Dead Man's Walk

He had visited the whorehouse, though, with Gus, several times —he didn’t scorn it as a pastime. Matilda Roberts was employed there while waiting for passage to the west. She had taken a liking to young Call. Gus too had his likeable side, but he was overpersistent, and also a blabber. There were times when Matilda could put up with persistence easier than she could with blab.

Young Call, though, seldom said two words. He just handed over the coins. Matilda saw something sad in the boy’s eyes—it touched her. She saw after a few visits that her great bulk frightened him, and put him with a young Mexican girl named Rosa, who soon came to like him.

Call often though of Rosa—she taught him many Spanish words: how to count, words for food. She was a slim girl who seldom smiled, though once in awhile she smiled at him. Call thought of her most afternoons when he was working in the hot lots behind the blacksmith’s shop. He also thought of her at night when he was sleeping on his blanket, near the stable. He would have liked to see Rosa oftener-Gus had not been wrong to recommend whores, but Gus was reckless with his money and Call wasn’t. Gus would borrow, or cheat at cards, or make promises he couldn’t keep, just to have money for whores.

Call, though, could not bring himself to be so spendthrift. He knew that he wanted to be a Ranger once the troop went out again, which meant that sooner or later he would be fighting Indians. This time, when the fight came, he wanted to be as well equipped as his resources would permit. Neither of the cheap guns he owned was reliable. If he ever had to face the Comanche with the great hump again, he wanted a weapon that wouldn’t fail him. Much as he was apt to think of Rosa, he knew that if he wanted to survive as a professional Ranger, he had to put guns first.

Once he felt assured that his friend was going to come with him on the new expedition, Gus relaxed, located a spot of shade under a wagon, stretched out full length, put his hat over his face, and took a long serene nap while Call labored on with the mules. The last little mule was a biter—Call cuffed him several times, but the mule bared his teeth and demonstrated that he had every intention of using them on Call’s flesh if he could. Call was finally forced to rope the mule’s jaws shut before he could finish his work. Gus had a snore like a rasp-Call could hear the snore plainly when he wasn’t hammering in a horseshoe nail.

Just as the last shoe was nailed in place, there was a clatter in the street. Call looked up to see Long Bill Coleman, Rip Green, gimpyJohnny Carthage, and Matilda Roberts come loping up. Matilda was mounted on Tom, her large grey gelding.

“Saddle up, Woodrow—it’s Santa Fe or bust,” Long Bill sang out. He was wearing a fur cap he had found in a closet in the whorehouse.

“Dern, Bill, I thought you’d left town,” Call said. “Ain’t it a little warm for that hat?”

He himself was drenched in sweat from shoeing the four mules.

“That cap’s to fool the grizzlies, if we meet any,” Long Bill said. “I’m scared of grizzlies, and other kinds of bears as well. I figure if I wear this fur bonnet they’ll think I’m one of the family and let me alone.”

“That cap belonged to Joe Slaw; they hung the son of a bitch,” Matilda said. “I guess he considered himself a mountain man.”

Gus McCrae, hearing voices, suddenly rose up, forgetting that he was under a wagon. He whonked his head so loudly that everyone in the group laughed.

“Shut up, I think my skull’s broke open,” Gus said, annoyed at the levity—he had only made a simple mistake. His head had taken a solid crack, though. He wobbled over to the water tank and stuck his head under—the cool water felt good.

While the group was watching Gus dip his head in the water, Blackie Slidell came racing up—he had been with a whore when the others left the saloon. The reason for his rush was that he feared being left, which would mean having to cross the prairies in the direction of Austin all by himself.

“So, are you with us, Woodrow?” Rip Green asked. Although Call was a younger man than himself, Rip considered him dependable and was anxious to have him with the group.

“I thought you was already gone, Bill,” Call said.

“Why no, we’ve been collecting Rangers, but we can’t find Bigfoot, and Shadrach prefers to travel alone, mostly,” Bill said. “He’s already gone up to Austin. I guess we’ll have to leave Bigfoot. I expect he’ll catch up.”

With so many of his companions mounted and ready, Call hesitated no longer. His complaints and criticism had mainly been designed to annoy Gus, anyway. The urge to be adventuring was too strong to be resisted.

“So, who’s leading the Rangers?” he asked when he untied the jaw rope and released the biting mule.“Why, we’ll lead ourselves, unless somebody shows up who wants to captain,” Long Bill said.

“Whoa—I ain’t rangering for Bob Bascom,” Gus said. “I don’t like his surly tongue—I expect I’ll have to whip him before the trip is over.”

Long Bill looked skeptical at this prediction.

“Take a good club when you go to whip him,” he said. “Bob’s stout.”

“Take two clubs,” Blackie said. “Bob’s a scrapper.”

“I didn’t expect you’d want to go fight Mexicans, Matty,” Call said, surprised to see Matilda with the Rangers.

“I’m needing to get west before I get old,” Matilda said. “I’ve heard there’s roads to the west from up around Santa Fe.”

Call’s possessions were few, though he did now have a coat to go with his two shirts. Gus McCrae, because of his urgent expenditures, had only the clothes on his back and his two pistols. When old Jesus saw that Call was leaving, he sighed. The thought of having to shoe all the horses and mules by himself made him feel a weariness. He had done hard work all his life and was ready to stop, but he couldn’t stop. All his children had left home except one little girl, and his little girl could not shoe mules. Yet he could not blame Call for going—he himself had roved, when he was young. He had left Saltillo and come to the land of the Texans, but now he was weary and his only helper was leaving. There was something about the boy that he liked, too—and he didn’t like many of the Texas boys.

“Adios,” he said, as Call was tying his blanket and his extra shirt onto his saddle.

“Adios, Jesus,” Call said—he liked the old man. They had not exchanged a cross word in all the time Call had worked for him.

“Let’s ride, boys,” Long Bill said. “Austin’s a far piece up the road.”

“We’ll ride, but I ain’t a boy,” Matilda said, as they rode out of San Antonio. Gus McCrae had a headache, from rising up too quickly after his nap.

“Boys, IT’S CLOUDING UP,” Long Bill said late in their first day out of San Antonio. “I expect we’re in for a drenching.”

“I’d rather ride all night than sleep wet,” Rip Green observed.

“Not me,” Gus said. “If I have to be wet I’d just as soon be snoozing.”

“There’s plenty of farms up this way,” Matilda said. “German families, mostly. If we could find a farm they might let us sleep on the floor. Or if they have some kind of shed for the stock, maybe we could crawl under it.”

As the sun was dipping, Call noticed that the whole southwestern quadrant of the sky had turned coal black. In the distance there was a rumbling of thunder. At the horizon the blackness was cut through with streaks of golden light from the setting sun, but the light at the bottom only made the blackness of the upper sky seem blacker. A wind rose—it whirled Call’s straw hat off his head and sailed it a good thirty feet, which annoyed him. He hated above all to lose control of his headgear.Long Bill cackled at the sight.