'Hair-offs--hair-offs!' Th@er@ese said, coming to the table. 'You first, monsieur,' she said, tapping Augustus on the shoulder.
'All right, I'll volunteer--d I get a shave too?' Gus said.
Th@er@ese didn't answer--she had already marched off to her tent. When she emerged, carrying a razor, a razor strop, and several other tools of the barbering trade, she pulled another chair from under the wagon sheet and insisted that Gus sit on it.
The rangers, most of them now drunk, watched with interest as Th@er@ese vigorously stropped her razor.
'I'm shaggier than Gus, she ought to have barbered me first,' Stove Jones complained.
'What you complaining about? I'll be lucky to even get a shave,' Lee Hitch said, well aware that his bald head offered little incentive to a barber.
Jake Spoon gulped down what was left of the whiskey and went off to sit with Pea Eye and Deets. It .was vexing that Gus McCrae seemed to get the first attentions, if a woman was around. Now the woman was wrapping Gus in a sheet and cooing over him as if he were something special. The sight put Jake in such a hot mood that he picked up three clods and threw them at the blue sow, who had consumed the bull snake and had flopped down under a small bush to rest. The clods missed but Xavier Wanz noticed and immediately walked over to Jake.
'Monsieur!' he said sternly. 'Do not disturb the pig.' 'That's right, it ain't your pig, don't be chunking it,' Gus said, from his barber chair. 'That pig's the pride of the community--it needs its rest.' His pride stung, Jake walked straight past Pea Eye and on toward the river. He had merely thrown three clods at a sow. What right had Gus to speak to him in such a tone? He felt like quitting the rangers on the spot. He could hammer and saw; maybe the French couple would hire him to carpenter. With Gus gone the Frenchwoman might even come to like his curly hair, as Madame Scull once had.
Perhaps she would take him up and teach him the language; he imagined how chagrined Gus McCrae would be if, the next time the rangers stopped in Lonesome Dove, he and Madame Wanz were chattering in French.
'Where do you suppose he's going?' Pea Eye asked, when Jake walked past.
'Could be going to take a wash,' Deets said.
'Now you've run Jake off, picking on him,' Lee Hitch remarked.
'The pup, he's welcome to drown himself for all I care,' Gus said, well aware that he was the envy of the troop, by virtue of having been chosen to receive the first haircut.
Th@er@ese Wanz, though flirtatious in her approach to barbering, was all seriousness when she got down to the business itself. She decided to start with the shave and promptly lathered Gus's face liberally with a nice- smelling soap.
'Boy, this beats that old lye soap,' Gus said, but Th@er@ese rapped his head sharply with her knuckles, indicating that the time for talk was over.
Th@er@ese then shaved him carefully and expertly, not omitting to do some careful work under his nose. Then she wrapped his face in a hot towel and began the haircut, moving his head this way and that, touching him, making him sit up straighter, or insisting that he turn one way or another. With the hot towel steaming on his face and Th@er@ese's deft hands working it with scissors and comb, Gus drifted into a kind of half sleep, in which he allowed himself to imagine that it was Clara doing the barbering. On occasion, dissatisfied with the work of the local barbers, Clara had barbered him, sitting him down on the steps behind the store and scissoring away until she had him looking the way she wanted him to look, a process that took much squinting and inspecting.
Th@er@ese Wanz, more expert than Clara, was also more decisive. When she took the hot towel off his face she produced some small tweezers and began to yank the hairs out of his nose. Gus had never had his nose hairs interfered with before. He was relaxed, half asleep, and a little drunk--the first extraction took him so completely by surprise that he yelped.
His companions had been watching the barbering operation closely, all of them filled with envy. When Th@er@ese yanked out the first nose hair Gus's reaction struck them as the funniest thing they had ever seen. They howled with laughter. Lee Hitch was so amused that a chair could not hold him--he lay on his back on the floor of the saloon, laughing violently. Stove Jones laughed nearly as loud. Far down the street, Jake Spoon heard the laughter and turned, wondering what could be so funny.
Pea Eye and Deets, who had been trimming a gelding's hoof, had not been paying too much attention to the barbering. When they saw the Frenchwoman pulling hairs out of Gus's nose they began to laugh too.
Augustus McCrae, who had been in a pleasurably relaxed state, found that he had suddenly become an object of wild amusement to the men. Th@er@ese, though, brooked no resistance; she finished his nose to her satisfaction and began to yank hairs out of his ears, oblivious to the laughter from the saloon.
She proceeded briskly with her tweezers, seizing a hair and extracting it with the same motion.
Xavier Wanz, standing stiffly behind a bar, thought the men he was serving must be crazy. He had never heard such desperate laughter, and at what? Because his wife was giving their captain the hair-offs? Not knowing quite what to do, he contented himself with folding and refolding his little white towel several times.
The hairs out, Th@er@ese began to rub Gus with an unguent whose smell she liked. The young monsieur had nice hair; she felt she might enjoy entertaining him in her tent for a bit, if only Xavier could be distracted, which didn't seem likely.
Meanwhile, there was business. Once she had combed Gus's hair the way she considered that it ought to be combed, she took the sheet off him and announced that he could stand up.
'One dollars, monsieur,' she said. 'Now you look like a fine cavalier.' Augustus was somewhat startled by the price; he had not expected to pay more than fifty cents for his barbering, in such a place. Many a whore would cost little more than the haircut. But Th@er@ese smiled at him and whisked him off with her little brush. He liked her plump shoulders--why be tight?
'A bargain at the price, ma'am,' he said, and paid her the dollar.
When Call came back to Lonesome Dove with the four carpenters he was surprised to find that the whole troop had been barbered and shaved. Pea Eye was just rising from the chair when he rode up.
