'I'll be lucky not to get fired,' Brookshire said--he was mainly just thinking out loud.
'Why? Pea Eye was never your responsibility,' Call said. 'You never even met the man, and can't be blamed for the fact that he married and settled down.' 'I can be blamed for anything,' Brookshire assured him. 'I'm one of those people everybody blames, when there's a misfortune.' For several minutes he sat with his head down, feeling sorry for himself. It seemed to him that life was nothing but one misfortune after another, and he got blamed for them all. He had been the seventh boy in a family of eight children. His mother had blamed him for not being the little girl she had hoped for; his father blamed him for not being able to go out in the world and get rich. His brothers blamed him for being a runt; and in the army, he was blamed for being a coward.
That one was fair, he had to admit. He was a coward, more or less. Fisticuffs appalled him, and gunfire alarmed him violently. He didn't like storms or lightning, and preferred to live on the first floor of apartment buildings, so escape would be easier in case of fire. He had been afraid that Katie wouldn't marry him, and once she did, he began to fear she would leave him, or else die.
But of all the things he had managed to be frightened of in his life, Colonel Terry's anger was unquestionably the most powerful.
Brookshire feared the Terry temper so much that he would rather bite his tongue off than give the Colonel even the smallest particle of bad news.
Call didn't doubt what Brookshire said.
A man who couldn't even control his hat was likely to attract a lot of blame. In that respect, Call reflected, Brookshire was not unlike Pea Eye himself. Pea had a strange tendency to assume that any bad turn of fortune was probably his fault. On the long cattle drive to Montana, various things happened that could not easily have been prevented.
One morning the little Texas bull that all the cowboys feared got into a fight with a grizzly.
The grizzly definitely didn't fear the bull; the fight was more or less a draw, though the bull got much of his hide ripped off, in the process of holding his own.
For reasons that no one could fathom, Pea Eye decided the encounter was his fault. He felt he should either have roped the bull, or shot the bear, though neither, in Call's view, would have been sensible procedure. If he had roped the bull, it might well have jerked Pea's horse down, in which case the bear would have got them both. If Pea had tried to kill the grizzly with a sidearm, the bear might have turned on the cowboys, instead of on the bull.
Five years and more later, Pea Eye was still worrying about his role in the encounter. What it showed was that people weren't sensible, when it came to assigning or assuming blame.
People were rarely sensible about anything, in Call's opinion. He had taken, he thought, a sensible approach to Pea Eye's desertion while he was actually in the man's presence--but now that he wasn't actually faced with his old corporal, Call found that his anger was rising. He had taken Pea Eye into his troop of Rangers when the latter was no more than a boy, too young to be an official member of any military organization.
But, because the boy looked honest, Call had bent the rules, which were more bendable then than they would become.
Now, it seemed, Pea Eye had deserted him in favor of matrimony, and the desertion left a bitter taste in his mouth. Call had supposed that if he could count on any of his old troop, he could count on Pea. Yet it turned out to be Lorena, once a whore, now a schoolteacher, who could count on Pea.
Call had no doubt that Clara Allen had been behind the match, and though fifteen years had passed, he still resented her interference. It was one thing to educate Lorena; whores had as much right to improve themselves as anybody else. But it was another thing to arrange matters so that the girl could take his most trusted helper.
Dish Boggett, the best of the Hat Creek cowboys and far better on horseback than Pea had ever been, had mooned over Lorena for years. Why couldn't Clara have nudged the girl into accepting Dish? Up to that time Pea had shown no great inclination to domesticity, though he briefly courted, or was courted by, a rather bossy widow in the village of Lonesome Dove.
The trail drive had ended that, if there'd been anything to end.
Because of Clara's meddling, or Lorena's boldness, or a combination of the two, Call was riding south with only a Yankee office worker, to go after the most enterprising young bandit to show up on the border in a decade or more.
It galled Call--when he next encountered Pea Eye, he intended to make that clear.
'I regret now that I didn't force him,' Call said to Brookshire. 'It leaves us shorthanded. It's just that I never expected to have to force Pea Eye. He's always followed me, before.' Brookshire noticed that the Captain looked a little tight around the mouth.
'How long has your friend been married?' he asked.
'Fifteen years, I suppose. He had a number of children, though I have not met them,' Call said.
'You have not married yourself, I take it?' Brookshire asked, cautiously. He did not want to annoy the man, as he clearly had earlier in the day by asking him how long he had been a lawman.
'Oh no,' Call said. 'It's one thing I never tried. But you're married, and you're here.
Your wife hasn't stopped you from doing your duty.' 'Why, Katie wouldn't care if I went to China,' Brookshire said. 'She's got her sewing, and then there's the cat. She's very fond of the cat.' Call said nothing. He knew women were sometimes fond of cats, though the reason for the attraction escaped him.
'So what will we do for a second man, now that your deputy has declined?' Brookshire asked. 'Know any good gun hands in San Antonio?' 'Nobody reliable,' Call said. 'I don't know what a gun hand is, but if I ever happened to meet one I doubt I'd want to hire him.' 'No offense,' Brookshire said. 'That's just what we call them in New York.' 'I would rather do the job alone than to take someone unreliable, particularly if we have to go into Mexico,' Call said.
'We might, I guess,' Brookshire said.
'He did rob that train with the governor of Coahuila on it. That was his worst act, after robbing Mr. Stanford.' 'I doubt he knew the governor was on the train,' Call said. 'That was just luck. I doubt he ever heard of Mr. Stanford, either. I hadn't myself, until you mentioned him.' 'Maybe I ought to wire the Colonel,' Brookshire suggested. 'The Colonel could raise an army, if he wanted to. I'm sure he can find us one man.' 'No,' Call said. 'I'll
