Lonesome Dove

Call thought he might yet say it, even if the men were there to hear. Fie trembled from the effort, and his trembling and the look on his face caused great consternation in Pea Eye, who had never known the Captain to be at a loss for words. The Captain would ride up and give an order, and that was that-but now he merely stood looking at Newt, a jerking in his throat.

Looking at the Captain, Newt began to feel sadder than he had ever felt in his life. Just go on, he wanted to say. Go on, if it's that hard. He didn't want the Captain to go on, of course. He felt too young; he didn't want to be left with it all. He felt he couldn't bear what was happening, it was so surprising. Five minutes before, he had been pulling a yearling out of a bog. Now the Captain had given him his horse and his gun, and stood with a look of suffering on his face. Even Sean O'Brien, dying of a dozen snakebites, had not shown so much pain. Go on, then, Newt thought. Just let it be. It's been this way always. Let it be, Captain.

Call walked the few steps to the boy and squeezed his arm so hard Newt thought his fingers had pinched the bone. Then he turned and tried to mount the dun. He had to try for the stirrup three times before he could mount. He wished he had died on the Musselshell with Gus. It would have been easier than knowing he could not be honest. His own son stood there-surely, it was true; after doubting it for years, his own mind told him over and over that it was true-yet he couldn't call him a son. His honesty was lost, had long been lost, and he only wanted to leave.

When he mounted, the feeling loosened a bit and he fell back into the habit he had vowed to discard-the habit of leading.

"There's two heifers bogged yet," he said. "They're half a mile downstream. You better go get them."

Then he rode over and shook Pea Eye's hand. Pea Eye was so astonished he couldn't close his mouth. Gus had never shaken his hand until the last minute, and now the Captain was shaking it too.

"Help Newt," Call said. "He'll need a steady man, and you qualify if anybody ever did."

He raised his hand to Needle Nelson and turned his horse.

"So long, boys," he said.

But he looked again at Newt. The boy looked so lonesome that he was reminded of his own father, who had never been comfortable with people. His father had fallen drunk out of a barn loft in Mississippi and broken his neck. Call remembered the watch that had been passed on to him, an old pocket watch with a thin gold case. He had carried it since he was a boy. He raised up in his stirrups, took it out of his pocket and handed it to Newt.

"It was my pa's," he said, and turned and left.

"Dern, Newt," Pea Eye said, more astonished that he had ever been in his life. "He gave you his horse and his gun and that watch. He acts like you're his kin."

"No, I ain't kin to nobody in this world," Newt said bitterly. "I don't want to be. I won't be."

Despair in his heart, he mounted the Hell Bitch as if he had ridden her for years, and turned downstream. He felt he never wanted to hope for anything again, and yet no more than a minute later the strange hope struck him that the Captain might have turned back. He might have forgotten something-perhaps an order he had meant to give. Even that he would have welcomed. It felt so lonely to think of the Captain being gone. But when he turned to look, the Captain was merely a speck on the long plain. He was gone, and things would never be as Newt had hoped-never. Somehow it had been too hard for the Captain, and he had left.

Pea Eye and Needle followed Newt silently. Pea Eye felt old and frightened. In a few minutes the whole ground of his life had shifted, and he felt stricken with foreboding. For thirty years the Captain had been there to give orders, and frequently the orders had kept them alive. He had always been with the Captain, and yet now he wasn't. He couldn't understand why the Captain had given Newt the horse, the gun and the watch. The business of the ax, and what he had heard when retrieving it, was forgotten-it had puzzled him so long that it had finally just slipped from his mind.

"Well, here we are," he said wearily. "I guess we'll just have to do the work."

The Texas bull was standing a hundred yards or so away with a small group of cows. When the riders drew near, he began to bellow and paw the earth. It irritated him if he saw several riders together, though he had not charged anyone lately.

"I'll tell you one thing, I may shoot that bull yet," Needle said. "I've put up with that son of a bitch about long enough. The Captain may like him, but I don't."

Newt heard the talk, but didn't speak. He knew the Captain had left him with too much, but he didn't say it. He would have to try and do the work, even if he no longer cared.

Feeling that it was pointless, but acting from force of habit, they pulled the two stuck heifers from the Milk River mud.

101.

IN MILES CITY, Call found that the storage of Augustus's remains had been bungled. Something had broken into the shed and knocked the coffin off the barrels. In the doctor's opinion it had probably been a wolverine, or possibly a cougar. The coffin had splintered and the varmint had run off with the amputated leg. The mistake wasn't discovered until after a blizzard had passed through, so of course the leg had not been recovered.

The look on Call's face, when he heard the news, was so grim it made the doctor extremely nervous.

"We've mostly kept him," he said, avoiding Call's eye. "I had him repacked. He had done lost that leg before he died anyway."

"It was in the coffin when I left here," Call said. He didn't care to discuss the matter with the man. Instead, he found the carpenter who had built the coffin in the first place and had him reinforce it with strong planks. The result was a heavy piece of work.

By luck, the same day, Call saw a buggy for sale. It was old but it looked sturdy enough, and he bought it. The next day he had the coffin covered in canvas and lashed to the seat. The buggy hood was in tatters, so he tore it off. Greasy, the mule, was used to pulling the wagon and hardly noticed the buggy, it was so light. They left Miles City on a morning when it had turned unseasonably cold-so cold that the sun only cast a pale light through the frigid clouds. Call knew it was dangerous to go off with only two animals, but he felt like taking his chances.

The weather improved the next day and he rode for a time beside a hundred or so Crow Indians who were traveling south. The Crow were friendly, and their old chief, a dried-up little man with a great appetite for tobacco and talk, tried to get Call to camp with them. They were all interested in the fact that he was traveling with a coffin and asked him many questions about the man inside it.

"We traveled together," Call said. He did not want to talk about Gus with the old man, or anyone. He wanted to get on, but he was cordial and rode with the Crow because he felt that if he were discourteous some of the young bucks might try to make sport with him farther south, when he was out of range of the old chief's protection.

Once he struck Wyoming, he rode for eleven days without seeing a soul. The buggy held up well, but Greasy lost flesh from the pace Call kept up. The coffin got some bad jolts crossing the gullies near the Powder River, but the reinforcements held it together.

The first people he saw, as he approached Nebraska, were five young Indians who had gotten liquor somewhere. When they saw he was carrying a dead man they let him alone, though they were too drunk to hunt successfully and begged him for food. None of them looked to be eighteen, and their horses were poor. Call started to refuse, but then he reflected that they were just boys. He offered them food if they would give up their liquor, but at that they grew quarrelsome. One drew an old pistol and acted as if he might fire at him, but Call ignored the threat, and they were soon gone.