Gus at once rejected the suggestion that he help shoe the mules. He saw that Call was weakening in his opposition to the trip, and his own spirits began to rise at the thought of the great adventure that lay ahead of them.
“I say leave the mules—I want to get started for Austin,” Gus said. “Redmond Dale can find someone else to paint his saloon. Of course we might have time for a visit to the whorehouse, if you ever get tired of working.”
“I can’t afford the whorehouse—I’m saving up for a better gun,” Call said. “If we’re going out there into the Indian country, I need to have a better gun.”
He had visited the whorehouse, though, with Gus, several times—he didn’t scorn it as a pastime. Matilda Roberts was employed there while waiting for passage to the west. She had taken a liking to young Call. Gus too had his likable side, but he was overpersistent, and also a blabber. There were times when Matilda could put up with persistence easier than she could with blab.
Young Call, though, seldom said two words. He just handed over the coins. Matilda saw something sad in the boy’s eyes—it touched her. She saw after a few visits that her great bulk frightened him, and put him with a young Mexican girl named Rosa, who soon came to like him.
Call often thought of Rosa—she taught him many Spanish words: how to count, words for food. She was a slim girl who seldom smiled, though once in awhile she smiled at him. Call thought of her most afternoons when he was working in the hot lots behind the blacksmith’s shop. He also thought of her at night when he was sleeping on his blanket, near the stable. He would have liked to see Rosa oftener—Gus had not been wrong to recommend whores, but Gus was reckless with his money and Call wasn’t. Gus would borrow, or cheat at cards, or make promises he couldn’t keep, just to have money for whores.
Call, though, could not bring himself to be so spendthrift. He knew that he wanted to be a Ranger once the troop went out again, which meant that sooner or later he would be fighting Indians. This time, when the fight came, he wanted to be as well equipped as his resources would permit. Neither of the cheap guns he owned was reliable. If he ever had to face the Comanche with the great hump again, he wanted a weapon that wouldn’t fail him. Much as he was apt to think of Rosa, he knew that if he wanted to survive as a professional Ranger, he had to put guns first.
Once he felt assured that his friend was going to come with him on the new expedition, Gus relaxed, located a spot of shade under a wagon, stretched out full length, put his hat over his face, and took a long, serene nap while Call labored on with the mules. The last little mule was a biter—Call cuffed him several times, but the mule bared his teeth and demonstrated that he had every intention of using them on Call’s flesh if he could. Call was finally forced to rope the mule’s jaws shut before he could finish his work. Gus had a snore like a rasp—Call could hear the snore plainly when he wasn’t hammering in a horseshoe nail.
Just as the last shoe was nailed in place, there was a clatter in the street. Call looked up to see Long Bill Coleman, Rip Green, gimpy Johnny Carthage, and Matilda Roberts come loping up. Matilda was mounted on Tom, her large gray gelding.
“Saddle up, Woodrow—it’s Santa Fe or bust,” Long Bill sang out. He was wearing a fur cap he had found in a closet in the whorehouse.
“Dern, Bill, I thought you’d left town,” Call said. “Ain’t it a little warm for that hat?”
He himself was drenched in sweat from shoeing the four mules.
“That cap’s to fool the grizzlies, if we meet any,” Long Bill said. “I’m scared of grizzlies, and other kinds of bears as well. I figure if I wear this fur bonnet they’ll think I’m one of the family and let me alone.”
“That cap belonged to Joe Slaw; they hung the son of a bitch,” Matilda said. “I guess he considered himself a mountain man.”
Gus McCrae, hearing voices, suddenly rose up, forgetting that he was under a wagon. He whonked his head so loudly that everyone in the group laughed.
“Shut up, I think my skull’s broke open,” Gus said, annoyed at the levity—he had only made a simple mistake. His head had taken a solid crack, though. He wobbled over to the water tank and stuck his head under—the cool water felt good.
While the group was watching Gus dip his head in the water, Blackie Slidell came racing up—he had been with a whore when the others left the saloon. The reason for his rush was that he feared being left, which would mean having to cross the prairies in the direction of Austin all by himself.
“So, are you with us, Woodrow?” Rip Green asked. Although Call was a younger man than himself, Rip considered him dependable and was anxious to have him with the group.
“I thought you was already gone, Bill,” Call said.
“Why no, we’ve been collecting Rangers, but we can’t find Bigfoot, and Shadrach prefers to travel alone, mostly,” Bill said. “He’s already gone up to Austin. I guess we’ll have to leave Bigfoot. I expect he’ll catch up.”
With so many of his companions mounted and ready, Call hesitated no longer. His complaints and criticism had mainly been designed to annoy Gus, anyway. The urge to be adventuring was too strong to be resisted.
“So, who’s leading the Rangers?” he asked when he untied the jaw rope and released the biting mule.
“Why, we’ll lead ourselves, unless somebody shows up who wants to captain,” Long Bill said.
“Whoa—I ain’t rangering for Bob Bascom,” Gus said. “I don’t like his surly tongue—I expect I’ll have to whip him before the trip is over.”
Long Bill looked skeptical at this prediction.
“Take a good club when you go to whip him,” he said. “Bob’s stout.”
“Take two clubs,” Blackie said. “Bob’s a scrapper.”
“I didn’t expect you’d want to go fight Mexicans, Matty,” Call said, surprised to see Matilda with the Rangers.
“I’m needing to get west before I get old,” Matilda said. “I’ve heard there’s roads to the west from up around Santa Fe.”
Call’s possessions were few, though he did now have a coat to go with his two shirts. Gus McCrae, because of his urgent expenditures, had only the clothes on his back and his two pistols. When old Jesus saw that Call was leaving, he sighed. The thought of having to shoe all the horses and mules by himself made him feel a weariness. He had done hard work all his life and was ready to stop, but he couldn’t stop. All his children had left home except one little girl, and his little girl could not shoe mules. Yet he could not blame Call for going—he himself had roved, when he was young. He had left Saltillo and come to the land of the Texans, but now he was weary and his only helper was leaving. There was something about the boy that he liked, too—and he didn’t like many of the Texas boys.
“Adiós,” he said, as Call was tying his blanket and his extra shirt onto his saddle.
“Adiós, Jesus,” Call said—he liked the old man. They had not exchanged a cross word in all the time Call had worked for him.
“Let’s ride, boys,” Long Bill said. “Austin’s a far piece up the road.”
“We’ll ride, but I ain’t a boy,” Matilda said, as they rode out of San Antonio. Gus McCrae had a headache, from rising up too quickly after his nap.
2.
“BOYS, IT’S CLOUDING UP,” Long Bill said late in their first day out of San Antonio. “I expect we’re in for a drenching.”
“I’d rather ride all night than sleep wet,” Rip Green observed.
“Not me,” Gus said. “If I have to be wet I’d just as soon be snoozing.”
“There’s plenty of farms up this way,” Matilda said. “German families, mostly. If we could find a farm they might let us sleep on the floor. Or if they have some kind of shed for the stock, maybe we could crawl under it.”
As the sun was dipping, Call noticed that the whole southwestern quadrant of the sky had turned coal black. In the distance there was a rumbling of thunder. At the horizon the blackness was cut through with streaks of golden light from the setting sun,
but the light at the bottom only made the blackness of the upper sky seem blacker. A wind rose—it whirled Call’s straw hat off his head and sailed it a good thirty feet, which annoyed him. He hated above all to lose control of his headgear.
Long Bill cackled at the sight.
“You ought to have a good fur cap, like I do,” he said.
They crested a ridge and spotted just what Matilda had been hoping for—a little farm. There was only one building in the little clearing, but it was a sizable log building.
“It’ll hold us all, snug, if the family is friendly,” Blackie Slidell observed.
“I hope they’re cooking pork, if they’re cooking,” Gus said. “I’d enjoy a good supper of pork.”
Call retrieved his hat, but the wind had risen so that he saw no point in sticking it back on his head. All the men were holding their hats on by this time. They were a mile or two from the little cabin, and the darkness in the sky was swelling, pushing toward them. It abruptly extinguished the sunset, but the force of the sun left an eerie light over the long prairie ahead.
The rumblings of the thunder were deeper. Call had seen many storms, and paid them little mind, but this one caught his attention. It had been a sultry day—the wind coming out of the cloud wasn’t cool. It was a sultry wind, and it blew fitfully, at first. Some gusts were so strong they caused his horse to break stride—of course, his horse was just a skinny nag that had been underfed for the last few weeks. It wouldn’t take much of a wind to blow him off course.
“Why, look at that,” Gus said. “That dern cloud is behaving like a snake.”
Call looked, and saw that it was true. A portion of the cloud had formed itself into a column, or funnel, and was twisting through the lower sky in a snakelike motion.
“You damn young fools, that’s a cyclone,” Matilda said. “We better race for that cabin.”
The snake cloud was dipping closer and ever closer to the ground, sucking up dust and weeds as it twisted. A hawk that had been skimming the ground looking for mice or quail rose, and sped away; Call saw two deer bolt from a little thicket and flash their white tails as they raced off, away from the twisting cloud. The cloud was roaring so loudly by then that the horses began to rear and pitch. They wanted to run away, like the deer.
“We won’t make that cabin, we need to lay flat,” Long Bill advised. “That’s what you do when a cyclone hits. We best find a ditch or a gully or something, or we’re done for.”
“There’s a buffalo wallow,” Blackie said. “That’s all I see.”
“It ain’t deep,” Gus said. He had been feeling good, enjoying the thought of adventure, and now a dangerous cloud had come out of nowhere and spoiled his feeling. They were scarcely a mile from the cabin, but the spinning, roaring, sucking cloud was coming too fast. All day Gus had tensed himself and strained his eyes, looking for Indians. He didn’t want to see the humpbacked Comanche charge out of a thicket with his lance raised. If Buffalo Hump showed up, or any hostile red man, he was prepared to run and shoot. The last thing he had expected was deadly weather, but now deadly weather was two hundred yards away. A bobcat burst from a thicket and began to run in the same direction as the deer.
The Rangers reached the little wallow and jumped off their mounts.
“What about the horses?” Call yelled, as the roar increased.
“The devil with the horses—get flat!” Long Bill advised. “Get flat and don’t look up.”
Call did as he was told. He released his rearing mount and flattened himself under the edge of the shallow wallow. The other Rangers did the same.
Gus was fearful of Matilda’s chances—she was so big she couldn’t really hide in anything as shallow as a buffalo wallow. But there was no time to dig—she would just have to hope for the best.
Then the roaring became so loud that none of them could think. Call’s loose shirt billowed up—he thought the wind inside it was going to lift him off the ground. There was a kind of seething noise, like a snake’s hiss, only louder—it was the sound of the sand being sucked up from the shallow wallow. It was pitch black by then—as black as a moonless midnight.
Gus was wishing he’d never come to Texas—what was it but one danger after another? He had been thinking about the cabin ahead, and the pork chop he hoped to eat, and now he had his face in the dirt, being pulled at by a cloud that was like a giant snake. In Tennessee clouds didn’t behave like that. Besides, their horses were lost, though they had scarcely traveled half a day. Both his pistols were on his saddle, too—if he survived the storm and Buffalo Hump showed up, he would be helpless.
The sound of the cyclone was so loud, and the dust swirling up beneath them so thick, that some of the Rangers felt they were being deafened and suffocated at the same time. Blackie Slidell, who was limber, managed to bend his neck and get his nose inside his shirt, so he could breathe a little better.
But the whirling and roaring slowly diminished—when the Rangers felt it safe to lift their heads, they saw sunlight beneath the black edge of cloud, far to the west. The eerie light still hung over the prairie, a light that seemed hellish to Rip Green.
“I expect this is the kind of light you get once you’re dead,” he commented.
Matilda sat up, relieved. She had heard that cyclones took people up in the air and blew them as much as forty miles away. People who survived such removals were never again right in the head, so she had heard. Of course, being heavy, she herself was less likely than some to blow away, but then wagons sometimes blew away, and she was no heavier than a wagon.
“Are we all alive?” she asked. The gray light was so strange it made them all look different—most of them had been so scared while they were pressing themselves into the wallow that their voices sounded strange when they tried to talk.
“We’re alive but we’re afoot,” Call said. Though unnerved, he hadn’t really had time to be very frightened—the cyclone was a thing beyond him or any man. An Indian he could fight, but who could fight a roaring snake of air? His hat was gone—all the hats were gone, except Long Bill Coleman’s fur cap, which he had stuffed beneath him as he clutched the sand.
“We ought to have tied them horses, somehow,” Call added. “I expect they’ve run halfway back to San Antonio by now.”
“I’d rather lose my horse than blow away,” Gus said. “Them was just thirty-dollar horses anyway.”
“I could spare the nag, but they took everything we own with them,” Blackie said. “We’ll have to hobble into Austin and hope they allow us credit.”
“You boys are green—them horses ain’t run far,” Long Bill said. “They’ll show up in the morning, or else we’ll track ’em.”
Now that he had survived the cyclone, Gus began to feel lively. The storm had scared his headache away, but not his appetite.
“I’m still in the mood for a pork chop,” he said. “Let’s go on to that cabin. They might just be sitting down to supper.”
Having no other prospect to hand, the Rangers adopted the suggestion, only to find that the cyclone had obliterated the cabin where they had hoped to bunk. When they got to the ridge where it had been, there were only a few logs in place, and six unhappy people were stumbling around weeping and looking dazed—four children and a man and a woman. The man and the woman had lanterns and were shining them in the rubble, hoping to locate a few possessions to pile up. The four children had been scared into silence. One little girl was chewing on the hem of her dress.
Her father, a stout young man with a full beard, was inquiring about his roof in the bewildered tone that a man might use to complain about a mislaid hammer.
“Where’s my roof, dammit?” the young man said. “It was here and now it’s gone. I worked a week on my roof—now I guess it’s blown plumb over into the woods.”
“Well, we lost our horses,” Gus said—a little callously, Call felt. The stout man with the beard had a family to house. Losing a thirty-dollar horse with a cheap saddle and blanket on it was not a loss
on the same scale as the man’s roof.
The area where the cabin had been was a wild litter. It was almost dark, but the Rangers could see that clothes and utensils and tools and animals were as jumbled as if they had all been hastily shoveled out of a wagon. A black rooster stood on one of the fallen logs, complaining loudly. Two shoats were grunting and rooting amid the mess, and several hens squawked.
No one paid much attention when Matilda and the six Rangers came walking up in the last of the light. The only person who seemed reasonably calm was the young woman of the house, and she was quietly picking up utensils and clothes and putting them in neat piles.
“Dern the luck—it’s a pain to lose that roof,” the stout man said. He didn’t address the remark either to his wife or to the Rangers—he seemed to be talking to himself.
“That’s enough cussing, Roy,” the young woman said. “We got visitors, and the children don’t need to hear you cussing just because the cabin got blown away. We can build another cabin.”
“I can, you mean, Melly,” the man said. “You ain’t strong enough to hoist no logs.”
“I said we got visitors, Roy—why don’t you be polite and ask them to sit, at least?” the young woman said, with a flash of temper.
“You have to take weather as it comes,” she added. “Cussing don’t change it.”
“Here, maybe we can help you pick up,” Gus offered. He liked the looks of the young woman, Melly. Even in the dim light he could tell she was pretty. The husband seemed a rude sort—Gus felt it was a pity he hadn’t been blown away. A young woman that pretty might entice him to give up rangering, if she took a notion.
“Well, men, I hope you ain’t thieves, because our worldly possessions are spread out here for the picking of any damn thieves who happen to walk up,” Roy said. He was still agitated by the loss of his roof.
The Rangers did what they could by lantern light to help the little family reassemble its scattered possessions. There were no pork chops, but the young woman did have some bacon and a little cornmeal. Long Bill Coleman was a master fire builder; he soon had a good blaze going in the ruins of the little chimney. They all ate bacon and corn cakes and talked about how curious it was to see an ordinary thundercloud turn into a cyclone.
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 10