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“It’s night, ain’t we stopping, Gus?” Long Bill asked. “Do we look like we’re stopped?” Gus replied, a little testily. Long Bill had the boresome habit of asking questions to which the answers were obvious.
“Captain, if the sun’s there, why wouldn’t we see it?” he asked. “Well, it could be cloudy weather—I expect it will be,” Captain Scull said. “That’s one reason we might not see sunup. Another reason is that we all might be dead.
He wondered, as he loped over the cold plains, what made Indians so much like women. The way Famous Shoes made him feel, when he asked a question, was not unlike how Clara Forsythe made him feel, when he ventured into her store. With both the Indian and the women he was always left with the feeling that, without meaning to, he had made some kind of mistake.
Right at the moment, he was having a violent imagining in which young Jake was being chewed on by seven or eight thin hungry pigs. There were plenty of thin hungry pigs running loose within the town of Austin, too. It was against the ordinances, but the skinny half-wild pigs didn’t know there was an ordinance against them.
For one thing, he couldn’t figure out what a food chain could be, unless the Captain was talking about link sausage. How a beetle in a country he had never heard of could turn a dead man into link sausage was beyond his ken.
“The tragedy of man is not death or epidemic or lust or rage or fitful jealousy,” he said loudly—his voice tended to rise while declaiming unpleasant facts. “No sir, the tragedy of man is boredom, sir—boredom!” the Captain said. “A man can only do a given thing so many times with freshness and spirit—then, no matter what it is, it becomes like an office task.
“You don’t know educated people, that’s why,” Call said. “Besides, his cousin was in Brazil. You’ve never been to Brazil—you don’t know how people behave down there.” “No, and if they’ve got snakes that can kill you in seventeen minutes, I ain’t never going, either,” Augustus said.
They were deadly, merciless killers, but they were also the last free Indians on the southern plains. When the last of them had been killed, or their freedom taken from them, their power broken, the plains around him would be a different place. It would be a safer place, of course, but a flavor would have been taken out of it—the flavor of wildness. Of course, it would be a blessing for the settlers, but the settlers weren’t the whole story—not quite.
“It’s the quality of the opponent that makes soldiering a thing worth doing,” he said. “It ain’t the cause you fight for—the cause is only a cause. Those torturing fiends down there are the best opponents I’ve ever faced. I mean to kill them to the last man, if I can—but once it’s done I’ll miss ’em.”
“Renegades, sir,” Call said, a good deal puzzled by the remark. “I thought the Comanches were about the last renegades.” Inish Scull smiled and waved a hand. “I don’t mean these poor savages,” he said. “I mean the Southern fops who are even now threatening to secede from the Union. There’ll be blood spilled from Baltimore to Galveston before that conflict’s settled, I’ll wager. It’s the Southern boys I called ‘renegades’—and they are renegades, by God.
“It’ll be brother against brother, and father against son, when that war comes, gentlemen,” he said.
Still, the one thing Maggie needed most was marriage; it might be the one thing Gus McCrae needed most, as well. But Call couldn’t or wouldn’t give it to Maggie, and she couldn’t give it to Gus. It was a linkage that irked her, but that she could neither ignore nor deny.
He thought of the tall white boy as “Mr. Pea”—he would call him “Mr. Pea.” When he came back with the wood the young ranger was still holding his hands to the little fire. “I guess I just call you ‘Mr. Pea,’ if it suits you,” Deets said. “Why, yes—that’ll do fine,” Pea Eye said. “I guess I’m a mister—I guess everybody’s a mister.” No, I ain’t, black people ain’t, Deets thought—but he didn’t say it.
Sometimes, of course, the customer outside her door would just be some unhappy man whose wife had passed away. Those men, who were just looking for a little pleasure or comfort, were not a problem. The men she feared were the men who wanted to punish women—that was the chief peril of her profession;
At moments he missed the learned talk of Cambridge; at times he grew depressed when he considered the gap in knowledge between himself and the poor dull fellows he commanded—they were brave beyond reason, but, alas, untutored. Young Call, it was true, was eager to learn, and Augustus McCrae sometimes mimicked a few lines of Latin picked up in some Tennessee school. But, the truth was, the men were ignorant, which is why, from time to time, with no immediate enemy to confront, he had started giving little impromptu lectures on the great battles of history.
Scull slipped backward onto the big horse’s rump, put his head on the saddle, and raised his legs. He stood on his head in the saddle while the Buffalo Horse pissed. Of course it was not unusual for men who were good riders to do feats of horsemanship—Comanche riders, particularly young riders, did them all the time. But neither Kicking Wolf nor Three Birds had ever seen a rider stand on his head while a horse was pissing. “I think Big Horse is crazy,” Three Birds said, when he saw that. Those were his last words on the subject and his only words on any subject for several days.
“I’ve heard that geniuses are desperate smart,” Teddy Beatty said. “I met one once up in St. Louis and he could spell words backwards and even say numbers backwards too.” “Now, what would be the point of spelling backwards?” Augustus asked. “If you spell backwards you wouldn’t have much of a word. I expect you was drunk when you met that fellow.”
“I guess we’ll be promoted when we get home,” Gus said, reloading his rifle. “There ain’t nothing to promote us to, we’re already captains,” Call reminded him. “If that ain’t high enough for you, then I guess you’ll just have to run for governor.”
Clara felt an old confusion, the feelings that had so often filled her when Gus came: relief that he was safe, excitement when he kissed her, joy that he still rushed in to see her first, disappointment that he left before she could even take a good look at him. Just a kiss and then he’s gone—that’s my ranger, she thought. Just a kiss and then he’s gone.
There was no changing men—not much, anyway; mainly men stayed the way they were, no matter what women did.
They were camped in a long canyon with high walls, a place Three Birds didn’t like. He had lived his life on the open prairie and didn’t like sleeping beneath a cliff of rocks. Someone with the power to shake the earth could make one of the cliffs fall on them and bury them, a thing that could never happen on the plains. In his dream he had seen a great cliff falling and had awakened in a sweat.
Kicking Wolf knew that he was in great danger, but he also felt great pride. The old man on the rock was Ahumado, the Black Vaquero. Whatever his own fate might be, he had completed his quest. He had stolen the Buffalo Horse and brought him to the great bandit of the south; he had done it merely for the daring of doing it. If a hundred pistoleros rose up in the rocks and killed him, he would die happy in his courage and pride.
It occurred to Kicking Wolf, as he rode north, that the problem with his eyes might not be the work of a bad witch; it might be the work of his own medicine man, Worm. The old spirits might have spoken to Worm and told him that Kicking Wolf had shamed the tribe by his insistence on taking the Buffalo Horse to Ahumado.
It annoyed him. He had worked a miracle, killed his captor, and yet he wasn’t free. Then, with a moment to breathe, he remembered another of Papa Franklin’s fine sayings: “Haste makes waste.” He looked more closely at the jointure of the wrappings.
“I don’t know that little Maggie Tilton too well, but I do know she wasn’t meant to be no whore,” Long Bill said. “She was meant to be a wife and she’d make a fine one.” Then, embarrassed by what he had said, he abruptly shut up and rode away. “Amen,” Gus said. “Now you see, Woodrow—the sooner you marry Maggie, the happier the rest of us will be.”
All during his years as a ranger, Augustus had been prone to anxiety because of the Indians’ well-known ability to perfectly mimic birdsongs and animal sounds. He had never actually caught an Indian imitating a bird, but he knew they could. Long Bill Coleman shared this particular anxiety.
“The armadillo people are from a time before the Comanche,” Worm said. “They were here when we were not. They are so old that they have learned to grow shells, and yet they are not slow, like turtles.” Worm paused. He was studying the paw of one of the armadillos he had killed. “If we could learn to grow shells we would be safe in battle,” he said. “If I eat enough of these armadillos maybe I will grow a shell.”
“That water is never still,” he told Buffalo Hump suspiciously. “It is always moving.” Buffalo Hump shrugged. He liked it that the water moved, that the waves came in and went out. He liked the sound it made, a sound that came from depths he could not see. “I like the land—it doesn’t move,” Worm said. “This water sighs like a woman who is sad.”
It was Worm who had said that the pox and the shitting sickness were caused by gold. He had a vision in which he saw a river of gold flowing out of a mountain to the west. The whites ran through their country like ants, seeking the gold, and left their sicknesses behind them.
“Let’s get off the damn Brazos tomorrow,” Gus suggested. “Why?” Call asked. “There’s always abundant water in the Brazos.” “I know it—that’s why,” Augustus said. “Where there’s water, there’s farmers—or people who were trying to be farmers. It means more people to bury. Me, I’d like to get on home.” “It’s wrong to leave Christian folk unburied,” Call told him. “It ain’t if we don’t even see ’em,” Gus said. “If we get away from all this watered country we won’t happen on so many.”
“Oh, Saint Peter!” they heard him exclaim. “Oh, Saint Paul!” “I wish Billy would hear of some new saints to pray to,” Gus said. “I’m tired of hearing him pray to Peter and Paul.” “He can’t read—I guess he’s forgot the other saints,” Call said.
“Pearl must be a mighty good cook, for him to take on about her so before he even knows if she’s dead.” “No, she ain’t,” Augustus said. “I’ve et Pearl’s cooking and it was only fair. I expect it’s the poking.” “The what?” Call asked, surprised. “The poking, Woodrow,” Gus said. “Pearl was large and large women are usually a pleasure to poke.” “Well, you would think that,” Call said.
“How would a whore know if a child is one man’s or another’s?” he asked one night. Long Bill was nodding, so the question was mainly directed at Gus, but Long Bill snapped to attention and answered. “Oh, women know,” he said. “They got ways.” To Call’s annoyance, Augustus casually agreed, though he was so drunk at the time that he could scarcely lift his glass. “If she says it’s yours, it’s yours,” Gus said. “Now don’t you be fidgeting about it.”
Gus didn’t answer. He wondered how women so easily found out what men were feeling. He had never so much as mentioned Clara’s name to Inez Scull—how did she know it was Clara on his mind? Women could smell feelings as a dog could smell a fox.
Famous Shoes would have preferred to walk; he had never liked the pace of horses very much. It seemed to him that a man who bounced around on the back of horses risked injury to his testicles—indeed, he had known men whose testicles were injured when their horses suddenly jumped a stream or did something else injurious to the testicles.
“Well, that’s you, Woodrow—you’ll always get the chores done,” Augustus said. “I ain’t that much of a worker, myself. I can skip a chore now and then, if it’s a sunny day.” “I don’t know what sunny has to do with chores—they need to be done whether it’s sunny or not,” Call said.
The one weapon Scull had left to him was his hatred—always, throughout his life, hatred had come easier to him than love. The Christian view that one should love his brethren struck him as absurd. His brethren were conniving, brutish, dishonest, greedy, and cruel—and that judgment included, particularly, his own brothers and most of the men he had grown up with.
Just then a flock of white-winged doves flew over the clearing, a hundred or more at least. Mourning doves were abundant too—the one thing that wouldn’t need to be lonesome in such a remote place were the doves, Augustus concluded.
“I guess it’s bad news for Maggie, if you feel that way, Woodrow,” Gus said. “She’s needing to retire.” “She can retire, if she wants to,” Call said. “Yes, retire and starve,” Gus said. “What would a retired whore do, in Austin, to earn a living? The only thing retired whores can do is what Matty just did, open a whorehouse, and I doubt Maggie’s got the capital. I imagine she could borrow it if you went on her note.”
He had never particularly liked to sleep, and rarely did for more than three or four hours a night. Even that necessity he begrudged. Why just lay there, when you could be living? A little rest at night was needful, but the less the better.
“I suppose she’s just dying of living—that’s the one infection that strikes us all down, sooner or later.”
Several times in his life he had felt an intense desire to start over, to somehow turn back the clock of his life to a point where he might, if he were careful, avoid the many mistakes he had made the first time around.
While he sat Gus noticed a number of snapping turtles, no smaller than the one Matty had captured; at least things were stable with the turtles. While the river flowed through the wide, empty landscape a parade of dead rangers streamed through the river of his memory—Black
Graciela was a little shocked by Maggie’s innocence about men and women—it was not wise to take lightly or discount the violence that was in men.
Jake Spoon, who was delicate and prone to vomits at the sight of dead people, couldn’t tolerate the woman’s shrieks. He plugged his ears with some cotton ticking he kept in his saddlebags for just such a purpose. Then he loped ahead, so he wouldn’t have to see the blood from the woman’s torn wrists dripping off her horse’s shoulders. “What’s wrong with that boy?” Goodnight asked, when he saw the tufts of cotton sticking out of Jake Spoon’s ears. “Why, I don’t know, Charlie,” Augustus said. “Maybe he’s just tired of listening to all this idle conversation.”
In the last year or two he had not only grown indifferent to company, he had begun to find it irritating. Everyone who came to see him asked questions that were either stupid or impertinent. Better to see no one than to see fools.
That was the devilish thing about arguing with Augustus: he could always come up with answers that made sense about schemes that would never happen.
“Now the difficulty with a pig is that it’s smarter than most human beings and it has a large appetite,” Gus said. “A pig might even eat a customer, if the customer was drunk and not alert. Or it might at least eat one of his legs, if it was in the mood to snack. Or it could eat his coat off, or swallow the nice belt buckle his wife had given him for his birthday,
“I’m scared of Duck, he’s mean,” Monkey John said, a comment that amused Ermoke a good deal. “Mean? Duck? Why, when did you notice?” he said, before he turned back north.
