Lonesome Dove - By Larry McMurtry Page 0,89

Hat Creek pens in silence, their minds on the white-armed woman in the saloon. She was no longer unfriendly, but it seemed to both of them that things had gone a little better before the change.

16

BY THE END of the first day’s hiring, Call had collected four boys, none of them yet eighteen. Young Bill Spettle, the one they called Swift Bill, was no older than Newt, and his brother Pete only a year older than Bill. So desperate were their family circumstances that Call was almost hesitant to take them.

The widow Spettle had a brood of eight children, Bill and Pete being the oldest. Ned Spettle, the father of them all, had died of drink two years before. It looked to Call as if the family was about to starve out. They had a little creek-bottom farm not far north of Pickles Gap, but the soil was poor and the family had little to eat but sowbelly and beans. The widow Spettle, however, was eager for him to take the boys, and would hear no protest from Call. She was a thin woman with bitter eyes. Call had heard from someone that she had been raised rich, in the East, with servants to comb her hair and help her into her shoes when she got up. It might just have been a story—it was hard for him to imagine a grownup who would need to be helped into their own shoes—but if even part of it was true she had come a long way down. Ned Spettle had never got around to putting a floor in the shack of a house he built. His wife was rearing eight children on the bare dirt. He had heard it said that Ned had never got over the war, which might have explained it. Plenty hadn’t. It accounted for the shortage of grown men of a certain age, that war. Call himself felt a kind of guilt at having missed it, though the work he and Gus had done on the border had been just as dangerous, and just as necessary.

“Take ’em,” the widow Spettle said, looking at her boys as if she wondered why she’d borne them. “I reckon they’ll work as hard as any.”

Call knew the boys had helped take a small herd to Arkansas. He paid the widow a month’s wage for each boy, knowing she would need it. There was evidently not a shoe in the family—even the mother was barefoot, a fact that must shame her, if the servant story were true.

He didn’t take the Spettle boys with him, for he had brought no spare horses. But the boys started at once for Lonesome Dove on foot, each of them carrying a blanket. They had one pistol between them, a Navy Colt with half its hammer knocked off. Though Call assured them he would equip them well once they got to Lonesome Dove, they wouldn’t leave the gun.

“We’ve never shot airy other gun,” Swift Bill said, as if that meant they couldn’t.

When he took his leave, Mrs. Spettle and the six remaining children scarcely noticed him. They stood in the hot yard, with a scrawny hen or two scratching around their bare feet, watching the boys and crying. The mother, who had scarcely touched her sons before they left, stood straight up and cried. Three of the children were girls, but the other three were boys in their early teens, old enough, at least, to be of use to their mother.

“We’ll take good care of them,” Call said, wasting words. The young girls hung onto the widow’s frayed skirts and cried. Call rode on, though with a bad feeling in his throat. It was better that the boys go; there was not enough work for them there. And yet they were the pride of the family. He would take as good care of them as he could, and yet what did that mean, with a drive of twenty-five hundred miles to make?

He made the Rainey ranch by sundown, a far more cheerful place than the Spettle homestead. Joe Rainey had a twisted leg, the result of an accident with a buckboard, but he got around on the leg almost as fast as a healthy man. Call was not as fond of Maude, Joe’s fat red-faced wife, as Augustus was, but then he had to admit he was not as fond of any woman as Augustus was.

Maude Rainey was built like a barrel, with a bosom as big