"McMurtry, Larry - Lonesome Dove 02 - Comanche Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMurtry Larry)

Augustus could see nothing at all, and he was well known to have the best vision in the troop. The plain was so wide it seemed you could see to the rim of forever, and yet, in all that distance, there was nothing.

Augustus, like the other rangers, had been in the saddle thirty-six hours. Before the chase started he had been up all night, whoring and drinking; now he was so tired he thought he might be losing his mind. There were those among his comrades who thought that it was excessive whoring and drinking that had caused Gus's hair to turn white, almost overnight; but his own view was that too many long patrols had fatigued his hair so that it had lost its color.

Now, when he looked up, the horizon seemed to roll. It was as if the plain was turning over, like a plate. Augustus's stomach, which had little in it, began to turn, too. For a moment, he had the sensation that the sky was below him, the earth above. He needed to see something definite--an antelope, a tree, anything--ffrid himself of the queasy sensation he got when the land seemed to tip. It grew so bad, the rolling, that at one point he felt his own horse was above him, its feet attached to the sky.

The more Gus thought about it, the angrier he became at Captain Scull.

"If he don't stop for breakfast I'm just going to dismount right here and die," Gus said. "I'm so tired I'm confusing up with down." "I guess he'll stop when he hits the Canadian," Call said. "I doubt it's much further." "No, and I doubt the North Pole is much further, either," Gus said. "Why has he brought us here? There's nothing here." Call was weary, too. All the men were weary.

Some slept in their saddles, despite the cold.

Under the circumstances, Call just wanted to concentrate on seeing that no one fell behind, or straggled off and got lost. Though the plain looked entirely flat, it wasn't. There were dips so shallow they didn't look like dips, and rises so gradual they didn't seem to be rises. A ranger might ride off a little distance from the troop, to answer a call of nature, only to find, once the call was answered, that he had traversed a dip or crossed a rise and become completely lost. The troop would have vanished, in only a few minutes. A man lost on the llano would wander until he starved-- or until the Comanches got him.

Call wanted to devote what energies he had to seeing that no one got lost. It was vexing to have to turn his attention from that important task to answer Gus's questions--particularly since they were questions that Gus himself ought to know the answer to.

"He brought us here to catch Kicking Wolf and get those horses back," Call said. "Did you think he was leading us all this way just to exercise our horses?" Ahead they could see Inish Scull, his coat white with sleet, moving at the same steady pace he had maintained the whole way. Hector's shaggy coat steamed from melting sleet. It crossed Call's mind to wonder just how far Hector could travel without rest. Would it be one hundred miles, or two hundred? The Captain was well ahead of the troop. Seen from a distance he seemed very small, in relation to his huge mount. Seen up close, though, that changed.

No one thought of Inish Scull as small when his eyes were boring into them, as he delivered commands or criticisms. Then all anyone remembered was that he was a captain in the Texas Rangers--size didn't enter into it.

Augustus's head was still swimming. The horizon still rocked, but talking to Woodrow helped a little. Woodrow Call was too hardheaded to grow confused about up and down; he was never likely to get sky and land mixed up.

"He's not going to catch Kicking Wolf," Gus said. "I expect the reason he's rarely run off from is because he's careful who he chases.

If you ask me, he usually just chases the ones he knows he can catch." Call had been thinking the same thing, though he had no intention of saying it in front of the men.

He didn't like to be doubting his captain, but it did seem to him that Captain Scull had met his match in the game of chase and pursuit. Kicking Wolf had had nearly a day's start, and the shifting weather made tracking difficult. Inish Scull didn't like to turn his troop, any more than he liked to turn his own head when spitting tobacco juice. He seemed to think he could keep an enemy ahead of him by sheer force of will, until he wore him down. But Kicking Wolf had lured the Captain onto the llano, which was his place. He wasn't subject to anybody's will--not even Buffalo Hump's, if reports were true.

Then Augustus spotted something moving in the sky, the first sign he had seen that there was life anywhere around.

"Look, Woodrow--I think that's a goose," Gus said, pointing at the dark in the gray sky. "If it comes in range I mean to try and shoot it. A fat goose would make a fine breakfast." "Geese fly in flocks," Call reminded him. "Why would one goose be flying around out here?" "Well, maybe it got lost," Gus suggested.

"No, birds don't get lost," Call said.

"A bird dumb enough to fly over this place could well get lost," Gus said. "This place is so empty an elephant could get lost in it." The bird, when it came in sight, proved to be a great blue heron. It flew right over the troop; several of the men looked up at it and felt some relief. All of them were oppressed by the gray emptiness they were travelling in. The sight of a living thing, even a bird, stirred their hopes a little.

"I see something else," Gus said, pointing to the west. He saw a moving spot, very faint, but moving in their direction, he felt sure.

Call looked and could see nothing, which vexed him. Time and again he had to accept the fact that Augustus McCrae had him beaten, when it came to vision. Gus's sight just reached out farther than Call's--t was the plain fact.

"I expect it's Famous Shoes," Gus said. "It's about time that rascal got back." "He ain't a rascal, he's our scout," Call said. "What's rascally about him?" "Well, he's independent," Augustus commented. "What's the use of a scout who goes off and don't bring back a report but every two or three days? And besides that, he beat me at cards." "An Indian who can beat a white man at cards is a rascal for sure," Long Bill volunteered.

"I expect it just took him this long to find Kicking Wolf's track," Call said.

A few minutes later they sighted the Canadian River, a narrow watercourse cutting through a shallow valley. There was not a tree along it.

"Now, that's a disappointment," Augustus said.

"Here we are at the river, and there's not any dern wood. We'll have to burn our stirrups if we want to make a fire." Then Call saw Famous Shoes--Inish Scull had stopped to receive his report. What amazed Call was that Famous Shoes had arrived so swiftly. Only moments before, it seemed, the scout had been so far away that Call hadn't even been able to see him; but now he was there.