Streets of Laredo

by Larry McMurtry

The below is basically nothing but SPOILERS!

This is the sequel to Lonesome Dove, with many of the same characters. Pea Eye has married Lorena and they have 5 kids and a farm in the Texas panhandle. Lorena has gotten educated and runs the schoolhouse. Woodrow Call is now hired to do the kinds of things he’d done once as a Texas Ranger, kind of like a bounty hunter.

Call is hired by a railroad company to hunt a young killer named Joey Garza who keeps robbing their trains. The accountant from the railroad, Brookshire, is sent with him to keep the ledgers. Call, Brookshire, and a police deputy named Plunkert go off looking for Garza. Pea Eye declines to join them, but later guilt gets the better of him, and he goes to meet them. He meets a Kickapoo tracker named Famous Shoes who helps him find Call.

They discover that Mox Mox, the manburner, is alive. He catches people and burns them alive, just for fun. He was in Lonesome Dove and almost burned Lorena when she was captured by Blue Duck. When Lorena hears (from Charlie Goodnight) that Mox Mox is alive, she instantly ships her kids off to Clara in Nebraska and takes off looking for Pea Eye.

Charles Goodnight to Lorena, when she said her daughter Clarie “grasps fractions better than I do”:

I expect I could chase a fraction from dawn to sunset and never come near enough to grasp it.

Call kills Mox Mox and most of his party. He frees two kids who Mox Mox had been about to burn, and they turn out to belong to Jasper Fant (one of the Hat Creek cowboys). Call goes to Laredo to return them, and there he meets up with Lorena. The two travel together, but on the way Call is shot badly by Joey Garza, who shoots from under a hobbled horse. Garza has a high powered German rifle with a spyglass that helps him shoot accurately from a long distance.

Call doesn’t die. Lorena has to cut off his leg by knicking a Bowie knife and using it as a saw. She ends up taking him to Maria’s house in Ojinaga, not realizing that Maria is Joey’s mother!

When Lorena brings Call to Maria, Maria could kill him but doesn’t. Call had killed her father and brother a long time, but she cares for him instead:

Maria looked only briefly at the man tied to the black horse. He was an old man, and so wounded that he was only just barely alive. Though he bore the name of the man who hd killed her father and her brother, Maria knew he was no longer that man, the one she had wanted to kill. She had wanted to kill him in his power because he had used his power wrongly. She wanted him to know that he could not simply kill people, good people, and be excused.

But the man who had wielded the power and done the killing was not the old, sick man on the black horse. To stab him now would be pointless -- for she would not be stabbing the Captain Call she had hated for so long, but only the clothes and fleshly wrappings of that man.

Meanwhile, Joey goes off to kill Call’s partners (Pea Eye, Brookshire, and maybe Famous Shoes – Plunkert had already died by this time). Famous Shoes is off tracking, and Joey decides to have some fun, trying to scare them into running off into the desert where they will die of cold. He shoots their horses, and they run for cover into a dried creek bed. They have few guns; Brookshire grabbed a shotgun, which won’t have much range. Brookshire is sick of cowering and decides to walk off. Garza shoots him dead, but he leaves the shotgun. Pea Eye is able to charge Garza, surprising him. He grabs the shotgun and shoots Garza twice before Garza gets away on horseback. Pea Eye is shot, too, but not too badly.

Joey comes to Maria’s house, where Call is, but Call is unable to move. He doesn’t kill Call. He captures his blind sister Teresa and simple brother Rafael and tries to drown them in a river. His mother tries to stop him, even stabbing him in the shoulder, but he doesn’t stop. The town butcher, Gordo, is the one to finally shoot and kill him, but not before Joey mortally stabs Maria.

Call loses an arm and a leg. Lorena and Pea Eye take Teresa and Rafael, as well as Call, back to their farm in the Panhandle.