“I may die eventually, but I’ll be damned if I’ll allow myself to be disappointed,” Will Isinglass said to me in one of the curious conversations we had while I was his prisoner north of San Jon.
He was eating a beefsteak, and he paused to look at me down the length of the long table his dead partner, Lord Snow, had brought from England. Drippings from the meat stained his beard. He looked like an old gray buffalo—a shaggy mane, a great head.
“I’ve lived eighty-five years and got every damn thing I wanted,” he added.
“Except a son with a chin, I suppose,” Cecily Snow said, contempt dripping from her voice as the juice dripped from the meat. The English do know how to manage contempt.
Isinglass studied her a moment—her enmity affected him as little as the bite of a flea, though she was a beautiful woman, daughter of a family that had held sway in England for six hundred years.
“Well, a whelp is usually a burden,” Isinglass said. “I’ve found it cheaper to hire my help.”
Yet he had had four sons by Cecily’s mother, started three in Cecily herself, fathered Katerina Garza, the flame of the cantinas, on a Mexican woman, and Bloody Feathers, hawk of the Jicarillas, on an Apache girl.
All these years later I still wonder about that old man. When the knell had finally rung for all the sweethearts; when Cecily Snow was gone and even Mesty-Woolah had fallen; when the great Whiskey Glass ranch was taken from him and a century weighed upon his shoulders; when Billy Bone had killed his four mute sons, and only the Mexican girl and the Indian brave were left to mark his passage across that huge land—did he know regret?
Even I had regrets about Dora, a woman who used her tongue as a cabbie uses a buggy whip.
The one person I had to put the question to was Tully Roebuck, the sad sheriff, one of the men Isinglass sent after Billy once Mesty-Woolah was dead.
He and I were sitting in the shade of his porch in Lincoln, listening to his little blind daughter croon from her bedroom, when I asked him if he thought Isinglass had known disappointment at the end.
“Doubt it,” Tully said, tipping his chair. “Old Whiskey was not a man to question himself.”