Lonesome Dove (96 page)

Then someone noticed that Captain Call was leaving. He took an extra rifle from the wagon and got the slicker that he had lent Pea, covering Pea with a blanket.

“Just move the stock on north,” he said. “Be alert. I’m going to get Gus.”

The thought of him leaving sent a ripple of apprehension through the camp. Though independent to a man in some respects, the outfit was happier in all respects when Captain Call was around. Or if not the Captain, then Gus. Only a few hours earlier, they had felt cocky enough to take on an army. After all, they were the conquerors of the Yellowstone. But now, watching the Captain catch a horse for Gus to ride back on, they all felt daunted. The vast plain was beautiful, but it had reduced Pea Eye to a scarred wreck. And the Indians had Gus holed up somewhere. They might kill him and the Captain too. All men were mortal, and they felt particularly so. A thousand Indians might come by nightfall. The Indians might fall on them as they had fallen on Custer.

Call had no time to soothe the men with elaborate instructions. If Gus was badly wounded, he would weaken rapidly, and every hour counted. Arriving ten minutes too late would be as bad as ten days, or a year, for that matter. Besides, the almost beseeching way the men looked at him was irritating. Sometimes they acted as if they would forget how to breathe if he or Gus wasn’t there to show them. They were all resourceful men—he knew that, if they didn’t—and yet at certain times they became like children, wanting to be led. All his adult life, he had consented to lead, and yet occasionally, when the men seemed particularly dumbstruck, he wondered why he had done it.

He and Augustus had discussed the question of leadership many times.

“It ain’t complicated,” Augustus maintained. “Most men doubt their own abilities. You don’t. It’s no wonder they want to keep you around. It keeps them from having to worry about failure all the time.”

“They ain’t failures, most of them,” Call pointed out. “They can do perfectly well for themselves.”

Augustus chuckled. “You work too hard,” he said. “It puts most men to shame. They figure out they can’t keep up, and it’s just a step or two from that to feeling that they can’t do nothing much unless you’re around to get them started.

“It don’t take on me, which is lucky,” he added. “I don’t care how hard you work, or where you go.”

“I’d like to see something that could put you to shame,” Call said.

“My pecker’s done it a few times,” Augustus said.

Call wondered what he meant by that, but didn’t ask.

When he was packed, he mounted at once, and rode over to Dish Boggett. “You’re in charge,” he said. “Trail on north. I’ll be back when I can.”

Dish paled at the thought of so much responsibility. He had enough worries as it was, what with Pea Eye talking of ghosts.

The Captain looked angry, which made the men better reconciled to the fact that he was leaving. All of them feared his angers. But once he left, before he and the mare were even out of sight, their mood of relief changed back to one of apprehension.

Jasper Fant, so cheerful only an hour before, sank the fastest. “Good lord,” he said. “Here we are in Montana and there’s Indians and bears and it’s winter coming on and the Captain and Gus both off somewhere. I’ll be surprised if we don’t get massacred.”

For once Soupy Jones didn’t have a word to say.

95

AUGUSTUS KEPT HIS PISTOL COCKED ALL NIGHT, once Pea Eye left. He watched the surface of the river closely, for the trick he hoped might work for Pea could also work for the Indians. They might put a log in the water and float down on him, using the log for cover. He tried to look and listen closely, a task not helped by the fact that he was shaking and feverish.

He expected the Indians to come sliding out of the water like big snakes, right in front of him, but none came, and as his fever mounted he began to mumble. From time to time he was half aware that he was delirious, but there was nothing he could do about it, and anyway he preferred the delirium to the tedium of waiting for the Indians to attack. One minute he would be trying to watch the black water, the next he would be back at Clara’s. At times he saw her face vividly.

The dawn broke sunny. Bad as he felt, Augustus still enjoyed seeing the sun. It helped clear his head and stirred him to thoughts of escape. He was sick of the little cold cave under the riverbank. He had thought to wait there for Call, but the more he considered, the more he felt it to be a bad plan. Call’s arrival was days away, and dependent on Pea getting through. If Pea didn’t get through—and the chances were good that he wouldn’t—then Call might not even start to look for him for another week.

As a student of wounds, he knew just by looking at his leg that he was in trouble. The leg was yellowish, with black streaks striping the yellow. Blood poisoning was a possibility. He knew that if he didn’t get medical attention within the next few days his chances were slim. Even waiting for nightfall might be folly.

If the Indians caught him in the open, his chances would be equally slim, of course, but it took no deliberation to know that if he had to choose, and he did, he would prefer the active to the passive course.

As soon as the sun was well up he eased out of the cave and stood up. The bad leg throbbed. Even to touch his toes to the ground hurt. The waters were rapidly receding. Fifty yards to the east, a game trail led up the creek bank. Augustus decided to use the carbine he had taken off the Indian boy as a crutch. He cut the stirrups off the saddle and lashed one over each end of the rifle, then padded one end of his rude crutch with a piece of saddle leather. He stuffed one pistol under his belt, holstered the other, took his rifle and a pocketful of jerky, and hobbled across along the bank to the animal trail.

He edged cautiously out of the riverbed, but saw no Indians. The broad plain was empty for miles. The Indians had left. Augustus wasted no time in speculation. He started at once, hobbling southeast toward Miles City. He hoped he had not more than thirty or forty miles to go before he struck the town.

He was not used to the crutch and he made poor time. When occasionally he forgot and set his bad foot to the ground, the pain was almost enough to make him pass out. He was weak, and had to stop every hour or so to rest. In the hot sun, sweat poured out of him, though he felt cold and feared a chill. Two or three miles from where he started, he crossed the tracks of a sizable herd of buffalo—they were probably the reason the Indians had left. With winter coming, buffalo were more important to the warriors than two white men, though probably they meant to return and finish off the whites once the hunt was over.

All day he persevered, dragging himself along. He stopped less frequently, because he found it hard to get started once he stopped. Rest was seductive, made more so by his tendency to improve the situation through imagination. Maybe the herd had moved north faster than he calculated. Maybe Call would show up the next day and save him the painful business of dragging along with his crutch.

Yet he hated waiting almost as much as he hated the traveling. His habit had been to go and meet whatever needed to be met, not to wait idly for what might approach.

What was approaching now was death, he knew. He had faced it before and overridden its motion with his own. To sit and wait for it gave it too many advantages. He had seen many men die of wounds, and had watched the turning of their spirits from active desire to live to indifference. With a bad wound, the moment indifference took over, life began to subside. Few men rose out of it: most lost all impulse toward activity and ended by offering death at least a halfhearted welcome.

Augustus didn’t intend to do that, so he struggled on. When he took his rests he took them standing up, leaning on the crutch. It took less will to get started if one was standing up.

He hobbled over the plain through the long afternoon and twilight, finally collapsing sometime in the night. His hand slipped off the crutch and he felt it falling from him. In stooping to reach for it, he fell face down, unconscious before he hit the ground. In his dreams he was with Lorena, in the tent on the hot Kansas plains. He longed for her to cool him somehow, touch him with her cool hand, but though she smiled, she didn’t cool him. The world had become red, as though the sun had swollen and absorbed it. He felt as if he were lying on the surface of the red sun as it looked at sunset when it sank into the plain.

When he got his eyes open the sun was white, not red, and directly above him. He heard a spitting sound, such as a human would make, and his hand went to the pistol at his belt, thinking the Indians had come. But when he turned his head, it was a white man he saw: a very old, small white man in patched buckskins. The old man had a tobacco-stained beard and a bowie knife in his hand. A spotted horse grazed nearby. The old man was just squatting there, watching. Augustus kept his hand on his gun, but didn’t draw it—he didn’t know if he had the strength to draw it.

“Them was Blood Indians,” the old man said. “It beats all that they didn’t get you. You got enough of them.”

“Five is all,” Augustus said, raising himself to a sitting position. He didn’t like to talk lying down.

“Seven I heard,” the old man said. “I get along with the Bloods and the Blackfeet too. Bought lots of beaver from them in the beaverin’ days.”

“I’m Augustus McCrae,” Augustus said.

“Hugh Auld,” the visitor said. “Down Miles City they call me Old Hugh, although I doubt I’m eighty yet.”

“Was you meaning to stab me with that knife?” Augustus asked. “I’d rather not shoot you unnecessarily.”

Old Hugh grinned and spat again. “I was about to have a go at cutting off that rotten leg of yours,” he said. “Before you come to, I was. That leg’s ruint, but I might have a hell of a time cutting through the bone without no saw. Besides, you might have woke up and give me trouble.”

“’Spect I would have,” Augustus said, looking at the leg. It was no longer black-striped—just black.

“We got to take it off,” Old Hugh said. “If that rot gets in the other leg you’ll lose both of them.”

Augustus knew the old man was right in everything he said. The leg was rotting, but a bowie knife was no instrument for taking it off.

“How far is Miles City?” he asked. “I guess they’ve got a sawbones there.”

“Two, last time I went to town,” Old Hugh said. “Both drunkards.”

“You forgot to inform me of the distance,” Augustus said.

“Forty miles and a fraction,” Hugh said. “I don’t believe you could have walked it.”

Augustus used the crutch to pull himself up. “I might fool you,” he said, though it was just pride talking. He knew quite well he couldn’t have walked it. Just getting to his feet left him nauseous.

“Where’d you come from, stranger?” the old man asked. He rose to his feet but did not exactly straighten up. His back was bent. To Augustus he seemed scarcely five feet tall.

“I was setting a deadfall and let it fall on me,” Old Hugh explained cheerfully. “Some Blood warriors found me. They thought it was funny, but my back never did straighten out.”

“We all have misfortunes,” Augustus said. “Could I borrow your horse?”

“Take it, only don’t kick him,” Old Hugh said. “If you kick him he’ll buck. I’ll follow along as best I can in case you fall off.”

He led the spotted horse over and helped Augustus mount. Augustus thought he might pass out, but managed not to. He looked at Old Hugh.

“You sure you get along with these Indians?” he asked. “I’d be embarrassed if you came to any trouble on my account.”

“I won’t,” Old Hugh said. “They’re off stuffing themselves with fresh buffalo meat. I was invited to join ’em but I think I’ll poke along after you, even though I don’t know where you come from.”

“A little fart of a town called Lonesome Dove,” Augustus said. “It’s in south Texas, on the Rio Grande.”

“Dern,” the old man said, clearly impressed by the information. “You’re a traveling son of a bitch, ain’t you?”

“Does this horse have a name?” Augustus asked. “I might need to speak to him.”

“I been calling him Custer,” Old Hugh said. “I done a little scouting for the General once.”

Augustus paused a minute, looking down at the old trapper. “I got one more favor to ask you,” he said. “Tie me on. I ain’t got strength enough to mount again if I should fall.”

The old man was surprised. “I guess you’ve learned some tricks, with all your traveling,” he said. He fixed a rawhide loop around Augustus’s waist and made it tight to the cantle.

“Let’s go, Custer,” Augustus said, giving the horse rein and remembering not to kick him.

Five hours later, as the sun was setting, he nudged the exhausted horse over a slope north of the Yellowstone and saw the little town of Miles City four or five miles to the east.

When he got to town it was nearly dark. He stopped in front of what appeared to be a saloon but found he could not dismount. Then he remembered that he was tied on. He couldn’t untie the knots in the rawhide, but managed to draw his pistol and fire in the air. The first shot seemed to go unnoticed, but when he fired twice more several men came to the door of the saloon and looked at him.

“That’s Old Hugh’s horse,” one said in a sullen voice, as if he suspected Augustus of horse theft.

“Yes, Mr. Auld was kind enough to loan him to me,” Augustus said, staring the man down. “I’ve a ruined leg and would appreciate it if someone would locate me a medical man quick.”

The men walked out and came around the horse. When they saw the leg, one whistled.

“What done that?” he asked.

“An arrow,” Augustus said.

“Who are you, sir?” the oldest of the men asked, more respectfully.

“Augustus McCrae, Captain in the Texas Rangers,” Augustus said. “One of you gentlemen will need to help me with these knots.”

They hurried to help, but before they could get him off the horse the red water washed over his eyes again. The spotted horse named Custer didn’t like so many men around him. He tried to bite one of them, then bucked twice, throwing Augustus, who had just been untied, into the street. Two of the men tried to catch the horse but he easily outran them and raced back out of town.