Gus found such tasks irksome?he believed he had been put on earth to enjoy himself, and there was no enjoyment to be derived from shoeing horses. Horses were heavy animals?most of the ones he shoed had a tendency to lean on him, once he picked up a foot.
Drinking mescal was far more to his liking?in fact he had a few swallows left, in a small jug he had managed to appropriate. He had kept the jug buried in the sand all day, lest some thirsty Ranger discover it and drain the mescal. He owned a woolen serape, purchased in a stall in San Antonio, and had managed to sneak the jug out of camp under the serape.
When he brought it out and took a swig, Call looked annoyed.
“If the Major caught you drinking on guard he’d shoot you,” Call said. It was true, too. The Major tolerated many foibles in his troop, but he did demand sobriety of the men assigned to keep guard. They were camped not far from the great Comanche war trail?the merciless raiders from the north could appear at any moment. Even momentary inattention on the part of the guards could imperil the whole troop.
“Well, but how could he catch me?” Gus asked. “He’s trying to talk to that old woman?he’d have to sneak up on us to catch me, and I’d have to be drunker than this not to notice a fat man sneaking up.
It was certainly true that Major Chevallie was fat. He outweighed Matilda by a good fifty pounds, and Matilda was not small. The Major was short, too, which made his girth all the more noticeable. Still, he was the Major. Just because he hadn’t shot the scalp hunters didn’t mean he wouldn’t shoot Gus.
“I don’t believe you was ever on a riverboat?why would they hire you?” Call asked. At times of irritation he began to remember all the lies Gus had told him. Gus McCrae had no more regard for truth than he did for the rules of rangering.
“Why, of course I was,” Gus said. “I was a top pilot for a dern year?I’m a Tennessee boy. I can run one of them riverboats as well as the next man. I only run aground once, in all the time I worked.”
The truth of that was that he had once sneaked aboard a riverboat for two days; when he was discovered, he was put off on a mud bar, near Dubuque. A young whore had hidden him for the two days? the captain had roundly chastised her when Gus was discovered. Shortly after he was put off, the riverboat ran aground?that was the one true fact in the story. The tale sounded grand to his green friend, though. Woodrow Call had got no farther in the world than his uncle’s scratchy farm near Navasota. Woodrow’s parents had been taken by the smallpox, which is why he was raised by the uncle, a tyrant who stropped him so hard that when Woodrow got old enough to follow the road to San Antonio, he ran off. It was in San Antonio that the two of them had met?or rather, that Call had found Gus asleep against the wall of a saloon, near the river. Call worked for a Mexican blacksmith at the time, stirring the forge and helping the old smith with the horseshoeing that went on from dawn till dark. The Mexican, Jesus, a kindly old man who hummed sad harmonies all day as he worked, allowed Call to sleep on a pallet of nail sacks in a small shed behind the forge. Blacksmithing was dirty work. Call had been on his way to the river to wash off some of the smudge from his work when he noticed a lanky youth, sound asleep against the wall of the little adobe saloon. At first he thought the stranger might be dead, so profound were his slumbers. Killings were not uncommon in the streets of San Antonio?Call thought he ought to stop and check, since if the boy was dead it would have to be reported.
It turned out, though, that Gus was merely so fatigued that he was beyond caring whether he was counted among the living or among the dead. He had traveled in a tight stagecoach for ten days and nine nights, making the trip from Baton Rouge through the pines of east Texas to San Antonio. Upon arrival, his fellow passengers decided that Gus had been with them long enough; he was in such a stupor of fatigue that he offered no resistance when they rolled him out. He could not remember how long he had been sleeping against the saloon; it was his impression that he had slept about a week. That night Call let Gus share his pallet of nail sacks, and the two had been friends ever since. It was Gus who decided they should apply for the Texas Rangers?Call would never have thought himself worthy of such a position. It was Gus, too, who boldly approached the Major when word got out that a troop was being formed whose purpose?other than hanging whatever horse thieves or killers turned up?was to explore a stage route to El Paso. Fortunately, Major Chevallie had not been hard to convince?he took one look at the two healthy-looking boys and hired them at the princely sum of three dollars a month. They would be furnished with mounts, blankets, and a rifle apiece. Departure was immediate; saddles proved to be the main problem. Neither Gus nor Call had a saddle, or a pistol either. Finally the Major intervened on their behalf with an old German who owned a hardware store and saddle shop, the back of which was piled with single-tree saddles in bad repair and guns of every description, most of which didn’t work. Finally two pistols were extracted that looked as if they might shoot if primed a little; and also two single-tree rigs with tattered leather that the German agreed to part with for a dollar apiece, pistols thrown in.
Major Chevallie advanced the two dollars, and the next morning at dawn, he, Call, Gus, Shadrach, Bob Bascom, Long Bill Coleman, Ezekiel Moody, Josh Corn, one-eyed Johnny Carthage, Blackie Slidell, Rip Green, and Black Sam, leading his kitchen mule, trotted out of San Antonio. Call had never been so happy in his life?overnight he had become a Texas Ranger, the grandest thing anyone could possibly be.
Gus, though, was irritated at the lack of ceremony attending their departure. A scabby dog barked a few times, but no inhabitants lined the streets to cheer them on. Gus thought there should at least have been a bugler.
“I’d blow a bugle myself, if one was available,” he said.
Call thought the remark wrongheaded. Even if they had a bugle, and if Gus could blow it, who would listen to it, except a few Mexicans and a donkey or two? It was enough that they were Rangers? two days before they had simply been homeless boys.
Bigfoot Wallace, the scout, didn’t catch up until the next day? at the time of their departure he had been in jail. Apparently he had thrown a deputy sheriff out the second-floor window of the community’s grandest whorehouse. The deputy suffered a broken collarbone, an annoyance sufficient to cause the sheriff to jail Bigfoot for a week.
Gus McCrae, a newcomer to Texas, had never heard of Bigfoot Wallace and saw no reason to be awed. Throwing a deputy sheriff out a window did not seem to him to be a particularly impressive feat.
“Now, if he’d thrown the governor out, that would have been a fine thing,” Gus said.
Call thought his friend’s comment absurd. Why would the governor be in a whorehouse, anyway? Bigfoot Wallace was the most respected scout on the Texas frontier; even in Navasota, far to the east, Bigfoot’s name was known and his exploits talked about.
“They say he’s been all the way to China,” Call explained. “He knows every creek in Texas, and whether it’s boggy or not, and he’s a first-rate Indian killer besides.”
“Myself, I’d rather know every whore,” Gus said. “You can have a lot more fun with whores than you can with governors.”
Call had seen several whores on the street, but had never visited one. Although he had the inclination, he had never had the money. Gus McCrae, though, seemed to have spent his life in the company of whores?though he had once mentioned that he had a mother and three sisters back in Tennessee, he preferred to talk mainly about whores, often to the point of tedium.
Call, though, had the greatest respect for Bigfoot Wallace; he intended to study the man and learn as many of his wilderness skills as possible. Though most of the older Rangers were well versed in woodcraft, Bigfoot and Shadrach were clearly the two masters. If the company came to a fork in a creek or river while the scouts were ranging ahead, the company waited until one of them showed up and told it which fork to take. Major Chevallie had never been west of San Antonio?once they left the settlements behind and started toward the Pecos, he allowed his accomplished scouts to choose a route.
It was Shadrach who took them south, into the lonely country of sage and sand, where the two boys were now crouched behind their chaparral bush. In San Antonio there had been talk that war with Mexico was brewing?early on, the Major had instructed the troop to fire on any Mexican who seemed hostile.
“Better to be safe than sorry,” he said, and many heads nodded.
In fact, though, the only Mexican they had seen was the unfortunate driver of the donkey cart. In the western reaches, no one was quite certain where Mexico stopped and Texas began. The Rio Grande made a handy border, but neither Major Chevallie nor anyone else considered it to be particularly official.
Mexicans, hostile or otherwise, didn’t occupy much of the troop’s attention, almost all of which was reserved for the Comanches. Call had yet to see a Comanche Indian, though throughout the trek, Long Bill, Rip Green, and other Rangers had assured him that the Comanches were sure to show up in the next hour or two, bent on scalping
