being married to a schoolteacher hadn't changed him much. Hundreds of Lorie's looks, like this one, left him baffled.
'See you for supper,' he said, finally.
'If you don't show up, I'll know you changed your mind,' Lorena said. 'He might talk you into going yet.' 'No, he won't talk me into going,' Pea Eye said.
All the same, loping across the plains, he dreaded the meeting he was riding to. It was a fine, crisp day, but Pea Eye didn't feel fine. He had never said no to the Captain, and now he would have to. The Captain wasn't going to like the news, either--the Captain definitely wasn't going to like the news.
When Captain Call saw Pea Eye standing by the railroad track, with no duffle and no firearms, he knew that the moment of change had come. It was an unpleasant shock, but it was not a surprise. Lorena had been tightening her hold on Pea Eye year by year. In the last two years, particularly, Pea Eye's reluctance to accompany him had been evident, and had even begun to affect his work. Half the time on their trips, he was too homesick, or woman- sick, to function as skillfully as he once had, and his skill had its limits, even when he was a young man.
'Well, I guess I've stopped this train for nothing, if you ain't getting on,' Call said.
He was annoyed, and he knew Pea Eye knew it, but since Pea Eye had arrived without his equipment, he saw no profit in forcing the issue.
'I'd better just go,' Call said. 'Good luck with your farm.' He shook Pea Eye's hand and got back on the train, which, in a moment, left. Soon even the caboose had vanished from Pea Eye's view, swallowed up by the sea of grass as surely as a boat would have been by the curving sea.
Pea Eye walked slowly over and caught his horse; it had grazed some distance away. He felt stunned: the Captain was gone. The Captain hadn't even argued with him, though he had looked a good deal put out. Of course, he noticed immediately that Pea hadn't brought his guns.
'Forget your arsenal?' the Captain asked, when he first stepped off the train.
'No, I didn't forget it, I just left it at home,' Pea Eye said. A man in a fedora had been looking out the window of the train, at them. Pea Eye was uncomfortable anyway, and being stared at by a man in a fedora hat didn't help.
'Oh, that's Brookshire, he's with the railroad,' the Captain said, glancing around at the man. 'He'll have to replace that hat, if he expects to travel very far with me. A man who can't keep his hat on his head won't be much help, in Mexico.' 'I guess I won't be being no help in Mexico neither, Captain,' Pea Eye said.
'I've got a wife and five children, and one's a baby. The time's come for me to stay home.' Though Call had been expecting such a decision from Pea Eye for some time, hearing it was still a shock. He had paid Pea especially well on the last few trips, hoping to overcome his reluctance--it took money to farm, and what little Lorena had inherited from Gus must have been long gone by now.
But Call knew Pea Eye too well to suppose that money, or anything else, would prevail much longer. Pea Eye was through with rangering, and Call had to admit that what they were doing was only the shadow of rangering, anyway.
Call always felt angry when he anticipated Pea Eye's desertion--and, in his eyes, it was desertion--but, there by the train tracks, on the windy plain just north of Quanah, he swallowed the anger down, shook Pea Eye's hand, and got back on the train.
The woman had won. In the end, it seemed they always did.
Brookshire was startled when he saw the Captain come back alone. The man looked testy. Then the train pulled away, leaving the tall man and the grazing horses behind, on the prairie.
'What's wrong with your man?' Brookshire asked. 'Was he sick?' 'No, he's not sick, he's married,' Call said. 'Running down bandits don't tempt him no more.' 'But I thought it was arranged,' Brookshire said, more than a little alarmed. His instructions from Colonel Terry had been to let Call bring his man. Pea Eye himself was a legend, in a small way--Brookshire had been looking forward to meeting him. It was said that he had escaped from the Cheyenne Indians and had walked over one hundred miles, naked, to bring help to the other famous ranger, Augustus McCrae. Not many men could have walked one hundred miles naked, in Cheyenne country, and survived. Brookshire doubted that he could walk one hundred miles naked across New Jersey, and yet New Jersey was settled country, and his home state to boot.
He had hoped to meet the man and hear about his adventures. So far, he was certainly not hearing about many of Captain Call's. It would have been entertaining to hear about the hundred-mile walk, but evidently, it was not to be.
'I apologize--he's always been a reliable man,' Call said. 'He served with me more than thirty years--he's the last man I would have thought likely to marry. He never sought women, when he rode with me.' 'Oh well, I married myself,' Brookshire said, thinking of Katie's fat legs. Those legs had once had great appeal to him, but their appeal had diminished over the years. There were times when he missed Katie, and times when he didn't. When he wasn't missing her, he sometimes considered that he had been a fool, to tie himself down. Indeed, he was hoping that one bonus from his long train trip might be a Mexican girl. The popular view in Brooklyn was that Mexican girls were pretty, lively, and cheap.
'Who'll we get to replace him?' he asked, remembering that Colonel Terry expected results--and not next year, either.
Joey Garza had struck seven times, stopping trains in remote areas of the Southwest, where trains were rarely bothered. He had killed eleven men so far, seemingly selecting his victims at random. Seven of the dead had been passengers; the rest, crew. Four of the seven trains had been carrying military payrolls, and one of the seven had Leland Stanford aboard. At that time, Leland Stanford was thought to be the richest man in California. The boy had taken his rings, his watch, and the fine silk sheets off the bed in his private car. He also took his diamond cuff links. Leland Stanford was not a man who took kindly to having his sheets removed by a young Mexican not yet out of his teens. It was Stanford who stoked the fire under Colonel Terry, prompting him to hire expensive help such as Captain Woodrow Call.
It disturbed Brookshire that their plan had already gone awry, though they were still hundreds of miles from the border, and no doubt, many more hundreds of miles from where Joey Garza was to be found, if he was found.
One thing could be said with certainty about Colonel Terry: he did not like for plans to go awry. If some did go awry anyway, someone invariably got blamed, and most of the time that someone was Brookshire.
