LATE THAT AFTERNOON, as the boys were sitting around Bolivar’s cook fire, getting their evening grub, Augustus looked up from his plate and saw Jake and Lorena ride into camp. They were riding two good horses and leading a pack horse. The most surprising thing was that Lorena was wearing pants. So far as he could remember, he had never seen a woman in pants, and he considered himself a man of experience. Call had his back turned and hadn’t seen them, but some of the cowboys had. The sight of a woman in pants scared them so bad they didn’t know where to put their eyes. Most of them began to concentrate heavily on the beans in their plates. Dish Boggett turned white as a sheet, got up without a word to anybody, got his night horse and started for the herd, which was strung out up the valley. It was Dish’s departure that got Call’s attention. He looked around and saw the couple coming. “Wegot you to thank for this,” he said to Gus. “I adm

ALTHOUGH HE KNEW they wouldn’t leave until the heat of the day was over, Newt felt so excited that he didn’t miss sleep and could hardly eat. The Captain had made it final: they were leaving that day. He had told all the hands that they ought to see to their equipment; once they got on the trail, opportunities for repair work might be scarce. In fact, the advice only mattered to the better-equipped hands: Dish, Jasper, Soupy Jones and Needle Nelson. The Spettle brothers, for example, had no equipment at all, unless you called one pistol with a broken hammer equipment. Newt had scarcely more; his saddle was an old one and he had no slicker and only one blanket for a bedroll. The Irishmen had nothing except what they had been loaned. Pea seemed to think the only important equipment was his bowie knife, which he spent the whole day sharpening. Deets merely got a needle and some pieces of rawhide and sewed a few rawhide patches on his old quilted pants. When they saw Mr. Augustus ride u

 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