'At least I get paid in cash,' Pea Eye said.
'I don't care if you get paid in cash,' Lorena said. 'Cash can't hug me. It can't make me a baby. It can't be a father to Augie and Georgie and Ben and the girls.' 'Well, it won't have to,' Pea said.
'I'll come back.' 'I don't believe you, this time,' Lorena said. 'If you go you won't come back. We'll never lie in the bed like this, again. I'll get old and I won't have you, and neither will the children.' Pea Eye said nothing. He had begun to have wild thoughts, one being that the Captain was already dead. That would mean that he didn't have to go. But of course, if the Captain had been killed, he would have heard about it, and he hadn't.
Lorena didn't say a thing, either; her thoughts were disordered, too. If Pea got killed, she would probably have to turn Dish Boggett down again. He kept a store in New Mexico and was still single, unless he had recently married. If Pea got killed, Dish would soon hear of it and ride over to court her. He wasn't a bad man; in fact, he was a good man. But she didn't want him, never had, and all the tea in China wouldn't change that.
I wish this would stop, she thought. I wish it would stop. It's going to drive me crazy, if it don't stop.
In the morning, they were both as drained as if they had done three days' work. Clarie had to deal with everything, including the chores and the younger children, too.
'What's wrong, Mama?' she asked, disturbed. 'What's wrong, Pa?' Neither parent would say. When Clarie went out to milk, Lorena made one last try.
'What makes you think you can find him?' she asked. 'He's been gone nearly a month. He could be in the middle of Mexico by now. He could be as far away as the Pacific Ocean.' 'I expect I can find the Captain,' Pea Eye said. 'People notice, when he's around. Roy Bean or somebody will know where he is.' 'Go on, then, today,' Lorena said. 'Go now.
I can't stand another night like last night. Go right now, before I leave for school.' Pea Eye got his slicker and his rifle and walked down to get his horse.
'You're going to ride?' Lorena asked, when he came back. 'You could take the train. He took the train.' 'No, I'll ride. I might not find a trustworthy horse down on the border,' Pea said. Patches, his big bay with white spots, was a trustworthy horse.
Pea Eye kissed each of his children goodbye.
All of them cried, Clarie the most. She was a big, strong girl. The boys cried themselves out, and Laurie cried because everybody else was crying.
Lorena went in and got ready for school. She dressed slowly, very slowly. Slowly, very slowly, she put her lesson books in order.
Usually, she just threw them in her bag and sorted them out once she got to school. But this morning, she put them in order, carefully and slowly, as if her sanity or even her life depended upon keeping her schoolbooks in the correct order.
It was all she could do, once she got outside, even to raise her eyes to her husband.
But she did, just briefly. His eyes, though troubled, were the same honest eyes that had won through her reluctance, long ago, in Wyoming. She kissed him briefly, gave him a long, tight hug, and then, moving stiffly, like a woman whose back has been injured, helped her children into the buggy and drove away to school. The children all looked back at their father, but Lorena didn't.
She kept her eyes fixed on the plains ahead.
Pea Eye put a little salt and pepper in a sack, stuck a small skillet in his saddlebags, and stood at his back door a minute, wondering when he would see them all again, his loved ones, already almost out of sight to the north.
Then he mounted Patches, made sure his rifle and scabbard were tight, and turned himself south, toward Mexico, to go to the assistance of Captain Woodrow Call.
On his way into Mexico, Call stopped to say goodbye to Bolivar. The old man had been with him a long time. Seeing him brought back memories, good and bad, of the Ranger troop and the Hat Creek outfit: memories of Gus and Deets, Pea Eye and Newt, Call's son. Only after the boy's death, in Montana, had Call been able to admit that Newt had been his son. Now, with the boy several years dead, it made Call sad to think of him. He had fathered a son, but had not been a father to him, although Newt had lived with the Hat Creek outfit most of his short life. He had lived with the outfit, but as an employee, not a son. Now it was too late to change any of that. The memory of it was a sore that throbbed every time his mind touched it. Bolivar, who had not many more years to live, was so woven into Call's memories of earlier days that Call had begun to hate leaving him behind, although Bolivar was an old, frail man who could not travel hard and perhaps ought not to travel at all.
But leaving him behind had become, to Call, like leaving his own life behind.
'Capit@an, the bell! I can still ring the bell!' Bolivar said. He had a desperate look in his eye and a quaver in his voice. He saw that the capit@an was about to leave without him.
The two gringos with him were mounted, and there was a pack mule, well laden. It meant the capit@an was going, perhaps never to come back.
The bell he referred to was the dinner bell, near the livery stable in Lonesome Dove, a business that Call and his partner, Gus McCrae, had once owned. Bolivar had summoned them all to his never very appetizing meals by whacking the dinner bell with a broken crowbar. As he grew older and less in control of his mind, he sometimes rang the bell whether he had made a meal or not. He often rang it when there was no one in hearing to come and eat the meal he had made. Beating the bell with the broken crowbar took his mind off the disappointments of life. The bell rang so loudly that it almost deafened him, but he continued to beat it fiercely, nonetheless. His life had contained many disappointments, and he needed something to make him forget them, even if he was deafened in the process.
Call, and Bolivar, too, regretted that the Hat Creek outfit was gone. What they had in common now was their regret. But the outfit was gone. Some of its members were dead, and those still living were scattered up the rivers and across the plains. Newt and Deets and Gus were no longer alive, and Call had the feeling that Bolivar might not be alive, either, when he returned to Laredo.
'That old man needs a haircut,' Deputy Plunkert said, as they were leaving Nuevo Laredo.
The old man's white hair hung almost to his shoulders.
