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Plot Summary
The second novel in Larry McMurtry's four-book Lonesome Dove saga, set in 1850s–1860s Texas, follows Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call as they mature from experienced soldiers into seasoned captains, while the Comanche civilization they have spent their careers fighting enters its final decline.
The novel opens in freezing sleet on the edge of the Palo Duro Canyon, a vast gorge in the Texas panhandle. Captain Inish Scull, a wealthy, eccentric Harvard graduate, drives his troop of 12 rangers in pursuit of Kicking Wolf, a Comanche horse thief. Scull rides his enormous warhorse Hector, called the Buffalo Horse by the Comanches. Augustus and Call, close friends, ride together through the storm, trailed by their veteran companion Long Bill Coleman, who worries about the cold and whether the sun will rise. Comanche war cries echo from the canyon below, where Buffalo Hump, the most feared war chief on the southern plains, has his camp. Scull presses on after Kicking Wolf, but his Kickapoo tracker, Famous Shoes, reports that Kicking Wolf has escaped with three stallions, having butchered the remaining stolen horses for meat. Scull abandons the pursuit but begins talking about Ahumado, a cruel Mexican bandit known as the Black Vaquero.
In the canyon, Buffalo Hump sits splitting buffalo bones for marrow. His son Blue Duck, fathered on a Mexican captive, is brave but reckless and violent; the tribal elders want him banished, but Buffalo Hump delays. Buffalo Hump reflects on the growing impossibility of free Comanche life as whites multiply along the rivers. Five young warriors attack the ranger camp and kill Jimmy Watson, a ranger. Blue Duck mutilates Watson's body, then attempts to ambush Call at dawn. Ignoring his father's instruction to use an arrow, Blue Duck hesitates too long with his gun, and Call shoots him twice. Blue Duck escapes by leaping down the canyon wall. When the elderly chief Slow Tree's large band arrives, Scull orders a retreat.
In Austin, Clara Forsythe, the sharp-tongued daughter of the general store owners, has been courted by Augustus for a decade. She loves him but refuses to marry him, unable to tolerate a ranger wife's constant uncertainty. Maggie Tilton, who fell into prostitution after both parents died, is deeply in love with Call. Jake Spoon, a young ranger working at the Scull mansion, is seduced by Captain Scull's aggressively sexual wife, Inez Scull. Weeks later, angry and drunk after Inez dismisses him, Jake goes to Maggie's room and strikes her, trying to replicate the rough treatment he experienced. Maggie endures the coercive visit in silence.
Kicking Wolf decides to steal Hector and deliver him to Ahumado's stronghold as an act of supreme daring. After days of preparation, he approaches the great horse during urination, when it cannot bolt, and leads it silently away. When Scull learns his horse has been stolen, he expresses admiration rather than rage. He strips down to essentials, declares he will pursue on foot with Famous Shoes, appoints Call and Augustus co-commanders, and walks into the empty distance.
Call and Augustus lead the troop south and rescue Maudy Clark, a captured settler, from a Comanche raiding party. Augustus shoots the young warrior Tana just as Tana raises a knife to Maudy's throat. Maudy is mentally shattered by repeated rapes and the murders of two of her children; she repeatedly tries to flee during the journey home. Deets, a young Black man who serves as the troop's cook, tends Maudy's surviving children throughout. In Austin, Maggie tells Call she is pregnant with his child, but he departs for his appointment with the Governor without truly registering the news. Clara tells Augustus she is marrying the horse trader Bob Allen on Sunday. She explains she was never meant for waiting and wondering, and she accuses him of always choosing Woodrow over her. She embraces him, affirms she will always need his friendship, and walks back into the store with tears on her cheeks.
Scull and Famous Shoes track Kicking Wolf into Mexico. At Ahumado's Yellow Canyon stronghold, the old bandit accepts Hector but has Kicking Wolf dragged behind a horse until nearly dead. Three Birds, Kicking Wolf's companion, is offered a cage over the cliff; when Ahumado orders him skinned instead, Three Birds sings his death song and steps backward off the cliff. Ahumado captures Scull on the open mesa. Hector has been cooked whole in a pit. Scull is lowered in a cage down the cliff face, where he survives by catching birds and scratching Greek hexameters into the rock. He files through the bars, kills the guard Tudwal by breaking his wrist and seizing his pistol, and mounts a horse, but bolas, weighted throwing cords, bring him down and he is recaptured. Ahumado then has Scull's eyelids surgically removed, exposing his eyes to the sun.
Buffalo Hump launches a devastating raid. He assembles 600 warriors and orders them to fight silently with traditional weapons so the soldiers in the forts will not hear. The war party strikes Austin at dawn, killing Clara's parents in their store and shooting Long Bill's wife Pearl Coleman with four arrows after she is raped by several warriors. Maggie survives by hiding under the smokehouse exactly as Call instructed. Clara is safely away, married only days before.
The raid's aftermath destroys the Coleman household. Pearl refuses conjugal relations with Long Bill; both are broken by trauma. Long Bill hangs himself from a live oak tree behind their house. Unable to secure the thousand ransom cattle demanded for Scull's return, Call and Augustus ride south, discover the ramshackle Rio Grande settlement of Lonesome Dove, and cross into Mexico alone. In the Yellow Canyon, Ahumado has departed after interpreting a spider bite as a divine summons. Call and Augustus find the camp deserted and Scull alive in a snake pit, filthy, half-naked, his eyes lidless, hopping uncontrollably from a hereditary condition triggered by his captivity.
The novel's final section spans the Civil War years and beyond. Augustus marries twice; both wives die young. Scull, his mind gradually recovered, serves as a Union general. Maggie gains respectable employment, and Jake Spoon moves into her household as a surrogate father to Newt, Maggie and Call's son. When Call discovers the arrangement and suggests Jake has compromised Maggie, she throws a pan of hot cornmeal at him, shouting that Call was the one who compromised her. Call refuses to give Newt his name, a refusal that becomes Maggie's central sorrow.
Buffalo Hump, weakened by cholera and abandoned by younger warriors, rides alone to a sacred site on the llano, the vast open grassland of the high plains. He gathers black rocks into a great circle and sings his death song. Blue Duck follows and takes his father's lance while the old chief sleeps. Buffalo Hump wakes to find Blue Duck already holding the weapon. Blue Duck drives the lance through the great hump and into the earth, fulfilling the prophecy that Buffalo Hump can only die when his hump is pierced. Call and Augustus find the body at the circle of rocks. Blue Duck fires on them from long range, destroying Call's boot heel but drawing no blood, and kills two horses before escaping north.
Maggie, weakened by a persistent cough, slowly dies. Her son Newt packs a shoe box with his few possessions, looks once at his mother, and walks to Pearl Coleman's door in the gray dawn. That evening he moves into the ranger bunkhouse, climbs the corral fence with his rope, and watches the moon. Augustus jokes that Kicking Wolf's refusal to steal their mule on the long walk home signals the era is over. Call looks south across the empty llano, the work unfinished, the future unresolved. The story of these characters continues in Lonesome Dove.
The novel opens in freezing sleet on the edge of the Palo Duro Canyon, a vast gorge in the Texas panhandle. Captain Inish Scull, a wealthy, eccentric Harvard graduate, drives his troop of 12 rangers in pursuit of Kicking Wolf, a Comanche horse thief. Scull rides his enormous warhorse Hector, called the Buffalo Horse by the Comanches. Augustus and Call, close friends, ride together through the storm, trailed by their veteran companion Long Bill Coleman, who worries about the cold and whether the sun will rise. Comanche war cries echo from the canyon below, where Buffalo Hump, the most feared war chief on the southern plains, has his camp. Scull presses on after Kicking Wolf, but his Kickapoo tracker, Famous Shoes, reports that Kicking Wolf has escaped with three stallions, having butchered the remaining stolen horses for meat. Scull abandons the pursuit but begins talking about Ahumado, a cruel Mexican bandit known as the Black Vaquero.
In the canyon, Buffalo Hump sits splitting buffalo bones for marrow. His son Blue Duck, fathered on a Mexican captive, is brave but reckless and violent; the tribal elders want him banished, but Buffalo Hump delays. Buffalo Hump reflects on the growing impossibility of free Comanche life as whites multiply along the rivers. Five young warriors attack the ranger camp and kill Jimmy Watson, a ranger. Blue Duck mutilates Watson's body, then attempts to ambush Call at dawn. Ignoring his father's instruction to use an arrow, Blue Duck hesitates too long with his gun, and Call shoots him twice. Blue Duck escapes by leaping down the canyon wall. When the elderly chief Slow Tree's large band arrives, Scull orders a retreat.
In Austin, Clara Forsythe, the sharp-tongued daughter of the general store owners, has been courted by Augustus for a decade. She loves him but refuses to marry him, unable to tolerate a ranger wife's constant uncertainty. Maggie Tilton, who fell into prostitution after both parents died, is deeply in love with Call. Jake Spoon, a young ranger working at the Scull mansion, is seduced by Captain Scull's aggressively sexual wife, Inez Scull. Weeks later, angry and drunk after Inez dismisses him, Jake goes to Maggie's room and strikes her, trying to replicate the rough treatment he experienced. Maggie endures the coercive visit in silence.
Kicking Wolf decides to steal Hector and deliver him to Ahumado's stronghold as an act of supreme daring. After days of preparation, he approaches the great horse during urination, when it cannot bolt, and leads it silently away. When Scull learns his horse has been stolen, he expresses admiration rather than rage. He strips down to essentials, declares he will pursue on foot with Famous Shoes, appoints Call and Augustus co-commanders, and walks into the empty distance.
Call and Augustus lead the troop south and rescue Maudy Clark, a captured settler, from a Comanche raiding party. Augustus shoots the young warrior Tana just as Tana raises a knife to Maudy's throat. Maudy is mentally shattered by repeated rapes and the murders of two of her children; she repeatedly tries to flee during the journey home. Deets, a young Black man who serves as the troop's cook, tends Maudy's surviving children throughout. In Austin, Maggie tells Call she is pregnant with his child, but he departs for his appointment with the Governor without truly registering the news. Clara tells Augustus she is marrying the horse trader Bob Allen on Sunday. She explains she was never meant for waiting and wondering, and she accuses him of always choosing Woodrow over her. She embraces him, affirms she will always need his friendship, and walks back into the store with tears on her cheeks.
Scull and Famous Shoes track Kicking Wolf into Mexico. At Ahumado's Yellow Canyon stronghold, the old bandit accepts Hector but has Kicking Wolf dragged behind a horse until nearly dead. Three Birds, Kicking Wolf's companion, is offered a cage over the cliff; when Ahumado orders him skinned instead, Three Birds sings his death song and steps backward off the cliff. Ahumado captures Scull on the open mesa. Hector has been cooked whole in a pit. Scull is lowered in a cage down the cliff face, where he survives by catching birds and scratching Greek hexameters into the rock. He files through the bars, kills the guard Tudwal by breaking his wrist and seizing his pistol, and mounts a horse, but bolas, weighted throwing cords, bring him down and he is recaptured. Ahumado then has Scull's eyelids surgically removed, exposing his eyes to the sun.
Buffalo Hump launches a devastating raid. He assembles 600 warriors and orders them to fight silently with traditional weapons so the soldiers in the forts will not hear. The war party strikes Austin at dawn, killing Clara's parents in their store and shooting Long Bill's wife Pearl Coleman with four arrows after she is raped by several warriors. Maggie survives by hiding under the smokehouse exactly as Call instructed. Clara is safely away, married only days before.
The raid's aftermath destroys the Coleman household. Pearl refuses conjugal relations with Long Bill; both are broken by trauma. Long Bill hangs himself from a live oak tree behind their house. Unable to secure the thousand ransom cattle demanded for Scull's return, Call and Augustus ride south, discover the ramshackle Rio Grande settlement of Lonesome Dove, and cross into Mexico alone. In the Yellow Canyon, Ahumado has departed after interpreting a spider bite as a divine summons. Call and Augustus find the camp deserted and Scull alive in a snake pit, filthy, half-naked, his eyes lidless, hopping uncontrollably from a hereditary condition triggered by his captivity.
The novel's final section spans the Civil War years and beyond. Augustus marries twice; both wives die young. Scull, his mind gradually recovered, serves as a Union general. Maggie gains respectable employment, and Jake Spoon moves into her household as a surrogate father to Newt, Maggie and Call's son. When Call discovers the arrangement and suggests Jake has compromised Maggie, she throws a pan of hot cornmeal at him, shouting that Call was the one who compromised her. Call refuses to give Newt his name, a refusal that becomes Maggie's central sorrow.
Buffalo Hump, weakened by cholera and abandoned by younger warriors, rides alone to a sacred site on the llano, the vast open grassland of the high plains. He gathers black rocks into a great circle and sings his death song. Blue Duck follows and takes his father's lance while the old chief sleeps. Buffalo Hump wakes to find Blue Duck already holding the weapon. Blue Duck drives the lance through the great hump and into the earth, fulfilling the prophecy that Buffalo Hump can only die when his hump is pierced. Call and Augustus find the body at the circle of rocks. Blue Duck fires on them from long range, destroying Call's boot heel but drawing no blood, and kills two horses before escaping north.
Maggie, weakened by a persistent cough, slowly dies. Her son Newt packs a shoe box with his few possessions, looks once at his mother, and walks to Pearl Coleman's door in the gray dawn. That evening he moves into the ranger bunkhouse, climbs the corral fence with his rope, and watches the moon. Augustus jokes that Kicking Wolf's refusal to steal their mule on the long walk home signals the era is over. Call looks south across the empty llano, the work unfinished, the future unresolved. The story of these characters continues in Lonesome Dove.
