Lonesome Dove - Streets Of Laredo Part 68

I want to look at his wounds." Billy cut the b.l.o.o.d.y knots and lifted Call off the horse. Call moaned when his wounded arm b.u.mped against the saddle horn. Teresa came over and stood beside Billy as he lifted Call.

"Is that the man who was here before?" Teresa asked. "I hear him breathe--is he sick?" "Yes, he's sick," Maria said. She was unsaddling Call's horse. "Tell Rafael to drive the goats to the pen. We don't want the wolves getting them." Lorena was stiff. She hadn't yet dismounted.

She was trying to adjust to the fact that she had actually found the village. She had stopped believing that she would find any settlement, anyplace with people in it.

"Get down," Maria told her. "Billy will take care of your horse. You need to wash and you need to eat." Lorena eased off the horse.

"I've come a long distance," she said. "I'm tired." "Who cut his leg off?" Maria asked. Not until Billy lifted Call down did she notice the missing leg.

"I did," Lorena responded. "It was that or let him die." "No wonder you are tired," Maria said.

"Come into my house and rest." It was a small house. There was a table with a lamp on it, two plain chairs, and some blankets spread on the dirt floor. But it was a house, so warm inside that before Lorena had been there five minutes, she began to nod.

The large boy brought in a bowl full of cold water for her from the well. Lorena splashed it on her face, trying to wake up. She saw Maria bending over Call. The old scout was there, too.

They cut his shirt off and examined the wound in his chest. Then they looked at his arm.

"You should have cut the arm off, too," Maria told her, when Lorena squatted beside her.

"I was just too tired," Lorena answered.

"It was just too much cutting.

"You have a pretty daughter," she added. The little blind girl was ladling food out of a pot. The girl moved around the house lightly, like a moth.

"Thank you," Maria said.

"Well, I ain't going in after that bullet," Billy Williams said. "That bullet is lodged in a bad place. Whoever takes it out needs to know what he's doing, and I don't." "There's no doctor here?" Lorena asked.

"Just the butcher, and he's a butcher," Maria said. "Who shot this man?" "Joey Garza, I guess," Lorena said.

"Neither of us ever saw who it was. The man shot from under a horse. Captain Call said he thought it was Joey Garza, though." Maria was silent. Her son would be very famous now; he had brought down the great manhunter.

All the girls on the border would want him, though that would make little difference to Joey. He didn't like girls.

But Joey had avenged her father and her brother.

He had crippled their killer, and there was no need for her to do more. She could even help the old man a little, though she knew she was not skillful enough to remove the bullet from his chest. She could probably cut off his arm if the butcher couldn't be persuaded to do it. Or they could send across the river for the doctor in Presidio. He didn't like coming to Mexico--the people were too poor to pay him --but he might come to treat Captain Call.

He was a famous Ranger, not a poor Mexican.

"Do you know Joey Garza?" Lorena asked.

She had seen the woman stiffen a little, when she said the name.

"He is my son," Maria said.

Lorena thought she must have misheard. Surely she hadn't carried Captain Call for three days across the wastes, only to bring him to the house of the boy who had tried to kill him.

"I am Joey's mother, but I am not like him," Maria said. She saw that Lorena was frightened.

"You need to rest," she added. "There is a bed in the other room. You can sleep without worrying.

We will take care of your friend. We are not going to kill him. If I had meant to kill him, I would not have brought him into my house." Lorena was so tired that she wasn't thinking or even hearing very well. She had to sleep soon, no matter what happened to Captain Call.

"Teresa, take her," Maria said.

Lorena followed the little blind girl into the other room.

"I cleaned your bed," the little girl said. "When you wake up, I will tell you a story." "Why, thank you," Lorena said. "I like stories." Then she stretched out on the low bed.

"Do you have any children?" Teresa asked, as Lorena stretched her stiff limbs.

"Five ... I have five," Lorena said. Then, in a blink, she went to sleep.

Teresa sat on the bed beside her for a few minutes. She had ladled up some posole, but she knew the woman hadn't eaten any.

"You didn't eat your posole ... wake up," she said, touching the woman. But the woman didn't wake up.

Teresa sat on the bed listening to the woman breathe. She was thinking about the story she would tell her when she woke up. It would be a story about the big spider that lived by their well. Sometimes she would put her hand on the ground and let the spider crawl over it. The spider never bit her, though a scorpion had bitten her once. She could hardly wait for the woman to wake up so she could tell her the story about the spider.

When he robbed the train outside San Angelo, Joey made a discovery. What he discovered was that it was more interesting to him to frighten people than to kill them. He had made the pa.s.sengers stand outside for an hour after he robbed them. He told them he would be watching through his spygla.s.s, and he a.s.sured them he would kill the first one who moved before the hour was up. The people stood in terror for a long time. He had taken their watches, and he told them to look at the sun and mark the hour by its movements. But the people stood in the cold for almost three hours before any of them dared to move. They were afraid of being shot. In the end, Joey didn't shoot any of them. Through the spygla.s.s he could see that the people were shivering--from fear, not from cold.

Two of the men wet themselves. They were too afraid of his bullets even to move behind a bush.

Watching the pa.s.sengers tremble was more satisfying than killing them. None of them were people of importance, and there was no distinction to be gained from killing people of no importance. Making people dead was easy, but it was no longer interesting to him.

Wounding Captain Call so badly and so easily was a triumph Joey knew he would never be likely to equal. But he would never need to equal it, so potent was the reputation of the man he had wounded. Even if he never shot another person or robbed another train, his reputation would grow and grow along the border and all through the West. He had ended the career of the most famous manhunter of all. People would still be talking about Joey Garza when he was an old man, even if he never killed or robbed again.

He planned to kill again, though, and quickly.

He wanted to shoot Captain Call's three deputies. They were probably too inept to be a nuisance, but Joey wanted it known that he had wiped out Captain Call's whole party. That would build his reputation even higher.

Joey followed the blond woman all the way to Ojinaga. From time to time, he took out his spygla.s.s and trained it on the horse carrying Captain Call. He expected to see that the old man had died. But every time he looked, he saw movement. Somehow the old man still lived.

When he saw the woman lead the horse upriver toward the village, he let her go and rode off a few miles into Mexico, where he made camp. He meant to travel up the Rio Concho and locate the deputies.

The next morning, a little before midday, he found their camp. They were almost a day's ride inside Mexico, and they seemed simply to be waiting.

They were probably waiting for Captain Call.

They didn't know what had befallen him.

Joey was surprised to see that there were now only two deputies and old Famous Shoes. He saw no reason to kill the old man.

Probably the third deputy had met with an accident of some sort.

Joey studied the camp for a while with his spygla.s.s, trying to decide on a method of attack that would provoke the utmost fear. After giving it some thought, he decided to shoot the horses and the two pack animals first. Maybe he could scare the men out into the desert. If he frightened them badly enough, he might not even have to shoot them. He could simply chase them into the desert, shooting now and then to scare them farther away from the river. When he had them exposed and lost, he could simply go away and leave them to freeze or starve to death.