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Chapter 25
JULY JOHNSON HAD BEENRAISED not to complain, so he didn’t complain, but the truth of the matter was, it had been the hardest year of his life: a year in which so many things went wrong that it was hard to know which trouble to pay attention to at any given time. His deputy, Roscoe Brown—forty-eight years of age to July’s twenty-four—assured him cheerfully that the increase in trouble was something he had better get used to. “Yep, now that you’ve turned twenty-four you can’t expect no mercy,” Roscoe said. “I don’t expect no mercy,” July said. “I just wish things would go wrong one at a time. That way I believe I could handle it.” “Well, you shouldn’t have got married then,” Roscoe said. It struck July as an odd comment. He and Roscoe were sitting in front of what passed for a jail in Fort Smith. It just had one cell, and the lock on that didn’t work—when it was necessary
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Lonely Dove CHAPTER 1
“You pigs git,” Augustus said, kicking the shoat. “Head on down to the creek if you want to eat that snake.” It was the porch he begrudged them, not the snake. Pigs on the porch just made things hotter, and things were already hot enough. He stepped down into the dusty yard and walked around to the springhouse to get his jug. The sun was still high, sulled in the sky like a mule, but Augustus had a keen eye for sun, and to his eye the long light from the west had taken on an encouraging slant. Evening took a long time getting to Lonesome Dove, but when it came it was a comfort. For most of the hours of the day—and most of the months of the year—the sun had the town trapped deep in dust, far out in the chaparral flats, a heaven for snakes and horned toads, roadrunners and stinging lizards, but a hell for pigs and Tennesseans. There was not even a respectable shade tree within twenty or thirty miles; in fact, the actual l
Lonely Dove CHAPTER 2
Of course, real scouting skills were superfluous in a place as tame as Lonesome Dove, but Call still liked to get out at night,sniff the breeze and let the country talk. The country talked quiet; one human voice could drown it out, particularly if itwas a voice as loud as Augustus McCrae’s. Augustus was notorious all over Texas for the strength of his voice. On a stillnight he could be heard at least a mile, even if he was more or less whispering. Call did his best to get out of range ofAugustus’s voice so that he could relax and pay attention to other sounds. If nothing else, he might get a clue as to whatweather was coming—not that there was much mystery about the weather around Lonesome Dove. If a man lookedstraight up at the stars he was apt to get dizzy, the night was so clear. Clouds were scarcer than cash money, and cashmoney was scarce enough.There was really little in the way of a threat to be looked for, either. A coyote might sneak in and s
Lonely Dove CHAPTER 3
it was her one aim. It seemed to her she had learned to sweat atthe same time she had learned to breathe, and she was still doing both. Of all the places she had heard men talk about,San Francisco sounded the coolest and nicest, so it was San Francisco she set her sights on.Sometimes it seemed like slow going. She was nearly twenty-four and hadn’t got a mile past Lonesome Dove, whichwasn’t fast progress considering that she had only been twelve when her parents got nervous about Yankees and leftMobile.That much slow progress would have discouraged most women, but Lorena didn’t allow her mind to dwell on it. She hadher flat days, of course, but that was mostly because Lonesome Dove itself was so flat. She got tired of looking out thewindow all day and seeing nothing but brown land and gray chaparral. In the middle of the day the sun was so hot theland looked white. She could see the river
Lonely Dove CHAPTER 4
The border nights had qualities that he had come to admire, different as they were from the qualities of nights in Tennessee. In Tennessee, as he remembered, nights tended to get mushy, with a cottony mist drifting into the hollows. Border nights were so dry you could smell the dirt, and clear as dew. In fact, the nights were so clear it was tricky; even with hardly any moon the stars were bright enough that every bush and fence post cast a shadow. Pea Eye, who had a jumpy disposition, was always shying from shadows, and he had even blazed away at innocent chaparral bushes on occasion, mistaking them for bandits. Augustus was not particularly nervous, but even so he had hardly started down the street before he got a scare: a little ball of shadow ran right at his feet. He jumped sideways, fearing snakebite, although his brain knew snakes didn’t roll like balls. Then he saw an armadillo hustle past his feet. Once he saw
Lonely Dove CHAPTER 5
“A man that sleeps all night wastes too much of life,” he often said. “As I see it the days was made for looking and the nights for sport.” Since sport was what he had been brooding about when he got home, it was still in his thoughts when he arose, which he did about 4 A.M., to see to the breakfast—in his view too important a meal to entrust to a Mexican bandit. The heart of his breakfast was a plenitude of sourdough biscuits, which he cooked in a Dutch oven out in the backyard. His pot dough had been perking along happily for over ten years, and the first thing he did upon rising was check it out. The rest of the breakfast was secondary, just a matter of whacking off a few slabs of bacon and frying a panful of pullet eggs. Bolivar could generally be trusted to deal with the coffee. Augustus cooked his biscuits outside for three reasons. One was because the house was sure to heat up well enough anyway during th
Lonely Dove CHAPTER 6
Jake Spoon was the man who came most often to see her. It had begun to be clear to him, as he turned over his memories, that his mother had been a whore, like Lorena, but this realization tarnished nothing, least of all his memories of Jake Spoon. No man had been kinder, either to him or his mother—her name had been Maggie. Jake had given him hard candy and pennies and had set him on a pacing horse and given him his first ride; he had even had old Jesus, the bootmaker, make him his first pair of boots; and once when Jake won a lady’s saddle in a card game he gave the saddle to Newt and had the stirrups cut down to his size. Those were the days before order came to Lonesome Dove, when Captain Call and Augustus were still Rangers, with responsibilities that took them up and down the border. Jake Spoon was a Ranger too, and in Newt’s eyes the most dashing of them all. He always carried a pearl-handled pistol and rode
Lonely Dove CHAPTER 7
watching Call and Deets head for the barn. He had been looking forward to being home from the moment he looked out the door of the saloon and saw the dead man laying in the mud across the wide main street of Fort Smith, but now that he was home it came back to him how nervous things could be if Call wasn’t in his best mood. “Deets’s pants are a sight, ain’t they,” he said mildly. “Seems to me he used to dress better.” Augustus chuckled. “He used to dress worse,” he said. “Why, he had that sheepskin coat for fifteen years. You couldn’t get in five feet of him without the lice jumping on you. It was because of that coat that we made him sleep in the barn. I ain’t finicky except when it comes to lice.” “What happened to it?” Jake asked. “I burned it,” Augustus said, “Done it one summer when Deets was off on a trip with Call. I told him a buffalo hunter stole it. Deets was ready to track him and get his coat
Lonely Dove CHAPTER 8
At least Newt couldn’t, and the other hands didn’t seem to be thinking very fast either. All they could find to argue about was whether it was hotter down in the well digging or up in the sun working the windlass. Down in the well they all worked so close together and sweated so much that it practically made a fog, while up in the sun fog was no problem. Being down in the well made Newt nervous, particularly if Pea was with him, because when Pea got to working the crowbar he didn’t always look where he was jabbing and once had almost jabbed it through Newt’s foot. From then on Newt worked spraddle-legged, so as to keep his feet out of the way. They were going at it hard when the Captain came riding back, having lathered the mare good by loping her along the river for about twenty miles. He rode her right up to the well. “Hello, boys,” he said. “Ain’t the water flowing yet?” “It’s flowin’,” Dish said. “A
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