That night they camped at a warm spring atop a hill amid old traces of Spanish masonry and they stripped and descended like acolytes into the water while huge white leeches willowed away over the sands. When they rode out in the morning it was still dark. Lightning stood in ragged chains far to the south, silent, the staccato mountains bespoken blue and barren out of the void. Day broke upon a smoking reach of desert darkly clouded where the riders could count five separate storms spaced upon the shores of the round earth. They were riding in pure sand and the horses labored so hugely that the men were obliged to dismount and lead them, toiling up steep eskers where the wind blew the white pumice from the crests like the spume from sea swells and the sand was scalloped and fraily shaped and nothing else was there save random polished bones. They were all day among the dunes and in the evening coming down from the last low sandhills to the plain below among catclaw and crucifixion thorn they were a parched and haggard lot man and beast. Harpie eagles flew up screaming from a dead mule and wheeled off westward into the sun as they led the horses out onto the plain.
Two nights later bivouacked in a pass in the mountains they could see the distant lights of the city below them. They crouched along a shale ridge in the leeward wall of the gap while the fire sawed in the wind and they watched the lamps winking in the blue floor of the night thirty miles away. The judge crossed before them in the dark. Sparks from the fire ran down the wind. He took his seat among the scrabbled plates of shale out there and so they sat like beings from an older age watching the distant lamps dim out one by one until the city on the plain had shrunk to a small core of light that might have been a burning tree or some solitary encampment of travelers or perhaps no ponderable fire at all.
As they rode out through the tall wooden gates of the governor's palace two soldiers who had been standing there counting them past stepped forward and took Toadvine's horse by the headstall. Glanton passed him on the right and rode on. Toadvine stood in the saddle.
Glanton!
The riders clattered into the street. Glanton just beyond the gates looked back. The soldiers were speaking to Toadvine in Spanish and one held an escopeta on him.
I aint got nobody's teeth, Glanton said.
I'll shoot these two fools where they stand.
Glanton spat. He looked down the street and he looked at Toadvine. Then he dismounted and led his horse back into the courtyard. Vamonos, he said. He looked up at Toadvine. Get off your horse.
They rode out of town under escort two days later. Upward of a hundred soldiers herding them along the road, uneasy in their varied dress and arms, wrenching their horses about and booting them through the ford where the American horses had stopped to drink. In the foothills above the aqueduct they reined to one side and the Americans filed past and wound up through the rocks and nopal and diminished among the shadows and were gone.
They rode west into the mountains. They passed through small villages doffing their hats to folk whom they would murder before the month was out. Mud pueblos that lay like plague towns with the crops rotting in the fields and what stock not driven off by the indians wandering at will and none to herd or tend it and many villages almost wholly depopulated of male inhabitants where the women and children crouched in terror in their hovels listening until the last hoofclop died in the distance.
At the town of Nacori there was a cantina and here the company dismounted and crowded through the doorway and took tables. Tobin volunteered to guard the horses. He stood watching up and down the street. No one paid him any mind. These people had seen Americans in plenty, dusty laggard trains of them months out of their own country and half crazed with the enormity of their own presence in that immense and bloodslaked waste, commandeering meal and meat or indulging a latent taste for rape among the sloe-eyed girls of that country. Now it was something near to an hour past noon and a number of workers and tradesmen were crossing the street toward the cantina. As they passed Glanton's horse Glanton's dog rose up bristling. They veered slightly and went on. At the same moment a deputation of dogs of the village had started across the plaza, five, six of them, their eyes on Glanton's dog. As they did so a juggler leading a funeral rounded the corner into the street and taking a rocket from among several under his arm he held it to the cigarillo in his mouth and tossed it into the plaza where it exploded. The pack of dogs shied and scrambled back save for two who continued into the street. Among the Mexican horses tethered at the bar before the cantina several shot out a hind leg and the rest stepped about nervously. Glanton's dog did not take his eyes from the men moving toward the door. None of the American horses even raised an ear. The pair of dogs that had crossed in front of the funeral procession veered off from the kicking horses and came on toward the cantina. Two more rockets exploded in the street and now the rest of the procession had swung into view, a fiddler and a cornetplayer leading with a quick and lively tune. The dogs were trapped between the funeral and the animals of the mercenaries and they halted and flattened their ears and began to sidle and trot. Finally they bolted across the street behind the pallbearers. These details should have stood the workers entering the cantina in better stead. They had turned and they stood now with their backs to the door holding their hats to their chests. The pallbearers passed carrying on their shoulders a bier and the watchers could see in her burial dress among the flowers the graylooking face of a young woman jostling along woodenly. Behind came her coffin, made from rawhide blacked with lampblack, carried by dark-clad porters and looking much like a rude hide boat. At the rear advanced a company of mourners, some of the men drinking, the old women in their dusty black shawls helped weeping over the potholes and children bearing flowers who looked shyly at the spectators in the street as they passed.
Within the cantina the Americans had no more than seated themselves before a muttered insult from a nearby table brought three or four of them to their feet. The kid addressed the table in his wretched Spanish and demanded which among those sullen inebriates had spoken. Before any could own it the first of the funeral rockets exploded in the street as told and the entire company of Americans made for the door. A drunk at the table rose to his feet with a knife and lurched after them. His friends called after him but he waved them away.
John Dorsey and Henderson Smith, two boys from Missouri, were the first into the street. They were followed by Charlie Brown and the judge. The judge could see over their heads and he raised one hand to those behind him. The bier was just passing. The fiddler and the cornetist were making little bows to each other and their steps suggested the martial style of the air they played. It's a funeral, said the judge. As he spoke the drunk with the knife now reeling in the doorway sank the blade deep into the back of a man named Grimley. None saw it but the judge. Grimley put a hand on the rough wood frame of the door. I'm killed, he said. The judge drew his belt pistol and leveled it above the heads of the men and shot the drunk through the middle of the forehead.
The Americans outside the door were all but looking down the barrel of the judge's pistol when he fired and most of them dove to the ground. Dorsey rolled clear and got to his feet and collided with the workers who'd been paying their respects to the passing cortege. They were putting their hats on when the judge fired. The dead man fell backward into the cantina, blood spouting from his head. When Grimley turned they could see the wooden handle of the knife protruding from his bloody shirt.
Other knives were already in play. Dorsey was grappling with the Mexicans and Henderson Smith had drawn his bowie and half severed a man's arm with it and the man was standing with the dark arterial blood spraying between his fingers where he tried to hold the wound shut. The judge got Dorsey to his feet and they backed toward the cantina with the Mexicans feinting and jabbing at them with their knives. From inside came the uninterrupted sound of gunfire and the doorframe was filling up with smoke. The judge turned at the door and stepped over the several corpses sprawled there. Inside the huge pistols roared without intermission and the twenty
or so Mexicans who'd been in the room were strewn about in every position, shot to pieces among the overturned chairs and the tables with the fresh splinters blown out of the wood and the mud walls pocked everywhere by the big conical bullets. The survivors were making for the daylight in the doorway and the first of these encountered the judge there and cut at him with his knife. But the judge was like a cat and he sidestepped the man and seized his arm and broke it and picked the man up by his head. He put him against the wall and smiled at him but the man had begun to bleed from the ears and the blood was running down between the judge's fingers and over his hands and when the judge turned him loose there was something wrong with his head and he slid to the floor and did not get up. Those behind him had meanwhile met with a great battery of gunfire and the doorway was jammed with the dead and dying when there was suddenly a great ringing silence in the room. The judge stood with his back to the wall. The smoke drifted through like fog and the shrouded figures stood frozen. In the center of the room Toadvine and the kid were standing back to back with their pistols at port like duellists. The judge stepped to the door and shouted across the stacked bodies to the expriest where he stood among the horses with his pistol drawn.
The laggards, Priest, the laggards.
They'd not have shot men in public in a town so large but there was no help for it. Three men were running down the street and two others were legging it across the square. Of other souls abroad there were none. Tobin stepped from between the horses and leveled the big pistol in both hands and began to fire, the pistol bucking and dropping back and the runners wobbling and pitching headlong. He shot the two in the plaza and swung and shot down the runners in the street. The last one fell in a doorway and Tobin turned and drew the other pistol from his belt and stepped to the other side of the horse and looked up the street and across the square for any sign of movement there or among the buildings. The judge stepped back from the doorway into the cantina where the Americans stood looking at each other and at the bodies in a sort of wonder. They looked at Glanton. His eyes cut across the smoking room. His hat lying on a table. He stepped over and got it and set it on his head and squared it. He looked about. The men were reloading the empty chambers in their pistols. Hair, boys, he said. The string aint run on this trade yet.
When they left the cantina ten minutes later the streets were deserted. They had scalped the entire body of the dead, sliding about in a floor that had been packed clay and was now a wine-colored mud. There were twenty-eight Mexicans inside the tavern and eight more in the street including the five the expriest had shot. They mounted up. Grimley sat slumped sideways against the mud wall of the building. He did not look up. He was holding his pistol in his lap and looking off down the street and they turned and rode out along the north side of the plaza and disappeared.
It was thirty minutes before anyone appeared in the street. They spoke in whispers. As they approached the cantina one of the men from inside appeared in the doorway like a bloody apparition. He had been scalped and the blood was all run down into his eyes and he was holding shut a huge hole in his chest where a pink froth breathed in and out. One of the citizens laid a hand on his shoulder.
A donde vas? he said.
A casa, said the man.
The next town they entered was two days deeper into the sierras. They never knew what it was called. A collection of mud huts pitched on the naked plateau. As they rode in the people ran before them like harried game. Their cries to one another or perhaps the visible frailty of them seemed to incite something in Glanton. Brown watched him. He nudged forth his horse and drew his pistol and this somnolent pueblo was forthwith dragooned into a weltering shambles. Many of the people had been running toward the church where they knelt clutching the altar and from this refuge they were dragged howling one by one and one by one they were slain and scalped in the chancel floor. When the riders passed through this same village four days later the dead were still in the streets and buzzards and pigs were feeding on them. The scavengers watched in silence while the company picked their way past like supernumeraries in a dream. When the last of them was gone they commenced to feed again.
They went on through the mountains without resting. They trod a narrow trail through a black pine wood by day and by dark and in silence save for the creaking of tack and the breathing of the horses. A thin shell of a moon lay capsized over the jagged peaks. They rode down into a mountain town just before day where there was no lamp nor watchman nor dog. In the gray dawn they sat along a wall waiting for daylight. A rooster called. A door slammed. An old woman came down the lane past the daubed sty walls through the mist carrying a yoke of jars. They rose up. It was cold and their breath plumed about them. They took down the poles in the corral and led the horses out. They rode up the street. They halted. The animals sidled and stamped in the cold. Glanton had reined up and drawn his pistol.
A company of mounted troops passed out from behind a wall at the north end of the village and turned into the street. They wore tall shakos faced with metal plates and horsehair plumes and they wore green coats trimmed with scarlet and scarlet sashes and they were armed with lances and muskets and their mounts were nicely caparisoned and they entered the street sidling and prancing, horsemen riding upon horses, all of them desirable young men. The company looked to Glanton. He holstered the pistol and drew his rifle. The captain of the lancers had raised his sabre to halt the column. The next instant the narrow street was filled with riflesmoke and a dozen of the soldiers lay dead or dying on the ground. The horses reared and screamed and fell back upon each other and men were unhorsed and rose up struggling to hold their mounts. A second fire tore through their ranks. They fell away in confusion. The Americans drew their pistols and booted their horses forward up the street.
The Mexican captain was bleeding from a gunshot wound in the chest and he stood in the stirrups to receive the charge with his sabre. Glanton shot him through the head and shoved him from his horse with his foot and shot down in succession three men behind him. A soldier on the ground had picked up a lance and ran at him with it and one of the riders leaned down out of that wild melee and cut his throat and passed on. In the morning dampness the sulphurous smoke hung over the street in a gray shroud and the colorful lancers fell under the horses in that perilous mist like soldiers slaughtered in a dream wide-eyed and wooden and mute.
Some among the rear guard had managed to turn their mounts and start back up the street and the Americans were clouting back with pistolbarrels the riderless horses and the horses surged and milled with the stirrups kicking out and they trumpeted with their long mouths and trampled underfoot the dead. They beat them back and urged their horses through and up the street to where it narrowed and turned up the mountain and they fired after the fleeing lancers as they skeltered up the trail in a rattle of small stones.
Glanton sent a detachment of five men to follow and he and the judge and Bathcat turned back. They met the rest of the company riding up and they turned back and they went down and looted the bodies where they lay in the street like dead bandsmen and they smashed their muskets against the walls of the houses and broke their swords and lances. As they rode out they met the five scouts returning. The lancers had quit the trail and scattered through the woods. Two nights later camped on a butte looking out over the broad central plain they could see a point of light out on that desert like the reflection of a single star in a lake of utter blackness.
They took council. On that raw tablestone the flames of their balefire swirled and circled and they studied the arrant blackness under them where it fell away like the sheer cloven face of the world.
How far do you make them, said Glanton.
Holden shook his head. They've made half a day on us. They number no more than twelve, fourteen. They wont send men ahead.
How far are we from Chihuahua City?
Four days. Three. Where's Davy?
Glanton turned. How far to Chihuahua, David?
Brown stood wit
h his back to the fire. He nodded. If that's them they could be there in three days.
You reckon we can overhaul them?
I dont know. Might depend on whether they figure us to be after them.
Glanton turned and spat into the fire. The judge raised one pale and naked arm and pursued something in the pit of it with his fingers. If we can be off of this mountain by daylight, he said, I believe we can overtake them. Otherwise we had better make for Sonora.
They may be from Sonora.
Then we'd better go get them.
We could take these scalps to Ures.
The fire swept along the ground, it rose again. We'd better go get them, said the judge.
They rode onto the plain at dawn as the judge had said and that night they could see the fire of the Mexicans reflected in the sky to the east beyond the curve of the earth. All the day following they rode and all that night, jerking and lurching like a deputation of spastics as they slept in their saddles. On the morning of the third day they could see the riders before them on the plain in silhouette against the sun and in the evening they could count their number struggling upon that desolate mineral waste. When the sun rose the walls of the city stood pale and thin in the rising light twenty miles to the east. They sat their horses. The lancers were strung out along the road several miles to the south of them. There was no reason for them to stop and no hope in it any more than there was in the riding but as they were riding they rode and the Americans put their horses forward once again.