Lonesome Dove (20 page)

“You mean they hire you to play cards?” Jasper asked. He fancied himself a joker.

“Oh, I was just resting,” Dish said. “I’m helping their darky guard some stock.”

“Guard it from what?”

“From the Mexicans we stole it from,” Dish said. “The Captain went off to hire a crew.”

“Hell,” Jasper said. “If the Mexicans knew the Captain was gone they’d come and take back Texas.”

“I reckon not,” Dish said. He felt the remark was slightly insulting. The Captain was not the only man in Texas who could fight.

“He can hire me, if he wants to, when he gets back,” Jasper said.

“He probably will,” Dish said. Jasper had a reputation for being reliable, if not brilliant.

Though aware that Dish might be touchy on the subject, Jasper was curious about what had happened to change Lorie so. He looked wishfully at the light in her window.

“Is that girl got married, or what?” he asked. “Every time I jingled my money she looked at me like she was ready to carve my liver.”

Dish resented the question. He was not so coarse as to enjoy discussing Lorie with just any man who happened to ask. On the other hand, it was hard to see Jasper Fant as a rival. He looked half starved, and probably was.

“It’s a scoundrel named Jake Spoon,” Dish said. “I reckon he’s beguiled her.”

“Oh, so that’s it,” Jasper said. “I believe I’ve heard the name. A
pistolero
of some kind, ain’t he?”

“I wouldn’t know what he is,” Dish said, in a tone that was meant to let Jasper know he had no great interest in discussing the matter further. Jasper took the hint and the two of them rode over to the Hat Creek pens in silence, their minds on the white-armed woman in the saloon. She was no longer unfriendly, but it seemed to both of them that things had gone a little better before the change.

16

BY THE END of the first day’s hiring, Call had collected four boys, none of them yet eighteen. Young Bill Spettle, the one they called Swift Bill, was no older than Newt, and his brother Pete only a year older than Bill. So desperate were their family circumstances that Call was almost hesitant to take them.

The widow Spettle had a brood of eight children, Bill and Pete being the oldest. Ned Spettle, the father of them all, had died of drink two years before. It looked to Call as if the family was about to starve out. They had a little creek-bottom farm not far north of Pickles Gap, but the soil was poor and the family had little to eat but sowbelly and beans. The widow Spettle, however, was eager for him to take the boys, and would hear no protest from Call. She was a thin woman with bitter eyes. Call had heard from someone that she had been raised rich, in the East, with servants to comb her hair and help her into her shoes when she got up. It might just have been a story—it was hard for him to imagine a grownup who would need to be helped into their own shoes—but if even part of it was true she had come a long way down. Ned Spettle had never got around to putting a floor in the shack of a house he built. His wife was rearing eight children on the bare dirt. He had heard it said that Ned had never got over the war, which might have explained it. Plenty hadn’t. It accounted for the shortage of grown men of a certain age, that war. Call himself felt a kind of guilt at having missed it, though the work he and Gus had done on the border had been just as dangerous, and just as necessary.

“Take ’em,” the widow Spettle said, looking at her boys as if she wondered why she’d borne them. “I reckon they’ll work as hard as any.”

Call knew the boys had helped take a small herd to Arkansas. He paid the widow a month’s wage for each boy, knowing she would need it. There was evidently not a shoe in the family—even the mother was barefoot, a fact that must shame her, if the servant story were true.

He didn’t take the Spettle boys with him, for he had brought no spare horses. But the boys started at once for Lonesome Dove on foot, each of them carrying a blanket. They had one pistol between them, a Navy Colt with half its hammer knocked off. Though Call assured them he would equip them well once they got to Lonesome Dove, they wouldn’t leave the gun.

“We’ve never shot airy other gun,” Swift Bill said, as if that meant they couldn’t.

When he took his leave, Mrs. Spettle and the six remaining children scarcely noticed him. They stood in the hot yard, with a scrawny hen or two scratching around their bare feet, watching the boys and crying. The mother, who had scarcely touched her sons before they left, stood straight up and cried. Three of the children were girls, but the other three were boys in their early teens, old enough, at least, to be of use to their mother.

“We’ll take good care of them,” Call said, wasting words. The young girls hung onto the widow’s frayed skirts and cried. Call rode on, though with a bad feeling in his throat. It was better that the boys go; there was not enough work for them there. And yet they were the pride of the family. He would take as good care of them as he could, and yet what did that mean, with a drive of twenty-five hundred miles to make?

He made the Rainey ranch by sundown, a far more cheerful place than the Spettle homestead. Joe Rainey had a twisted leg, the result of an accident with a buckboard, but he got around on the leg almost as fast as a healthy man. Call was not as fond of Maude, Joe’s fat red-faced wife, as Augustus was, but then he had to admit he was not as fond of any woman as Augustus was.

Maude Rainey was built like a barrel, with a bosom as big as buckets and a voice that some claimed would make hair fall out. It was the general consensus around Lonesome Dove that if she and Augustus had married their combined voices would have deafened whatever children they might have produced. She talked at the table like some men talked when they were driving mules.

Still, she and Joe had managed to produce an even dozen children so far, eight of them boys and all of them strapping. Among them the Raineys probably ate as much food in one meal as the Spettles consumed in a week. As near as Call could determine they all devoted most of their waking hours to either growing or butchering or catching what they ate. Augustus’s blue pigs had been purchased from the Raineys and were the first thing Maude thought to inquire about when Call rode up.

“Have you et that shoat yet?” Maude asked, before he could even dismount.

“No, we ain’t,” Call said. “I guess Gus is saving him for Christmas, or else he just likes to talk to him.”

“Well, step down and have a wash at the bucket,” Maude said. “I’m cooking one of that shoat’s cousins right this minute.”

It had to be admitted that Maude Rainey set a fine table. Call had no sooner got his sleeves rolled up and his hands clean than supper began. Joe Rainey just had time to mumble a prayer before Maude started pushing around the cornbread. Call was faced with more meats than he had seen on one table since he could remember: beefsteak and pork chops, chicken and venison, and a stew that appeared to contain squirrel and various less familiar meats. Maude got red in the face when she ate, as did everyone else at her table, from the steam rising off the platters.

“This is my varmint stew, Captain,” Maude said.

“Oh,” he asked politely, “what kind of varmints?”

“Whatever the dogs catch,” Maude said. “Or the dogs themselves, if they don’t manage to catch nothing. I won’t support a lazy dog.”

“She put a possum in,” one of the little girls said. She seemed as full of mischief as her fat mother, who, fat or not, had made plenty of mischief among the men of the area before she settled on Joe.

“Now, Maggie, don’t be giving away my recipes,” Maude said. “Anyway, the Captain’s likely et possum before.”

“At least it ain’t a goat,” Call said, trying to make conversation. It was an unfamiliar labor, since at his own table he mostly worked at avoiding it. But he knew women liked to talk to their guests, and he tried to fit into the custom.

“We’ve heard a rumor that Jake is back and on the run,” Joe Rainey said. He wore a full beard, which at the moment was shiny with pork drippings. Joe had a habit of staring straight ahead. Though Call assumed he had a neck joint like other men, he had never seen him use it. If you happened to be directly in front of him, Joe would look you in the eye; but if you were positioned a little to the side, his look went floating on by.

“Yes, Jake arrived,” Call said. “He’s been to Montana and says it’s the prettiest country in the world.”

“It’s probably filt with women, then,” Maude said. “I remember Jake. If he can’t find a woman he gets so restless he’ll scratch.”

Call saw no need to comment on Jake’s criminal status, if any. Fortunately the Raineys were too busy eating to be very curious. The children, who had been well brought up, didn’t try for the better meats, but made do with a platter of chicken and some fryback and cornbread. One little tad, evidently the runt of the family, got nothing but cornbread and chicken gizzards, but he knew better than to complain. With eleven brothers and sisters all bigger than him, complaint would have been dangerous.

“Well, what’s Gus up to?” Maude asked. “I been sitting here waiting for him to come over and try to take me away from Joe, but I don’t guess he’s coming. Has he still got his craving for buttermilk?”

“Yes, he drinks it by the gallon,” Call said. “I fancy it myself, so we compete.”

He felt Maude’s statement not in the best of taste, but Joe Rainey continued to stare straight ahead and drip into his beard.

Call finally asked if he could hire a couple of the boys. Maude sighed, and looked down her double row of children. “I’d rather sell pigs than hire out boys,” she said, “but I guess they’ve got to go see the world sometime.”

“What’s the pay?” Joe asked, always the practical man.

“Why, forty dollars and found, I reckon,” Call said. “Of course we’ll furnish the mounts.”

That night he slept in a wagon in the Raineys’ yard. He had been offered a place in the loft, but it was piled so high with children that he hardly trusted himself in it. Anyway, he preferred the out-of-doors, though the out-of-doors at the Raineys’ was more noisy than he was used to. The pigs grunted all night, looking for lizards or something to eat. Then there was a barn owl that wouldn’t stop calling, so he had a time getting to sleep.

The next morning he got a promise from Maude that her two oldest boys would get themselves to Lonesome Dove by the end of the week. The boys themselves—Jimmy and Ben Rainey—scarcely said a word. Call rode off feeling satisfied, believing he had enough of a crew to start gathering cattle. Word would get out, and a few more men would probably trickle in.

They had to get the cattle and get them branded. At least they had the luxury of surplus horses, or did if Gus and Jake hadn’t contrived to fiddle around and lose them.

He worried about that possibility most of the way home. Not that Gus wasn’t competent—so far as sheer ability went, Gus was as competent as any man he’d ever known. There had been plenty of times when he’d wondered if he himself could match Gus, if Gus really tried. It was a question that never got tested, because Gus seldom tried. As a team, the two of them were perfectly balanced; he did more than he needed to, while Gus did less.

Gus himself often joked about it. “If you got killed I might work harder,” he said. “I might get in a righteous frame of mind if I had that stimulation. But you ain’t kilt, so what’s the point?”

Call wasted no time getting back, wishing all the way that he had the mare. She had spoiled him—made him too aware of the limitations of his other mounts. The fact that she was dangerous made him like her the more. She made him extra watchful, which was good.

When he got within fifteen miles of Lonesome Dove he cut west, thinking they would be holding the herd in that direction. He rode around the southern edge of the bad brush country and struck the trail of the horses. They had been going back south, over their own tracks, which was curious. Gus had taken them back to town. Probably he had a reason, but it was not one Call could guess, so he loped on home.

When he approached the town he saw the horses, grazing upriver a little ways, with Deets and Newt and the Irishmen holding them. They looked to be all there, so evidently nothing had happened.

One thing about Gus McCrae, he was easily found. By three in the afternoon, any afternoon, he would be sitting on the porch, drawing occasionally from his jug. When Call rode up, he was sitting there taking a nap. There was no sign of Jake.

“You’re a fine guard,” he said, dismounting.

Augustus had his hat over his eyes, but he removed it and looked at Call.

“How’s Maude Rainey?” he asked.

“She’s in good health,” Call said. “She fed me twice.”

“Good thing it was just twice,” Augustus said. “If you’d stayed a week you’d have had to rent an ox to get home on.”

“She’s anxious to sell you some more pigs,” Call said, taking the jug and rinsing his mouth with whiskey.

“If Joe was to get kilt I might court her again,” Augustus speculated.

“I hope you will,” Call said. “Them twelve young ones ought to have a good father. What are the horses doing back here so soon?”

“Why, grazing, most likely,” Augustus said.

“Didn’t Pedro make a try?”

“No, he didn’t, and for a very good reason,” Augustus said.

“What reason would that be?”

“Because he died,” Augustus said.

“Well, I swear,” Call said, stunned. “Is that the truth?”

“I ain’t seen the corpse,” Augustus said, “but I imagine it’s true. Jasper Fant rode in looking for work and had the news, though the scamp didn’t give it to me until I had wasted most of the night.”

“I wonder what killed him,” Call said. Pedro Flores had been a factor in their lives off and on for thirty years, though probably they had not actually seen him more than six or seven times. It was surprising, hearing he was gone, and though it should have been a relief, it wasn’t, exactly. It was too much of a surprise.

“Jasper wasn’t up on the details,” Augustus said. “He just heard it from a
vaquero
. But I allow it’s true, because it explains why you could lope in with a boy and an idiot and saunter off with his remuda.”

“Well, I swear,” Call said again. “I never expected that.”

“Oh, well,” Augustus said, “I never either, but then I don’t know why not. Mexicans don’t have no special dispensation. They die like the rest of us. I expect Bol will die one of these days, and then we won’t have nobody to whack the dinner bell with the crowbar.”

“Pedro was tough, though,” Call said.

After all, the man had more or less held nearly a hundred-mile stretch of the border, and for nearly thirty years. Call had known many men who died, but somehow had not expected it of Pedro, though he himself had fired several bullets at him.

“I’d like to know what took him,” Call said.

“He might have choked on a pepper,” Augustus said. “Them that can’t be killed by knives or bullets usually break their necks falling off the porch or something. Remember Johnny Norvel, dying of that bee sting? I guess Johnny had been shot twenty times, but a dern bee killed him.”

It was true. The man had rangered with them, and yet the bee sting had given him a seizure of some kind, and no one could bring him out of it.

“Well, it will about finish the Flores operation,” Augustus said. “He just had three boys, and we hung the only one of ’em with any get-up-and-go.”

To Augustus’s surprise, Call sat down on the porch and took a big swallow from the jug. He felt curious—not sick but suddenly empty—it was the way a kick in the stomach could make you feel. It was an odd thing, but true, that the death of an enemy could affect you almost as much as the death of a friend. He had experienced it before, when news reached them that Kicking Wolf was dead. Some young soldier on his second patrol had made a lucky shot and killed him, on the Clear Fork of the Brazos—and Kicking Wolf had kept two companies of Rangers busy for twenty years. Killed by a private. Call had been shoeing a horse when Pea brought him that piece of news, and he felt so empty for a spell that he had to put off finishing the job.