Lonesome Dove

Dish Boggett was sitting at one of the tables with Lorena, hoping to persuade her to give him a poke on credit. Though Dish was barely twenty-two, he wore a walrus mustache that made him look years older than he was, and much more solemn. In color the mustache was stuck between yellow and brown-kind of prairie-dog-colored, Augustus thought. He frequently suggested to Dish that if he wanted to eat prairie dog he ought to remember to pick his teeth, a reference to the mustache whose subtlety was lost on Dish.

Lorena had her usual look-the look of a woman who was somewhere else. She had a fine head of blond hair, whose softness alone set her apart in a country where most women's hair had a consistency not much softer than saddle strings. Her cheeks hollowed a little-it gave her a distracting beauty. Augustus's experience had taught him that hollow-cheeked beauty was a dangerous kind. His two wives had both been fat-cheeked and trustworthy but had possessed little resistance to the climate. One had expired of pleurisy in only the second year of their marriage, while the other had been carried off by scarlet fever after the seventh. But the woman Lorena put him most in mind of was Clara Allen, whom he had loved hardest and deepest, and still loved. Clara's eyes were direct and sparkled with interest, whereas Lorena's were always side-looking. Still, there was something about the girl that reminded him of Clara, who had chosen a stolid horse trader when she decided to marry.

"'I god, Dish," he said, going over to the table, "I never expected to see you loafing down here in the south this time of the year."

"Loan me two dollars, Gus," Dish said.

"Not me," Augustus said. "Why would I loan money to a loafer? You ought to be trailing cattle by this time of year."

"I'll be leaving next week to do just that," Dish said. "Loan me two dollars and I'll pay you in the fall."

"Unless you drown or get stomped or shoot somebody and get hung," Augustus said. "No sir. Too many perils ahead. Anyway, I've known you to be sly, Dish. You've probably got two dollars and just don't want to spend it."

Lippy finished his concert and came and joined them. He wore a brown bowler hat he had picked up on the road to San Antonio some years before. Either it had blown out of a stagecoach or the Indians had snatched some careless drummer and not bothered to take his hat. At least those were the two theories Lippy had worked out in order to explain his good fortune in finding the hat. In Augustus's view the hat would have looked better blowing around the country for two years than it did at present. Lippy only wore it when he played the piano; when he was just gambling or sitting around attending to the leak from his stomach he frequently used the hat for an ashtray and then sometimes forgot to empty the ashes before putting the hat back on his head. He only had a few strips of stringy gray hair hanging off his skull, and the ashes didn't make them look much worse, but ashes represented only a fraction of the abuse the bowler had suffered. It was also Lippy's pillow, and had had so many things spilled on it or in it that Augustus could hardly look at it without gagging.

"That hat looks about like a buffalo cud," Augustus said. "A hat ain't meant to be a chamber pot, you know. If I was you I'd throw it away.

Lippy was so named because his lower lip was about the size of the flap on a saddlebag. He could tuck enough snuff under it to last a normal person at least a month; in general the lip lived a life of its own, there toward the bottom of his face. Even when he was just sitting quietly, studying his cards, the lip waved and wiggled as if it had a breeze blowing across it, which in fact it did. Lippy had something wrong with his nose and breathed with his mouth wide open.

Accustomed as she was to hard doings, it had still taken Lorena a while to get used to the way Lippy slurped when he was eating, and she had once had a dream in which a cowboy walked by Lippy and buttoned the lip to his nose as if it were the flap of a pocket. But her disgust was nothing compared to Xavier's, who suddenly stopped wiping tables and came over and grabbed Lippy's hat off his head. Xavier was in a bad mood, and his features quivered like those of a trapped rabbit.

"Disgrace! I won't have this hat. Who can eat?" Xavier said, though nobody was trying to eat. He took the hat around the bar and flung it out the back door. Once as a boy he had carried slops in a restaurant in New Orleans that actually used tablecloths, a standard of excellence which haunted him still. Every time he looked at the bare tables in the Dry Bean he felt a failure. Instead of having tablecloths, the tables were so rough you could get a splinter just ru

He himself had a linen tablecloth which he brought out once a year, on the a

To Xavier's mind, Lippy's hat was the final exacerbation. No man of dignity would allow such a hat in his establishment, much less on the head of an employee, so from time to time he seized it and flung it out the door. Perhaps a goat would eat it; they were said to eat worse. But the goats ignored the hat, and Lippy always went out and retrieved it when he remembered that he needed an ashtray.

"Disgrace!" Xavier said again, in a somewhat happier tone.

Lippy was unperturbed. "What's wrong with that hat?" he asked. "It was made in Philadelphia. Says so inside it."

It did say so, but Augustus, not Lippy, was the one who had originally made the point. Lippy could not have read a word as big as Philadelphia, and he had only the vaguest notion of where the city was. All he knew was that it must be a safe and civilized place if they had time to make hats instead of fighting Comanches.

"Xavier, I'll make you a deal," Augustus said. "Loan Dish here two dollars so we can get a little game going, and I'll rake that hat into a towsack and carry it home to my pigs. It's the only way you'll ever get rid of it."

"If you wear it again I will burn it," Xavier said, still inflamed. "I will burn the whole place. Then where will you go?"

"If you was to burn that pianer you best have a swift mule waiting," Lippy said, his lip undulating as he spoke. "The church folks won't like it."

Dish found the conversation a burden to listen to. He had delivered a small horse herd in Matamoros and had ridden nearly a hundred miles upriver with Lorie in mind. It was fu