Streets of Laredo

Streets of Laredo is Larry McMurtry's long-awaited sequel to Lonesome Dove, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the Hat Creek outfit's epic trail drive from Texas to Montana. At the center of the novel is Captain Call, Augustus McCrae's old partner, now a bounty hunter hired to track down and kill the brilliant and elusive young Mexican bandit Joey Garza. In the chase that ensues, an old man's skills are matched against a young man's daring. Call's long hunt takes him into the Texas Panhandle, across the Pecos, and into northern Mexico. In pursuing Joey Garza, and the psychopathic manburner Mox Mox, Call traverses one of the last untamed and unsettled stretches of the American West. Call takes with him an Eastern dude; an incompetent deputy; and his old corporal, Pea Eye Parker, now married to Lorena - once in love with Gus McCrae. In Mexico he meets Maria, Joey Garza's mother, the gallant Mexican woman who struggles to save her son, both from Captain Call and from himself. As the chase progresses we meet such true-life Westerners as John Wesley Hardin, Judge Roy Bean and the great cattleman Charles Goodnight. The struggle that animates this novel is not merely between an old man and a young man; it is also a struggle between civilization and barbarism. Lorena Parker journeys into the barren lands in midwinter to rescue her husband and bring him back to their decent life; Maria Garza rides to Crow Town, a community of casual killers, in order to save her son. In the final, terrible conflict, Pea Eye's loyalty to his family and the devotion of the two women to husband and son hold a candle up to civilization for values that go beyond an ability to kill, and in doing so offer a hope forthe West that is to be.