rode her, and one day she killed him, just as Lippy and Jasper and one or two others had predicted she would.
After Newt's death the ranch soon fell inffdisorder; the Captain had to come back and sell it. Cattle prices were down, so he didn't get much, but Lorena's half enabled her and Pea Eye to buy the farm in Texas.
Lorena's view, expressed to Clara, not to Pea, was that the Captain wasn't prepared to forgive her hard past.
'He don't think whores should become schoolteachers,' she said.
To Pea Eye, Lorena advanced a different theory.
'He didn't like it that Gus liked me,' she said. 'Now that you married me I've taken two men from him. I took Gus and then I took you.
He'll never forgive it, but I don't care.' Pea Eye preferred to put such difficult questions out of his mind. With so much farm work to do and no one to do it but himself--none of the boys was old enough to plow--he had little time to spare for speculation.
If he had more time, he wouldn't have used it trying to figure out why the Captain did things the way he did, or why he liked people or didn't like people.
The Captain was as he was, and to Pea Eye, that was just life. Lorena and Clara could discuss it until they were blue in the face: no talk would change the Captain.
It bothered Pea Eye considerably that the Captain had never ridden over to see their farm or meet their children. His shack on the Goodnight place was not that far away. Pea Eye was proud of the farm and doubly proud of his children. He would have liked to introduce the Captain to his family and show him around the farm.
Instead, in only half an hour, he would have to leave his wife and children to go help a man who didn't like his wife and had never met his children. The thought made Pea Eye sick at heart.
Catching bandits was tricky work. There was no telling how long it might take. Little Laurie was tiny. She had come nearly a month early and was going to have to struggle through a bitter Panhandle winter. Pea Eye loved little Laurie with all his heart. He thought she looked just like her mother, and could not get enough of looking at her.
He had bought a rabbit fur robe from an old deaf Kiowa man who lived on the Quitaque.
The robe made a nice warm lining for the cartridge-box crib. Lorena kept assuring him that it was a snug enough crib now that it was lined with rabbit fur, but still Pea Eye worried. The cold was bitter. Winter never failed to carry off several little ones from neighboring farms and ranches.
Pea Eye had many dreams in which little Laurie died. It tormented him to think she might not be there to look at when he returned.
For days he had been choking his fear down--no need to burden Lorie with his worries--but suddenly, kneeling on the kitchen floor and trying unsuccessfully to wipe up the spilled coffee, fear and sadness came rushing up from inside him, too swiftly and too powerfully for him to control.
'I don't want to go, this time!' he said.
'What if Laurie dies while I'm gone?' He thought Lorena would be mighty surprised to hear him say that he didn't want to go with the Captain. Never before had he even suggested that he might not accompany Captain Call if the Captain needed him.
Lorena didn't seem surprised, though.
Perhaps she was too busy with Laurie. Because Laurie was so tiny, she was a fitful nurser, giving up sometimes before she had taken enough milk to satisfy her. Lorie had just given her the breast again, hoping she would take enough nourishment to keep her asleep for a while.
'What if we all died, while you was gone?' Lorena asked, calmly. She didn't want any agitated talk while the baby was at the breast. But her husband had to be very upset to say such a thing, and she didn't want to ignore his distress, either.
'Well, I'd never get over it, if any of you died,' Pea Eye said.
'You would--people get over anything--I've got over worse than dying myself, and you know it,' Lorena said. 'But that's in the past. You don't need to worry so much. I'm not going to die, and I won't let this baby die, either. I won't let any of our children die.' Pea Eye stood up, but despite Lorie's calm words, he felt trembly.
He felt he could trust Lorie--if she said she'd keep their family alive, he knew she would do her best. But people did their best and died anyway. Sometimes their children outlived them. That was the natural order; but sometimes, they didn't. He knew Lorie meant well when she told him not to worry, but he also knew that he would worry anyway.
The Captain would be unlikely to sympathize, because he didn't understand it. Captain Call had always been a single man. He had no one to miss, much less anyone to worry about.
'I never finished cleaning those guns,' Pea Eye said distractedly, looking down at his wife. August, the youngest boy, not yet two, came wandering into the kitchen just then. He was rubbing his eyes with his fists.
'Hongry,' he said, only half awake.
He began to crawl into his mother's lap.
'You cleaned them enough to smell like gun grease all night,' Lorena said. August had a runny nose, and she held out her hand for Pea Eye's rag.
'This is a dishrag,' he said, still distracted.
'It was--now it's a snot rag,' Lorena said. August arched his back and tried to duck away--he hated having his nose wiped. But his mother was too skilled for him. She pinned him to her with an elbow and wiped it anyway.
'You should take care of your weapons, if you're going after a killer,' she said. 'I don't want you neglecting important things, even if I complain about you being smelly.' 'I don't want to go,' Pea Eye said.
'I just don't want to go, this time.' There was a silence, broken only by August's whimpering, and the soft
