I had no right to ask before.
I understand him not telling me because he didn't know me.
But now I think that we would get along all right.
I'd like to be able to talk to him now and get his advice.
Hell, if I didn't get advice I'd just like to talk to him.
It's a shame there is such a jump in time between ones like us.
Then, as he thought, he realized that if there was any such thing as ever meeting, both he and his grandfather would be acutely embarrassed by the presence of his father.
Any one has a right to do it, he thought.
But it isn't a good thing to do.
I understand it, but I do not approve of it. _Lache_ was the word.
But you _do_ understand it?
Sure, I understand it but.
Yes, but.
You have to be awfully occupied with yourself to do a thing like that.
Aw hell, I wish Grandfather was here, he thought.
For about an hour anyway.
Maybe he sent me what little I have through that other one that misused the gun.
Maybe that is the only communication that we have.
But, damn it.
Truly damn it, but I wish the time-lag wasn't so long so that I could have learned from him what the other one never had to teach me.
But suppose the fear he had to go through and dominate and just get rid of finally in four years of that and then in the Indian fighting, although in that, mostly, there couldn't have been so much fear, had made a _cobarde_ out of the other one the way second generation bullfighters almost always are?
Suppose that?
And maybe the good juice only came through straight again after passing through that one?
I'll never forget how sick it made me the first time I knew he was a _cobarde_.
Go on, say it in English.
Coward.
It's easier when you have it said and there is never any point in referring to a son of a bitch by some foreign term.
He wasn't any son of a bitch, though.
He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have.
Because if he wasn't a coward he would have stood up to that woman and not let her bully him.
I wonder what I would have been like if he had married a different woman?
That's something you'll never know, he thought, and grinned.
Maybe the bully in her helped to supply what was missing in the other.
And you.
Take it a little easy.
Don't get to referring to the good juice and such other things until you are through tomorrow.
Don't be snotty too soon.
And then don't be snotty at all.
We'll see what sort of juice you have tomorrow.
But he started thinking about Grandfather again.
"George Custer was not an intelligent leader of cavalry, Robert," his grandfather had said.
"He was not even an intelligent man."
He remembered that when his grandfather said that he felt resentment that any one should speak against that figure in the buckskin shirt, the yellow curls blowing, that stood on that hill holding a service revolver as the Sioux closed in around him in the old Anheuser-Busch lithograph that hung on the poolroom wall in Red Lodge.
"He just had great ability to get himself in and out of trouble," his grandfather went on, "and on the Little Big Horn he got into it but he couldn't get out.
"Now Phil Sheridan was an intelligent man and so was Jeb Stuart.
But John Mosby was the finest cavalry leader that ever lived."
He had a letter in his things in the trunk at Missoula from General Phil Sheridan to old Killy-the-Horse Kilpatrick that said his grandfather was a finer leader of irregular cavalry than John Mosby.
I ought to tell Golz about my grandfather, he thought.
He wouldn't ever have heard of him though.
He probably never even heard of John Mosby.