Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry Page A

said.
    Jake grinned his slow grin. “You boys,” he said. “You got me down for lazier than I am. I ain’t no lover of cow shit and trail dust, I admit, but I’ve seen something that you haven’t seen: Montana. Just because I like to play cards don’t mean I can’t smell an opportunity when one’s right under my nose. Why, you boys ain’t even got a barn with a roof on it. I doubt it would bust you to move.”
    “Jake, if you ain’t something,” Augustus said. “Here we ain’t seen hide nor hair of you for ten years and now you come riding in and want us to pack up and go north to get scalped.”
    “Well, Gus, me and Call are going bald anyway,” Jake said. “You’re the only one whose hair they’d want.”
    “All the more reason not to carry it to a hostile land,” Augustus said. “Why don’t you just calm down and play cards with me for a few days? Then when I’ve won all your money we’ll talk about going places.”
    Jake whittled down a match and began to meticulously pick his teeth.
    “By the time you clean me, Montana will be all settled up,” he said. “I don’t clean quick.”
    “What about that horse?” Call asked. “You didn’t gant him like that just so you could get here and help us beat the rush to Montana. What’s this about your luck running thick?”
    Jake looked a little more sorrowful as he picked his teeth. “Kilt a dentist,” he said. “A pure accident, but I kilt him.”
    “Where’d this happen?” Call asked.
    “Fort Smith, Arkansas,” Jake said. “Not three weeks ago.”
    “Well, I’ve always considered dentistry a dangerous profession,” Augustus said. “Making a living by yanking people’s teeth out is asking for trouble.”
    “He wasn’t even pulling my tooth,” Jake said. “I didn’t even know there was a dentist in the town. I got in a little argument in a saloon and a damn mule skinner threw down on me. Somebody’s old buffalo rifle was leaning against the wall right by me and that’s what I went for. Hell, I was sitting on my own pistols—I never wouldn’t have got to it in time. I wasn’t even playin’ cards with the mule skinner.”
    “What riled him then?” Gus asked.
    “Whiskey,” Jake said. “He was bull drunk. Before I even noticed, he took a dislike to my dress and pulled his Colt.”
    “Well, I don’t know what took you to Arkansas in the first place, Jake,” Augustus said. “A fancy dresser like yourself is bound to excite comment in them parts.”
    Call had found, over the years, that it only did to believe half of what Jake said. Jake was not a bald liar, but once he thought over a scrape, his imagination sort of worked on it and shaded it in his own favor.
    “If the man pointed a gun at you and you shot him, then that was self-defense,” Call said. “I still don’t see where the dentist comes in.”
    “It was bad luck all around,” Jake said. “I never even shot the mule skinner. I did shoot, but I missed, which was enough to scare him off. But of course I shot that dern buffalo gun. It was just a little plank saloon we were sitting in. A plank won’t stop a fifty-caliber bullet.”
    “Neither will a dentist,” Augustus observed. “Not unless you shoot down on him from the top, and even then I expect the bullet would come out his foot.”
    Call shook his head—Augustus could think of the damndest things.
    “So where was the dentist?” he asked.
    “Walking along on the other side of the street,” Jake said. “They got big wide streets in that town, too.”
    “But not wide enough, I guess,” Call said.
    “Nope,” Jake said. “We went to the door to watch the mule skinner run off and saw the dentist laying over there dead, fifty yards away. He had managed to get in the exact wrong spot.”
    “Pea done the same thing once,” Augustus said. “Remember, Woodrow? Up in the Wichita country? Pea shot at a wolf and missed and the bullet went over a hill and kilt one of our horses.”
    “I won’t forget