Roy's folks were thinking of taking him out of school, since he couldn't be spared from the ranch work much longer. She hated to miss even one day with Roy. The Benson ranch was fifteen miles from their farm. Clarie felt she would never get to see him, once he left school.
'Since when have I not been able to get home with my own children?' Lorena asked, a little impatiently. She was anxious to get Clarie and Pea Eye gone. The children were beginning to act up, as they always did when her attention wavered for more than a minute or two. Roy Benson was usually the instigator, too. He was a bright boy, but full of the devil.
'Well, you can take care of them, but Laurie is my sister and I like to help with her,' Clarie said.
'You do help, but now I need you to help your father,' Lorena said. 'I wouldn't ask it, if I didn't need it.' Clarie gave up. The look in her mother's eye was a look you didn't argue with, if you were smart.
'Can I just go tell Roy I can't study with him today?' she asked.
'I'll tell him,' Lorena said. 'He ain't made of air, Clarie. He'll be here tomorrow.' 'Ma, you said 'ain't,'' Clarie told her, startled. Her mother's grammar only slipped when she was angry, or in a hurry.
'Yes, because you're vexing me,' Lorena said.
'You know I slip up, when you vex me.' 'Roy might not be here tomorrow,' Clarie said, returning to the original point at issue.
'His folks might make him work, and then I'll never get to see him.' She felt bitter. Roy was the only nice boy she knew, and now his folks might make him leave her, in order to help with the cow work.
But, bitter or not, she knew it was unwise to provoke her mother past a certain point, and that point was not far away. With another futile glance at Roy--he was teasing a little kid and did not see her--she went outside and obediently climbed up behind her father. Windmill, her father's big gray horse, grunted, but at least didn't break wind. For some reason, hearing horses break wind embarrassed her keenly; at least it did when there was a man around, even if the man was her father.
'Pa, do you like Roy Benson?' she asked, as they were trotting homeward.
'Roy? He's gangly, but then so am I,' Pea Eye said.
Billy Williams had to walk the last five miles into Ojinaga because he lost his horse. It was a ridiculous accident. It was sure to hurt his reputation as the last of the great scouts, and his reputation had been slipping badly, anyway.
The horse became misplaced as a result of the fact that Billy had to answer a call of nature. He had been riding at a sharp clip, all the way from Piedras Negras--the news he had was so urgent that it prompted him to neglect the call until disgrace was at hand.
Then, he failed to tether his mount properly and the horse wandered off. Perhaps because of the sharp clip he had maintained, or the tequila he had drunk while maintaining it, Billy relaxed so much in the course of his call of nature that he dozed off for a few minutes, still squatting. That in itself was nothing new, since he often nodded off for a few minutes while squatting in response to nature's call. Squatting was a position he found completely comfortable; in fact, it was one of the few that he did find comfortable. When he stood up straight, he coughed too much. His diagnosis was that a couple of his ribs were poking into a lung, the result of an encounter a few years back with a buffalo cow that looked dead but wasn't.
Lying flat on his back was not a good position, either. A headache usually accompanied that position, probably because Billy never lay flat on his back unless he was dead drunk.
The fact was, his horse wasn't very far away; Billy just couldn't see him. His vision had once been so sharp that he could see a small green worm on a small green leaf, at a distance of thirty yards. Now, he couldn't even see his own horse if the horse was thirty yards away. It was a sad state for a great scout to have come to.
'Willie, you best retire,' his friend Roy Bean told him the last time the two of them visited. 'A man as blind as you are ought not to be riding this river. You could fall in a hole and be swallowed up and that would be that.' Roy Bean didn't deliver that opinion with much concern in his voice. Like most of Roy Bean's pronouncements, this one got said mainly because the man was vain and arrogant. He had never been able to get enough of the sound of his own voice, though it held no particular charm for anyone but himself.
'You're blind drunk nine days out of ten--what keeps you from falling in a hole and being swallowed up?' Billy asked.
'The fact is, I sit here in this chair in this saloon, not nine days out of ten but ten days out of ten,' Roy Bean said. 'If I could sit here in this chair eleven days out of ten, I would. I don't go wandering off where there might be a hole that could swallow me up.' That point was hard to dispute. Roy Bean seldom left his chair; even seldomer did he leave his saloon; and never, so far as anyone living knew, had he been outside the town of Langtry, Texas, a town that consisted mainly of Roy Bean's saloon.
'But then I ain't the last of the great scouts,' Roy Bean said. 'I don't have to go traipsing through the gullies. I got no reputation to maintain.' 'I won't fall in no hole,' Billy assured him. 'I won't get swallowed up, neither.
'I would have to be a lot blinder than this, before I quit tracking,' Billy added, though that claim was bravado. Traveling was becoming more and more worrisome, and as for tracking, he probably could track an elephant if he could stay in hearing distance of it. But tracking anything smaller, including his own horse, was a hopeless matter.
'Well, if you do avoid holes, there's the problem of killers,' Roy Bean reminded him.
'You can't see in front of you, or behind you, or to the side. The dumbest killer in the West could sneak up on you and cut your throat.' Billy refrained from comment. The two of them were sitting in Roy's dirty, flyblown saloon while they were having the discussion. The saloon was hot as well as filthy, and the liquor cost too much, but it was the only saloon around and contained the only liquor to be had along that stretch of the border.
Roy Bean, out of a combination of boredom, greed, and vanity, had recently appointed himself judge of a vast jurisdiction--the trans-Pecos West--and nowadays hung people freely, often over differences amounting to no more than fifty cents. It was an ominous practice, in Billy's view; he had often found himself having differences with Roy Bean amounting to considerably more than fifty cents. Roy had been told by many of his constituents that he shouldn't hang people over such paltry sums, and of course, he had a ready reply.
'A man that will steal fifty cents would just as soon steal a million dollars, and he would, if the opportunity presented itself,' Roy said.
