Lonesome Dove, Volume 2: Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry

THE MORNING Inez Scull first called Jake Spoon into her bedroom, she was sitting on a blue velvet stool. The bedroom was in the Sculls' fine brick mansion on Shoal Creek, the first brick house in Austin, the rangers had been told. Jake had only been with the rangers three months at the time, working mainly as a kind of orderly for Captain Scull. His chief task was to groom Hector, and get him saddled when the Captain required him. Now and again Captain Scull would dispatch Jake to run an errand for Madame Scull-"Madame Scull" was how she preferred to be addressed. Usually the errand would consist of picking up packages for her at one of the more prominent stores. Jake had come to Texas with a group of ragged settlers from Kansas; he had never seen such buying as the Sculls routinely indulged in. The Captain was always ordering new guns, or saddlery, or hats or gloves or spyglasses. The big dining room table in the Scull mansion was always littered with catalogues of all descriptions-catalogues of combs or dresses or other frippery for Madame Scull, or knives or fine shotguns or microscopes or other gadgets for the Captain. The house even boasted a barometer, a thing Jake had never heard of, and also a brass ship's clock at the head of the stairs, a clock that sounded bells every hour and half hour.

Jake had never been, or expected to be, in a fine lady's bedroom when the kitchen girl, Felice, a young high yellow girl he had taken a bit of a fancy to, came outside and told him that the lady of the house wanted to see him upstairs. Jake was a little nervous, as he went up the stairs. Madame Scull and the Captain were often out of temper with one another, and were not quiet in their expressions of rage or discontent. More than once, according to Felice, the Captain had taken a bullwhip to his lady, and, more than once, she had taken the same bullwhip to him-not to mention quirts, buggy whips, or anything else that lay to hand. At other times, they screamed wild curses at one another and fought with their fists, like two men. Some of the Mexican servants were so alarmed by the goings-on that they thought the devil lived in the house-a few of them fled in the night and didn't stop until they were across the Rio Grande, more than two hundred and fifty miles away.