Streets Of Laredo

D. Brown were out looking for a stray bull one day. They finally found the bull on the Quitaque, dead; it had managed to strangle itself with a coil of barbed wire.

Now and again, if he was in the vicinity, Goodnight stopped by to pay his respects to Call and the Parkers.

They found Call standing in his workroom in the barn, sharpening a sickle that a farmer from Silverton had nicked badly while cutting hay. The blind girl was rounding up her chickens.

There must have been fifty chickens, at least, and there were also more goats than Goodnight was accustomed to seeing anywhere. They visited a minute, or tried to. Call scarcely looked up from his work. He had several hatchets and an axe in a bucket beside him that he needed to sharpen, once he finished with the sickle.

Pea Eye was out plowing, but Goodnight and J. D. Brown took a glass of buttermilk with Lorena before they left. Lorena was heavy with child; she paid Goodnight twenty dollars against her debt on the shack he had built for Call.

On the ride back across the gray plains, the young cowboy--he was just twenty--looked rather despondent. Goodnight ignored his despondence for a while, then got tired of it.

What did a healthy sprout of twenty have to be despondent about?

"What's made you look so peaked, J.d.?" Goodnight inquired.

"Why, it's Captain Call, I guess," the young cowboy said. He was glad to talk about it, to get his dark feelings out.

"What about Captain Call?" Goodnight asked.

"Why, wasn't he a great Ranger?" the boy asked. "I've always heard he was the greatest Ranger of all." "Yes, he had exceptional determination," Goodnight told him.

"Well, but now look ... what's he doing?

Sharpening sickles in a dern barn!" J.d.

exclaimed.

Goodnight was silent for a bit. He wished his young cowboys would keep their minds on the stock, and not be worrying so about things they couldn't change.

"Woodrow Call had his time," he said, finally. "It was a long time, too. Life's but a knife edge, anyway. Sooner or later people slip and get cut." "Well, you ain't slipped," J. D.

Brown said.

"How would you know, son?" Goodnight said.

In the fall of the following year, Clara Allen was pawed to death by a piebald stallion named Marbles. Everyone was scared of the stallion except Clara; Marbles, a beautiful animal, was her special pride.

On the morning of the attack three cowboys, including Chollo, her old vaquero, the most experienced man on the ranch, had urged her not to go into the pen with the stud.

"He's mad today ... wait," Chollo told her.

"He's my horse--he won't hurt me," Clara said, shutting the gate behind her. The stallion attacked her at once. Four men leapt into the corral but could not drive him off.

They didn't want to shoot the stallion, for Clara would never forgive them for it, if she lived.

Finally, they shot the horse anyway, but Clara Allen was dead before they could carry her out of the pen.

"It's risky, raising studs," Call said.

"She must have been good with horses, or she wouldn't have lasted this long." Lorena shut herself in her room, when she heard the news. She didn't come out all day. But then the day passed, and dusk fell. Lorena still wouldn't come out. Pea Eye knocked on the door, just a little knock.

"Leave me alone," Lorena said, in a raw voice.

Sadly, Pea Eye turned back down the hall.

"Pea," Lorena said, through the door.

"What, honey?" Pea Eye asked, feeling a little hopeful.

"Feed the children," Lorena said.

Later, when it was bedtime, Pea Eye knocked his little knock on the bedroom door, again.

"Leave me alone, Pea," Lorena said.

"Just leave me alone." "But where'll I sleep?" Pea Eye asked.

"I don't know ... wherever you drop, I guess," Lorena told him.

At a loss and worried, Pea Eye put the children to bed and walked down to the Captain's little shack. Tessie was sitting in the Captain's rocking chair, asleep. The Captain sat on his bed, his leg off, sharpening his pocketknife on a small whetstone.

"Lorie's taking it hard, about Clara," Pea said.

"Well, that's to be expected--Clara took her in," Call said.

There was only one rocking chair. After a minute, Pea Eye sat on the floor. He thought he might go sleep in the oat bin, since the Captain was no longer using it. He thought he might go, after a while. But he was used to his wife and his bed. He wasn't ready for the oat bin, not quite.

"Do you ever think of Brookshire, Captain?" Pea Eye asked.

"I rarely do," Call said.

"It's fu

Sometime deep in the night he heard the door to the oat bin creak. Lorena came in and bent over him. She held a lantern.

"I'm better--come on back, honey," she said.

Pea Eye felt itchy. The saddle blankets had been covered with horsehair, as was only natural. Now he was covered with horsehair, too, which wasn't so natural; at least, Lorena wouldn't be likely to think it natural, particularly on a day when she was in a bad mood anyway. He had horsehair absolutely all over him, a fact which made him more than a little nervous. Lorena was picky about their bed. Once she had lifted both her feet and kicked him straight off onto the floor, because he had been cutting his toenails and had neglected to clean the clippings off the sheets to her satisfaction. Horsehair might offend her even worse than toenail clippings had.

But Lorena was going--he saw the lantern swinging, as she left the barn. Pea Eye got up, rather stiffly, and tried to brush as much of the horsehair off himself as he could. In the dark, he knew he was probably making a poor job of it. But Lorena was going; he wanted to catch up.