swarming with thieves.' The Governor stopped talking and looked at the two men solemnly.
'There won't be many men staying here, not if they're able-bodied, and not if the war lasts as long as I think it will,' he said. 'They'll be off looking for glory. Some of them will find it and most of the rest of them will die in the mud.' 'But the South will win, won't it, Governor?' Augustus asked. 'I would hate to think the damn Yankees could whip us.' 'They might, sir--they might,' the Governor said.
'Half the people in Texas come from the Northern part of the country,' Call observed. 'Look at Lee Hitch. There's hundreds like him. Who do you think they'll fight for?' 'There will be confusion such as none of us expected to have to live through,' the Governor said.
'That could have been prevented, but it wasn't, so now we'll have to suffer it.' He paused and gave them another solemn inspection.
'I want you to stay with the rangers, gentlemen,' he said. 'Texas has never needed you more. The people respect you and depend on you, and we're still a frontier state.' Augustus let bitterness fill him, for a moment; bitterness and grief. He remembered the cheap dusty room Nellie had just died in.
'If we're so respected, then the state ought to pay us better,' he said. 'We've been rangers a long time now and we're paid scarcely better than we were when we started out. My wife just died in a room scarcely fit for dogs.' You could have afforded better if you'd been careful with your money, Call thought, but he didn't say it; in fact Augustus's criticism was true.
Their salaries were only a little larger than they had been when they were raw beginners.
'I wouldn't go to no war looking for glory,' Gus said. 'But I might go if the pay was good.' 'I take your point,' the Governor said.
'It's a scandal that you've been paid so poorly.
I'll see that it's raised as soon as the legislature sits--if we still have a legislature when the smoke clears.' There was a long pause--in the distance there was the sound of gunshots. The rowdies were still celebrating.
'Will you stay, gentlemen?' the Governor asked. 'The Comanches will soon find out about this war, and the Mexicans too. If they think the Texas Rangers have disbanded, they'll be at us from both directions, thick as fleas on a dog.' Call realized that he and Augustus had not had a moment to discuss the future, or their prospects as soldiers, or anything. They had scarcely had a minute alone, since Nellie McCrae got sick.
'I can't speak for Captain McCrae but I have no wish to desert my duties,' Call said.
'I have no quarrel with the Yankees, that I know of, and no desire to fight them.' 'Thank you, that's a big relief,' the Governor said. 'I recognize it's a poor time to ask, but what about you, Captain McCrae?' Augustus didn't answer--he felt resentful. From the moment, years before on the llano, when Inish Scull abruptly made him a captain, it seemed that, every minute, people had pressed him for decisions on a host of matters large and small. It might be trivial--someone might want to know which pack mules to pack--or it might be serious, like the question the Governor had just asked him. He was from Tennessee. If Tennessee were to join the war, he might want to fight with the Tennesseeans; not having heard from home much in recent years, he was not entirely sure which side Tennessee would line up with. Now the Governor was wanting him to stay in Texas, but he wasn't ready to agree. He had lost two wives in Texas--not to mention Clara, who, in a way, made three. Why would he want to stay in a place where his luck with wives was so poor? His luck with cards hadn't been a great deal better, he reflected.
'I assure you there'll be an improvement in the matter of salaries,' the Governor said.
'I'll raise you even if I have to pay you out of my own pocket until this crisis passes.' 'Let it pass--there'll just be another one right behind it,' Augustus said, irritably. 'It's just been one crisis after another, the whole time I've been rangering.' Then he stood up--fed up. He felt he had to get outside or else choke.
'I've got to get my wife decently buried, Governor,' he said. 'She won't keep, not with the weather this warm. I expect I'll stay with Woodrow and go on rangering, but I ain't sure. I just ain't sure, not right this minute. I agree with Woodrow--allyankees are still Americans, and I'm used to fighting Comanche Indians or else Mexicans.' He paused a moment, remembering his family.
'I've got two brothers, back in Tennessee,' he added. 'If my brothers was to fight with the Yankees, I wouldn't want to be shooting at them, I know that much.' Governor Clark sighed.
'Go home, Captain,' he said. 'Bury your wife. Then let me know what you decide.' 'All right, Governor,' Augustus said.
'I wish there was a good sheriff here. He ought to arrest those fools who are shooting off their guns in the street.'
Inish Scull--Hoppity Scull, as he was known in Boston, because he was still occasionally seized by involuntary fits of hopping; they might occur at a wedding or a dinner party or even while he was rowing, in which case he hopped into the chilly Charles--was walking across Harvard Yard, a copy of Newton's Opticks in his hand, when a student ran up to him with the news that war had been declared.
'Why the Southern rascals!' Scull exclaimed, after hearing of the provocation that had occurred.
His mind, though, was still on optics, where it had been much of the time since Ahumado had removed his eyelids. He had just spent three years making a close study of the eye, sight, light, and everything having to do with vision--Harvard had even been prompted to ask him to teach a course on optics, which is what he had been doing just before news of the Southern insurrection reached him. He was wearing his goggles, of course; even in the thinner light of Boston a chance ray of sunlight could cause him intense pain; the headaches, when they came, still blinded him for days. He was convinced, though, from his study of the musculature of the eye, that his experiment with the Swiss surgeon and the frog membrane need not have failed. He had been planning to go back to Switzerland, armed with new knowledge and also better membranes, to try again.
But the news that the spindly student had brought him, once it soaked in, drove optics, in all their rich complexity, out of Inish Scull's mind. The excitement in Cambridge was general; even the streets of Boston, usually silent as a cemetery, rang with talk. Scull rarely walked home, but today he did, growing more excited with every step. He still had his commission in the army of the United States; the thought of battle made a sojourn in Switzerland seem pallid. He longed to lead men again, to see the breaths of cavalry horses condense in white clouds on cold mornings, to ride and curse and shoot under the old flag, Bible and sword.
When he flung open the door of the great house on Beacon Hill, the house where he had been born and been raised, the sight that greeted him was one to arouse ardor, but not of a military kind.
Inez Scull, entirely bored with Boston, was striding up and down the long, gloomy entrance hall, naked from the waist down, slashing at the Scull family portraits with a quirt.
