Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

by Lonesome Dove

  "I'll go if you think you can get me to Ogallala," she said. "I'll pay you what it's worth to you." Zwey didn't say anything.

  "How'll we travel?" she asked. "I ain't much good at riding horses." Big Zwey didn't respond for about a minute. Elmira was about to lose patience when he brushed his mouth with the back of his hand, as if to clean it.

  "Could get that there hide wagon," he said, pointing to a rundown piece of equipment a few yards away. To Elmira the wagon didn't look like it could travel ten yards, much less all the way to Nebraska.

  "Could get the blacksmith to fix it," Big Zwey said. Now that he had spoken to her and not been struck by lightning, he felt a little easier.

  "Did you mean just us two to go?" Elmira asked.

  The question gave him so much pause that she almost wished she hadn't asked it. He fell silent again, his eyes troubled.

  "Might take Luke," he said.

  Luke was a weaselly little buffalo hunter with only a thumb and one finger on his left hand. He carried dice and gambled when he could get anyone to gamble with him. Once on the boat she had asked Fowler about him, and Fowler said a butcher had cut his fingers off with a cleaver, for some reason.

  "When can we go?" she asked. It turned out to be a decision Big Zwey wasn't immediately up to making. He pondered the matter for some time but reached no conclusion.

  "I want to get out of here," she said. "I'm tired of smelling buffalo hides." "Get that blacksmith to fix that wagon," Zwey responded. He stood up, picking up the tongue of the wagon and began to drag it toward the blacksmith's shop, a hundred yards away.

  The next morning, the wagon, more or less patched, was sitting outside her closet. When she walked over to inspect it she saw that Luke was in it, sleeping off a drunk. He slept with his mouth open, showing black teeth, and not many of them at that.

  Luke had ignored her on the trip upriver, but when he woke up he hopped out of the wagon and came right over, a grin on his weaselly face.

  "Big Zwey and I have partnered up," he said.

  "Can you drive a wagon?" "I guess I could if we go slow," she said.

  Luke had spiky red hair that stuck out in all directions. A skinning knife a foot long was slung in a scabbard under one shoulder.

  He grinned constantly, exposing his black teeth and, unlike Zwey, was not a bit afraid to look her in the eye. He had an insolent manner and spat tobacco juice constantly while he talked.

  "Zwey went to buy some mules," he said.

  "We got two horses but they won't do for the wagon. Anyway, we might get some hides while you're driving the wagon." "I don't like the smell of hides," she said pointedly, but not pointedly enough for Luke to get the message.

  "You get where you don't smell 'em after a while," he said. "I don't hardly even notice it, I've smelled 'em so much." Luke had a little quirt and was always nervously popping himself on the leg with it. "You skeert of Indians?" he asked.

  "I don't know," Elmira said.

  "I guess I don't like 'em much." "I've already killed five of them," Luke said.

  Big Zwey finally arrived leading two scrawny mules and carrying a harness he had traded for. The harness was in bad repair but there was plenty of rawhide around, and they soon had it tied together fairly well. Luke was quite dexterous with his thumb and little finger. He did better than Zwey, whose hands were too big for harness making.

  She soon got the hang of driving the mules.

  There was not much to it, for the mules were content to follow the two men on horseback. It was only when the men loped off to hunt that the mules were likely to balk. On the second day out, with the men gone, she crossed a creek whose banks were so steep and rough that she felt sure the wagon would turn over. She was ready to jump and take her chances, but by a miracle it stayed upright.

  That day the men killed twenty buffalo.

  Elmira had to wait in the sun all day while they skinned them out. Finally she got down and sat under the wagon, which provided a little shade. The men piled the bloody, smelly hides into the wagon, which didn't suit the mules. They hated the smell of hides as much as she did.

  Big Zwey had lapsed back into silence, leaving all the talking to Luke, who chattered away whether anybody listened to him or not.

  Often Elmira had a nervous stomach. The jostling of the wagon took getting used to. The plains looked smooth in the distance, but they were surprisingly rough to pass over. Big Zwey had given her a blanket to put over the rough seat--it kept her from getting splinters but didn't cushion the bumps.

  Alone with the two men, in the middle of the great, empty prairie, she felt apprehensive. In the cow towns there had been lots of girls around-- if a man got mean, she could yell. On the boat it hadn't seemed as dangerous, because the men were always fighting and gambling among themselves. But at night on the prairie there were only the three of them, and nothing much to keep anyone busy. Big Zwey sat and looked at her through the campfire, and Luke looked, too, while he talked. She didn't know if Big Zwey considered that in some way he had married her already. She worried that he might suddenly come over and want the marriage to begin, though so far he had been too shy even to speak to her much. For all she knew he might expect her to be married to Luke, too, and she didn't want that. The thought made her so nervous that she couldn't eat the buffalo meat they offered her--anyway, it was tougher than any meat she had ever tried to chew. She chewed on one bite until her jaws got tired and then spat it out.

  But when she went to the wagon and made the one blanket into a kind of bed, neither man followed.

  She lay awake for a long time, apprehensive, but the men sat by the fire, occasionally looking her way but making no move to disturb her. Luke got his dice out and soon they were playing.

  Elmira was able to sleep, but awoke to the roll of thunder a few hours later. The men were asleep by the dying fire. Across the prairie she began to see lightning darting down the sky, and within a few minutes big drops of water hit her. In a minute she was wet. She jumped down and crawled under the wagon. It wasn't much protection but it was some. Soon lightning was crashing all around and the thunder came in big, flat cracks, as if a building had fallen down. It frightened her so that she hugged her knees and trembled. When the lightning struck, the whole prairie would be bathed for a second in white light.

  The rainstorm soon passed, but she lay awake for the rest of the night, listening to water drip off the wagon. It grew very dark. She didn't know what might have happened to the men.

  But in the morning they were right where they had gone to sleep, wet as muskrats but ready to drink a pot of coffee. Neither even commented on the storm.

  Elmira decided they were used to hard traveling and that she had better get used to it too.

  Soon she began to talk to the mules as they plodded along. She didn't say much, and the mules didn't answer, but it made the long hot days pass a little faster.

  Augustus spent half the first day finding the tracks, for Blue Duck had been cool enough to lead Lorena through the stampeding cattle, so that their tracks would be blotted out by the thousands of cattle tracks. It was a fine trick, and one not many men would dare to try.

  Years had passed since Augustus had done any serious tracking. He rode around all morning, trying to remember the last man he had tracked, just to give himself perspective. It seemed to him that the last man had been an incompetent horse thief named Webster Witter, who had rustled horses in the Blanco country at one time. He and Call had gone after him one day by themselves and caught him and hung him before sundown. But the tracking had been elemental, due to the fact that the man had been driving forty stolen horses.

  The thing he remembered best about Webster Witter was that he had been a tall man and they caught him out in the scrub and had to hang him to a short tree. It was that or take him back, and Call was against taking him back. Call believed summary justice was often the only justice, and in those days he was right, since they had to depend on circuit judges who often as not didn't
show up.

  "If we take him back he'll bribe the jailer, or dig out or something, and we'll have to catch him at it again," Call said. It never occurred to Call just to shoot someone he could hang, and in this instance Augustus didn't suggest it, for they had rushed out without much ammunition and were traveling in rough country.

  Fortunately, Webster's neck broke when they whipped the horse out from under him, otherwise he could have stood there and laughed at them, for the limb of the mesquite sagged badly and both his feet drug the ground.

  That had been at least twelve years ago, and Augustus soon concluded that his tracking skills had rusted to the point of being unusable. The only horse tracks he found for the first three hours belonged to Hat Creek horses. He almost decided to go back and get Deets, though he knew Call would be reluctant to surrender him.

  Finally, by circling wide to the northwest, Augustus crossed the three horses' tracks.

  Blue Duck had tried the one trick--crossing the stampede--but that was all. After that the tracks bore straight for the northwest, so unerringly that Augustus soon found he didn't need to pay much attention to them. If he lost them he could usually pick them up within half a mile.

  He rode as hard as he dared, but he had only one horse and couldn't afford to ruin him.

  At each watering he let him have a few minutes of rest. He rode all night, and the next day the tracks were still bearing northwest. He felt unhappy with himself for he wasn't catching up. Lorena was getting a taste of hard travel the like of which she had never imagined. Probably she would have worse to deal with than hard travel unless she was very lucky, and Augustus knew it was his fault. He should have packed her into camp the minute he discovered who Blue Duck was; in retrospect he couldn't imagine why he hadn't. It was the kind of lapse he had been subject to all his life: things that were clearly dangerous didn't worry him enough.

  He tried to swallow his regrets and concentrate on finding her: after all, it had happened, and why he had let it no longer particularly mattered. Blue Duck was a name from their past. Having him show up in their midst fifteen years later had thrown his reasoning off.

  The second day he stopped tracking altogether, since it was plain Blue Duck was heading for the Staked Plains. That took in a lot of territory, of course, but Augustus thought he knew where Blue Duck would go: to an area north and west of the Palo Duro Canyon--it was there he had always retreated to when pursued.

  Once Call and he had sat on the western edge of the great canyon, looking across the brown waterless distances to the west. They had finally decided to end their pursuit there while they had a fair chance of getting back alive. It wasn't Indians they feared so much as lack of water. It had been midsummer and the plains looked seared, what grass there was, brown and brittle.

  Call was frustrated; he hated to turn back before he caught his man.

  "There's got to be water out there," Call said.

  "They cross it, and they can't drink dirt." "Yes, but they know where it is and we don't," Augustus pointed out. "They can kill their horses getting to it--they got more horses. But if we kill ours it's a dern long walk back to San Antonio." That afternoon he crossed the Clear Fork of the Brazos and passed a half-built cabin, abandoned and empty. It was a vivid enough reminder of the power of the Comanches--their massacres caused plenty of settlers to retreat while they still had legs to retreat on. Call and he had watched through the Fifties as the line of the frontier advanced only to collapse soon after.

  The men and women who came up the Trinity and the Brazos were no strangers to hardship--but hardship was one thing, terror another. The land was spacious and theirs for the taking, but land couldn't cancel out fear-- a fact that Call never understood. It annoyed him that the whites gave up and retreated.

  "I wish they'd stick," he said many times.

  "If they would, there'd soon be enough of them to beat back the Indians." "You ain't never laid in bed all night with a scared woman," Augustus said. "You can't start a farm if you've got to live in a fort. Them that starts the farms have got to settle off by themselves, which means they're easy to cut off and carve up." "Well, they could leave the women for a while," Call said. "Send for them when it's safe." "Yes, but a man that goes to the trouble to take a wife don't generally want to go off and leave her," Augustus pointed out. "It means doing the chores all by yourself. Besides, without a wife handy you won't be getting no kids, and kids are a wonderful source of free labor. They're cheaper than slaves by a damn sight." They had argued the point for years, but fruitlessly, for Call had no sympathy for human weakness. Augustus put it down to a lack of imagination. Call could never imagine what it was like to be scared. They had been in tight spots, but usually that meant action, and in battles things happened too fast for fear to paralyze the mind of a man like Call. He couldn't imagine what it was like to go to bed every night scared that you and your family would feel the knives of the Comanches before sunrise.

  That night Augustus stopped to rest his horse, making a cold camp on a little bluff and eating some jerky he had brought along. He was in the scrubby post-oak country near the Brazos and from his bluff could see far across the moonlit valleys.

  It struck him that he had forgotten emptiness such as existed in the country that stretched around him.

  After all, for years he had lived within the sound of the piano from the Dry Bean, the sound of the church bell in the little Lonesome Dove church, the sound of Bol whacking the dinner bell. He even slept within the sound of Pea Eye's snoring, which was as regular as the ticking of a clock.

  But here there was no sound, not any. The coyotes were silent, the crickets, the locusts, the owls. There was only the sound of his own horse grazing. From him to the stars, in all directions, there was only silence and emptiness. Not the talk of men over their cards, nothing. Though he had ridden hard he felt strangely rested, just from the silence.

  The next day he found the carcass of Lorie's mare. By the end of the day he was out of the scrub. When he crossed the Wichita he angled west. He had not seen Blue Duck's tracks in two days but he didn't care. He had always had confidence in his instincts and felt he knew where the man would stop. Possibly he was bound for Adobe Walls, one of the Bents' old forts. This one, on the Canadian, had never been much of a success. The Bents had abandoned it, and it became a well-known gathering place for buffalo hunters, as well as for anyone crossing the plains.

  It was spring--what few buffalo were left would be moving north, and what buffalo hunters were left would be gathered at the old fort, getting ready for a last hide harvest. Buffalo hunters were not known to be too particular about their company; though Blue Duck and his men had picked off plenty of them over the years, the new crop would probably overlook that fact if he turned up with a prize like Lorena.

  Also, there were still renegade bands of Kiowas and Comanches loose on the plains. The bands were supposedly scattered--at least that was the talk in south Texas--and the trade in captives virtually dead.

  But Augustus wasn't in south Texas anymore, and as he rode through the empty country he had plenty of time to consider that maybe the talk hadn't been all that accurate--talk often wasn't. The bands were doomed, but they might last another year or two, whereas he was advancing into their country in the here and now. He wasn't afraid for himself, but he was afraid for Lorena.

  Blue Duck might be dealing with some renegade chief with a taste for white women. Lorena would put a nice cap on a career largely devoted to stealing children.

  If Blue Duck intended to trade her to an Indian, he would probably take her farther west, through the region known as the Quitaque, and then north to a crossing on the Canadian where the Comanches had traded captives for decades. Nearby was the famous Valley of Tears, spoken ofwith anguish by such captives as had been recovered. There the Comancheros divided captives, mothers being separated from their children and sold to different bands, the theory being that if they were isolated they would be less likely to organize escapes.
/>   As he moved into the Quitaque, a parched country where shallow red canyons stretched west toward the Palo Duro, Augustus would see little spiraling dust devils rising from the exposed earth far ahead of him. During the heat of the day mirages in the form of flat lakes appeared, so vivid that a time or two he almost convinced himself there was water ahead, although he knew there wasn't.

  He decided to head first for the big crossing on the Canadian. If there was no sign of Blue Duck there he could always follow the river over to the Walls. He crossed the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River--plenty of prairie dogs were in evidence, too--and rode west to the edge of the Palo Duro. Several times he saw small herds of buffalo, and twice rode through valleys of bleached bones, places where hunters had slaughtered several hundred animals at a time.

  By good luck he found a spring and spent the night by it, resting his horse for the final push.