Read "Lonesome Dove, Volume 1" by Larry McMurtry online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
THE DEATH OF the young Irishman cast a heavy gloom over the cow camp. Call could do nothing about it. For the next week it seemed no one talked of anything but the death.
At night while they were having their grub, or just waiting for their turn at night herding to start, the cowboys talked endlessly about deaths they had witnessed, deaths they had heard about. Most of them had lived through rough times and had seen men die, but no one of their acquaintance had ridden into a nest of snakes in a river, and they could not keep the subject off their tongues.