtry - Dead Man's Walk

by Dead Man's Walk

  "If a Mexican posse shows up, let 'em have these two," he advised. "This ain't Indian hair, and what's more, it ain't grown-up hair. These two went over to Mexico and killed a passel of children." Kirker merely sneered.

  "Hair's hair," he said. "This is government property now, and you're welcome to keep your goddamn hands off it." Call and Gus waited, expecting the Major to shoot Kirker, and possibly Glanton too, but the Major didn't shoot. Bigfoot and Shadrach walked away, disgusted. Shadrach mounted, crossed the river, and was gone for several hours. Kirker kept on chewing his antelope jerky, and Glanton went sound asleep, leaning against his horse.

  Major Chevallie did look at Kirker hard. He knew he ought to shoot the two men and leave them to the flies. Shadrach's opinion was no doubt accurate: the men had been killing Mexican children; Mexican children were a lot easier to hunt than Comanches.

  But the Major didn't shoot. His troop was in an uncertain position, vulnerable to attack at any minute, and Kirker and Glanton made two more fighting men, adding two guns to the company's meager strength. If there was a serious scrape, one or both of them might be killed anyway. If not, they could always be executed at a later date.

  "Stay this side of the river from now on," the Major said--he still had his pistol in his hand.

  "If either of you cross it again, I'll hunt you down like dogs." Kirker didn't flinch.

  "We ain't dogs, though--we're wolves-- at least I am. You won't be catching me, if I go. As for Glanton, you can have him. I'm tired of listening to his goddamn snores." Gus soon forgot the incident, but Call didn't. He listened to Kirker sharpen his knife and wished he had the authority to kill the man himself. In his view Kirker was a snake, and worse than a snake. If you discovered a snake in your bedclothes, the sensible thing would be to kill it.

  Major Chevallie had looked right at the snake, but hadn't killed it.

  The sandstorm blew for another hour, until the camp and everything in it was covered with sand. When it finally blew out, men discovered that they couldn't find utensils they had carelessly laid down before the storm began. The sky overhead was a cold blue. The plain in all directions was level with sand; only the tops of sage bushes and chaparral broke the surface. The Rio Grande was murky and brown. The little mare, still snubbed to the tree, was in sand up to her knees. All the men stripped naked in order to shake as much sand as possible out of their clothes; but more sand filtered in, out of their hair and off their collars. Gus brushed the branch of a mesquite tree and a shower of sand rained down on him.

  Only the old Indian woman and the boy with no tongue made no attempt to rid themselves of sand.

  The fire had finally been smothered, but the old woman and the boy still sat by it, sand banked against their backs. To Call they hardly seemed human.

  They were like part of the ground.

  Gus, in high spirits, decided to be a bronc rider after all. He took it into his head to ride the Mexican mare.

  "I expect that storm's got her cowed," he said, to Call.

  "Gus, she ain't cowed," Call replied.

  He had the mare by the ears again, and detected no change in her attitude.

  Sure enough, the mare threw Gus on the second jump. Several of the naked Rangers laughed, and went on shaking out their clothes.

  In the early afternoon, still carrying more sand in his clothes than he would have liked, Major Chevallie attempted to question the old woman and the boy. He gave them coffee and fed them a little hardtack first, hoping it would make them talkative--but the feast, such as it was, failed in its purpose, mainly because no one in the troop spoke any Comanche.

  The Major had supposed Bigfoot Wallace to be adept in the tongue, but Bigfoot firmly denied any knowledge of it.

  "Why no, Major," Bigfoot said.

  "I've made it a practice to stay as far from the Comanche as I can get," Bigfoot said. "What few I ever met face-on I shot.

  Some others have shot at me, but we never stopped to palaver." The old woman wore a single bear tooth on a rawhide cord around her neck. The tooth was the size of a small pocketknife. Several of the men looked at it with envy; most of them would have been happy to own a bear tooth that large.

  "She must have been a chief's woman," Long Bill speculated. "Otherwise why would a squaw get to keep a fine grizzly tooth like that?" Matilda Roberts knew five or six words of Comanche and tried them all on the old woman, without result. The old woman sat where she had settled when she walked into the camp, backed by a hummock of sand. Her rheumy eyes were focused on the campfire, or on what had been the campfire.

  The tongueless boy, still hungry, dug most of the sandy turtle meat out of the ashes of the campfire and ate it. No one contested him, although Matilda dusted the sand off a piece or two and gnawed at the meat herself. The boy perked up considerably, once he had eaten the better part of Matilda's snapping turtle. He did his best to talk, but all that came out were moans and gurgles. Several of the men tried to talk to him in sign, but got nowhere.

  "Goddamn Shadrach, where did he go?" the Major asked. "We've got a Comanche captive here, and the only man we have who speaks Comanche leaves." As the day wore on, Gus and Call took turns getting pitched off the mare. Call once managed to stay on her five hops, which was the best either of them achieved. The Rangers soon lost interest in watching the boys get pitched around. A few got up a card game. Several others took a little target practice, using cactus apples as targets. Bigfoot Wallace pared his toenails, several of which had turned coal black as the result of his having worn footgear too small for his feet--it was that or go barefooted, and in the thorny country they were in, bare feet would have been a handicap.

  Toward sundown Call and Gus were assigned first watch. They took their position behind a good clump of chaparral, a quarter of a mile north of the camp. Major Chevallie had been making another attempt to converse with the old Comanche woman, as they were leaving camp. He tried sign, but the old woman looked at him, absent, indifferent.

  "Shadrach just rode off and he ain't rode back," Call said. "I feel better when Shadrach's around." "I'd feel better if there were more whores," Gus commented. In the afternoon he had made another approach to Matilda Roberts, only to be rebuffed.

  "I should have stayed on the riverboats," he added. "I never lacked for whores, on the riverboats." Call was watching the north. He wondered if it was really true that Shadrach and Bigfoot could smell Indians. Of course if you got close to an Indian, or to anybody, you could smell them. There were times on sweaty days when he could easily smell Gus, or any other Ranger who happened to be close by. Black Sam, the cook, had a fairly strong smell, and so did Ezekiel--the latter had not bothered to wash the whole time Call had known him.

  But dirt and sweat weren't what Bigfoot and Shadrach had been talking about, when they said they smelled Indians. The old woman and the boy had been nearly a mile away, when they claimed to smell them. Surely not even the best scout could smell a person that far away.

  "There could have been more Indians out there, when Shad said he smelled them," Call speculated. "There could be a passel out there, just waiting." Gus McCrae took guard duty a good deal more lightly than his companion, Woodrow Call. He looked at his time on guard as a welcome escape from the chores that cropped up around camp--gathering firewood, for example, or chopping it, or saddle-soaping the Major's saddle. Since he and Woodrow were the youngest Rangers in the troop, they were naturally expected to do most of the chores. Several times they had even been required to shoe horses, although Black Sam, the cook, was also a more than adequate blacksmith.

  Gus found such tasks irksome--he believed he had been put on earth to enjoy himself, and there was no enjoyment to be derived from shoeing horses.

  Horses were heavy animals--most of the ones he shoed had a tendency to lean on him, once he picked up a foot.

  Drinking mescal was far more to his liking--in fact he had a few swallows left, in a small jug he had managed to appropriate.

  He had kept the jug bu
ried in the sand all day, lest some thirsty Ranger discover it and drain the mescal. He owned a woolen serape, purchased in a stall in San Antonio, and had managed to sneak the jug out of camp under the serape.

  When he brought it out and took a swig, Call looked annoyed.

  "If the Major caught you drinking on guard he'd shoot you," Call said. It was true, too. The Major tolerated many foibles in his troop, but he did demand sobriety of the men assigned to keep guard. They were camped not far from the great Comanche war trail--the merciless raiders from the north could appear at any moment. Even momentary inattention on the part of the guards could imperil the whole troop.

  "Well, but how could he catch me?" Gus asked. "He's trying to talk to that old woman-- he'd have to sneak up on us to catch me, and I'd have to be drunker than this not to notice a fat man sneaking up." It was certainly true that Major Chevallie was fat. He outweighed Matilda by a good fifty pounds, and Matilda was not small. The Major was short, too, which made his girth all the more noticeable. Still, he was the Major. Just because he hadn't shot the scalp hunters didn't mean he wouldn't shoot Gus.

  "I don't believe you was ever on a riverboat--why would they hire you?" Call asked. At times of irritation he began to remember all the lies Gus had told him.

  Gus McCrae had no more regard for truth than he did for the rules of rangering.

  "Why, of course I was," Gus said. "I was a top pilot for a dern year--I'm a Tennessee boy. I can run one of them riverboats as well as the next man. I only run aground once, in all the time I worked." The truth of that was that he had once sneaked aboard a riverboat for two days; when he was discovered, he was put off on a mud bar, near Dubuque. A young whore had hidden him for the two days--the captain had roundly chastised her when Gus was discovered. Shortly after he was put off, the riverboat ran aground--that was the one true fact in the story. The tale sounded grand to his green friend, though. Woodrow Call had got no farther in the world than his uncle's scratchy farm near Navasota. Woodrow's parents had been taken by the smallpox, which is why he was raised by the uncle, a tyrant who stropped him so hard that when Woodrow got old enough to follow the road to San Antonio, he ran off. It was in San Antonio that the two of them had met--or rather, that Call had found Gus asleep against the wall of a saloon, near the river. Call worked for a Mexican blacksmith at the time, stirring the forge and helping the old smith with the horseshoeing that went on from dawn till dark. The Mexican, Jesus, a kindly old man who hummed sad harmonies all day as he worked, allowed Call to sleep on a pallet of nail sacks in a small shed behind the forge.

  Blacksmithing was dirty work. Call had been on his way to the river to wash off some of the smudge from his work when he noticed a lanky youth, sound asleep against the wall of the little adobe saloon.

  At first he thought the stranger might be dead, so profound were his slumbers. Killings were not uncommon in the streets of San Antonio-- Call thought he ought to stop and check, since if the boy was dead it would have to be reported.

  It turned out, though, that Gus was merely so fatigued that he was beyond caring whether he was counted among the living or among the dead. He had traveled in a tight stagecoach for ten days and nine nights, making the trip from Baton Rouge through the pines of east Texas to San Antonio.

  Upon arrival, his fellow passengers decided that Gus had been with them long enough; he was in such a stupor of fatigue that he offered no resistance when they rolled him out. He could not remember how long he had been sleeping against the saloon; it was his impression that he had slept about a week. That night Call let Gus share his pallet of nail sacks, and the two had been friends ever since.

  It was Gus who decided they should apply for the Texas Rangers--Call would never have thought himself worthy of such a position. It was Gus, too, who boldly approached the Major when word got out that a troop was being formed whose purpose--other than hanging whatever horse thieves or killers turned up--was to explore a stage route to El Paso. Fortunately, Major Chevallie had not been hard to convince-- he took one look at the two healthy-looking boys and hired them at the princely sum of three dollars a month. They would be furnished with mounts, blankets, and a rifle apiece.

  Departure was immediate; saddles proved to be the main problem. Neither Gus nor Call had a saddle, or a pistol either. Finally the Major intervened on their behalf with an old German who owned a hardware store and saddle shop, the back of which was piled with single-tree saddles in bad repair and guns of every description, most of which didn't work.

  Finally two pistols were extracted that looked as if they might shoot if primed a little; and also two single-tree rigs with tattered leather that the German agreed to part withfora dollar apiece, pistols thrown in.

  Major Chevallie advanced the two dollars, and the next morning at dawn, he, Call, Gus, Shadrach, Bob Bascom, Long Bill Coleman, Ezekiel Moody, Josh Corn, one-eyed Johnny Carthage, Blackie Slidell, Rip Green, and Black Sam, leading his kitchen mule, trotted out of San Antonio. Call had never been so happy in his life--overnight he had become a Texas Ranger, the grandest thing anyone could possibly be.

  Gus, though, was irritated at the lack of ceremony attending their departure. A scabby dog barked a few times, but no inhabitants lined the streets to cheer them on. Gus thought there should at least have been a bugler.

  "I'd blow a bugle myself, if one was available," he said.

  Call thought the remark wrongheaded. Even if they had a bugle, and if Gus could blow it, who would listen to it, except a few Mexicans and a donkey or two? It was enough that they were Rangers-- two days before they had simply been homeless boys.

  Bigfoot Wallace, the scout, didn't catch up until the next day--at the time of their departure he had been in jail. Apparently he had thrown a deputy sheriff out the second-floor window of the community's grandest whorehouse. The deputy suffered a broken collarbone, an annoyance sufficient to cause the sheriff to jail Bigfoot for a week.

  Gus McCrae, a newcomer to Texas, had never heard of Bigfoot Wallace and saw no reason to be awed. Throwing a deputy sheriff out a window did not seem to him to be a particularly impressive feat.

  "Now, if he'd thrown the governor out, that would have been a fine thing," Gus said.

  Call thought his friend's comment absurd. Why would the governor be in a whorehouse, anyway?

  Bigfoot Wallace was the most respected scout on the Texas frontier; even in Navasota, far to the east, Bigfoot's name was known and his exploits talked about.

  "They say he's been all the way to China," Call explained. "He knows every creek in Texas, and whether it's boggy or not, and he's a first-rate Indian killer besides." "Myself, I'd rather know every whore," Gus said.

  "You can have a lot more fun with whores than you can with governors." Call had seen several whores on the street, but had never visited one. Although he had the inclination, he had never had the money. Gus McCrae, though, seemed to have spent his life in the company of whores--though he had once mentioned that he had a mother and three sisters back in Tennessee, he preferred to talk mainly about whores, often to the point of tedium.

  Call, though, had the greatest respect for Bigfoot Wallace; he intended to study the man and learn as many of his wilderness skills as possible. Though most of the older Rangers were well versed in woodcraft, Bigfoot and Shadrach were clearly the two masters. If the company came to a fork in a creek or river while the scouts were ranging ahead, the company waited until one of them showed up and told it which fork to take. Major Chevallie had never been west of San Antonio--once they left the settlements behind and started toward the Pecos, he allowed his accomplished scouts to choose a route.

  It was Shadrach who took them south, into the lonely country of sage and sand, where the two boys were now crouched behind their chaparral bush. In San Antonio there had been talk that war with Mexico was brewing--early on, the Major had instructed the troop to fire on any Mexican who seemed hostile.

  "Better to be safe than sorry," he said, and many heads nodded.
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  In fact, though, the only Mexican they had seen was the unfortunate driver of the donkey cart. In the western reaches, no one was quite certain where Mexico stopped and Texas began. The Rio Grande made a handy border, but neither Major Chevallie nor anyone else considered it to be particularly official.

  Mexicans, hostile or otherwise, didn't occupy much of the troop's attention, almost all of which was reserved for the Comanches. Call had yet to see a Comanche Indian, though throughout the trek, Long Bill, Rip Green, and other Rangers had assured him that the Comanches were sure to show up in the next hour or two, bent on scalping and torture.

  "I wonder how big Comanches are?" he asked Gus, as they peered north into the silent darkness.

  "About the size of Matilda, I've heard," Gus said.