"And Gus did the same and got everything," Clara said. "Gus was lucky and Dish isn't."
"I ain't either," Lorena said.
Clara offered no advice. A few days later, when she was sewing, Lorena came and stood in front of her. She looked no better. "Why did you ask me to stay, when it was you Gus loved?" she asked. "Why didn't you ask him to stay? If you had he'd be alive."
Clara shook her head. "He loved us both," she said, "but Gus would never miss an adventure. Not for you or me or any other woman. No one could have kept him home. He was a rake and a rambler, though you'd have kept him longer than I could have."
Lorena didn't believe it. She remembered how often Gus had talked of Clara. Of course it no longer mattered — nothing like that mattered anymore, and yet she couldn't keep her mind from turning to it.
"It ain't so," she said. She had used her voice so little that it sounded weak.
"It is so," Clara said. "You're more beautiful and less bossy. When I told Gus I was marrying Bob, all those years ago, he looked relieved. He tried to act disappointed, but he was relieved. I've never forgot it. And he had proposed to me thirty times at least. But he saw it would be a struggle if he won me, and he didn't want it."
Clara was silent for a moment, looking into the other woman's eyes.
"Bob was too dumb to realize there'd be a struggle," Clara said. "Half the time he didn't notice it even when he was in it. So mainly I had the struggle with myself.
"It's been lonely," she added.
She thought the conversation a good sign. Maybe Lorie was going to come out of it. But it was the last conversation they had for months. Lorena lived through the winter in silence, only speaking to Betsey, who remained as loyal as ever.
Dish Boggett remained loyal too, although Lorena gave him no encouragement. He spent more and more time playing cards with Sally, whose bright girlish chatter he had come to like. Every day he tried his best with Lorena, but he had begun to feel hopeless. She would not even speak to him, no matter how sweetly he asked. She met everything he said with silence — the same silence she had had in Lonesome Dove, only deeper. He told himself that if the situation didn't improve by the spring he would go to Texas and try to forget her.
Yet when spring came Dish told Clara he would be glad to stay and help her with the colts.
100
IT CAME TO RANKLE CALL that Gus had left his half of the cattle herd to the woman. The woman was down in Nebraska. She was not there helping. Of course, if she had been there helping, there would have been trouble, but that didn't lessen the aggravation of what Gus had done. He could simply have given her money — he had money. As it was, every time Call sold a bunch of stock to the Army he had to put aside half the money for a woman he had never approved of, who might, for all any of them knew, have already forgotten Gus and married someone else, or even gone back to being a whore.
Still, Call had halved the money. However aggravating it was, Gus had meant it, and he would do it, though when he went back with the body he planned to see if he could at least buy her out. He didn't like the thought of being in partnership with a woman, much less a whore — although he conceded that she might have reformed.
He lived in the tent all winter, keeping the men working but taking little interest in the result. Sometimes he hunted, taking the Hell Bitch and riding off onto the plains. He always killed game but was not much interested in the hunt. He went because he no longer felt comfortable around the men. The Indians had not bothered them, and the men did well enough by themselves. Soupy Jones had assumed the top-hand role, once Dish left, and flourished in it. The other men did well too, although there was some grumbling and many small disputes. Hugh Auld and Po Campo became friends and often tramped off together for a day or two so Hugh could show Po Campo some pond where there were still beaver, or some other interesting place he knew about. Lippy, starved for music, played the accordion and spent nearly the whole winter trying to make a fiddle from a shoebox. The instrument yielded a powerful screeching sound, but none of the cowboys were ready to admit that the sound was music.
At Christmas, hungering for pork, they killed Gus's pigs. The most surprising development was that Jasper Fant learned to cook. He took it up mainly out of boredom, but, tutored by Po Campo, his progress was so rapid that when Po Campo went off with Old Hugh the cuisine didn't suffer.
In the early spring, while the weather was still chancy, fifteen horses disappeared one night. It was only by luck that the theft was discovered, for in such a place at such a time horsethieves were the last thing they were expecting. Call had taken the precaution of going with Old Hugh to two or three of the nearest Indian camps to meet the chiefs and do the usual diplomacy, in the hope of preventing the sort of surprise encounter that had proven deadly for Gus. The visits made him sad, for the Indians were not belligerent and it was apparent that Gus had merely struck the wrong bunch at the wrong time, in the wrong manner. It was a depressing irony, for Gus had always been one to preach diplomacy with the red man and over the years had engaged in many councils that Call himself thought pointless. Gus had talked to many a warrior that Call would merely have shot, and yet had got killed in a place where most of the Indians were happy to talk, particularly to a man who owned an endless supply of beef.
But Call noticed on the visits that, in the main, the Indians had better horses than he did, and he had even arranged a trade with the Blackfeet: fifty beeves for ten horses. The negotiations had required Old Hugh to talk for two days and had left him hoarse.
Thus, when the Spettle boy came in to report the horses gone, Call was surprised. Where would a horsethief come from, and where would one go?
Still, a fact was a fact: the horses were gone. Call took Pea, Newt, Needle Nelson, and Old Hugh, and went in pursuit. He soon ruled out Indians, for the thieves were traveling too slow, and had even stopped to camp not thirty miles from their headquarters, which Indians with stolen horses would never have been foolish enough to do. It was soon plain that they were only chasing two men. They crossed into Canada on the second day and caught the thieves on the third, surprising them at breakfast. They were a shaky old man with a dirty gray beard and a strapping boy about Newt's age. The old man had a single-shot buffalo gun, and the boy a cap-and-ball pistol. The boy was cooking venison and the old man propped against his saddle muttering over a Bible when Call walked in with his pistol drawn. The boy, though big as an ox, began to tremble when he saw the five men with guns.
"I tolt you, Pa," he said. "Now we're caught."
The old man, who had a jug beside his saddle, was clearly drunk, and seemed scarcely conscious of what was occurring.
"Why, I'm a minister of the Lord," he said. "Don't point your dern guns at me, we're just having breakfast. This is my boy, Tom."
Call disarmed the two, which only took a second. The fifteen horses were grazing in plain sight not a hundred yards from the camp.
"We didn't know they were your horses," the boy said, quivering with fright. "We thought they were Indian horses."
"They're all branded," Call said. "You could see that, unless you're blind."
"Not blind and not sinners, either," the old man said, getting to his feet. He was so drunk he couldn't walk straight.
"Well, you're horsethieves, and that's a sin in my book," Call said. "Where do you people come from?"
"From God, man," the old fellow said.
"Where on earth, I meant," Call said, feeling weary. He wondered what had possessed a minister and a boy to run off their horses, each plainly branded. It struck him as a stupid and pointless crime, for they were driving the horses north, where there were no towns and no ranches. It was clear the two were poor, and the old man out of his head. Call could tell the hands were glum at the prospect of hanging such a pair, and he himself didn't relish it, but they were horse-thieves and he felt he had no choice. His own distaste for the prospect caused him to make a mistake — he didn't immediately tie the old man, who seemed so weak he could
hardly stand. He was not too weak, though, to snatch up a hatchet and strike a blow at Needle that would have killed him had not Needle jerked back — as it was, the blade of the hatchet tore a bad cut in his arm. Call shot the old man before he could strike again. The boy took off running across the open prairie. He was easily caught, of course, but by the time he was tied and led back the old man was dead. The boy sat down in the thin snow and wept.
"He was all right until Ma died and Sister died," he said. "We were in a wagon train. Then he just went daft and said we had to go off by ourselves. I didn't want to."
"I wish he hadn't taken our horses," Call said.
The boy was trembling and crying. "Don't hang me, mister," he said. "I never stole in my life. I told him to leave them horses, but he said they were horses the Indians had already stole.
"I'll work for you," the boy added. "I can blacksmith. I worked two years at a forge back in Missouri, before we left."
Call knew there was not a decent tree in miles. It would be a hardship on them to ride along with the boy for a day in order to hang him. Besides, they needed a blacksmith. As for the boy's story, maybe it was true and maybe it wasn't. The old man had appeared to be mad, but Call had seen many thieves act that way in hopes that it would save them.
"Pa said he'd shoot me if I didn't help," the boy said.
Call didn't believe him. He had been about to cut the boy loose, but he didn't. He put him on one of the stolen horses, and they started back.
Newt felt sick at the thought of what would happen. He didn't want to see another person hang.
"You ask him," he said to Pea.
"Ask him what?" Pea said.
"Not to hang him," Newt said.
"He'll hang him," Pea said. "He hung Jake, didn't he?"
"His pa made him do it," Newt said.
"Maybe," Pea said. "And maybe he's just a dern horse-thief."
When they came to a good tree, Call rode on, all the way to the Hat Creek headquarters. Once there, he cut the boy loose.
"You can work," he said.
For ten days the big boy was the friendliest person in the outfit. He shoed all the horses, cut wood, did every chore he was asked to do and some that he wasn't. He chattered constantly and tried his best to be friendly, and yet no one really liked him. Even Newt didn't really like him. Tom stood too close to him, when he talked, and he talked all the time. His large face was always sweaty, even on the coldest days. Even Po Campo didn't like him, and gave him food grudgingly.
Then, before dawn one morning Call caught Big Tom, as they called him, saddling a horse and preparing to ride off. He had four of the men's wallets on him, stolen so smoothly that none of the men had even missed them. He had also taken the best saddle in the outfit, which belonged to Bert Borum.
Call had been expecting the move for two or three days and had made Pea Eye help him watch. Big Tom tried to make a dash for it, and Call shot him off his horse. Cowboys ran out of their house in their long johns, at the shot. Even wounded, the boy proved full of fight — Call had to rap him with the barrel of his Henry before he could be tied. This time he was summarily hung, though he wept again and begged for mercy.
"It's wasted on horsethieves," Call said, before kicking the boy's horse out from under him. None of the men said a word.
"Should have hung him in the first place, although he did shoe them horses," Pea Eye commented later.
Call had begun to think of Gus, and the promise he had made. It would soon be spring, and he would have to be going if he were to keep the promise, which of course he must. Yet the ranch had barely been started, and it was hard to know who to leave in command. The question had been in his mind all winter. There seemed to be no grave danger from Indians or anything else. Who would best keep things going? Soupy was excellent when set a task, but had no initiative and was unused to planning. The men were all independent to a fault and constantly on the verge of fist fights because they fancied that someone had attempted to put himself above them in some way. Pea Eye was clearly the senior man, but Pea Eye had contentedly taken orders for thirty years; to expect him to suddenly start giving them was to expect the impossible.
Call thought often of Newt. He watched him with increasing pride all winter. The boy was the only one left in the crew whom he enjoyed being with. The boy's skill and persistence with horses pleased him. He knew it would be chancy to leave a seventeen-year-old boy in charge of a group of grown men — yet he himself had led men at that age, and that had been in rougher times. He liked the way the boy went about his work without complaint. He had filled out physically during the year and could work all day energetically and accomplish more than most of the men.
Once, watching the boy cross a corral after having worked with one of the mustangs, Pea Eye said innocently, "Why, Captain, little Newt walks just like you."
Call flinched, but Pea Eye didn't notice — Pea Eye was no noticer, as Augustus had often said.
That night, sitting in Wilbarger's little tent, Call remembered the remark. He also remembered Gus's efforts to talk to him about the boy. With Gus pressing him, it was his nature to resist, but with Gus gone he didn't find it so distasteful to consider that the boy was his son. He had certainly gone to his mother, hateful as the memory was. Maggie, of course, had not been hateful — it was the strange need she induced in him that he disliked to remember.
He started taking the boy with him on every trip he made to the forts, not merely to familiarize him with the country but to let him participate in the selling and trading. Once, as a test, he sent Pea and the boy and the Raineys to Fort Benton with a sizable bunch of cattle, stipulating that the boy was to handle the details of the sale and bring home the money. Newt did well, as well as he himself could have done. He delivered the cattle safely, sold them for a fair amount and brought the money home.
It didn't sit well with Soupy Jones that Newt was being given such authority. It seemed to Soupy that he should have taken the cattle, and possibly received a commission, in his capacity as top hand. Soupy was rude to Newt from time to time, and Newt ignored him as best he could. Call did nothing, but two weeks later he let it be known that he was preparing to send the boy to the fort again — at which point Soupy boiled over. He took it as a slight and said he would draw his wages and go if that was how things were going to be.
Call promptly paid him his wages, much to Soupy's astonishment. He had never imagined such an outcome. "Why, Captain, I don't want to leave," he said plaintively. "I got nothing to go to back down south."
"Then give me back the money and behave yourself," Call said. "I decide who'll do what around here."
"I know, Captain," Soupy said. He was aware that he had chosen a bad moment to make his scene — right after breakfast, with many of the hands standing around.
"If you have other complaints, I'm listening," Call said. "You seem to be mad at Newt."
The words made the hairs stand up on the back of Newt's neck. It was the first time he could ever remember the Captain having spoken his name.
"Well, no, I ain't," Soupy said. "He's a fair hand, but it don't seem right a fair hand should be put over a top hand unless there's a reason."
"He's young and needs the training — you don't. That's the reason," Call said. "If I tell you to take orders from him you will, or else leave. They'll be my orders, at second hand."
Soupy reddened at the disgusting thought of taking orders from a boy. He stuffed his wages in his pocket, planning to leave, but an hour's contemplation caused him to mellow and he gave Call back the wages. That night, though, he suddenly stuck out a foot and tripped Newt, when Newt walked past with a plateful of food. Newt fell on his face but he rose and flung himself on Soupy in a second, so angry at the insult that he even held his own for a few licks, until Soupy could bring his weight and experience into play — after which Newt got thoroughly pounded, so thoroughly that he was not aware when the fight stopped. He was sitting on the ground spitting blood, and Soupy had walked a
way. Call had expected the fight and watched impassively, pleased that the boy had fought so hard. Winning would have been beyond his powers.
The battle won Soupy no friends; he had assumed so many airs once Dish left that he had few friends anyway, whereas Newt was popular. Reaction was so unfavorable that a few days later Soupy drew his wages again and left, taking Bert with him. They had concluded they could make Texas, if they went together.
Call was worried for a few weeks about being short-handed, but then three young men he had seen at the fort decided to quit soldiering and try their hand at ranching. All three were from Kentucky. They were inept at first but industrious. Then two genuine cowboys showed up; lured all the way north from Miles City by the news that there was a ranch on the Milk. They had given up cowboying for mule skinning the year before and concluded they had made a bad mistake. Then a tall boy named Jim wandered in alone. He had been with a wagon train but had lost interest in getting to Oregon.
Soon, instead of being short-handed, Call found that he had almost more men than he needed. He decided to start the branding early. Several hundred calves had been born since they left Texas; many were yearlings, and a struggle to brand. A few of the men questioned the necessity, since they were the only cattle outfit in the Territory, but Call knew that would soon change. Others would come.
The roundup took ten days. The cattle had spread themselves wide over the range between the Milk and the Missouri in their foraging during the winter. Then the branding took a week. At first the men enjoyed the activity, competing with one another to see who could throw the largest animals the quickest. There was also much disagreement over who should get to rope and who should work on foot. Newt improved so rapidly as a roper that he was soon sharing that task with Needle Nelson, the only one of the original crew skilled with a lariat.
With the branding ended, and the spring grass spiking through the thin May snows, Call knew the time had come for him to fulfill his promise to his old friend. It was awkward — indeed, it seemed absurd — to have to tote a six-months-old corpse to Texas, but there it was.