When they left, he went off dutifully to make his rounds. Augustus hitched the new mules to the new wagon. The streets of San Antonio were silent and empty as they left. The moon was high and a couple of stray goats nosed around the walls of the old Alamo, hoping to find a blade of grass. When they had first come to Texas in the Forties people had talked of nothing but Travis and his gallant losing battle, but the battle had mostly been forgotten and the building neglected.
'Well, Call, I guess they forgot us, like they forgot the Alamo,' Augustus said.
'Why wouldn't they?' Call asked. 'We ain't been around.'
'That ain't the reason-the reason is we didn't die,' Augustus said. 'Now Travis lost his fight, and he'll get in the history books when someone writes up this place. If a thousand Comanches had cornered us in some gully and wiped us out, like the Sioux just done Custer, they'd write songs about us for a hundred years.'
It struck Call as a foolish remark. 'I doubt there was ever a thousand Comanches in one bunch,' he said. 'If there had been they would have taken Washington, D.C.'
But the more Augustus thought about the insults they had been offered in the bar-a bar where once they had been hailed as heroes-the more it bothered him.
'I ought to have given that young pup from Mobile a rap or two,' he said.
'He was just scared,' Call said. 'I'm sure Tobe will lecture him next time he sees him.'
'It ain't the pint, Woodrow,' Augustus said. 'You never do get the pint.'
'Well, what is it, dern it?' Call asked.
'We'll be the Indians, if we last another twenty years,' Augustus said. 'The way this place is settling up it'll be nothing but churches and dry-goods stores before you know it. Next thing you know they'll have to round up us old rowdies and stick us on a reservation to keep us from scaring the ladies.'
'I'd say that's unlikely,' Call said.
'It's dern likely,' Augustus said. 'If I can find a squaw I like, I'm apt to marry her. The thing is, if I'm going to be treated like an Indian, I might as well act like one. I think we spent our best years fighting on the wrong side.'
Call didn't want to argue with nonsense like that. They were nearly to the edge of town, passing a few adobe hovels where the poorer Mexicans lived. In one of them a baby cried. Call was relieved to be leaving. With Gus on the prod, anything could happen. In the country, if he got mad and shot something, it would probably be a snake, not a rude bartender.
'We didn't fight on the wrong side,' Call said. 'What's a miracle is that you stayed on the right side of the law for as long as you have. Jake's too cowardly to be much of an outlaw, but you ain't.'
'I may be one yet,' Augustus said. 'It'd be better than ending up like Tobe Walker, roping drunks for a living. Why, the man nearly cried when we left, he wanted to come so bad. Tobe used to be quick, and look at him now, fat as a gopher.'
'It's true he's put on weight, but then Tobe was always chunky built,' Call said. On that one, though, he suspected Gus was right. Tobe had looked at them sadly when they mounted to ride away.
43.
AS FAR AS ROSCOE WAS CONCERNED, travel started bad and got worse. For one thing, it seemed he would never find Texas, a fact that preyed on his mind. From all indications it was a large place, and if he missed it he would be laughed out of Fort Smith-assuming he ever got back.
When he started out, he supposed that the easiest way to find Texas would be just to ask the settlers he encountered, but the settlers proved a remarkably ignorant lot. Most of them seemed never to have been more than a few hundred feet from the place they happened to be settled. Many were unable to give directions to the next settlement, much less to a place as remote as Texas. Some were able to point in the general direction of Texas, but after riding a few miles, dodging thickets and looking for suitable crossings on the many creeks, Roscoe could not be sure he was still proceeding in that direction.
Fortunately the problem of direction was finally solved one afternoon when he ran into a little party of soldiers with a mule team. They claimed to be heading for someplace called Buffalo Springs, which was in Texas. There were only four soldiers, two horseback and two in the wagon, and they had relieved the tedium of travel by getting drunk. They were generous men, so generous that Roscoe was soon drunk too. His relief at finding men who knew where Texas was caused him to imbibe freely. He was soon sick to his stomach. The soldiers considerately let him ride in the wagon-not much easier on his stomach, for the wagon had no springs. Roscoe became so violently ill that he was forced to lie flat in the wagon bed with his head sticking out the back end, so that when the heaves hit him he could vomit, or at least spit, without anyone losing time.
An afternoon passed in that way, with Roscoe alternately vomiting and lying on his back in the wagon, trying to recover his equilibrium. When he lay on his back the hot sun beat right down in his face, giving him a hard headache. The only way to block the sun was to put his hat over his face, but when he did that the close atmosphere in the hat, which smelled like the hair lotion Pete Peters, the barber back in Fort Smith, had used liberally, made him sick to his stomach again.
Soon Roscoe had nothing left in him to throw up but his guts, and he was expecting to see them come up any time. When he finally sat up, feeling extremely weak, he found that they had come to the banks of a wide, shallow river. The soldiers had ignored his illness, but they couldn't ignore the river.
'This is the Red,' one soldier said. 'That's Texas right across yonder.'
Roscoe crawled out of his wagon, thinking to ride Memphis across, but found he couldn't make the climb into the saddle. Of course, Memphis was a tallish horse, but normally the saddle was reachable. Suddenly it wavered in the heat. It wasn't that the saddle was rising, it was that Roscoe's legs were sinking. He found himself sitting on the ground, holding to one stirrup.
The soldiers laughed at his plight and pitched him on Memphis as if he were a sack of potatoes.
'It's a good thing you run into us, Deputy,' one soldier said. 'If you'd kept on going west into the Territory, the dern Indians would have got you and et your testicles off.'
'Et my what?' Roscoe asked, appalled at the casual way the soldier dropped such a terrible remark.
'I've heard that's what occurs if you let 'em catch you alive,' the soldier said.
'Well, what's the Indian situation in Texas then?' Roscoe asked. The soldiers seemed completely uninformed on the subject. They were from Missouri. All they knew about Indians was that they liked to do bad things to white captives. One mentioned that a soldier he knew had been shot with an arrow at such close range that the arrow went in one ear and the point came out the other side of the soldier's head.
The soldiers seemed to enjoy telling such stories, but Roscoe couldn't share their enthusiasm. He lay awake most of the night, thinking about testicles and arrows in the head.
The next afternoon the soldiers turned west, assuring him that he only had to hold a course southwest and he would eventually hit San Antonio. Though recovered from his drunk, he didn't feel very vigorous-lack of proper sleeping conditions was slowly breaking down his health, it seemed.
That evening, as dusk was falling, he was about to reconcile himself to another night spent propped against a tree. He didn't like sleeping sitting up, but it meant he could be up and running quicker, if the need arose. But before he could select a tree to lean against he spotted a cabin a little distance ahead.
When he approached, he saw an old man with a tobacco-stained beard sitting on a stump skinning a small animal-a possum, as it turned out. Roscoe felt encouraged. The old man was the first person he had seen in Texas, and perhaps would be a source of accurate information about the road.
'Howdy,' he said loudly, for the old man had not looked up from his skinning and Roscoe considered it dangerous to take people by surprise.
The old man didn't look up, but a form appeared in the doorway of the cabin-a girl, Roscoe thought, though in the dusk he couldn't be sure.
'Mind if I stop for the night?' Roscoe asked, dismounting.
The old man squinted at him briefly. 'If you want supper you'll have to kill your own varmint,' he said. 'And leave the gal alone, she's mine, bought and paid for.'
That struck Roscoe as strange. The old man's manner was anything but friendly. 'Well, it's a little too late to go possum-huntin',' Roscoe said, trying to make light talk. 'I've got a biscuit I can eat.'
