'Your men took four. I sell a lot of whiskey out my back door.' 'It's convenient, I guess,' Mox Mox said. He handed over the money. He wanted to stay friendly with the Irishman. In his experience, it was bad policy to offend saloonkeepers.
The real reason Mox Mox led his horse behind the saloon was because he needed a place to mount that wouldn't require him to jump for his stirrup in front of the men. He found just the thing, too, a little lump of sand about two feet high. Usually he managed to mount from the uphill side, so he wouldn't have to jump for the stirrup. That was the awkward thing about being short, he could never forget it. If he was mounting out on the flats, where there was no uphill side, he had to jump for the stirrup, whether he liked it or not.
When he rode back around the saloon, all the men were mounted except Hergardt, who had just crawled out the door. He sat in the snow, crooning a German song he sometimes sang when he was unhappy. Some blood ran out of his ear, on the side where Hardin had hit him.
'Get up, Gardt. We're off to catch that Mexican boy,' Mox Mox said.
Hergardt stumbled up, but fell flat down again before he could reach his horse. Manuel and Oteros managed to hoist him to his feet, but Pedro Jones and Jimmy Cumsa had to help, in order to get him flopped over his horse. Hergardt caught his reins, but dropped them. Pedro Jones had to lead Hergardt's horse.
The mesquite limbs from what had once been old Naiche's hut were still smoldering as Mox Mox and the seven men rode out of Crow Town. The crows were cawing, and the bitter wind still blew.
Brookshire had attended Princeton College for a year. He hadn't the head for it, and knew he hadn't the head for it, but his mother had ambitions for her children: she was determined that he become a college man. She made him a suit, so that he would not look so much like a plain Hoboken boy, and she scraped and scrimped to save the money to send him.
They were not rich, but his father had a decent job on the railroad. He was foreman of the railroad yard in Queens; it had not been Colonel Terry's yard, not then.
Brookshire had only stayed a few months at Princeton College. Even his mother was forced to accept the sad fact that he didn't have the head for it. In later years, it was only in her bitterest moments, after she discovered that his father, like the Colonel, had a Miss Cora tucked away in Queens, that she railed about her son's failure at Princeton.
As he rode up the Rio Concho, with Captain Call and Deputy Plunkert, Brookshire had occasion to remember Princeton College, and to reflect on it. The wind grew colder, and what might have been only a soft snow in the East became a sharp sleet that bit at his face like bees.
In Princeton College, they had talked a good deal about civilization. Those who attended Princeton College were, of course, among the civilized. The New Jersey countryside had been civilized too, though Brookshire hadn't thought much about the civilized New Jersey landscape, or civilization in general, until he found himself freezing on the Rio Concho with Captain Call.
Up to that time, civilization had just been a fancy word that preachers and professors and politicians bruited about.
It wasn't just a word to Brookshire anymore. It was something he had left, and it involved comfortable beds and gas heaters and snug brick buildings, to keep out the wind. It involved meat that had been sliced by a well- trained butcher, and purchased at a butcher shop and cooked by Katie, his wife, now sadly gone, leaving him with no one to cook his chops for him.
Nothing that the professors at Princeton College would have been prepared to call civilization existed on the Rio Concho. Indeed, on the cold stretch where they were, nothing human existed, except themselves. At least the old women in Chihuahua City, staring out of their dusty shawls, had been human. Here, there was only the earth, the sky, and the wind. When night came, it took them an hour to gather enough scanty brushwood to make a decent fire.
The night the ice storm hit, it was so cold that even Captain Call didn't pretend to sleep. They all huddled by the fire, trying to keep it alive. At times, the wind surged so that it seemed the fire might blow away.
Brookshire had never expected to be this cold, and yet, he reflected, only a month before he had been sweltering in Laredo.
'A few weeks ago, I was the hottest I've ever been,' he told the Captain.
'Now, I'm the coldest. It ain't ever moderate down here, is it?' Deputy Plunkert had given up talking.
Every time he opened his mouth, the air came in, so cold that it made his teeth hurt down to the roots.
'No, it's not moderate, much,' Call said.
His knee pained him. The morning before, he had let a mule kick him. Usually he was quick enough to sidestep such kicks, but he hadn't sidestepped this one.
More worrisome to him was the fact that the joints of his fingers had begun to swell, when it got cold.
For most of his life, he had paid no attention to weather; weather was just there. He never let it interfere with his work or his movements. In time, the weather would always change, but the work couldn't wait. Now, it seemed, weather was interfering plenty. When the cold struck, his wrist joints became swollen, and the joints of his fingers, even more so. It had happened to a lesser degree the winter before, and a doctor in Amarillo had told him he had arthritis. The only remedy the doctor suggested was that he wear a copper bracelet, advice Call ignored. Now he wished he had tried it. His finger joints were so swollen on the cold mornings that he had an awkward time buttoning his pants, or pulling his saddle straps tight. Knotting the packs onto the mules had ceased to be a simple task, with his joints so swollen. He tried letting Deputy Plunkert pack the mules, but Deputy Plunkert could not tie a knot that would hold.
Just the day before, they had spotted a mule deer --a big doe. They needed meat, too. Call yanked his rifle out of its scabbard and tried to get off a shot, only to find that the knuckle of his trigger finger had swollen so badly he had to force it through the trigger guard. When he finally got his finger on the trigger, the doe was two hundred yards away, and Call missed.
Sitting by the gusting fire with Brookshire and the deputy, Call rubbed the knuckle. It had not become any less swollen. They still needed meat, too. They were living on jerky, and a few tortillas that were stiff as leather. He looked at the knuckle and was shocked by its size. He thought he might possibly have a thorn in it; mesquite thorns could cause swelling in a joint. But he looked closely and could find no sign of a thorn.
