'Yes, I'd say it was bad luck,' Brookshire said. 'The man gave me his biscuit, the morning it happened. He said he was too nervous to eat. He was afraid his stomach would gripe him, if he ate the biscuit.
Johnny drove the wagon we hauled the wounded in. Off he went, while I stayed by the mess and ate his biscuit. While I was sipping coffee, General Grant rode by. That was the one time I saw General Grant. Then, me and Jackie O'Connor went down the road in a buggy, squinching down as best we could. The shells were just whistling around us like ducks. Most of them hit in the trees. They broke off a world of limbs. We weren't five minutes down the road, when we saw a bunch of the boys standing around the wagon Johnny had been driving. We thought maybe they were looking at a dead Reb, but no, it was Johnny, and his head was gone. There was just a red bone, sticking out between his shoulders.' 'Oh, Lord,' Ted Plunkert said. 'That's awful. It was just a bone?' 'Yes, a red bone,' Brookshire said. 'I suppose it was the end of his spine.' 'Oh, Lord,' Ted said, again. 'His neck bone?' The detail he didn't like was that the bone was red. Of course, all the bones were inside you, where the blood was, but he still felt himself getting queasy at the thought of red bones.
Call listened with some amusement--not that the incident hadn't been terrible. Being decapitated was a grisly fate, whether you were a Yankee or not. But then, amusing things happened in battle, as they did in the rest of life. Some of the funniest things he had ever witnessed had occurred during battles. He had always found it more satisfying to laugh on a battlefield than anywhere else, for if you lived to laugh on a battlefield, you could feel you had earned the laugh. But if you just laughed in a saloon, or at a social, the laugh didn't reach deep.
In this case, what mainly amused Call was the contemplation of how amused his old partner, Augustus McCrae, would be if he could see the crew he was riding out with on his manhunt.
Augustus had a well-developed sense of humor, too well developed, Call had often felt. Yet he missed Augustus's laughter as much as he missed anything else in his life.
Gus enjoyed the predicaments of his fellowmen, and would have laughed long and hard at the spectacle of Call, Brookshire, and lanky Ted Plunkert.
'Joey Garza shoots a rifle, not a cannon,' he observed. 'If he takes your head off, he'll have to do it with a knife or a saw.' Deputy Plunkert ignored the part about the knife and the saw. Captain Call was only joking, probably. So far as he knew, the Garza boy had not cut any heads off, but there were plenty of other, less dramatic injuries to worry about.
'They say that rifle of his will hit you between the eyes even if you're a mile away,' the deputy said. Several people he had talked with claimed that Joey Garza made kills at a distance of one mile.
'Half a mile, about,' Call said. 'I doubt the part about hitting between the eyes. If he's sensible, he'll shoot for the trunk. It's a bigger target.' 'Well, half a mile, then. How do you expect to beat him?' Ted asked.
'I expect to outlast him,' Call said.
'He's young, and he's likely impatient.
There's three of us, and he's alone. He might get impatient, and make a big mistake.' 'The truth is, he's killed several passengers at a distance of about five feet, with his pistol,' Brookshire reminded them. 'Oh, I've no doubt he can shoot the German rifle. But he's done damage with some short shots, too.' 'Why, he robs trains and makes people get off and hand over their watches and tiepins,' Ted Plunkert said. 'Some of the passengers are armed men. Why don't one of them try to shoot him?
Then, the rest of them could jump him.' 'I've wondered about that myself,' Brookshire said. 'You'd think somebody would try him, but they don't. They just stand there like sheep and let themselves be robbed.' 'That's the effect of reputation,' Call said.
'Once you get one as big as this boy's, people think you're better than you are. They think you can't be beat, when the fact is, anybody can be beat, or make mistakes. I never met an outlaw who didn't make mistakes. I guess Blue Duck didn't make many, but he was exceptional.' 'Joey Garza hasn't made any mistakes, not one,' Brookshire said.
'Why, I'd say he has,' Call said.
'He broke the law--your Colonel's law, particularly. That was his mistake, and now he's got us hunting him.' 'I guess I was talking tactics,' Brookshire said. 'He just seems to know when to show up, and when not to. If there's a company of soldiers on the train, he don't show up.' 'That's just common sense,' Call said. 'I wouldn't show up, either, if I saw there was a company of soldiers on the train. That don't make the boy General Lee.' Deputy Plunkert was still thinking about the red bone, sticking out of the dead soldier's neck.
Once he got such a troubling picture in his mind, he sometimes had a hard time making the picture go away. It was as if it got stuck, somewhere in his thinking machine. It might be a good picture that got stuck; several having to do with Doobie's young body got stuck just before they married.
But it was the bad pictures that seemed to get stuck the hardest, and stay stuck the longest. Being sucked down into quicksand was one bad picture Ted Plunkert had trouble with. There were patches of quicksand in the Rio Grande, and the deputy had a deadly fear of them. Not being able to breathe because quicksand was filling up your mouth and your nose was a bad picture, but not as bad as the picture of a red bone sticking out of a man's neck. He wished Brookshire had never told the story. It was just like a Yankee to talk about things civilized people would have the good sense to leave undiscussed.
'How did General Grant look?' Call asked. He had always had a curiosity about the great soldiers: Grant and Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Sherman.
'Well, he looked drunk and he was drunk,' Brookshire said. 'He won that War, and was drunk the whole time.' Call said nothing, but again, he remembered his old partner, Gus McCrae. Gus, too, could fight drunk. Sometimes he had fought better drunk than he had fought sober.
'I'd feel better if somebody could steal that rifle from that boy,' Deputy Plunkert said.
'A mile's a long way to be killed from.' 'Half a mile,' Call corrected, again.
Brookshire was wondering if Katie's legs would be any fatter when he got home.
'I'd still like to know who the second robber is,' he said. 'The one that struck that train out in New Mexico.' 'I'd like to know that too,' Call said.
In Crow Town, Joey lived with three whores. He didn't use them for his pleasure-- he never used women for his pleasure. The white whore was named Beulah. She had come south from Dodge City with a gambler named Red Foot. The nickname resulted from the fact that another gambler had become enraged and tried to stab Red Foot in the heart. But, being drunk as well as enraged, he took a wild swing, toppled out of his chair, and finally managed to stab Red Foot in his foot.
