'Well, I expect I'd better go locate Pea Eye,' Call said. He looked again at the sprightly little girl, and turned his horse.
Later, Teresa took Rafael into the sheep herd and told him that an unusual man had come.
Rafael had been there too, of course, but often he did not know of many things that happened in his presence, until Teresa told him. She stroked her baby chicken and helped Rafael suckle one of the sheep who had just lambed and had much milk.
'I think he must have been the king,' Teresa told her brother. She wasn't sure what a king did, but her mother had read her two storybooks, and one of the books had stories about a king.
'I think he must have been the king,' she said again, as Rafael sucked the ewe.
Famous Shoes had not wanted to go into Presidio.
'The hard sheriff will arrest me,' he told Pea Eye. 'He thinks I stole a horse.
It was a long time ago, but he will remember.' 'We've got to have shells,' Pea Eye reminded him. 'If we don't get shells, we'll starve and never find the Captain.' They'd had a hard trip across the Pecos country. The cold was bitter, and the antelope stayed just out of range, tempting Pea Eye to shoot time after time at animals he couldn't hit. They'd had no food at all for the last thirty miles.
'You're working for the Captain now,' Pea said.
'You're like a deputy. Doniphan won't arrest no deputy of Captain Call's.' But Doniphan, the hard sheriff, came with the one-eared deputy, Tom Johnson, and pointed rifles at them in the hardware store.
Doniphan wore a long mustache and carried two handguns, besides the rifle. The one-eared deputy had a red face, from drink. His life had not been easy since Billy Williams shot off his ear. People mocked him, and Doniphan, his boss, had no sympathy. As everyone on the border knew, Doniphan had been born without sympathy.
'We're here waiting for Captain Call,' Pea Eye said, when he saw the rifles pointed at them. 'We're both deputies. We've been hired to help the Captain bring in Joey Garza.' 'This Indian is a horse thief,' Doniphan said. 'He's escaped me once, because of a fire. He won't escape me again.' 'He's called Famous Shoes because he walks everywhere,' Pea Eye told him. 'He wouldn't steal a horse because he don't use horses. The only use he'd have for one would be to eat it.' 'Stealing horses to eat is still stealing horses,' Doniphan said. 'Start walking toward the jail.' 'I have never stolen a horse in my life,' Pea Eye said. 'Why are you arresting me?' 'Because you're with this horse thief,' the sheriff answered. 'You might be a horse thief, too.' Pea Eye went along to the jail. He felt bad about Famous Shoes. He should have come into the town alone and bought the cartridges. He had ignored the old man's advice, which was foolish of him. Almost every time he ignored someone's advice, whether it was Lorena's or Mr.
Goodnight's or the Captain's or Famous Shoes', he had cause to regret it.
Doniphan put the two prisoners in separate cells.
'Once I hang this old red nigger, and I'll get to it quick, you can go,' Doniphan said.
'I suspect you're a criminal, but I can't prove it.' The next day, several people came to the jail and stared at Famous Shoes. Doniphan had let everyone know the man had been recaptured. He decided to keep the old man on display for a week, as a form of publicity. His boast was that no criminal escaped him. Now he had recaptured the one man who had escaped him.
He decided to hang him publicly, as an example. Normally, he would just have taken him out and yanked him up and let him choke; normally, an old Indian with a taste for horseflesh would not have merited a public hanging. But Famous Shoes' escape was the only escape there had been from Sheriff Doniphan's jail, and he wanted it to be known up and down the border that he had avenged it.
Pea Eye's repeated claim that Famous Shoes worked for Captain Call merely annoyed Doniphan. He left the old man without food for two days, to show his annoyance. When Pea Eye tried to share his frijoles with him, Doniphan moved Famous Shoes a cell away, so that Pea Eye couldn't pass him the food.
'Why are you starving him?' Pea Eye asked.
'All he done was eat a dead horse, and that was years ago.' 'He evaded the law--my law,' Doniphan replied. 'He deserves worse than starving, and he'll get worse than starving, too.' Famous Shoes said nothing. Talking to the hard sheriff was a waste of breath. He began to regret having left the Madre. He knew that his time was near, but was sorry that it might be the hard sheriff who put him to death. He had hoped to die near the Rio Rojo; even though he had not made contact with the spirit of his grandfather, the spirits of many of the Kickapoo people were there, along the river. It would have been a better place to give up his spirit than the jail of the hard sheriff.
Famous Shoes was old, though. He had lived past the time of his people. He knew that few men got to choose the place of their going, or of their coming, either. Only the wisest old men and women of the tribe were able to determine when or where to accept their deaths. Only the wise could do that, but even with those few wise ones, there had to be more than wisdom.
For wisdom, in his view, had ever been a downward path: luck was better than wisdom, while one was alive. It was mainly the lucky who got to die in the right time, or the right place, or so Famous Shoes felt.
He himself had been lucky, for he had lived in the lands of the Mexicans and also the lands of the whites. Both peoples hated Indians, yet he had lived a long life. His main regret was that he had not kept his last wife. She had grown dissatisfied and left him, just as he was beginning to appreciate her attentions. He missed her sorely for many years, and still missed her, when he thought about her.
Also, he would have liked to know how to read. It seemed that his dream of having Pea Eye's wife teach him would be frustrated. The one-eared deputy, who didn't hate him as much as the hard sheriff, let him have an old piece of newspaper that had the book tracks on it.
Famous Shoes tried his best, for what he thought might be the last time, to make sense of the tracks on the paper, but it was no use. He lacked instruction, and he had to give up.
Every time Pea Eye mentioned the Captain, Sheriff Doniphan got a cold look in his eye, and the look in his eye was not very warm to begin with.
'I doubt he'll show up, and if he does, I'm apt to lock him up, too,' he told Pea Eye. 'He's just an old bounty hunter--he ain't the law. He's too old to catch that Mexican boy, anyway.' 'Well, Charlie Goodnight don't think so,' Pea Eye said. He thought that name, at least, might impress Doniphan, but the truth seemed to be that nothing
