'Then you should have picked a cattleman to mention it to,' Augustus said. 'Not two old laws like us.'
'Hell, you're cattlemen now,' Jake said. 'All it takes is cows.'
'Are you aiming to marry Lorie?' Augustus asked, changing his tack.
'Marry her?' Jake asked, astonished. 'Why would I marry her?'
'You could do worse,' Augustus said. 'An old scamp like you's apt to break down any time. It would be nice to have a young woman to rub your back and bring you soup.'
'I ain't near as old as you,' Jake reminded him. 'Why don't you marry her?' It was talk he didn't care to hear.
Swift Bill Spettle had let a horse kick him that morning and had a knot on his forehead as big as a goose egg.
'You best let Bol rub some ointment on that bump,' Call suggested. The Spettle boys were mighty green, but they were not afraid to work.
Call got up and went to get his supper. As soon as he left, Augustus stretched his legs and grinned at Jake.
'I played a hand with Lorie this afternoon,' he said. 'I believe you've made her restless, Jake.'
'How's that?'
'She does seem to be looking forward to San Francisco,' Augustus said.
Jake felt himself getting more and more peevish. Lorena should have known better than to play cards with Gus, or even to talk to him, though she could hardly be blamed for listening. It was well known that Gus would talk to a stump if he couldn't find a human.
'I doubt she'll want to spend no time in San Antonio,' Augustus said. 'That's where she was before she came here, and women don't like to go backwards. Most women will never back up an inch their whole lives.'
'I can't see that it's any of your affair what we do,' Jake said. 'I guess she'd go to San Antonio if I say to. If she don't, she'll just get left.
'Bring her on the drive,' Augustus said. 'She might like Montany. Or if she gets tired of looking at the ass end of these cows, you could always stop in Denver.'
It was something, the talent Gus had for saying the very thing that a man might have been half thinking. Jake had more than once considered Denver, regretted more than once that he hadn't stopped there instead of going to Fort Smith. Going along with a drive would be a good enough way to get back to Denver. Of course, that didn't settle the question of Lorie, exactly.
'You know as well as I do Call would never allow no woman in this camp,' he said. It was surprising that Gus would even suggest such a thing.
'Call ain't God,' Augustus said. 'He don't have to get his way every day of the month. If she was my sweetheart, I'd bring her, and if he didn't like it he could bite himself.'
'You couldn't afford her, Gus, no better card player than you are,' Jake said, standing up. 'I believe I'll go to town. I don't feel like bumping around Mexico tonight.'
Without another word he got his horse and left. Call watched him go and walked back over to Gus. 'Do you think he'll come on the drive?' he asked.
'Not unless you let him bring his girl,' Augustus said.
'Why, is Jake that crazy?' Call asked. 'Does he want to bring that girl?'
'It never occurred to him, but it has now,' Augustus said. 'I invited her.'
Call was impatient to get off, but Gus's remark stopped him. Gus was never one to do the usual, but this was stretching things, even for him.
'You done what?'
'Told him he ought to bring Lorie along,' Augustus said. 'She'd improve the company.'
'I won't have it,' Call said at once. 'Goddamn you. You know better than that.'
'Ain't you late for work?' Augustus asked. 'I can't enjoy the night for all this jabbering.'
Call decided it was some joke. Even Gus wouldn't go that far. 'I'm going,' he said. 'You watch this end.'
Augustus lay back, his head against his saddle. It was a clear night, the stars just beginning to appear. Needle, Bert, Pea, Deets and Dish were waiting to go to Mexico. The rest of the boys were holding the herd. Bol was peeing on the campfire, causing it to sputter. Call turned his horse and rode toward the river.
19.
NEWT'S MIND had begun to dwell on the north for long stretches. Particularly at night, when he had nothing to do but ride slowly around and around the herd, listening to the small noises the bedded cattle made, on the sad singing of the Irishmen, he thought of the north, trying to imagine what it must be like.
He had grown up with the sun shining, with mesquite and chaparral, armadillos and coyotes, Mexicans and the shallow Rio Grande. Only once had he been to a city: San Antonio. Deets had taken him on one of his banking trips, and Newt had been in a daze from all there was to see.
Once, too, he had gone with Deets and Pea to deliver a small bunch of horses to Matagorda Bay, and had seen the great gray ocean. Then, too, he had felt dazed, staring at the world of water.
But even the sight of the ocean had not stirred him so much as the thought of the north. All his life he had heard talk of the plains that had no end, and of Indians and buffalo and all the creatures that lived on them. Mr. Gus had even talked of great bears, so thick that bullets couldn't kill them, and deerlike creatures called elk, twice the size of ordinary deer.
Now, in only a few days, he would be going north, a prospect so exciting that for hours at a stretch he was taken away from himself, into imaginings. He continued to do his normal work, although his mind wasn't really on it. He could imagine himself and Mouse out in a sea of grass, chasing buffalo. He could scare himself to the point where his breath came short, just imagining the great thick beans.
Before the Irishmen had been there a week, he had made friends with Sean O'Brien. At first the conversation was one-sided, for Sean was full of worries and prone to talking a blue streak; once he found that Newt would listen and not make fun of him, the talk gushed out, most of it homesick talk. He missed his dead mother and said over and over again that he would not have left Ireland if she hadn't died. He would cry immediately at the thought of his mother, and when Newt revealed that his mother was also dead, the friendship became closer.
'Did you have a pa?' Newt asked one day, as they were resting by the river after a stretch of branding.
'Yes, I had one, the bastard,' Sean said grimly. 'He only came home when he was a mind to beat us.'
'Why would he beat you?' Newt asked.
'He liked to,' Sean said. 'He was a bastard, Pa. Beat Ma and all of us whenever he could catch us. We laid for him once and was gonna brain him with a shovel, but he was a lucky one. The night was dark and we never seen him.'
'What happened to him?' Newt asked.
'Ha, the drunkard,' Sean said. 'He fell down a well and drownded. Saved us killing him and going to jail, I guess.'
Newt had always missed having a father, but the fact that Sean spoke so coldly of his put the matter in a different light. Perhaps he was not so unlucky, after all.
He was riding around the herd when Jake Spoon trotted past on his way to Lonesome Dove.
'Going to town, Jake?' Newt asked.
'Yes, I think I will,' Jake said. He didn't stop to pass the time; in a second he was out of sight in the shadows. It made Newt's spirits fall a little, for Jake had seldom said two words to him since he came back. Newt had to admit that Jake was not much interested in him, or the rest of them either. He gave the impression of not exactly liking any thing around the Hat Creek outfit.
Listening to the talk around the campfire at night, Newt learned that the cowboys were unanimously hostile to Jake for fixing it so that Lorena was no longer a whore. Dish, he knew, was particularly riled, though Dish never said much when the other boys were talking about it:
'Hell,' Needle said, 'there never was but one thing worth doing on this border, and now a man can't even do that.'
