Lonesome Dove, Volume 2: Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry

WHEN SCULL AWOKE Hickling Prescott was on his mind and the smell of cooking meat was in his nostrils. His mother, a Ticknor, had been a childhood friend of the great historian, whose house stood only a block down the hill from the great Georgian town house where Inish Scull had grown up. The world knew the man as William Hickling Prescott, of course, but Scull's mother had always called him "Hickling. " As Inish Scull was leaving for the Mexican War he had gone by to pay his respects to the old man, then blind and mostly deaf. It was well to know your history when going off to battle, Scull believed, and certainly his mother's friend, Hickling Prescott, knew as much about the history of Mexico as anyone in Boston-or in America, for that matter. To Hickling Prescott, of course, Boston was America-as much of it, at least, as he cared to acknowledge.

Twice before, during the few weeks he had spent in Boston, Scull had made the mistake of taking Inez along when visiting the old man. But Hickling Prescott didn't approve of Inez. Although he couldn't see or hear and wasn't expected to feel, somehow Inez's determined carnality had impressed itself on the historian, who was not charmed. He didn't believe the sons of Boston should marry women from the South-and yet, to his annoyance, not a few sons of Boston did just that.