Dead Man's Walk Read Online Free PDF

a woolen serape, purchased in a stall in San Antonio, and had managed to sneak the jug out of camp under the serape.

When he brought it out and took a swig, Call looked annoyed.

"If the Major caught you drinking on guard he'd shoot you," Call said. It was true, too. The Major tolerated many foibles in his troop, but he did demand sobriety of the men assigned to keep guard. They were camped not far from the great Comanche war trail--the merciless raiders from the north could appear at any moment. Even momentary inattention on the part of the guards could imperil the whole troop.

"Well, but how could he catch me?" Gus asked. "He's trying to talk to that old woman-- he'd have to sneak up on us to catch me, and I'd have to be drunker than this not to notice a fat man sneaking up." It was certainly true that Major Chevallie was fat. He outweighed Matilda by a good fifty pounds, and Matilda was not small. The Major was short, too, which made his girth all the more noticeable. Still, he was the Major. Just because he hadn't shot the scalp hunters didn't mean he wouldn't shoot Gus.

"I don't believe you was ever on a riverboat--why would they hire you?" Call asked. At times of irritation he began to remember all the lies Gus had told him.

Gus McCrae had no more regard for truth than he did for the rules of rangering.

"Why, of course I was," Gus said. "I was a top pilot for a dern year--I'm a Tennessee boy. I can run one of them riverboats as well as the next man. I only run aground once, in all the time I worked." The truth of that was that he had once sneaked aboard a riverboat for two days; when he was discovered, he was put off on a mud bar, near Dubuque. A young whore had hidden him for the two days--the captain had roundly chastised her when Gus was discovered. Shortly after he was put off, the riverboat ran aground--that was the one true fact in the story. The tale sounded grand to his green friend, though. Woodrow Call had got no farther in the world than his uncle's scratchy farm near Navasota. Woodrow's parents had been taken by the smallpox, which is why he was raised by the uncle, a tyrant who stropped him so hard that when Woodrow got old enough to follow the road to San Antonio, he ran off. It was in San Antonio that the two of them had met--or rather, that Call had found Gus asleep against the wall of a saloon, near the river. Call worked for a Mexican blacksmith at the time, stirring the forge and helping the old smith with the horseshoeing that went on from dawn till dark. The Mexican, Jesus, a kindly old man who hummed sad harmonies all day as he worked, allowed Call to sleep on a pallet of nail sacks in a small shed behind the forge.

Blacksmithing was dirty work. Call had been on his way to the river to wash off some of the smudge from his work when he noticed a lanky youth, sound asleep against the wall of the little adobe saloon.

At first he thought the stranger might be dead, so profound were his slumbers. Killings were not uncommon in the streets of San Antonio-- Call thought he ought to stop and check, since if the boy was dead it would have to be reported.

It turned out, though, that Gus was merely so fatigued that he was beyond caring whether he was counted among the living or among the dead. He had traveled in a tight stagecoach for ten days and nine nights, making the trip from Baton Rouge through the pines of east Texas to San Antonio.

Upon arrival, his fellow passengers decided that Gus had been with them long enough; he was in such a stupor of fatigue that he offered no resistance when they rolled him out. He could not remember how long he had been sleeping against the saloon; it was his impression that he had slept about a week. That night Call let Gus share his pallet of nail sacks, and the two had been friends ever since.

It was Gus who decided they should apply for the Texas Rangers--Call would never have thought himself worthy of such a position. It was Gus, too, who boldly approached the