When the Captain wasn't around, things were apt to go wrong.
Several horses might turn up lame at the same time, or a man might develop pleurisy, or the hunters might be unable to bring in any game.
'I guess it will upset Brookshire,' Pea Eye said. It was easy to see that Brookshire set great store by the Captain's judgment.
'Yes, I expect so,' Call said. 'But he's a grown man, and he knows how to make a fire.
'You'll have to watch that you don't fall asleep on guard duty,' he added, mildly. 'The others haven't had your experience. You don't want to let anybody slip up on you.' 'Not with the manburner on the loose,' Pea Eye said. 'Where do you want us to go?' 'Go back to where we were, only circle down into Mexico,' Call said. 'You'll be safer, at least from Mox Mox. That village just across from Presidio is where Joey Garza's mother lives. I think that's where we'll catch him.' 'What if he gets there before you do?' Pea Eye asked.
'Wait,' Call said. 'Circle south of the village and camp on the Rio Concho about half a day away. I'll find you.' 'That don't sound too hard,' Pea Eye said.
But the melancholy wouldn't leave him; it only got stronger. The Captain was going one way, and sending him another. It was a sign of trust, that the Captain would leave him in charge of the men. There was nothing exceptional about splitting up a company, either. That had happened many times, in the old days.
'This is not the end of the world,' Lorena often told him, when she was trying to boost his spirits after some quarrel or mistake. 'It's not the end of the world, Pea. Just pick up and keep going.' Pea Eye felt that Lorena didn't understand how much their fights or his mistakes saddened him.
She would get busy with the children, or start studying her schoolwork, and the quarrel would go out of her mind.
She would become cheerful again so quickly that it would make Pea Eye feel a little lonely. Hurts didn't go out of his mind that quickly, particularly if he was the cause of them. They seemed to settle in his throat, like gravel in a chicken's craw. Often, his feelings of absence or confusion would linger so long in his breast, while Lorena and the children went on with their lives, moving around him as if he wasn't there, that Pea Eye had a hard time feeling he was in their lives at all. He would begin to feel he was just some stranger who happened to be staying where his family lived.
Often, too, it would not be until the next day, when some child jumped in his lap or came to him with a problem, that he would recover a sense of being connected to them.
As the Captain went about preparing to leave--they had bought a couple of extra rifles in Presidio, and the Captain took one of them and a good supply of ammunition--Pea Eye felt the same sadness tightening his throat that he felt at home when Lorena tried to assure him that his world wasn't coming to an end.
Lorena could say that to him all she liked, but her saying it didn't take away Pea Eye's feelings that the world might be coming to an end anyway.
As he grew older, he felt more keenly how hard it was to know anyone. Lorena and the Captain, in turn, let him stay with them and share their lives. But Lorena and the Captain were complete, in a way that he wasn't, and being complete, they didn't realize how partial he felt. He was not as good as they were, not as smart and not as strong.
They might know him, but he felt he would never be much good at knowing them. Often, in bed at night, listening to Lorena breathe and feeling her body warming his, tears would come to his eyes, from the sense that he didn't know his Lorena. He didn't, and he never would. He felt grateful, though, that she was letting him stay with her, and glad that they had the children and the farm.
But it didn't mean that the world wasn't coming to an end, or that it wouldn't.
Pea Eye didn't attempt to tell the Captain how he felt, though. The Captain was preparing to leave, and he didn't linger when he had someplace to go.
'I'll meet you on the other side of the river,' Call said. 'If I don't have too much aggravation with Mox Mox, I wouldn't think I'd be gone much more than a week.' 'Don't neglect any killers,' Roy Bean admonished. He was swaddled in his buffalo robe, the cocked pistol still in his hand.
'You oughtn't to leave that pistol cocked,' Pea Eye said, as they watched the Captain lope away to the east. 'You might have a bad dream and jerk and shoot your knee off.' 'It might rain whores out of the sky, too, but I doubt it,' Roy Bean said.
Joey Garza watched Captain Call's departure through a telescope he had taken off the train from San Angelo. The telescope had belonged to an old man with stringy gray hair, who protested so much when Joey took it that Joey shot him. He had not intended to kill anybody when he stopped the train; he'd only wanted to add to his treasures. If the old man had surrendered the telescope peacefully, Joey wouldn't have killed him. The old man claimed to be a teacher. He said he taught about the stars, and needed the telescope in order to study the stars.
He was bound for Fort Davis, where the stars were easier to see, or so he said. He offered to give Joey all his money if Joey would leave him the telescope.
'You see, I can't get another, not in these parts,' the man said. 'I had to send to England for this one.' Joey thought he was just a disagreeable old man, so he shot him and took the telescope and the money, too. Apart from two or three good watches, the telescope was the only thing on that particular train that Joey felt was worth stealing. He hoped that by going east, closer to the cities of the Texans, he would find better things on the trains he robbed. But if San Angelo was any example, this theory was no good. The train mainly held cowboys, who were being sent to some large ranch. None of the cowboys had anything of value. Sometimes Joey took fine spurs, but the spurs these cowboys wore were of no interest.
Even their saddles were poor. So he took the telescope, and the little stand that it rested on, killed the old man, and left.
That night, he used the telescope to look at the stars. He had to admit that the old man had been telling the truth. The telescope brought the stars much closer. When Joey pointed it at the moon, the results were even better. He could see what seemed to be mountains on the moon. The surface of the moon looked a little like the country where the Apaches had taken him. It was pretty bare.
The best use of the telescope, though, was to look at men. He concealed his mother's spotted pony in a gully, before pointing the telescope at Roy Bean's door. By adjusting it a little, he could see with great clarity. He saw the famous Captain Call come out with his tall friend, and get ready to leave. He saw the Captain take an extra
