Streets of Laredo: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

little Lorena had inherited from Gus must have been long gone by now.
     
    But Call knew Pea Eye too well to suppose that money, or anything else, would prevail much longer. Pea Eye was through with rangering, and Call had to admit that what they were doing was only the shadow of rangering, anyway.
     
    Call always felt angry when he anticipated Pea Eye's desertion--and, in his eyes, it was desertion--but, there by the train tracks, on the windy plain just north of Quanah, he swallowed the anger down, shook Pea Eye's hand, and got back on the train.
     
    The woman had won. In the end, it seemed they always did.
     
    Brookshire was startled when he saw the Captain come back alone. The man looked testy. Then the train pulled away, leaving the tall man and the grazing horses behind, on the prairie.
     
    "What's wrong with your man?" Brookshire asked. "Was he sick?" "No, he's not sick, he's married," Call said. "Running down bandits don't tempt him no more." "But I thought it was arranged," Brookshire said, more than a little alarmed. His instructions from Colonel Terry had been to let Call bring his man. Pea Eye himself was a legend, in a small way--Brookshire had been looking forward to meeting him. It was said that he had escaped from the Cheyenne Indians and had walked over one hundred miles, naked, to bring help to the other famous ranger, Augustus McCrae. Not many men could have walked one hundred miles naked, in Cheyenne country, and survived. Brookshire doubted that he could walk one hundred miles naked across New Jersey, and yet New Jersey was settled country, and his home state to boot.
     
    He had hoped to meet the man and hear about his adventures. So far, he was certainly not hearing about many of Captain Call's. It would have been entertaining to hear about the hundred-mile walk, but evidently, it was not to be.
     
    "I apologize--he's always been a reliable man," Call said. "He served with me more than thirty years--he's the last man I would have thought likely to marry. He never sought women, when he rode with me." "Oh well, I married myself," Brookshire said, thinking of Katie's fat legs. Those legs had once had great appeal to him, but their appeal had diminished over the years. There were times when he missed Katie, and times when he didn't. When he wasn't missing her, he sometimes considered that he had been a fool, to tie himself down. Indeed, he was hoping that one bonus from his long train trip might be a Mexican girl. The popular view in Brooklyn was that Mexican girls were pretty, lively, and cheap.
     
    "Who'll we get to replace him?" he asked, remembering that Colonel Terry expected results--and not next year, either.
     
    Joey Garza had struck seven times, stopping trains in remote areas of the Southwest, where trains were rarely bothered. He had killed eleven men so far, seemingly selecting his victims at random. Seven of the dead had been passengers; the rest, crew. Four of the seven trains had been carrying military payrolls, and one of the seven had Leland Stanford aboard. At that time, Leland Stanford was thought to be the richest man in California. The boy had taken his rings, his watch, and the fine silk sheets off the bed in his private car. He also took his diamond cuff links. Leland Stanford was not a man who took kindly to having his sheets removed by a young Mexican not yet out of his teens. It was Stanford who stoked the fire under Colonel Terry, prompting him to hire expensive help such as Captain Woodrow Call.
     
    It disturbed Brookshire that their plan had already gone awry, though they were still hundreds of miles from the border, and no doubt, many more hundreds of miles from where Joey Garza was to be found, if he was found.
     
    One thing could be said with certainty about Colonel Terry: he did not like for plans to go awry. If some did go awry anyway, someone invariably got blamed, and most of the time that someone was Brookshire.
     
    "I'll be lucky not to get fired," Brookshire