The Last Kind Words Saloon: A Novel by Larry McMurtry Read Free Book Online Page B

up her nerve to ask about it, and that was that San Saba always wore a sock on her right foot—a thick sock that she pulled halfway up her calf. She even wore it in the bath, and she bathed every day—at least she did when the water supply permitted.
    San Saba never took off her sock. Otherwise she was careless about her body.
    The day they were supposed to leave for the great new ranch in Texas, San Saba noticed Flo looking at her sock. She was just stepping out of her bath. The sock, of course, was wet. The girl Flo was special to her, so without hesitation San Saba stooped and peeled off the sock.
    There were red markings low on San Saba’s right ankle. Flo was disturbed, without knowing exactly what she was seeing.
    “It’s a brand,” San Saba explained. “I very rarely show it.”
    “Who branded you?”
    “The eunuchs, when I was six.”
    “I guess it hurt.”
    San Saba smiled.
    “It still hurts,” she said. “But now you know my darkest secret. Could you bring me another sock?”
    Lord Ernle, meanwhile, was directing the departure of his large, complicated entourage, which filled a number of wagons, buggies, and other conveyances. There were his pipers, of course, and a fowler and a falconer, and a man to handle the greyhounds. There were two blacksmiths, two cooks, three Irish laundresses, and even an electrician: it was clear to Lord Ernle that electricity was the coming thing and he wanted to see to it that his Texas establishment was absolutely state-of-the-art.
    “No half measures,” he muttered several times. It was his personal motto; he intended to have it latinized and put on a crest.
    San Saba watched it all from her balcony: beyond the tiny town there was the vastness of the plains: colorless, gloomy, vast: the sea of grass, Lord Ernle called it.
    Benny Ernle kept looking at her hopefully, at the dinner table. For years she had summoned her gaiety to enliven Benny Ernle’s meals. The food was excellent: pheasant again, and rabbit, fresh killed. She chose the rabbit, and ate in silence.
    “What? Not off your feed?” Lord Ernle asked.
    “We’ve a hard journey ahead of us—I would be foolish to overeat,” she said.
    Her mood alarmed him—it was a change he hadn’t ordered.
    “Bosh, I overeat every night,” he told her. “Where’s your smile? Your laughter?”
    San Saba looked at him directly; perhaps as directly as her mother had looked at the sultan, when she refused him.
    Lord Ernle made an excuse and left the table.
    It would not be the end of it, San Saba knew. Lord Ernle must not be thwarted, ever. San Saba felt sure there would be punishment, just as there had been for her mother, the Rose Concubine.

DENVER

     

 
    - 23 -
    The gunfighter skit involving Wyatt and Doc did not, at first, go well at all. For one thing the pair had not bothered to practice—both despised practice, on the whole.
    “Pull a pistol out of a dern holster and shoot it—why would that require practice?” Wyatt wondered.
    “Everything about show business requires practice,” Cody told him, but he didn’t press the point; these moody men would find out soon enough about the practicalities of show business.
    Sure enough, on the very first draw, Wyatt yanked his gun out so vigorously that it somehow flew out of his hand and landed twenty feet in front of him with the barrel in the dirt.
    Doc, meanwhile, had the opposite problem: he had jammed his pistol in its holster so tight that it wouldn’t come out. This behavior annoyed Doc so much that he ripped off the holster and threw it at a bronc, which happened to be loose in the arena.
    The crowd was largely silent: this was not what they had expected; many members of the audience were eager to get on to the dramatic reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand.
    Some bronc riders and a cowboy or two snickered, which did not improve Wyatt’s mood, or Doc’s—or Bill Cody’s.
    “They’ve made it into a comedy routine,” he said to Frank, Annie Oakley’s