Lonesome Dove Read Free Page A

wearing a gun,” Newt said wistfully. It seemed he would never get old enough to wear a gun, though he was seventeen.
    “If you was to wear a gun somebody would just mistake you for a gunfighter and shoot you,” Augustus said, noting the boy’s wistful look. “It ain’t worth it. If Bol ever calls up any bandits I’ll lend you my Henry.”
    “That old man can barely cook,” Pea Eye remarked. “Where would he get any bandits?”
    “Why, you remember that greasy bunch he had,” Augustus said. “We used to buy horses from ’em. That’s the only reason Call hired him to cook. In the business we’re in, it don’t hurt to know a few horsethieves, as long as they’re Mexicans. I figure Bol’s just biding his time. As soon as he gains our trust his bunch will sneak up some night and murder us all.”
    He didn’t believe anything of the kind—he just liked to stimulate the boy once in a while, and Pea too, though Pea was an exceptionally hard man to stimulate, being insensitive to most fears. Pea had just sense enough to fear Comanches—that didn’t require an abundance of sense. Mexican bandits did not impress him.
    Newt had more imagination. He turned and looked across the river, where a big darkness was about to settle. Every now and then, about sundown, the Captain and Augustus and Pea and Deets would strap on guns and ride off into that darkness, into Mexico, to return about sunup with thirty or forty horses or perhaps a hundred skinny cattle. It was the way the stock business seemed to work along the border, the Mexican ranchers raiding north while the Texans raided south. Some of the skinny cattle spent their lives being chased back and forth across the Rio Grande. Newt’s fondest hope was to get old enough to be taken along on the raids. Many a night he lay in his hot little bunk, listening to old Bolivar shore and mumble below him, peering out the window toward Mexico, imagining the wild doings that must be going on. Once in a while he even heard gunfire, though seldom more than a shot or two, from up or down the river—it got his imagination to working all the harder.
    “You can go when you’re grown,” the Captain said, and that was all he said. There was no arguing with it, either—not if you were just hired help. Arguing with the Captain was a privilege reserved for Mr. Gus.
    They no sooner got in the house than Mr. Gus began to exercise the privilege. The Captain had his shirt off, letting Bolivar treat his mare bite. She had got him just above the belt. Enough blood had run down into his pants that one pants leg was caked with it. Bol was about to pack the bite with his usual dope, a mixture of axle grease and turpentine, but Mr. Gus made him wait until he could get a look at the wound himself.
    “’I god, Woodrow,” Augustus said. “As long as you’ve worked around horses it looks like you’d know better than to turn your back on a Kiowa mare.”
    Call was thinking of something and didn’t answer for a minute. What he was thinking was that the moon was in the quarter—what they called the rustler’s moon. Let it get full over the pale flats and some Mexicans could see well enough to draw a fair bead. Men he’d ridden with for years were dead and buried, or at least dead, because they’d crossed the river under a full moon. No moon at all was nearly as bad: then it was too hard to find the stock, and too hard to move it. The quarter moon was the right moon for a swing below the border. The brush country to the north was already thick with cattlemen, making up their spring herds and getting trail crews together; it wouldn’t be a week before they began to drift into Lonesome Dove. It was time to go gather cattle.
    “Who said she was Kiowa?” he said, looking at Augustus.
    “I’ve reasoned it out,” Augustus said. “You could have done the same if you ever stopped working long enough to think.”
    “I can work and think too,” Call said. “You’re the only man I know whose