Cattle ranching was the new thing--hundreds of thousands of Texas cattle were being driven north every year now. Once, while in San Antonio, he and Gus had ridden out with Captain King to watch one of his herds pass--some four thousand cattle in all. They were being skillfully handled by experienced vaqueros, a sight that interested Call but immediately bored Gus, for the vaqueros were mainly letting the cattle graze along at their own pace.
'Watching weeds turn brown is more interesting than this,' Augustus said. 'I could have stayed in the saloon and looked out the window at a donkey eating a prickly pear. It would have been just as much fun, and besides, I'd be drunk.' This sally caused Captain King to laugh heartily.
'Use your mind's eye, Captain,' he said. 'Think of the East, the teeming millions.' 'The what?' Gus asked.
'The people, sir,' Captain King said. 'The millionaires and the beggars. The English, the Irish, the Italians, the Poles--the Swedes and the Jews. People in the finest New York mansions will soon be eating this beef. The cooks in Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington will soon be cooking it.' 'Why, what a bother--y'd take cattle all that way so a bunch of foreigners can eat beef? Let them grow their own beef, I say.' 'But there's no room, sir--the East is mighty crowded,' Captain King explained.
'Beef is what will bring Texas back from the war. Cotton won't do it. There's too damn much cotton in the world now. But beef? That's different. All the starving Irish who have never tasted anything except the potato in their entire lives will pay for beef.' 'Me, I'd rather have whores,' Augustus said.
'Me, sorting dry goods, no thank you,' Augustus had said, when Call once mentioned the possibility of their buying a store. He had given a similarly dismissive reply to several other ideas Call had floated. Only the notion of running a livery stable seemed to arouse his interest, if only because--z Gus envisioned the enterprise--there would be Pea Eye and Deets to do the work, whereas he would take the money to the bank and perhaps wet his whistle, against the drought, on the way back.
The thought of owning a livery stable affected Gus much as the thought of the beef-eating millionaires affected Captain King. Every time a livery stable was mentioned, around the bunkhouse, Gus would get a light in his eye and would soon be spinning notions that made the contemplated livery stable unlike any Call, or Pea, or Deets had ever seen.
'Of course, we wouldn't have to just rent horses,' he said, one blazing day when the group of them were sitting in the shade of a big mesquite, behind the bunkhouse.
'No, we could rent a mule or two, if we had a couple,' Call allowed, only to draw from Augustus the look of scorn he reserved for the hopelessly unimaginative.
'I wasn't talking about mules, Woodrow,' he said. 'A mule is just a lesser horse, and so is a donkey.' 'They may be lesser, but a lot of people would rather rent a mule than a horse, I imagine,' Pea Eye said. 'A mule won't step in a hole, and a horse will.' 'You're out of your depth when it comes to commerce, Pea,' Gus said. 'You should keep your tongue back there behind your teeth.' Call was puzzled.
'What other kind of animls would you be renting, then?' he asked, though he knew Augustus was probably just launching into one of the elaborate leg pulls he loved so much. He particularly loved them when he had the credulous Deets and Pea to confound and dumbfound.
'Well, we could rent sheep and goats and laying hens,' Augustus said, without hesitation.
'Laying hens? Why would anybody pay to rent a hen?' Call asked.
'It could be that a salesman had just come to town for a few days,' Gus said. 'He might want a nice raw egg with his coffee andof course he'd prefer it to be fresh. We could rent him a hen for a day or two so he'd have his egg.' The answer had a certain logic to it--sch a thing could happen, though Call knew it never would.
That was the devilish thing about arguing with Augustus: he could always come up with answers that made sense about schemes that would never happen.
'How much would I have to pay if I was to rent a hen from you for a day or two, Gus?' Pea Eye asked.
'If it was one of those nice speckled hens I expect I'd require a quarter a day,' Augustus said. 'If it was just one of those plain brown hens I might let you rent her for fifteen cents.' 'All right, but why would anyone want to rent a sheep or a goat?' Dan Connor asked. He was a small, feisty ranger who had joined the troop after Jake left.
'Well, our same salesman might want a sheep around because the odor of sheep repels mosquitoes,' Augustus said. 'He might want to hitch a sheep at the foot of his bed so the skeeters wouldn't bite him too hard.' That answer, which Augustus delivered with a straight face, stopped conversation for a while, as the various rangers tried to remember if they had slept free of mosquitoes while there was a sheep around. Of course, there .were no sheep in Austin, and very few anywhere in Texas, so the theory was hard to test.
'What would a goat do, then?' Pea Eye inquired.
'Goats eat up the trash,' Deets ventured, unexpectedly. Though he always listened intently to the general conversation, he rarely contributed a remark, especially not if one of the captains was around. Alone with Pea Eye, though, Deets had plenty to say.
'That's it, Deets--t's it,' Augustus declared. 'Your salesman might have some old ledgers or a few bills of lading he wants to dispose of. We'd rent him a goat for thirty cents a day and the problem would be solved.' 'How about pigs, then, Captain?' Dan Connor asked. 'A pig has got as good an appetite as a goat. How much would a pig rent for?' At that Augustus looked stern.
'Oh, we wouldn't be renting no pigs, couldn't afford to, Dan,' he said. 'It might lead to lawsuits.' 'Why would renting a pig lead to lawsuits?' Call asked. He had had enough of the conversation and was about to take a walk, but he thought he would hear how Augustus justified his remark about pigs and lawsuits.
'Now the difficulty with a pig is that it's smarter than most human beings and it has a large appetite,' Gus said. 'A pig might even eat a customer, if the customer was drunk and not alert. Or it might at least eat one of his legs, if it was in the mood to snack. Or it could eat his coat off, or swallow the nice belt buckle his wife had given him for his birthday, which would get him in trouble at home and cause a passel of bad feelings. Even if it didn't mean a lawsuit it might cause him to tell all his friends not to rent from us, which could mean a sag in the profits.' At that point Call walked off, as Gus was regaling his audience with his wildest scheme yet, which was to locate a zebra somewhere and teach it to pull a wagon, after which they could rent the zebra and the wagon together at a steep price for all manner of festivities.
'It might work for weddings,' Augustus allowed. 'We could teach it to pull the buggy that the bride and groom ride in.' 'As I recall, you walked to your weddings,' Call said. 'I doubt anyone in this part of the country could afford to rent a zebra, even if we had one, which we don't.' The one point the two of them agreed on was that their future, once they left the rangers, would not be spent in Austin. They had been there too long, seen too much of
