Then Augustus saw the boy walking up from the lots, so tired he was barely moving. Pea Eye was half drunk by the time Newt finally made the wagons.
''I god, Newt, I'm glad you got here before fall,' Augustus said. 'We'd have missed you during the summer.'
'I been throwin' rocks at the mare,' Newt said, with a grin. 'Did you see what a hunk she bit out of the Captain?'
Newt lifted one foot and carefully scraped the mud from the well off the sole of his boot, while Pea Eye continued to wash the dust out of his throat.
Augustus had always admired the way Newt could stand on one leg while cleaning the other boot. 'Look at that, Pea,' he said. 'I bet you can't do that.'
Pea Eye was so used to seeing Newt stand on one leg to clean his boot that he couldn't figure out what it was Gus thought he couldn't do. A few big swigs of liquor sometimes slowed his thinking down to a crawl. This usually happened at sundown, after a hard day of welldigging or horseshoeing; at such times Pea was doubly glad he worked with the Captain, rather than Gus. The less talk the Captain had to listen to, the better humor he was in, whereas Gus was just the opposite. He'd rattle off five or six different questions and opinions, running them all together like so many unbranded cattle-it made it hard to pick out one and think about it carefully and slowly, the only ways Pea Eye liked to think. At such times his only recourse was to pretend the questions had hit him in his deaf ear, the left one, which hadn't really worked well since the day of their big fight with the Keechis-what they called the Stone House fight. It had been pure confusion, since the Indians had been smart enough to fire the prairie grass, smoking things up so badly that no one could see six feet ahead. They kept bumping into Indians in the smoke and having to shoot pointblank; a Ranger right next to Pea had spotted one and fired too close to Pea's ear.
That was the day the Indians got away with their horses, which made Captain Call about as mad as Pea had ever seen him. It meant they had to walk down the Brazos for nearly two hundred miles, worrying constantly about what would happen if the Comanches discovered they were afoot. Pea Eye hadn't noticed he was half deaf until they had walked most of the way out.
Fortunately, while he was worrying the question of what it was he couldn't do, old Bolivar began to whack the dinner bell, which put an end to discussion. The old dinner bell had lost its clapper, but Bolivar had found a crowbar that somebody had managed to break, and he laid into the bell so hard that you couldn't have heard the clapper if there had been one.
The sun had finally set, and it was so still along the river that they could hear the horses swishing their tails, down in the lots-or they could until Bolivar laid into the bell. Although he probably knew they were standing around the wagons, in easy hearing distance, Bolivar continued to pound the bell for a good five minutes. Bolivar pounded the bell for reasons of his own; even Call couldn't control him in that regard. The sound drowned out the quiet of sunset, which annoyed Augustus so much that at times he was tempted to go up and shoot the old man, just to teach him a lesson.
'I figure he's calling bandits,' Augustus said, when the ringing finally stopped. They started for the house, and the pigs fell in with them, the shoat eating a lizard he had caught somewhere. The pigs liked Newt even better than Augustus-when he didn't have anything better to do he would feed them scraps of rawhide and scratch their ears.
'If them bandits were to come, maybe the Captain would let me start 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 snore 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 brain don't work unless it's in the shade.'
Augustus ignored the remark. 'I figure it was a Kiowa on his way to steal a woman that lost that mare,' he said. 'Your Comanche don't hunger much after
'Can we eat or do we have to wait till the argument's over?' Pea Eye asked.
'We starve if we wait for that,' Bolivar said, plunking a potful of sowbelly and beans down on the rough table. Augustus, to the surprise of no one, was the first to fill his plate.
'I don't know where you keep finding these Mexican strawberries,' he said, referring to the beans. Bolivar managed to find them three hundred and sixty-five days a year, mixing them with so many red chilies that a spoonful of beans was more or less as hot as a spoonful of red ants. Newt had come to think that only two things were certain if you worked for the Hat Creek Cattle Company. One was that Captain Call would think of more things to do than he and Pea Eye and Deets could get done, and the other was that beans would be available at all meals. The only man in the outfit who didn't fart frequently was old Bolivar himself-he never touched beans and lived mainly on sourdough biscuits and chickory coffee, or rather cups of brown sugar with little puddles of coffee floating on top. Sugar cost money, too, and it irked the Captain to spend it, but Bolivar could not be made to break a habit. Augustus claimed the old man's droppings were so sugary that the blue shoat had taken to stalking him every time he went to shit, which might have been true. Newt had all he could do to keep clear of the shoat, and his own droppings were mostly bean.
