When they entered Glanton's chamber he lurched upright and glared wildly about him. The small clay room he occupied was entirely filled with a brass bed he'd appropriated from some migrating family and he sat in it like a debauched feudal baron while his weapons hung in a rich array from the finials. Caballo en Pelo mounted into the actual bed with him and stood there while one of the attending tribunal handed him at his right side a common axe the hickory helve of which was carved with pagan motifs and tasseled with the feathers of predatory birds. Glanton spat.
Hack away you mean red nigger, he said, and the old man raised the axe and split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple.
When they entered the judge's quarters they found the idiot and a girl of perhaps twelve years cowering naked in the floor. Behind them also naked stood the judge. He was holding leveled at them the bronze barrel of the howitzer. The wooden truck stood in the floor, the straps pried up and twisted off the pillow-blocks. The judge had the cannon under one arm and he was holding a lighted cigar over the touch-hole. The Yumas fell over one another backward and the judge put the cigar in his mouth and took up his portmanteau and stepped out the door and backed past them and down the embankment. The idiot, who reached just to his waist, stuck close to his side, and together they entered the wood at the base of the hill and disappeared from sight.
The savages built a bonfire on the hill and fueled it with the furnishings from the white men's quarters and they raised up Glanton's body and bore it aloft in the manner of a slain champion and hurled it onto the flames. They'd tied his dog to his corpse and it was snatched after in howling suttee to disappear crackling in the rolling greenwood smoke. The doctor's torso was dragged up by the heels and raised and flung onto the pyre and the doctor's mastiff also was committed to the flames. It slid struggling down the far side and the thongs with which it was tied must have burnt in two for it began to crawl charred and blind and smoking from the fire and was flung back with a shovel. The other bodies eight in number were heaped onto the fire where they sizzled and stank and the thick smoke rolled out over the river. The doctor's head had been mounted upon a paling and carried about but at the last it too was thrown onto the blaze. The guns and clothing were divided upon the clay and divided too were the gold and silver out of the hacked and splintered chest that they'd dragged forth. All else was heaped on the flames and while the sun rose and glistened on their gaudy faces they sat upon the ground each with his new goods before him and they watched the fire and smoked their pipes as might some painted troupe of mimefolk recruiting themselves in such a wayplace far from the towns and the rabble hooting at them across the smoking footlamps, contemplating towns to come and the poor fanfare of trumpet and drum and the rude boards upon which their destinies were inscribed for these people were no less bound and indentured and they watched like the prefiguration of their own ends the carbonized skulls of their enemies incandescing before them bright as blood among the coals.
XX
The escape - Into the desert - Pursued by the Yumas - A stand - Alamo Mucho - Another refugee - A siege - At long taw - Nightfires - The judge lives - At barter in the desert - How the expriest comes to advocate murder - Setting forth - Another encounter - Carrizo Creek - An attack - Among the bones - Playing for keeps - An exorcism - Tobin wounded - A counseling - The slaughter of the horses - The judge on torts - Another escape, another desert.
Toadvine and the kid fought a running engagement upriver through the shore bracken with arrows clattering through the cane all about them. They came out of the willow brakes and climbed the dunes and descended the far side and reappeared again, two dark figures anguishing upon the sands, now trotting, now stooping, the report of the pistol flat and dead in the open country. The Yumas who crested out on the dunes were four in number and they did not follow but rather fixed them upon the terrain to which they had committed themselves and then turned back.
The kid carried an arrow in his leg and it was butted against the bone. He stopped and sat and broke off the shaft a few inches from the wound and then he got up again and they went on. At the crest of the rise they stopped and looked back. The Yumas had already left the dunes and they could see the smoke rising darkly along the river bluff. To the west the country was all rolling sandhills where a man might lie in hiding but there was no place the sun would not find him and only the wind could hide his tracks.
Can you walk? said Toadvine.
I aint got no choice.
How much water you got?
Not much.
What do you want to do?
I dont know.
We could ease back to the river and lay up, said Toadvine.
Till what?
He looked toward the fort again and he looked at the broken shaft in the kid's leg and the welling blood. You want to try and pull that?
No.
What do you want to do?
Go on.
They mended their course and picked up the trail the wagon parties followed and they went on through the long forenoon and the day and the evening of the day. By dark their water was gone and they labored on beneath the slow wheel of stars and slept shivering among the dunes and rose in the dawn and went on again. The kid's leg had stiffened and he hobbled after with a section of wagontongue for a crutch and twice he told Toadvine to go on but he would not. Before noon the aborigines appeared.
They watched them assemble upon the trembling drop of the eastern horizon like baleful marionettes. They were without horses and they seemed to be moving at a trot and within the hour they were lofting arrows upon the refugees.
They went on, the kid with his pistol drawn, stepping and ducking the shafts where they fell out of the sun, the lengths of them glistening against the pale sky and foreshortening in a reedy flutter and then suddenly quivering dead in the ground. They snapped off the shafts against their being used again and they labored on sideways over the sand like crabs until the arrows coming so thick and close they made a stand. The kid dropped onto his elbows and cocked and leveled the revolver. The Yumas were over a hundred yards out and they set up a cry and Toadvine dropped to one knee alongside the kid. The pistol bucked and the gray smoke hung motionless in the air and one of the savages went down like a player through a trap. The kid had cocked the pistol again but Toadvine put his hand over the barrel and the kid looked up at him and lowered the hammer and then sat and reloaded the empty chamber and pushed himself up and recovered his crutch and they went on. Behind them on the plain they could hear the thin clamor of the aborigines as they clustered about the one he'd shot.
That painted horde dogged their steps the day long. They were twenty-four hours without water and the barren mural of sand and sky was beginning to shimmer and swim and the periodic arrows sprang aslant from the sands about them like the tufted stalks of mutant desert growths propagating angrily into the dry desert air. They did not stop. When they reached the wells at Alamo Mucho the sun was low before them and there was a figure seated at the rim of the basin. This figure rose and stood warped in the quaking lens of that world and held out one hand, in welcome or warning they had no way to know. They shielded their eyes and limped on and the figure at the well called out to them. It was the expriest Tobin.
He was alone and unarmed. How many are ye? he said.
What you see, said Toadvine.
All the rest gone under? Glanton? The judge?
They didnt answer. They slid down to the floor of the well where there stood a few inches of water and they knelt and drank.
The pit in which the well was sunk was perhaps a dozen feet in diameter and they posted themselves about the inner slope of this salient and watched while the indians fanned out over the plain, moving past in the distance at a slow lope. Assembled in small groups at cardinal points out there they began to launch their arrows upon the defenders and the Americans called out the arrival of the incoming shafts like artillery officers, lying there on the exposed bank and watching out across the pit toward the assail
ants in that quarter, their hands clawed at either side of them and their legs cocked, rigid as cats. The kid held his fire altogether and soon those savages on the western shore who were more favored by the light began to move in.
About the well were hillocks of sand from old diggings and the Yumas may have meant to try to reach them. The kid left his post and moved to the west rim of the excavation and began to fire on them where they stood or squatted on their haunches like wolves out there on the shimmering pan. The expriest knelt by the kid's side and watched behind them and held his hat between the sun and the foresight of the kid's pistol and the kid steadied the pistol in both hands on the edge of the works and let off the rounds. At the second fire one of the savages fell over and lay without moving. The next shot spun another one around and he sat down and then rose and took a few steps and sat down again. The expriest whispered encouragement at his elbow and the kid thumbed back the hammer and the expriest adjusted the hat to shade gunsight and sight eye with the one shadow and the kid fired again. He'd drawn his sight upon the wounded man sitting on the pan and his shot stretched him out dead. The expriest gave a low whistle.
Aye, you're a cool one, he whispered. But it's cunning work all the same and wouldnt it take the heart out of ye.
The Yumas seemed immobilized by these misfortunes and the kid cocked the pistol and shot down another of their number before they began to collect themselves and to move back, taking their dead with them, lofting a flurry of arrows and howling out bloodoaths in their stoneage tongue or invocations to whatever gods of war or fortune they'd the ear of and retreating upon the pan until they were very small indeed.
The kid shouldered up his flask and shotpouch and slid down the pitch to the floor of the well where he dug a second small basin with the old shovel there and in the water that seeped in he washed the bores of the cylinder and washed the barrel and ran pieces of his shirt through the bore with a stick until they came clean. Then he reassembled the pistol, tapping the barrel pin until the cylinder was snug and laying the piece in the warm sand to dry.
Toadvine had made his way around the excavation until he reached the expriest and they lay watching the retreat of the savages through the heat shimmering off the pan in the late sunlight.
He's a deadeye aint he?
Tobin nodded. He looked down the pit to where the kid sat loading the pistol, turning the powderfilled chambers and measuring them with his eye, seating the balls with the sprues down.
How do you stand by way of ammunition?
Poorly. We got a few rounds, not many.
The expriest nodded. Evening was coming on and in the red land to the west the Yumas were gathering in silhouette before the sun.
All night their watchfires burned on the dark circlet of the world and the kid unpinned the barrel from the pistol and using it for a spyglass he went around the warm sand selvage of the well and studied the separate fires for movement. There is hardly in the world a waste so barren but some creature will not cry out at night, yet here one was and they listened to their breathing in the dark and the cold and they listened to the systole of the rubymeated hearts that hung within them. When day broke the fires had burned out and slender terminals of smoke stood from the plain at three separate points of the compass and the enemy had gone. Crossing the dry pan toward them from the east was a large figure attended by a smaller. Toadvine and the expriest watched.
What do you make it to be?
The expriest shook his head.
Toadvine cupped his hand and whistled sharply down at the kid. He sat up with the pistol. He clambered up the slope with his stiff leg. The three of them lay watching.
It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed. The three at the well watched mutely this transit out of the breaking day and even though there was no longer any question as to what it was that approached yet none would name it. They lumbered on, the judge a pale pink beneath his talc of dust like something newly born, the imbecile much the darker, lurching together across the pan at the very extremes of exile like some scurrilous king stripped of his vestiture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die.
Those who travel in desert places do indeed meet with creatures surpassing all description. The watchers at the well rose the better to witness these arrivals. The imbecile was fairly loping along to keep the pace. The judge on his head wore a wig of dried river mud from which protruded bits of straw and grass and tied upon the imbecile's head was a rag of fur with the blackened blood side out. The judge carried in one hand a small canvas satchel and he was bedraped with meat like some medieval penitent. He hove up at the diggings and nodded them a good morning and he and the idiot slid down the bank and knelt and began to drink.
Even the idiot, who must be fed by hand. He knelt beside the judge and sucked noisily at the mineral water and raised his dark larval eyes to the three men crouched above him at the rim of the pit and then bent and drank again.
The judge threw off his bandoliers of sunblacked meat and his skin beneath was strangely mottled pink and white in the shapes of them. He set by the little mud cap and laved water over his burnt and peeling skull and over his face and he drank again and sat in the sand. He looked up at his old companions. His mouth was cracked and his tongue swollen.
Louis, he said. What will you take for that hat?
Toadvine spat. It aint for sale, he said.
Everything's for sale, said the judge. What will you take?
Toadvine looked uneasily at the expriest. He looked down into the well. Got to have my hat, he said.
How much?
Toadvine gestured with his chin at the strings of meat. I reckon you want to trade some of that tug for it.
Not at all, said the judge. Such as is here is for everybody. How much for the hat?
What'll you give? said Toadvine.
The judge studied him. I'll give one hundred dollars, he said.
No one spoke. The idiot crouched on its haunches seemed also to be awaiting the outcome of this exchange. Toadvine took off the hat and looked at it. His lank black hair clove to the sides of his head. It wont fit ye, he said.
The judge quoted him some term in latin. He smiled. Not your concern, he said.
Toadvine put the hat on and adjusted it. I reckon that's what you got in that there satchel, he said.
You reckon correctly, said the judge.
Toadvine looked off toward the sun.
I'll make it a hundred and a quarter and wont ask you where you got it, said the judge.
Let's see your color.
The judge unclasped the satchel and tipped and emptied it out on the sand. It contained a knife and perhaps a half a bucketful of gold coins of every value. The judge pushed the knife to one side and spread the coins with the palm of his hand and looked up.
Toadvine took off the hat. He made his way down the slope. He and the judge squatted on either side of the judge's trove and the judge put forward the coins agreed upon, advancing them with the back of his hand forward like a croupier. Toadvine handed up the hat and gathered the coins and the judge took the knife and slit the band of the hat at the rear and cut through the brim and opened up the crown and then set the hat on his head and looked up at Tobin and the kid.
Come down, he said. Come down and share this meat.
They didnt move. Toadvine already had a piece of it in both hands and was tugging at it with his teeth. It was cool in the well and the morning sun fell only upon the upper rim. The judge scooped the remaining coins back into the satchel and stood it aside and bent to drink again. The imbecile had been watching its reflection in the pool and it watched the judge drink and it watched the water calm itself once more. The j
udge wiped his mouth and looked at the figures above him.
How are you fixed for weapons? he said.
The kid had set one foot over the edge of the pit and now he drew it back. Tobin did not move. He was watching the judge.
We've just the one pistol, Holden.
We? said the judge.
The lad here.
The kid had risen to his feet again. The expriest stood by him.
The judge in the floor of the well likewise rose and he adjusted his hat and gripped the valise under his arm like some immense and naked barrister whom the country had crazed.
Weigh your counsel, Priest, he said. We are all here together. Yonder sun is like the eye of God and we will cook impartially upon this great siliceous griddle I do assure you.
I'm no priest and I've no counsel, said Tobin. The lad is a free agent.
The judge smiled. Quite so, he said. He looked at Toadvine and he smiled up at the expriest again. What then? he said. Are we to drink at these holes turn about like rival bands of apes?
The expriest looked at the kid. They stood facing the sun. He squatted, the better to address the judge below.
Do you think that there is a registry where you can file on the wells of the desert?
Ah Priest, you'd know those offices more readily than I. I've no claim here. I've told you before, I'm a simple man. You know you're welcome to come down here and to drink and to fill your flask.
Tobin didnt move.
Let me have the canteen, said the kid. He'd taken the pistol from his belt and he handed it to the expriest and took the leather bottle and descended the bank.