Lonesome Dove (99 page)

Lippy broke down and cried a time or two, thinking of Gus. To him, the mysterious part was why Gus wanted to be taken to Texas.

“All that way to Texas,” Lippy kept saying. “He must have been drunk.”

“I never seen Gus too drunk to know what he meant,” Pea Eye said. He, too, was very sad. It seemed to him it would have been better if he could have persuaded Gus to come with him.

“All that way to Texas,” Lippy kept saying. “I wager the Captain won’t do it.”

“I’ll take that wager,” Dish said. “He and Gus rangered together.”

“And me too,” Pea Eye said sadly. “I rangered with them.”

“Gus won’t be much but a skeleton, if the Captain does do it,” Jasper said. “I wouldn’t do it. I’d get to thinking of ghosts and ride off in a hole.”

At the mention of ghosts, Dish got up and left the campfire. He couldn’t abide the thought of any more ghosts. If Deets and Gus were both roaming around, one might approach him, and he didn’t like the thought. The very notion made him white, and he pitched his bedroll as close to the wagon as he could get.

The other men continued to talk of Augustus’s strange request.

“Why Texas beats me,” Soupy said. “I always heard he was from Tennessee.”

“I wonder what he’d have to say about being dead?” Needle said. “Gus always had something to say about everything.”

Po Campo began to jingle his tambourine lightly, and the Irishman whistled sadly.

“He never collected all that money he won from us at cards,” Bert remembered. “That’s the bright side of the matter.”

“Oh, dern,” Pea Eye said, feeling so sorrowful that he wanted to die himself.

No one had to ask him what he was derning about.

98

OLD HIGH AULD soon replaced Augustus as the main talker in the Hat Creek outfit. He caught up with the herd, with his wagonload of coats and supplies, near the Missouri, which they crossed near Fort Benton. The soldiers at the tiny outpost were as surprised to see the cowboys as if they were men from another planet. The commander, a lanky major named Court, could scarcely believe his eyes when he looked up and saw the herd spread out over the plain. When told that most of the cattle had been gathered below the Mexican border he was astonished, but not too astonished to buy two hundred head. Buffalo were scarce, and the fort not well provisioned.

Call was short with Major Court. He had been short with everyone since Gus’s death. Everyone wondered when he would stop going north, but no one dared ask. There had been several light snows, and when they crossed the Missouri, it was so cold that the men built a huge fire on the north bank to warm up. Jasper Fant came near to realizing his lifelong fear of drowning when his horse spooked at a beaver and shook him off into the icy water. Fortunately Ben Rainey caught him and pulled him ashore. Jasper was blue with cold; even though they covered him with blankets and got him to the fire, it was a while before he could be convinced that he was alive.

“Why, you could have waded out,” Old Hugh said, astonished that a man would be frightened over such a little thing as a soaking. “If you think this water’s cold now, try setting a few beaver traps around February,” he added, thinking it would help the man put things in perspective.

Jasper couldn’t speak for an hour. Most of the men had long since grown bored with his drowning fears, and they left him to dry out his clothes as best he could. That night, when he was warm enough to be bitter, Jasper vowed to spend the rest of his life north of the Missouri rather than cross such a stream again. Also, he had developed an immediate resentment against beavers and angered Old Hugh several times on the trip north by firing at them recklessly with his pistol if he saw some in a pond.

“Them’s
beaver
,” Old Hugh kept saying. “You trap beaver, you don’t shoot ’em. A bullet will ruin the pelt and the pelt’s the whole point.”

“Well, I hate the little toothy sons of bitches,” Jasper said. “The pelts be damned.”

Call kept riding northwest until even Old Hugh began to be worried. The great line of the Rockies was clear to the west. Though Old Hugh was the scout, it was Call who rode on ahead. Once in a while Old Hugh might point out a landmark, but he was shy about offering advice. Call made it clear that he didn’t want advice.

Though accustomed to his silences, none of the men could remember him being
that
silent. For days he didn’t utter a word—he merely came in and got his food and left again. Several of the men became convinced that he didn’t mean to stop—that he would lead them north into the snows and they would all freeze.

The day after they crossed the Marais, Old Dog disappeared. From being a lead steer, he had drifted back to the drags and usually trailed a mile or two behind the herd. Always he was there in the morning, but one morning he wasn’t. Newt and the Raineys, still in charge of the drags, went back to look for him and saw two grizzlies making a meal of the old steer. At the sight of the bears their horses bolted and raced back to the herd. Their fear instantly communicated itself to all the animals and the herd and remuda stampeded. Several cowboys got thrown, including Newt, but no one was hurt, though it took an afternoon to gather the scattered herd.

A few days later they finally came to the Milk River. It was a crisp fall day, and most of the men were wearing their new coats. The slopes of the mountains to the west were covered with snow.

“That’s the last one,” Old Hugh said. “You go much north of that river and you’re in Canada.”

Call left the herd to graze and rode east alone for a day. The country was beautiful, with plenty of grass and timber enough in the creek bottoms for building a house and corrals. He came across scattered buffalo, including one large herd. He saw plentiful Indian sign, but no Indians. It was cold but brilliantly sunny. He felt that the whole top of the Montana territory was empty except for the buffalo, the Indians and the Hat Creek outfit. He knew it was time to stop and get a house of some kind built before a blizzard caught them. He knew one could come any time. He himself paid no attention to weather, and didn’t care, but there were the men to think of. It was too late for most of them to go back to Texas that fall. Like it or not, they were going to be wintering in Montana.

That night, camping alone, he dreamed of Gus. Frequently he woke up to hear Gus’s voice, so real he looked around expecting to see him. Sometimes he would scarcely fall asleep before he dreamed of Gus, and it was even beginning to happen in the daytime if he rode along not paying much attention to his surroundings. Gus dead invaded his thoughts as readily as he had when he was alive. Usually he came to josh and tease, much as he had in life. “Just because you’ve got to the top of the country, you don’t have to stop,” he said, in one dream. “Turn east and keep going until you hit Chicago.”

Call didn’t want to turn east, but neither did he particularly want to stop. Gus’s death, and the ones before it, had caused him to lose his sense of purpose to such an extent that he scarcely cared from one day to the next what he was doing. He kept on going north because it had become a habit. But they had reached the Milk River and winter was coming, so he had to break the habit or else lose most of the men and probably the cattle too.

He found a creek with a good stand of sheltering timber and decided it would do for a headquarters, but he felt no eagerness for the tasks ahead. Work, the one thing that had always belonged to him, no longer seemed to matter. He did it because there was nothing else to do, not because he felt the need. Some days he felt so little interest in the herd and the men that he could simply have ridden off and left them to make the best of things. The old sense of being responsible for their well-being had left him so completely that he often wondered how he could ever have felt it so strongly. The way they looked at him in the morning, as they waited for orders, irritated him more and more. Why should grown men wait for orders every day, after coming three thousand miles?

Frequently he gave no orders—merely ate his breakfast and rode off, leaving them with puzzled expressions on their faces. An hour later, when he looked back, he would see that they were following, and that, too, irritated him. Sometimes he felt he would prefer to look back and see the plains empty, all the followers and cattle vanished.

But nothing like that happened, and when he had settled on a headquarters, he told the men to drive the cattle east for a day and then let them graze at will. The drive was over. The ranch would lie between the Milk and the Missouri. He would file on the land in the spring.

“What about them of us that want to go back to Texas?” Dish Boggett asked.

Call was surprised. Until then no one had suggested going back to Texas.

“It’s late in the year,” he said. “You’d be better advised to wait and go in the spring.”

Dish looked at him stubbornly; “I didn’t hire on for no winter in Montana,” he said. “I guess if I could have my wages I’d take my chances.”

“Well, you’re needed for the building,” Call said, reluctant to lose him. Dish looked as if he stood ready to ride south then and there. “Once that’s done any can go that wants,” Call added.

Dish Boggett felt angry. He hadn’t hired on to carpenter either. His first work for the Hat Creek outfit had been well-digging, and his last would be swinging an ax, it appeared. Neither was work fit for a cowhand, and he was on the verge of demanding his wages and standing up for his rights as a free man—but the Captain’s look dissuaded him, and the next morning, when they started the herd east along the Milk, he took the point for the last time. With Old Dog dead, the Texas bull was frequently in the forefront of the drive. He looked ugly, for his wound had been sewn up unevenly, and being one-eyed and one-horned had made him even more irascible. He would often turn and attack anyone who approached him on his blind side. Several men had narrowly escaped disaster, and only the fact that Captain Call favored the bull had kept them from shooting him.

Dish resolved that as soon as the building was done he would go like a streak for Nebraska. The thought that a stranger might come along and win Lorie before he could get back was a torment to him—but it made him one of the more vigorous members of the logging crew once the building got started. Most of the other members of the crew, Jasper and Needle particularly, were less vigorous, and they irritated Dish by taking frequent breaks, leaving him to chop alone. They would sit around smoking, keeping a close watch for bears, while Dish flailed away, the sound of the striking ax echoing far across the valley of the Milk River.

Before the work had been in progress a week, an event occurred which changed the men’s attitudes dramatically. The event was a blizzard, which howled out of the north for three days. Only the fact that Call had seen to it that ample firewood had been cut saved the outfit. The men had never known or imagined such cold. They built two large fires and huddled between them, feeding them logs, freezing on the side not closest to the fire. The first day there was no visibility at all—the men could not even to go the horses without the risk of being lost in the swirling snow.

“It’s worse than a sandstorm,” Needle said.

“Yes, and colder too,” Jasper said. “I’ve got my feet practically in the fire and my dern toes are still frozen.”

Dish found to his annoyance that his own breath caused his mustache to freeze, something he would not have imagined could happen. The men put on all the clothes they had and were still terribly cold. When the storm blew out and the sun reappeared, the cold refused to leave. In fact, it got colder, and formed such a hard crust on the snow that the men slipped and fell just going a few feet to the wagon.

Only Po Campo seemed to thrive in the weather. He still relied largely on his serape, plus an old scarf he had found somewhere, and he annoyed the men by nagging them to go shoot a bear. His theory was that bear meat would help them get used to the weather. Even if it didn’t, a bearskin might come in handy.

“Yes, and them dern bears probably think a little man meat would come in handy,” Soupy observed.

Pea Eye, the tallest man in the group, had developed a new fear, which was that he would be swallowed up in a snowdrift. He had always worried about quicksand, and now he was in a place where all he could see, for miles around, was a colder version of quicksand.

“If it was to cover you up, I reckon you’d freeze,” he said, over and over, until the men were tired of hearing it. Most of the men were tired of hearing one another say anything—the complaints characteristic of each had come to bore them thoroughly as a group.

Newt found that he had no urge either to talk or listen, but he did have an urge to stay warm, and he spent as much time by the fire as he honorably could. The only parts of his body that he was still conscious of were his hands, feet and ears, all of which were dreadfully cold. When the storm abated and they rode out to check the cattle he tied an old flannel shirt over his ears and they still felt frozen.

The livestock weathered the storm fairly well, although some of the cattle had drifted far south and had to be pushed back toward the Milk.

Even so, within ten days of the blizzard, a sizable rough log house had been built, complete with fireplace and chimney, both the work of Po Campo. He took advantage of a few days’ thaw to make a great quantity of mud bricks, all of which froze hard with the next freeze. The roof had hardly been on the cabin a day when the next blizzard hit. This time, though, the men were comparatively warm.

To their amazement, Captain Call refused to live in the house. He set up the old tent of Wilbarger’s in a sheltered spot on the creek, and spent his nights in it, sometimes building a small fire in front of it.

Every morning, the men expected to come out and find him frozen; instead, he came in every morning and found them sleeping too late, reluctant to leave their blankets for the chill.

But there were still corrals to build, and a smokehouse, and improvements on the cabin. Call saw that the men stayed at work while he himself did most of the checking on the livestock, sometimes taking Newt with him on his rounds. He killed several buffalo and taught Newt how to quarter them.

Old Hugh Auld came and went at will on his spotted pony. Though he talked constantly while he was with the crew, he often developed what he called lonesome feelings and disappeared for ten days at a time. Once in a prolonged warm spell he came racing in excitedly and informed Call that there was a herd of wild horses grazing only twenty miles to the south.

Since the Hat Creek remuda was not in the best of shape, Call decided to go see about the horses. They had a great stroke of luck and caught them in a box canyon only fifteen miles from the headquarters. The horses were smallish, but still fat from a summer’s grazing. Bert Borum, the best roper in the outfit, caught eighteen of the horses and they were brought back, hobbled, to the remuda.

True to his word, Dish Boggett drew his wages and left the day after they caught the wild horses. Call had assumed the blizzards would have taught the young man the folly of leaving, and was annoyed when Dish asked for his pay.

“It’s no time to be traveling in country you don’t know,” Call said.

“I pointed that herd the whole way up here,” Dish said stubbornly. “I guess I can find my way back. Besides, I got a coat.”

Call had little money on him, but he had arranged for credit in the little bank in Miles City and he wrote Dish out an order for his wages, using the bottom of a frying pan to rest his tablet on. It was just after breakfast and a number of the hands were watching. There had been a light snowfall the night before and the plains were white for miles around.

“Dern, we might as well hold the funeral right now,” Soupy said. “He won’t even make it to the Yellowstone, much less to Nebraska.”