Comanche Moon (Lonesome Dove, #4)

by Larry McMurtry

When he felt disturbances in his life, as all men would, Famous Shoes tried to go back to one of the simple places, the places of rock and sky, to steady himself and grow calm again.

He had no happiness in his face, the young ranger; perhaps he had never had a place where things were simple, a place he could think about when he needed to remember happiness. Perhaps the young ranger had been unlucky—he might have no good place or good time to remember.

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.

He would have liked to see Matty again, to lift a glass with her and hear her thoughts on the great game of life, now that she was about to lose it.

“I’m glad you ain’t dead, Captain,” Pea Eye said. “I’m real glad you ain’t dead.” Augustus was a little startled by the force of the young man’s emotion. The trip must have been even more of a trial to him than he had imagined. “No, I ain’t dead,” Augustus told him. “I just rode off to think for a few days, and one of the things I wanted to think about was the fact that I ain’t dead.”

“The rangering does keep me busy,” he adding not knowing what else to say.

“You compromised me and I hope that you’ll be thinking about what you did and about how you betrayed our little son for the rest of your life, right up till the day you die. You don’t deserve Newt! You don’t even deserve me!”

She had never been able to be quite what Jake wanted, though she had tried; though she would now have no one to carry her groceries or help her with her garden, she would also be free of the strain involved in never being quite what a man wanted.

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.

Augustus marched into a saloon—when in town, he was seldom outside the saloons. Whenever he was annoyed or bored, Augustus drank—and he was all too frequently annoyed or bored.

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.

“How about pigs, then, Captain?” Dan Connor asked. “A pig has got as good an appetite as a goat. How much would a pig rent for?” At that Augustus looked stern. “Oh, we wouldn’t be renting no pigs, couldn’t afford to, Dan,” he said. “It might lead to lawsuits.” “Why would renting a pig lead to lawsuits?” Call asked. He had had enough of the conversation and was about to take a walk, but he thought he would hear how Augustus justified his remark about pigs and lawsuits. “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, which would get him in trouble at home and cause a passel of bad feelings. Even if it didn’t mean a lawsuit it might cause him to tell all his friends not to rent from us, which could mean a sag in the profits.”

He wanted to keep the sunlight that had bathed him his whole life, but the sun went and the plain darkened; no man could slow the sun.

He felt the grass growing beneath him, growing and rising to cover him, growing to hide him from wolf and bear. Then he knew no more.

Kicking Wolf knew, though, that having many reasons to be content didn’t necessarily mean that a person was content, particularly not if the person in question was a woman.

He had hoped that Buffalo Hump had been able to make a peaceful death. Certainly he had not led a peaceful life, but to die at the hands of his own son was not a thing Buffalo Hump would have expected to happen.

The time of good fighting was ended; what was left for the Comanches was to smile at the white men and pretend they didn’t hate them.

Augustus took his hat off and scratched his head, amused by what he saw—even though it was a dark joke. After the walk they had had, any joke seemed better than none, to him. “Why, he tuned up his nose at our mule, old Kicking Wolf,” he said. Call didn’t find it amusing.

“How’s this for a scandal, Woodrow?” he said. “We didn’t get our man, and now we’ve sunk so low that a Comanche won’t even steal our mule. I guess that means the fun’s over.” “It may be over but it wasn’t fun,” Call said, looking at the long dry distance that still waited to be crossed.