Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian

BLOOD MERIDIAN
OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST
CORMAC McCARTHY
Cormac McCarthy is the author of The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of G-d,
Suttree, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award
and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The author wishes to thank the Lyndhurst Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He also
wishes to express his appreciation to Albert Erskine, his editor of twenty years.
Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are
. absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irre istible. Finally, you fear blood
more and more. Blood and time.
paul?valery
. It is not to be thought that the life of dark ess is sunk in misery and lost as if in
. sorrow ng. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death,
and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.
. JACOB ?BOEHME
Clark, who led last year's expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC
Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 3OO,ooo-year-old
fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.
THE?YUMA?DAILY?SUN
June 13,1982
I
Childhood in Tennessee - Runs away - New Orleans -

Fights - Is shot - To Galveston - Nacogdoches -
The Reverend Green - Judge Holden - An affray - Toadvine -
Burning of the hotel - Escape.
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes
the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods
beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and
drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he
quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches
him.
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. G-d how the stars did
fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who
would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He
has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed.
He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence.
All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the
predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a
solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. Blacks in the fields, lank and
stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the
garden. Against the sun's declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper
skyline. A lone dark husbandman pursuing mule and harrow down the rainblown
bottomland toward night.
A year later he is in Saint Louis. He is taken on for New Orleans aboard a flatboat.
Forty-two days on the river. At night the steamboats hoot and trudge past through the
black waters all alight like cities adrift. They break up the float and sell the lumber and
he walks in the streets and hears tongues he has not heard before. He lives in a room
above a courtyard behind a tavern and he comes down at night like some fairybook
beast to fight with the sailors. He is not big but he has big wrists, big hands. His
shoulders are set close. The child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the
eyes oddly innocent. They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. All races, all
breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes. Men from lands so far and
queer that standing over them where they lie bleeding in the mud he feels mankind

itself vindicated.
On a certain night a Maltese boatswain shoots him in the back with a small pistol.
Swinging to deal with the man he is shot again just below the heart. The man flees and
he leans against the bar with the blood running out of his shirt. The others look away.
After a while he sits in the floor.
He lies in a cot in the room upstairs for two weeks while the tavernkeeper's wife
attends him. She brings his meals, she carries out his slops. A hardlooking woman with
a wiry body like a man's. By the time he is mended he has no money to pay her and
he leaves in the night and sleeps on the riverbank until he can find a boat that will
take him on. The boat is going to Texas.
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become
remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains
so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will
or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay. The passengers are a diffident lot.
They cage their eyes and no man asks another what it is that brings him here. He
sleeps on the deck, a pilgrim among others. He watches the dim shore rise and fall.
Gray seabirds gawking. Flights of pelicans coastwise above the gray swells.
They disembark aboard a lighter, settlers with their chattels, all studying the low
coastline, the thin bight of sand and scrub pine swimming in the haze.
He walks through the narrow streets of the port. The air smells of salt and newsawn
lumber. At night whores call to him from the dark like souls in want. A week and he is
on the move again, a few dollars in his purse that he's earned, walking the sand roads
of the southern night alone, his hands balled in the cotton pockets of his cheap coat.
. Earthen causeways across the marsh and. Egrets in their rookeries white as candles
among the moss. The wind has a raw edge to it and leaves lope by the roadside and
skelter on in the night fields. He moves north through small settlements and farms,
working for day wages and found. He sees a parricide hanged in a crossroads hamlet
and the man's friends run forward and pull his legs and he hangs dead from his rope
while urine darkens his trousers.
He works in a sawmill, he works in a diptheria pesthouse. He takes as pay from a
farmer an aged mule and aback this animal in the spring of the year eighteen and
forty-nine he rides up through the latterday republic of Fredonia into the town of
Nacogdoches.
The Reverend Green had been playing to a full house daily as long as the rain had

been falling and the rain had been falling for two weeks. When the kid ducked into the
ratty canvas tent there was standing room along the walls, a place or two, and such a
heady reek of the wet and bathless that they themselves would sally forth into the
downpour now and again for fresh air before the rain drove them in again. He stood
with others of his kind along the back wall. The only thing that might have
distinguished him in that crowd was that he was not armed.
Neighbors, said the reverend, he couldnt stay out of these here hell, hell, hellholes right
here in Nacogdoches. I said to him, said: You goin to take the son of G-d in there with
ye? And he said: Oh no. No I aint. And I said: Dont you know that he said I will foller
ye always even unto the end of the road?
Well, he said, I aint askin nobody to go nowheres. And I said: Neighbor, you dont need
to ask. He's a goin to be there with ye ever step of the way whether ye ask it or ye
. dont. I said: Neigh or, you caint get shed of him. Now. Are you going to drag him,
him, into that hellhole yonder?
You ever see such a place for rain?
The kid had been watching the reverend. He turned to the man who spoke. He wore
long moustaches after the fashion of teamsters and he wore a widebrim hat with a low
round crown. He was slightly walleyed and he was watching the kid earnestly as if he'd
know his opinion about the rain.
I just got here, said the kid.
Well it beats all I ever seen.
The kid nodded. An enormous man dressed in an oilcloth slicker had entered the tent
and removed his hat. He was bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had
no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them. He was close on to seven feet in height and
he stood smoking a cigar even in this nomadic house of G-d and he seemed to have
removed his hat only to chase the rain from it for now he put it on again.
The reverend had stopped his sermon altogether. There was no sound in the tent. All
watched the man. He adjusted the hat and then pushed his way forward as far as the
crateboard pulpit where the reverend stood and there he turned to address the
reverend's congregation. His face was serene and strangely childlike. His hands were
small. He held them out.
Ladies and gentlemen I feel it my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival

is an imposter. He holds no papers of divinity from any institution recognized or
improvised. He is altogether devoid of the least qualification to the office he has
usurped and has only committed to memory a few passages from the good book for the
purpose of lending to his fraudulent sermons some faint flavor of the piety he despises.
In truth, the gentleman standing here before you posing as a minister of the L-rd is not
only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky,
Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Oh G-d, cried the reverend. Lies, lies! He began reading feverishly from his opened
bible.
. On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years said
. eleven ho had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating
while actually clothed in the livery of his G-d.
A moan swept through the crowd. A lady sank to her knees.
This is him, cried the reverend, sobbing. This is him. The devil. Here he stands.
Let's hang the turd, called an ugly thug from the gallery to the rear.
Not three weeks before this he was run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress
with a goat. Yes lady, that is what I said. Goat.
Why damn my eyes if I wont shoot the son of a bitch, said a man rising at the far side
of the tent, and drawing a pistol from his boot he leveled it and fired.
. The young teamster instantly produced a knife from his cloth ng and unseamed the
tent and stepped outside into the rain. The kid followed. They ducked low and ran
across the mud toward the hotel. Already gunfire was general within the tent and a
dozen exits had been hacked through the canvas walls and people were pouring out,
women screaming, folk stumbling, folk trampled underfoot in the mud. The kid and his
friend reached the hotel gallery and wiped the water from their eyes and turned to
watch. As they did so the tent began to sway and buckle and like a huge and wounded
medusa it slowly settled to the ground trailing tattered canvas walls and ratty guyropes
over the ground.
The baldheaded man was already at the bar when they entered.
On the polished wood before him were two hats and a double handful of coins. He
raised his glass but not to them. They stood up to the bar and ordered whiskeys and

the kid laid his money down but the barman pushed it back with his thumb and
nodded. These here is on the judge, he said.
They drank. The teamster set his glass down and looked at the kid or he seemed to,
you couldnt be sure of his gaze. The kid looked down the bar to where the judge stood.
The bar was that tall not every man could even get his elbows up on it but it came
just to the judge's waist and he stood with his hands placed flatwise on the wood,
leaning slightly, as if about to give another address. By now men were piling through
the doorway, bleeding, covered in mud, cursing. They gathered about the judge. A posse
was being drawn to pursue the preacher.
Judge, how did you come to have the goods on that no-account?
Goods? said the judge.
When was you in Fort Smith?
Fort Smith?
Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?
You mean the Reverend Green?
Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come out here.
I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was.
They looked from one to the other.
Well where was it you run up on him?
I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him.
He raised his glass and drank.
There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally
someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone
bought the judge a drink.
It had been raining for sixteen days when he met Toadvine and it was raining yet. He
was still standing in the same saloon and he had drunk up all his money save two

dollars. The teamster had gone, the room was all but empty. The door stood open and
you could see the rain falling in the empty lot behind the hotel. He drained his glass
and went out. There were boards laid across the mud and he followed the paling band
of doorlight down toward the batboard jakes at the bottom of the lot. Another man was
coming up from the jakes and they met halfway on the narrow planks. The man before
him swayed slightly. His wet hatbrim fell to his shoulders save in the front where it was
pinned back. He held a bottle loosely in one hand. You better get out of my way, he
said.
. The kid wasnt going to do that and he saw no use in discuss ng it. He kicked the
man in the jaw. The man went down and got up again. He said: I'm goin to kill you.
He swung with the bottle and the kid ducked and he swung again and the kid stepped
back. When the kid hit him the man shattered the bottle against the side of his head.
He went off the boards into the mud and the man lunged after him with the jagged
bottleneck and tried to stick it in his eye. The kid was fending with his hands and they
were slick with blood. He kept trying to reach into his boot for his knife.
Kill your ass, the man said. They slogged about in the dark of the lot, coming out of
their boots. The kid had his knife now and they circled crabwise and when the man
lurched at him he cut the man's shirt open. The man threw down the bottleneck and
unsheathed an immense bowieknife from behind his neck. His hat had come off and his
black and ropy locks swung about his head and he had codified his threats to the one
word kill like a crazed chant.
. That'ns cut, said one of several men standing along the walk ay watching.
Kill kill slobbered the man wading forward.
. But someone else was coming down the lot, great steady suck ng sounds like a cow.
He was carrying a huge shellalegh. He reached the kid first and when he swung with
the club the kid went face down in the mud. He'd have died if someone hadn't turned
him over.
When he woke it was daylight and the rain had stopped and he was looking up into the
face of a man with long hair who was completely covered in mud. The man was saying
something to him.
What? said the kid.
I said are you quits?

Quits?
Quits. Cause if you want some more of me you sure as hell goin to get it.
He looked at the sky. Very high, very small, a buzzard. He looked at the man. Is my
neck broke? he said.
The man looked out over the lot and spat and looked at the boy again. Can you not get
up?
I dont know. I aint tried.
I never meant to break your neck.
No.
I meant to kill ye.
They aint nobody done it yet. He clawed at the mud and pushed himself up. The man
was sitting on the planks with his boots alongside him. They aint nothin wrong with
you, he said.
The kid looked about stiffly at the day. Where's my boots? he said.
The man squinted at him. Flakes of dried mud fell from his face.
I'm goin to have to kill some son of a bitch if they got my boots.
Yonder looks like one of em.
The kid labored off through the mud and fetched up one boot. He slogged about in the
yard feeling likely lumps of mud.
This your knife? he said.
The man squinted at him. Looks like it, he said.
The kid pitched it to him and he bent and picked it up and wiped the huge blade on
his trouserleg. Thought somebody'd done stole you, he told the knife.

The kid found his other boot and came and sat on the boards. His hands were huge
with mud and he wiped one of them briefly at his knee and let it fall again.
They sat there side by side looking out across the barren lot. There was a picket fence
at the edge of the lot and beyond the fence a boy was drawing water at a well and
there were chickens in the yard there. A man came from the dramshop door down the
walk toward the outhouse. He stopped where they sat and looked at them and then
stepped off into the mud. After a while he came back and stepped off into the mud
again and went around and on up the walk.
The kid looked at the man. His head was strangely narrow and his hair was plastered
up with mud in a bizarre and primitive coiffure. On his forehead were burned the
letters H T and lower and almost between the eyes the letter F and these markings
were splayed and garish as if the iron had been left too long. When he turned to look
at the kid the kid could see that he had no ears. He stood up and sheathed the knife
and started up the walk with the boots in his hand and the kid rose and followed.
Halfway to the hotel the man stopped and looked out at the mud and then sat down
on the planks and pulled on the boots mud and all. Then he rose and slogged off
through the lot to pick something up.
I want you to look here, he said. At my G-ddamned hat.
You couldnt tell what it was, something dead. He flapped it about and pulled it over his
head and went on and the kid followed.
The dramhouse was a long narrow hall wainscotted with varnished boards. There were
tables by the wall and spittoons on the floor. There were no patrons. The barman
looked up when they entered and a nigger that had been sweeping the floor stood the
broom against the wall and went out.
Where's Sidney? said the man in his suit of mud.
In the bed I reckon.
They went on.
Toadvine, called the barman.
The kid looked back.
The barman had come from behind the bar and was looking after them. They crossed

from the door through the lobby of the hotel toward the stairs leaving varied forms of
mud behind them on the floor. As they started up the stairs the clerk at the desk
leaned and called to them.
Toadvine.
He stopped and looked back.
He'll shoot you.
Old Sidney?
Old Sidney.
They went on up the stairs.
At the top of the landing was a long hall with a windowlight at the end. There were
varnished doors down the walls set so close they might have been closets. Toadvine
went on until he came to the end of the hall. He listened at the last door and he eyed
the kid.
You got a match?
The kid searched his pockets and came up with a crushed and stained wooden box.
The man took it from him. Need a little tinder here, he said. He was crumbling the box
and stacking the bits against the door. He struck a match and set the pieces alight. He
pushed the little pile of burning wood under the door and added more matches.
Is he in there? said the boy.
That's what we're fixin to see.
A dark curl of smoke rose, a blue flame of burning varnish. They squatted in the
hallway and watched. Thin flames began to run up over the panels and dart back again.
The watchers looked like forms excavated from a bog.
Tap on the door now, said Toadvine.
The kid rose. Toadvine stood up and waited. They could hear the flames crackling inside
the room. The kid tapped.

You better tap louder than that. This man drinks some.
He balled his fist and lambasted the door about five times.
Hell fire, said a voice.
Here he comes.
They waited.
You hot son of a bitch, said the voice. Then the knob turned and the door opened.
He stood in his underwear holding in one hand the towel he'd used to turn the
doorknob with. When he saw them he turned and started back into the room but
Toadvine seized him about the neck and rode him to the floor and held him by the hair
and began to pry out an eyeball with his thumb. The man grabbed his wrist and bit it.
Kick his mouth in, called Toadvine. Kick it.
The kid stepped past them into the room and turned and kicked the man in the face.
Toadvine held his head back by the hair.
Kick him, he called. Aw, kick him, honey.
He kicked.
Toadvine pulled the bloody head around and looked at it and let it flop to the floor and
he rose and kicked the man himself. Two spectators were standing in the hallway. The
. door was com letely afire and part of the wall and ceiling. They went out and down
the hall. The clerk was coming up the steps two at a time.
Toadvine you son of a bitch, he said.
Toadvine was four steps above him and when he kicked him he caught him in the
throat. The clerk sat down on the stairs. When the kid came past he hit him in the
side of the head and the clerk slumped over and began to slide toward the landing. The
kid stepped over him and went down to the lobby and crossed to the front door and
out.
Toadvine was running down the street, waving his fists above his head crazily and

laughing. He looked like a great clay voodoo doll made animate and the kid looked like
another. Behind them flames were licking at the top corner of the hotel and clouds of
dark smoke rose into the warm Texas morning.
He'd left the mule with a Mexican family that boarded animals at the edge of town and
he arrived there wildlooking and out of breath. The woman opened the door and looked
at him.
Need to get my mule, he wheezed.
She looked at him some more, then she called toward the back of the house. He walked
around. There were horses tethered in the lot and there was a flatbed wagon against the
fence with some turkeys sitting on the edge looking out. The old lady had come to the
back door. Nito, she called. Venga. Hay un caballero aquf. Venga.
He went down the shed to the tackroom and got his wretched saddle and his blanketroll
and brought them back. He found the mule and unstalled it and bridled it with the
rawhide hacka-more and led it to the fence. He leaned against the animal with his
shoulder and got the saddle over it and got it cinched, the mule starting and shying and
running its head along the fence. He led it across the lot. The mule kept shaking its
head sideways as if it had something in its ear.
He led it out to the road. As he passed the house the woman came padding out after
him. When she saw him put his foot in the stirrup she began to run. He swung up into
the broken saddle and chucked the mule forward. She stopped at the gate and watched
him go. He didnt look back.
When he passed back through the town the hotel was burning and men were standing
around watching it, some holding empty buckets. A few men sat horseback watching the
flames and one of these was the judge. As the kid rode past the judge turned and
watched him. He turned the horse, as if he'd have the animal watch too. When the kid
looked back the judge smiled. The kid touched up the mule and they went sucking out
past the old stone fort along the road west.
II
Across the prairie - A hermit - A nigger's heart -
A stormy night - Westward again - Cattle drovers - Their kindness -
On the trail again - The deadcart - San Antonio de Bexar -

A Mexican cantina - Another fight - The abandoned church -
The dead in the sacristy - At the ford -
Bathing in the river.
Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save
. he. He's left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him be
ond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the
weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of
black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no
less.
He keeps from off the king's road for fear of citizenry. The little prairie wolves cry all
night and dawn finds him in a grassy draw where he'd gone to hide from the wind. The
hobbled mule stands over him and watches the east for light.
The sun that rises is the color of steel. His mounted shadow falls for miles before him.
He wears on his head a hat he's made from leaves and they have dried and cracked in
the sun and he looks like a raggedyman wandered from some garden where he'd used
to frighten birds.
Come evening he tracks a spire of smoke rising oblique from among the low hills and
before dark he hails up at the doorway of an old anchorite nested away in the sod like
a groundsloth. Solitary, half mad, his eyes redrimmed as if locked in their cages with
hot wires. But a ponderable body for that. He watched wordless while the kid eased
down stiffly from the mule. A rough wind was blowing and his rags flapped about him.
Seen ye smoke, said the kid. Thought you might spare a man a sup of water.
The old hermit scratched in his filthy hair and looked at the ground. He turned and
entered the hut and the kid followed.
Inside darkness and a smell of earth. A small fire burned on the dirt floor and the only
furnishings were a pile of hides in one corner. The old man shuffled through the gloom,
his head bent to clear the low ceiling of woven limbs and mud. He pointed down to
where a bucket stood in the dirt. The kid bent and took up the gourd floating there and
dipped and drank. The water was salty, sulphurous. He drank on.
You reckon I could water my old mule out there?

The old man began to beat his palm with one fist and dart his eyes about.
Be proud to fetch in some fresh. Just tell me where it's at.
What ye aim to water him with?
The kid looked at the bucket and he looked around in the dim hut.
I aint drinkin after no mule, said the hermit.
Have you not got no old bucket nor nothin?
No, cried the hermit. No. I aint. He was clapping the heels of his clenched fists together
at his chest.
The kid rose and looked toward the door. Ill find somethin, he said. Where's the well
at?
Up the hill, foller the path.
It's nigh too dark to see out here.
It's a deep path. Foller ye feet. Foller ye mule. I caint go.
He stepped out into the wind and looked about for the mule but the mule wasnt there.
. Far to the south lightning flared sound essly. He went up the path among the
thrashing weeds and found the mule standing at the well.
A hole in the sand with rocks piled about it. A piece of dry hide for a cover and a
stone to weight it down. There was a rawhide bucket with a rawhide bail and a rope of
greasy leather. The bucket had a rock tied to the bail to help it tip and fill and he
lowered it until the rope in his hand went slack while the mule watched over his
shoulder.
He drew up three bucketfuls and held them so the mule would not spill them and then
he put the cover back over the well and led the mule back down the path to the hut.
I thank ye for the water, he called.
The hermit appeared darkly in the door. Just stay with me, he said.

That's all right.
Best stay. It's fixin to storm.
You reckon?
I reckon and I reckon right.
Well.
Bring ye bed. Bring ye possibles.
He uncinched and threw down the saddle and hobbled the mule foreleg to rear and
took his bedroll in. There was no light save the fire and the old man was squatting by
it tailorwise.
Anywheres, anywheres, he said. Where's ye saddle at?
The kid gestured with his chin.
Dont leave it out yonder somethinll eat it. This is a hungry country.
He went out and ran into the mule in the dark. It had been standing looking in at the
fire.
Get away, fool, he said. He took up the saddle and went back in.
Now pull that door to fore we blow away, said the old man.
The door was a mass of planks on leather hinges. He dragged it across the dirt and
fastened it by its leather latch.
I take it ye lost your way, said the hermit.
No, I went right to it.
He waved quickly with his hand, the old man. No, no, he said. I mean ye was lost to
of come here. Was they a sandstorm? Did ye drift off the road in the night? Did thieves
beset ye?

. The kid pondered this. Yes, he said We got off the road someways or another.
Knowed ye did.
How long you been out here?
Out where?
The kid was sitting on his blanketroll across the fire from the old man. Here, he said.
In this place.
The old man didnt answer. He turned his head suddenly aside and seized his nose
between his thumb and forefinger and blew twin strings of snot onto the floor and
wiped his fingers on the seam of his jeans. I come from Mississippi. I was a slaver,
dont care to tell it. Made good money. I never did get caught. Just got sick of it. Sick
of niggers. Wait till I show ye somethin.
He turned and rummaged among the hides and handed through the flames a small dark
thing. The kid turned it in his hand. Some man's heart, dried and blackened. He passed
it back and the old man cradled it in his palm as if he'd weigh it.
They is four things that can destroy the earth, he said. Women, whiskey, money, and
niggers.
. They sat in silence. The wind moaned in the section of stove ipe that was run through
the roof above them to quit the place of smoke. After a while the old man put the
heart away.
That thing costed me two hundred dollars, he said.
You give two hundred dollars for it?
I did, for that was the price they put on the black son of a bitch it hung inside of.
He stirred about in the corner and came up with an old dark brass kettle, lifted the
cover and poked inside with one finger. The remains of one of the lank prairie hares
interred in cold grease and furred with a light blue mold. He clamped the lid back on
the kettle and set it in the flames. Aint much but we'll go shares, he said.
I thank ye.

Lost ye way in the dark, said the old man. He stirred the fire, standing slender tusks of
bone up out of the ashes.
The kid didnt answer.
The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. G-d
made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everbody, did he?
I dont believe he much had me in mind.
Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world's he
seen that he liked better?
I can think of better places and better ways.
Can ye make it be?
No.
No. It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has
to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to
look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that G-d has set
for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when G-d made man the
devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a
machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to
tend it. You believe that?
I dont know.
Believe that.
When the old man's mess was warmed he doled it out and they ate in silence. Thunder
was moving north and before long it was booming overhead and starting bits of rust in
a thin trickle down the stovepipe. They hunkered over their plates and wiped the grease
up with their fingers and drank from the gourd.
The kid went out and scoured his cup and plate in the sand and came back banging
the tins together as if to fend away some drygulch phantom out there in the dark.
Distant thunderheads reared quivering against the electric sky and were sucked away in
the blackness again. The old man sat with one ear cocked to the howling waste without.
The kid shut the door.

Dont have no bacca with ye do ye?
No I aint, said the kid.
Didnt allow ye did.
You reckon it'll rain?
It's got ever opportunity. Likely it wont.
The kid watched the fire. Already he was nodding. Finally he raised up and shook his
head. The hermit watched him over the dying flames. Just go on and fix ye bed, he
said.
He did. Spreading his blankets on the packed mud and pulling off his stinking boots.
The fluepipe moaned and he heard the mule stamp and snuffle outside and in his sleep
he struggled and muttered like a dreaming dog.
He woke sometime in the night with the hut in almost total darkness and the hermit
bent over him and all but in his bed.
What do you want? he said. But the hermit crawled away and in the morning when he
woke the hut was empty and he got his things and left.
All that day he watched to the north a thin line of dust. It seemed not to move at all
and it was late evening before he could see that it was headed his way. He passed
through a forest of live oak and he watered at a stream and moved on in the dusk and
made a fireless camp. Birds woke him where he lay in a dry and dusty wood.
By noon he was on the prairie again and the dust to the north was stretched out along
the edge of the earth. By evening the first of a drove of cattle came into view. Rangy
vicious beasts with enormous hornspreads. That night he sat in the herders' camp and
ate beans and pilotbread and heard of life on the trail.
They were coming down from Abilene, forty days out, headed for the markets in
Louisiana. Followed by packs of wolves, coyotes, indians. Cattle groaned about them for
miles in the dark.
. They asked him no questions, a ragged lot themselves. Cross reeds some, free niggers,
an indian or two.

I had my outfit stole, he said.
They nodded in the firelight.
They got everthing I had. I aint even got a knife.
You might could sign on with us. We lost two men. Turned back to go to Californy.
I'm headed yon way.
I guess you might be goin to Californy ye own self.
I might. I aint decided.
Them boys was with us fell in with a bunch from Arkansas. They was headed down for
Bexar. Goin to pull for Mexico and the west.
I'll bet them old boys is in Bexar drinkin they brains out.
I'll bet old Lonnie's done topped ever whore in town.
How far is it to Bexar?
It's about two days.
It's furthern that. More like four I'd say.
How would a man go if he'd a mind to?
You cut straight south you ought to hit the road about half a day.
You going to Bexar?
I might do.
You see old Lonnie down there you tell him get a piece for me. Tell him old Oren.
He'll buy ye a drink if he aint blowed all his money in.
In the morning they ate flapjacks with molasses and the herders saddled up and moved
on. When he found his mule there was a small fibre bag tied to the animal's rope and

inside the bag there was a cupful of dried beans and some peppers and an old
greenriver knife with a handle made of string. He saddled up the mule, the mule's back
galled and balding, the hooves cracked. The ribs like fishbones. They hobbled on across
the endless plain.
He came upon Bexar in the evening of the fourth day and he sat the tattered mule on
a low rise and looked down at the town, the quiet adobe houses, the line of green oaks
and cottonwoods that marked the course of the river, the plaza filled with wagons with
their osnaburg covers and the whitewashed public buildings and the Moorish
churchdome rising from the trees and the garrison and the tall stone powderhouse in
the distance. A light breeze stirred the fronds of his hat, his matted greasy hair. His
eyes lay dark and tunneled in a caved and haunted face and a foul stench rose from
the wells of his boot tops. The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred
clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire
at the earth's end. He spat a dry white spit and clumped the cracked wooden stirrups
against the mule's ribs and they staggered into motion again.
He went down a narrow sandy road and as he went he met a deadcart bound out with
a load of corpses, a small bell tolling the way and a lantern swinging from the gate.
Three men sat on the box not unlike the dead themselves or spirit folk so white they
were with lime and nearly phosphorescent in the dusk. A pair of horses drew the cart
and they went on up the road in a faint miasma of carbolic and passed from sight. He
turned and watched them go. The naked feet of the dead jostled stiffly from side to
side.
It was dark when he entered the town, attended by barking dogs, faces parting the
curtains in the lamplit windows. The light clatter of the mule's hooves echoing in the
little empty streets. The mule sniffed the air and swung down an alleyway into a square
where there stood in the starlight a well, a trough, a hitchingrail. The kid eased himself
down and took the bucket from the stone coping and lowered it into the well. A light
splash echoed. He drew the bucket, water dripping in the dark. He dipped the gourd
and drank and the mule nuzzled his elbow. When he'd done he set the bucket in the
street and sat on the coping of the well and watched the mule drink from the bucket.
He went on through the town leading the animal. There was no one about. By and by
he entered a plaza and he could hear guitars and a horn. At the far end of the square
there were lights from a cafe and laughter and highpitched cries. He led the mule into
the square and up the far side past a long portico toward the lights.
There was a team of dancers in the street and they wore gaudy costumes and called out
in Spanish. He and the mule stood at the edge of the lights and watched. Old men sat

along the tavern wall and children played in the dust. They wore strange costumes all,
the men in dark flatcrowned hats, white nightshirts, trousers that buttoned up the
outside leg and the girls with garish painted faces and tortoiseshell combs in their
blueblack hair. The kid crossed the street with the mule and tied it and entered the
cafe. A number of men were standing at the bar and they quit talking when he entered.
He crossed the polished clay floor past a sleeping dog that opened one eye and looked
at him and he stood at the bar and placed both hands on the tiles. The barman nodded
to him. Digame, he said.
I aint got no money but I need a drink. I'll fetch out the slops or mop the floor or
whatever.
The barman looked across the room to where two men were playing dominoes at a
table. Abuelito, he said.
The older of the two raised his head.
Que dice el muchacho.
The old man looked at the kid and turned back to his dominoes.
The barman shrugged his shoulders.
The kid turned to the old man. You speak american? he said.
The old man looked up from his play. He regarded the kid without expression.
Tell him I'll work for a drink. I aint got no money.
The old man thrust his chin and made a clucking noise with his tongue.
The kid looked at the barman.
The old man made a fist with the thumb pointing up and the little finger down and
tilted his head back and tipped a phantom drink down his throat. Quiere hecharse una
copa, he said. Pero no puede pagar.
The men at the bar watched.
The barman looked at the kid.

Quiere trabajo, said the old man. Quien sabe. He turned back to his pieces and made
his play without further consultation.
Quieres trabajar, said one of the men at the bar.
They began to laugh.
What are you laughing at? said the boy.
They stopped. Some looked at him, some pursed their mouths or shrugged. The boy
turned to the bartender. You got something I could do for a couple of drinks I know
damn good and well.
One of the men at the bar said something in Spanish. The boy glared at them. They
winked one to the other, they took up their glasses.
He turned to the barman again. His eyes were dark and narrow. Sweep the floor, he
said.
The barman blinked.
. The kid stepped back and made sweeping motions, a panto ime that bent the drinkers
in silent mirth. Sweep, he said, pointing at the floor.
No esta sucio, said the barman.
He swept again. Sweep, G-ddamnit, he said.
The barman shrugged. He went to the end of the bar and got a broom and brought it
back. The boy took it and went on to the back of the room.
A great hall of a place. He swept in the corners where potted trees stood silent in the
dark. He swept around the spittoons and he swept around the players at the table and
he swept around the dog. He swept along the front of the bar and when he reached the
place where the drinkers stood he straightened up and leaned on the broom and looked
at them. They conferred silently among themselves and at last one took his glass from
the bar and stepped away. The others followed. The kid swept past them to the door.
The dancers had gone, the music. Across the street sat a man on a bench dimly lit in
the doorlight from the cafe. The mule stood where he'd tied it. He tapped the broom on
the steps and came back in and took the broom to the corner where the barman had

gotten it. Then he came to the bar and stood.
The barman ignored him.
The kid rapped with his knuckles.
The barman turned and put one hand on his hip and pursed his lips.
How about that drink now, said the kid.
The barman stood.
The kid made the drinking motions that the old man had made and the barman flapped
his towel idly at him.
Andale, he said. He made a shooing motion with the back of his hand.
The kid's face clouded. You son of a bitch, he said. He started down the bar. The
barman's expression did not change. He brought up from under the bar an oldfashioned
military pistol with a flint lock and shoved back the cock with the heel of his hand. A
great wooden clicking in the silence. A clicking of glasses all down the bar. Then the
scuffling of chairs pushed back by the players at the wall.
The kid froze. Old man, he said.
The old man didnt answer. There was no sound in the cafe. The kid turned to find him
with his eyes.
Esta borracho, said the old man.
The boy watched the barman's eyes.
The barman waved the pistol toward the door.
The old man spoke to the room in Spanish. Then he spoke to the barman. Then he put
on his hat and went out.
The barman's face drained. When he came around the end of the bar he had laid down
the pistol and he was carrying a bung-starter in one hand.
The kid backed to the center of the room and the barman labored over the floor toward

him like a man on his way to some chore. He swung twice at the kid and the kid
stepped twice to the right. Then he stepped backward. The barman froze. The kid
boosted himself lightly over the bar and picked up the pistol. No one moved. He raked
the frizzen open against the bartop and dumped the priming out and laid the pistol
down again. Then he selected a pair of full bottles from the shelves behind him and
came around the end of the bar with one in each hand.
The barman stood in the center of the room. He was breathing heavily and he turned,
following the kid's movements. When the kid approached him he raised the bungstarter.
The kid crouched lightly with the bottles and feinted and then broke the right one over
the man's head. Blood and liquor sprayed and the man's knees buckled and his eyes
rolled. The kid had already let go the bottleneck and he pitched the second bottle into
his right hand in a roadagent's pass before it even reached the floor and he backhanded
the second bottle across the barman's skull and crammed the jagged remnant into his
eye as he went down.
The kid looked around the room. Some of those men wore pistols in their belts but
none moved. The kid vaulted the bar and took another bottle and tucked it under his
arm and walked out the door. The dog was gone. The man on the bench was gone too.
He untied the mule and led it across the square.
He woke in the nave of a ruinous church, blinking up at the vaulted ceiling and the tall
swagged walls with their faded frescos. The floor of the church was deep in dried guano
and the droppings of cattle and sheep. Pigeons flapped through the piers of dusty light
and three buzzards hobbled about on the picked bone carcass of some animal dead in
the chancel.
His head was in torment and his tongue swollen with thirst. He sat up and looked
around him. He'd put the bottle under his saddle and he found it and held it up and
shook it and drew the cork and drank. He sat with his eyes closed, the sweat beaded
on his forehead. Then he opened his eyes and drank again. The buzzards stepped down
one by one and trotted off into the sacristy. After a while he rose and went out to look
for the mule.
It was nowhere in sight. The mission occupied eight or ten ares of enclosed land, a
barren purlieu that held a few goats and burros. In the mud walls of the enclosure were
cribs inhabited by families of squatters and a few cookfires smoked thinly in the sun.
He walked around the side of the church and entered the sacristy. Buzzards shuffled off
through the chaff and plaster like enormous yardfowl. The domed vaults overhead were
clotted with a dark furred mass that shifted and breathed and chittered. In the room
was a wooden table with a few clay pots and along the back wall lay the remains of

several bodies, one a child. He went on through the sacristy into the church again and
got his saddle. He drank the rest of the bottle and he put the saddle on his shoulder
and went out.
The facade of the building bore an array of saints in their niches and they had been
shot up by American troops trying their rifles, the figures shorn of ears and noses and
darkly mottled with leadmarks oxidized upon the stone. The huge carved and paneled
doors hung awap on their hinges and a carved stone Virgin held in her arms a headless
child. He stood blinking in the noon heat. Then he saw the mule's tracks. They were
just the palest disturbance of the dust and they came out of the door of the church and
crossed the lot to the gate in the east wall. He hiked the saddle higher onto his
shoulder and set out after them.
A dog in the shade of the portal rose and lurched sullenly out into the sun until he had
passed and then lurched back. He took the road down the hill toward the river, a
ragged figure enough. He entered a deep wood of pecan and oak and the road took a
rise and he could see the river below him. Blacks were washing a carriage in the ford
and he went down the hill and stood at the edge of the water and after a while he
called out to them.
They were sopping water over the black lacquerwork and one of them raised up and
turned to look at him. The horses stood to their knees in the current.
What? called the black.
Have you seen a mule.
Mule?
I lost a mule. I think he come this way.
The black wiped his face with the back of his arm. Somethin come down the road about
a hour back. I think it went down the river yonder. It might of been a mule. It didnt
have no tail nor no hair to speak of but it did have long ears.
The other two blacks grinned. The kid looked off down the river. He spat and set off
along the path through the willows and swales of grass.
He found it about a hundred yards downriver. It was wet to its belly and it looked up
at him and then lowered its head again into the lush river grass. He threw down the
saddle and took up the trailing rope and tied the animal to a limb and kicked it

halfheartedly. It shifted slightly to the side and continued to graze. He reached atop his
head but he had lost the crazy hat somewhere. He made his way down through the
trees and stood looking at the cold swirling waters. Then he waded out into the river
like some wholly wretched baptismal candidate.
III
Sought out to join an army - Interview with Captain White ?
His views - The camp - Trades his mule - A cantina in the Laredito -
A Mennonite - Companion killed.
He was lying naked under the trees with his rags spread across the limbs above him
when another rider going down the river reined up and stopped.
He turned his head. Through the willows he could see the legs of the horse. He rolled
over on his stomach.
The man got down and stood beside the horse.
He reached and got his twinehandled knife.
Howdy there, said the rider.
He didnt answer. He moved to the side to see better through, the branches.
Howdy there. Where ye at?
What do you want?
Wanted to talk to ye.
What about?
Hell fire, come on out. I'm white and Christian.
The kid was reaching up through the willows trying to get his breeches. The belt was
hanging down and he tugged at it but the breeches were hung on a limb.
G-ddamn, said the man. You aint up in the tree are ye?

Why dont you go on and leave me the hell alone.
Just wanted to talk to ye. Didnt intend to get ye all riled up.
You done got me riled.
Was you the feller knocked in that Mexer's head yesterday evenin? I aint the law.
Who wants to know?
Captain White. He wants to sign that feller up to join the army.
The army?
Yessir.
What army?
Company under Captain White. We goin to whip up on the Mexicans.
The war's over.
He says it aint over. Where are you at?
He rose and hauled the breeches down from where he'd hung them and pulled them on.
He pulled on his boots and put the knife in the right bootleg and came out from the
willows pulling on his shirt.
The man was sitting in the grass with his legs crossed. He was dressed in buckskin and
he wore a plug hat of dusty black silk and he had a small Mexican cigar in the corner
of his teeth. When he saw what clawed its way out through the willows he shook his
head.
Kindly fell on hard times aint ye son? he said.
I just aint fell on no good ones.
You ready to go to Mexico?
I aint lost nothin down there.

It's a chance for ye to raise ye self in the world. You best make a move someway or
another fore ye go plumb in under.
What do they give ye?
Ever man gets a horse and his ammunition. I reckon we might find some clothes in
your case.
I aint got no rifle.
We'll find ye one.
What about wages?
Hell fire son, you wont need no wages. You get to keep ever-thing you can raise. We
goin to Mexico. Spoils of war. Aint a man in the company wont come out a big
landowner. How much land you own now?
I dont know nothin about soldierin.
The man eyed him. He took the unlit cigar from his teeth and turned his head and spat
and put it back again. Where ye from? he said.
Tennessee.
Tennessee. Well I dont misdoubt but what you can shoot a rifle.
The kid squatted in the grass. He looked at the man's horse. The horse was fitted out
in tooled leather with worked silver trim. It had a white blaze on its face and four
white stockings and it was cropping up great teethfuls of the rich grass. Where you
from, said the kid.
I been in Texas since thirty-eight. If I'd not run up on Captain White I dont know
where I'd be this day. I was a sorrier sight even than what you are and he come along
and raised me up like Lazarus. Set my feet in the path of righteousness. I'd done took
to drinkin and whorin till hell wouldnt have me. He seen somethin in me worth savin
and I see it in you. What do ye say?
I dont know.
Just come with me and meet the captain.

The boy pulled at the halms of grass. He looked at the horse again. Well, he said. Dont
reckon it'd hurt nothin.
They rode through the town with the recruiter splendid on the stockingfooted horse and
the kid behind him on the mule like something he'd captured. They rode through
narrow lanes where the wattled huts steamed in the heat. Grass and prickly pear grew
on the roofs and goats walked about on them and somewhere off in that squalid
kingdom of mud the sound of the little deathbells tolled thinly. They turned up
Commerce Street through the Main Plaza among rafts of wagons and they crossed
another plaza where boys were selling grapes and figs from little trundlecarts.
A few bony dogs slank off before them. They rode through the Military Plaza and they
passed the little street where the boy and the mule had drunk the night before and
there were clusters of women and girls at the well and many shapes of wickercovered
clay jars standing about. They passed a little house where women inside were wailing
and the little hearsecart stood at the door with the horses patient and motionless in the
heat and the flies.
The captain kept quarters in a hotel on a plaza where there were trees and a small
green gazebo with benches. An iron gate at the hotel front opened into a passageway
with a courtyard at the rear. The walls were whitewashed and set with little ornate
colored tiles. The captain's man wore carved boots with tall heels that rang smartly on
the tiles and on the stairs ascending from the courtyard to the rooms above. In the
. courtyard there were green plants growing and they were freshly watered and steam ng.
The captain's man strode down the long balcony and rapped sharply at the door at the
end. A voice said for them to come in.
He sat at a wickerwork desk writing letters, the captain. They stood attending, the
captain's man with his black hat in his hands. The captain wrote on nor did he look
up. Outside the kid could hear a woman speaking in Spanish. Other than that there was
just the scratching of the captain's pen.
When he had done he laid down the pen and looked up. He looked at his man and
then he looked at the kid and then he bent his head to read what he'd written. He
nodded to himself and dusted the letter with sand from a little onyx box and folded it.
Taking a match from a box of them on the desk he lit it and held it to a stick of
sealing wax until a small red medallion had pooled onto the paper. He shook out the
match, blew briefly at the paper and knuckled the seal with his ring. Then he stood the
letter between two books on his desk and leaned back in his chair and looked at the
kid again. He nodded gravely. Take seats, he said.

They eased themselves into a kind of settle made from some dark wood. The captain's
man had a large revolver at his belt and as he sat he hitched the belt around so that
the piece lay cradled between his thighs. He put his hat over it and leaned back. The
kid folded his busted boots one behind the other and sat upright.
The captain pushed his chair back and rose and came around to the front of the desk.
He stood there for a measured minute and then he hitched himself up on the desk and
sat with his boots dangling. He had gray in his hair and in the sweeping moustaches
that he wore but he was not old. So you're the man, he said.
What man? said the kid.
What man sir, said the captain's man.
How old are you, son?
Nineteen.
The captain nodded his head. He was looking the kid over. What happened to you?
What?
Say sir, said the recruiter.
Sir?
I said what happened to you.
The kid looked at the man sitting next to him. He looked down at himself and he
looked at the captain again. I was fell on by robbers, he said.
Robbers, said the captain.
Took everthing I had. Took my watch and everthing.
Have you got a rifle?
Not no more I aint.
Where was it you were robbed.

I dont know. They wasnt no name to it. It was just a wilderness.
Where were you coming from?
I was comin from Naca, Naca ...
Nacogdoches?
Yeah.
Yessir.
Yessir.
How many were there?
The kid stared at him.
Robbers. How many robbers.
Seven or eight, I reckon. I got busted in the head with a scantlin.
The captain squinted one eye at him. Were they Mexicans?
Some. Mexicans and niggers. They was a white or two with em. They had a bunch of
cattle they'd stole. Only thing they left me with was a old piece of knife I had in my
boot.
The captain nodded. He folded his hands between his knees. What do you think of the
treaty? he said.
The kid looked at the man on the settle next to him. He had his eyes shut. He looked
down at his thumbs. I dont know nothin about it, he said.
I'm afraid that's the case with a lot of Americans, said the captain. Where are you from,
son?
Tennessee.
You werent with the Volunteers at Monterrey were you?

No sir.
. Bravest bunch of men under fire I believe I ever saw. I sup ose more men from
Tennessee bled and died on the field in northern Mexico than from any other state. Did
you know that?
No sir.
They were sold out. Fought and died down there in that desert and then they were sold
out by their own country.
The kid sat silent.
The captain leaned forward. We fought for it. Lost friends and brothers down there. And
then by G-d if we didnt give it back. Back to a bunch of barbarians that even the most
biased in their favor will admit have no least notion in G-d's earth of honor or justice
or the meaning of republican government. A people so cowardly they've paid tribute a
hundred years to tribes of naked savages. Given up their crops and livestock. Mines shut
down. Whole villages abandoned. While a heathen horde rides over the land looting and
killing with total impunity. Not a hand raised against them. What kind of people are
these? The Apaches wont even shoot them. Did you know that? They kill them with
rocks. The captain shook his head. He seemed made sad by what he had to tell.
Did you know that when Colonel Doniphan took Chihuahua City he inflicted over a
thousand casualties on the enemy and lost only one man and him all but a suicide?
With an army of unpaid irregulars that called him Bill, were half naked, and had walked
to the battlefield from Missouri?
No sir.
The captain leaned back and folded his arms. What we are dealing with, he said, is a
race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than niggers. And maybe no better.
There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there's no G-d in Mexico. Never will be. We
are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you
know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others
come in to govern for them.
There are already some fourteen thousand French colonists in the state of Sonora.
They're being given free land to settle. They're being given tools and livestock.
Enlightened Mexicans encourage this. Paredes is already calling for secession from the

Mexican government. They'd rather be ruled by toadeaters than thieves and imbeciles.
Colonel Carrasco is asking for American intervention. And he's going to get it.
Right now they are forming in Washington a commission to come out here and draw up
the boundary lines between our country and Mexico. I dont think there's any question
that ultimately Sonora will become a United States territory. Guaymas a U S port.
Americans will be able to get to California without having to pass through our benighted
sister republic and our citizens will be protected at last from the notorious packs of cut
.hroats presently infesting the routes which they are obliged to travel.
The captain was watching the kid. The kid looked uneasy. Son, said the captain. We are
to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land. That's right. We are to
spearhead the drive. We have the tacit support of Governor Burnett of California.
He leaned forward and placed his hands on his knees. And we will be the ones who
will divide the spoils. There will be a section of land for every man in my company.
Fine grassland. Some of the finest in the world. A land rich in minerals, in gold and
silver I would say beyond the wildest speculation. You're young.
But I dont misread you. I'm seldom mistaken in a man. I think you mean to make your
mark in this world. Am I wrong?
No sir.
No. And I don't think you're the sort of chap to abandon a land that Americans fought
and died for to a foreign power. And mark my word. Unless Americans act, people like
you and me who take their country seriously while those mollycoddles in Washington sit
. . on their hindsides, unless we act, Mexico nd I mean the whole of the country ill one
day fly a European flag. Monroe Doctrine or no.
The captain's voice had become soft and intense. He tilted his head to one side and
regarded the kid with a sort of benevolence. The kid rubbed the palms of his hands on
the knees of his filthy jeans. He glanced at the man beside him but he seemed to be
asleep.
What about a saddle? he said.
Saddle?
Yessir.

You dont have a saddle?
No sir.
I thought you had a horse.
A mule.
I see.
I got a old hull on the mule but they aint much left of it. Aint a whole lot left of the
mule. He said I was to get a horse and a rifle.
Sergeant Trammel did?
I never promised him no saddle, said the sergeant.
We'll get you a saddle.
I did tell him we might find him some clothes, Captain.
Right. We may be irregulars but we dont want to look like bobtails, do we?
No sir.
We aint got no more broke horses neither, said the sergeant.
Well break one.
That old boy that was so good about breakin em is out of commission.
I know that. Get somebody else.
Yessir. Maybe this man can break horses. You ever break horses? No sir.
Aint no need to sir me. Yessir.
Sergeant, said the captain, easing himself down from the desk. Yessir. Sign this man up.
The camp was upriver at the edge of the town. A tent patched up from old wagon
canvas, a few wickiups made of brush and beyond them a corral in the form of a figure

eight likewise made from brush where a few small painted ponies stood sulking in the
sun.
Corporal, called the sergeant.
He aint here.
He dismounted and strode toward the tent and threw back the fly. The kid sat on the
mule. Three men were lying in the shade of a tree and they studied him. Howdy, said
one.
Howdy.
You a new man?
I reckon.
Captain say when we leavin this pesthole?
He never said.
The sergeant came from the tent. Where's he at? he said.
Gone to town.
Gone to town, said the sergeant. Come here.
The man rose from the ground and ambled over to the tent and stood with his hands
resting in the small of his back.
This here man aint got no outfit, said the sergeant.
The man nodded.
The captain give him a shirt and some money to get his boots mended. We need to get
him somethin he can ride and we need to get him a saddle.
A saddle.
Ought to be able to sell that mule for enough to get him one of some kind.

The man looked at the mule and turned back and squinted at the sergeant. He leaned
and spat. That there mule wont bring ten dollars.
What it brings it brings.
They done killed another beef.
I dont want to hear about it.
I caint do nothin with em.
I aint tellin the captain. He'll roll them eyes around till they come unscrewed and fall
out in the ground.
The man spat again. Well, that's the G-ds truth anyway.
See to this man now. I got to get.
Well.
Aint nobody sick is they?
No.
Thank G-d for that.
He stood up into the saddle and touched the horse's neck lightly with the reins. He
looked back and shook his head.
In the evening the kid and two other recruits went into town. He'd bathed and shaved
himself and he wore a pair of blue cord trousers and the cotton shirt the captain had
given him and save for the boots he looked a new man altogether. His friends rode
small and colorful horses that forty days ago had been wild animals on the plain and
they shied and skittered and snapped like turtles.
Wait till you get you one of these, said the second corporal. You aint never had no fun.
These horses is all right, said the other.
There's one or two in there yet that might make ye a horse.

The kid looked down at them from his mule. They rode either side like escorts and the
mule trotted with its head up, its eyes shifting nervously. They'll all stick ye head in the
ground, said the second corporal.
They rode through a plaza thronged with wagons and stock.
With immigrants and Texans and Mexicans and with slaves and Lipan Indians and
deputations of Karankawas tall and austere, their faces dyed blue and their hands locked
about the shafts of their sixfoot spears, all but naked savages who with their painted
. skins and their whispered taste for human flesh seemed out ageous presences even in
that fabled company. The recruits rode with their animals close reined and they turned
up past the courthouse and along the high walls of the carcel with the broken glass
imbedded in the topmost course. In the Main Plaza a band had assembled and were at
tuning their instruments. The riders turned down Salinas Street past small gaminghouses
and coffee-stands and there were in this street a number of Mexican harness-makers and
traders and keepers of gamechickens and cobblers and bootmakers in little stalls or
shops of mud. The second corporal was from Texas and spoke a little Spanish and he
meant to trade the mule. The other boy was from Missouri. They were in good spirits,
scrubbed and combed, clean shirts all. Each foreseeing a night of drink, perhaps of love.
How many youths have come home cold and dead from just such nights and just such
plans.
They traded the mule accoutred as it was for a Texas stock saddle, bare tree with
rawhide cover, not new but sound. For a bridle and bit that was new. For a woven
wool blanket from Saltillo that was dusty new or not. And lastly for a two and a half
dollar gold piece. The Texan looked at this small coin in the kid's palm and demanded
more money but the harnessmaker shook his head and held up his hands in utter
finality.
What about my boots? said the kid.
Y sus botas, said the Texan.
Botas?
Si. He made sewing motions.
The harnessmaker looked down at the boots. He cupped his fingers in a little gesture of
impatience and the kid took off the boots and stood barefoot in the dust.
When all was done they stood in the street and looked at one another. The kid had his

new tack slung up on his shoulder.
The second corporal looked at the boy from Missouri. You got any money, Earl?
Not a copper cent.
Well I aint neither. We might's well get our asses back on out to that hole of misery.
The kid shifted the weight of the gear on his shoulder. We got this quarter eagle to
drink up yet, he said.
Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in
courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning
charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in
the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along a bare adobe
wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and
they pass a hole in the wall where by the light of a small forgefire an old man beats
out shapes of metal. They pass in a doorway a young girl whose beauty becomes the
flowers about.
They arrive at last before a wooden door. It is hinged into a larger door or gate and all
must step over the foot-high sill where a thousand boots have scuffed away the wood,
where fools in their hundreds have tripped or fallen or tottered drunkenly into the
street. They pass along a ramada in a courtyard by an old grape arbor where small fowl
nod in the dusk among the gnarled and barren vines and they enter a cantina where
the lamps are lit and they cross stooping under a low beam to a bar and belly up one
two three.
There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin
man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin
rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down and order
more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another
table who look the recruits over. The recruits stand sideways along the bar with their
thumbs in their belts and watch the room. They talk among themselves of the
expedition in loud voices and the old Mennonite shakes a rueful head and sips his drink
and mutters.
They'll stop you at the river, he says.
The second corporal looks past his comrades. Are you talking to me?

At the river. Be told. They'll jail you to a man.
Who will?
The United States Army. General Worth.
The hell they will.
Pray that they will.
He looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. What does that mean, old
man?
Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed yell not cross it back.
Dont aim to cross it back. We goin to Sonora.
What's it to you, old man?
The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in
the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The
. wrath of G-d lies sleep ng. It was hid a million years before men were and only men
have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's
making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.
But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar
muttering, and how else could it be?
How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind
blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these
young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again
and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who
had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his
side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old
man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool
of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard.
It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The
fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call.
There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He

had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and
turned and went out the gate.
IV
Setting forth with the filibusters - On alien ground ?
Shooting antelope - Pursued by cholera -Wolves - Wagon repairs -
A desert waste - Night storms - The ghost manada -
A prayer for rain - A desert homestead - The old man - New country -
An abandoned village - Herdsmen on the plain -
Attacked by Comanches.
Five days later on the dead man's horse he followed the riders and wagons through the
plaza and out of the town on the road downcountry. They rode through Castroville
where coyotes had dug up the dead and scattered their bones and they crossed the Frio
River and they crossed the Nueces and they left the Presidio road and turned north
with scouts posted ahead and to the rear. They crossed the del Norte by night and
waded up out of the shallow sandy ford into a howling wilderness.
Dawn saw them deployed in a long file over the plain, the dry wood wagons already
moaning, horses snuffling. A dull thump of hooves and clank of gear and the constant
light chink of harness. Save for scattered clumps of buckbrush and pricklypear and the
little patches of twisted grass the ground was bare and there were low mountains to the
south and they were bare too. Westward the horizon lay flat and true as a spirit level.
Those first days they saw no game, no birds save buzzards. They saw in the distance
herds of sheep or goats moving along the skyline in scarves of dust and they ate the
meat of wild asses shot on the plain. The sergeant carried in his saddle scabbard a
heavy Wesson rifle that used a false muzzle and paper patch and fired a coneshaped
ball. With it he killed the little wild pigs of the desert and later when they began to see
herds of antelope he would halt in the dusk with the sun off the land and screwing a
bipod into the threaded boss on the underside of the barrel would kill these animals
where they stood grazing at distances of half a mile. The rifle carried a vernier sight on
the tang and he would eye the distance and gauge the wind and set the sight like a
man using a micrometer. The second corporal would lie at his elbow with a glass and
call the shots high or low should he miss and the wagon would wait by until he had
shot a stand of three or four and then rumble off across the cooling land with the

skinners jostling and grinning in the bed. The sergeant never put the rifle up but what
he wiped and greased the bore.
They rode well armed, each man with a rifle and many with the smallbore fiveshot
Colt's revolvers. The captain carried a pair of dragoon pistols in scabbards that mounted
across the pommel of the saddle so that they rode at each knee. These guns were
United States issue, Colt's patent, and he had bought them from a deserter in a Soledad
livery stable and paid eighty dollars in gold for them and the scabbards and the mold
and flask they came with.
The rifle the kid carried had been sawed down and rebored till it weighed very light
indeed and the mold for it was so small he had to patch the balls with buckskin. He
had fired it a few times and it carried much where it chose. It rode before him on the
saddlebow, he having no scabbard. It had been carried so before, G-d's years of it, and
the forestock was much worn beneath.
In the early dark the wagon came back with the meat. The skinners had piled the
wagonbed with mesquite brush and stumps they'd drug out of the ground with the
. horses and they unloaded the firewood and commenced cutting up the gutted ante opes
in the floor of the wagon with bowieknives and hand-axes, laughing and hacking in a
welter of gore, a reeking scene in the light of the handheld lanterns. By full dark the
blackened ribracks leaned steaming at the fires and there was a jousting over the coals
with shaven sticks whereon were skewered gobs of meat and a clank of canteens and
endless raillery. And sleep that night on the cold plains of a foreign land, forty-six men
wrapped in their blankets under the selfsame stars, the prairie wolves so like in their
yammering, yet all about so changed and strange.
They caught up and set out each day in the dark before the day yet was and they ate
cold meat and biscuit and made no fire. The sun rose on a column already ragged these
six days out. Among their clothes there was small agreement and among their hats less.
The little painted horses stepped shifty and truculent and a vicious snarl of flies fought
constantly in the bed of the gamewagon. The dust the party raised was quickly dispersed
and lost in the immensity of that landscape and there was no dust other for the pale
sutler who pursued them drives unseen and his lean horse and his lean cart leave no
track upon such ground or any ground. By a thousand fires in the iron blue dusk he
keeps his commissary and he's a wry and grinning tradesman good to follow every
campaign or hound men from their holes in just those whited regions where they've
gone to hide from G-d. On this day two men fell sick and one died before dark. In the
morning there was another ill to take his place. The two of them were laid among sacks
of beans and rice and coffee in the supply-wagon with blankets over them to keep them
from the sun and they rode with the slamming and jarring of the wagon half shirring

the meat from their bones so that they cried out to be left and then they died. The
men turned out in the early morning darkness to dig their graves with the bladebones
of antelope and they covered them with stones and rode on again.
They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper
run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the
earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of
nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat
squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay
like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced
elongate before them like strands of the night from which they'd ridden, like tentacles to
bind them to the darkness yet to come. They rode with their heads down, faceless under
their hats, like an army asleep on the march. By midmorning another man had died
and they lifted him from the wagon where he'd stained the sacks he'd lain among and
buried him also and rode on.
Now wolves had come to follow them, great pale lobos with yellow eyes that trotted
. neat of foot or squatted in the shimmer ng heat to watch them where they made their
noon halt. Moving on again. Loping, sidling, ambling with their long noses to the
ground. In the evening their eyes shifted and winked out there on the edge of the
firelight and in the morning when the riders rode out in the cool dark they could hear
the snarling and the pop of their mouths behind them as they sacked the camp for
meatscraps.
The wagons drew so dry they slouched from side to side like dogs and the sand was
grinding them away. The wheels shrank and the spokes reeled in their hubs and
clattered like loom-shafts and at night they'd drive false spokes into the mortices and tie
them down with strips of green hide and they'd drive wedges between the iron of the
tires and the suncracked felloes. They wobbled on, the trace of their untrue labors like
sidewinder tracks in the sand. The duledge pegs worked loose and dropped behind.
Wheels began to break up.
Ten days out with four men dead they started across a plain of pure pumice where
there grew no shrub, no weed, far as the eye could see. The captain called a halt and
he called up the Mexican who served as guide. They talked and the Mexican gestured
and the captain gestured and after a while they moved on again.
This looks like the high road to hell to me, said a man from the ranks.
What does he reckon for the horses to eat?

I believe they're supposed to just grit up on this sand like chickens and be ready for
the shelled corn when it does come.
In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied
skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even
in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and
. they saw a mule entire, the dried and black ned carcass hard as iron. They rode on.
The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with
dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and
grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were
fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness.
The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling
down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims
exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in
the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagon-tires grew polished bright as
chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler
image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now.
They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and
the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white
dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled
and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to
know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than
those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round
while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the
moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in
gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender
astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes
winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not
be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain
chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the
plain, pounding their shadows down the night and- leaving in the moonlight a vaporous
dust like the palest stain of their passing.
All night the wind blew and the fine dust set their teeth on edge. Sand in everything,
grit in all they ate. In the morning a urinecolored sun rose blearily through panes of
dust on a dim world and without feature. The animals were failing. They halted and
made a dry camp without wood or water and the wretched ponies huddled and
whimpered like dogs.
That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft

blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in
hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses
and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west
beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the
mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other
order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from
the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great
clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned
up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor
ruin more than any troubling dream.
They halted in the dark to recruit the animals and some of the men stowed their arms
in the wagons for fear of drawing the lightning and a man named Hayward prayed for
rain.
He prayed: Almighty G-d, if it aint too far out of the way of things in your eternal plan
do you reckon we could have a little rain down here.
Pray it up, some called, and kneeling he cried out among the thunder and the wind:
L-rd we are dried to jerky down here. Just a few drops for some old boys out here on
the prairie and a long ways from home.
Amen, they said, and catching up their mounts they rode on.
Within the hour the wind cooled and drops of rain the size of grapeshot fell upon them
out of that wild darkness. They could smell wet stone and the sweet smell of the wet
horses and wet leather. They rode on.
They rode through the heat of the day following with the waterkegs empty and the
horses perishing and in the evening these elect, shabby and white with dust like a
company of armed and mounted millers wandering in dementia, rode up off the desert
through a gap in the low stone hills and down upon a solitary jacal, crude hut of mud
and wattles and a rudimentary stable and corrals.
Bone palings ruled the small and dusty purlieus here and death seemed the most
prevalent feature of the landscape. Strange fences that the sand and wind had scoured
and the sun bleached and cracked like old porcelain with dry brown weather cracks and
where no life moved. The corrugated forms of the riders passed jingling across the dry
bistre land and across the mud facade of the jacal, the horses trembling, smelling water.
The captain raised his hand and the sergeant spoke and two men dismounted and
advanced upon the hut with rifles. They pushed open a door made of rawhide and

entered. In a few minutes they reappeared.
Somebody's here somewheres. They's hot coals.
The captain surveyed the distance with an air of vigilance. He dismounted with the
patience of one used to dealing with incompetence and crossed to the jacal. When he
came out he surveyed the terrain again. The horses shifted and clinked and stamped
and the men pulled their jaws down and spoke roughly to them.
Sergeant.
Yessir.
These people cant be far. See if you can find them. And see if there's any forage here
for the animals.
Forage?
Forage.
The sergeant placed a hand on the cantle and looked about at the place they were in
and shook his head and dismounted.
They went through the jacal and into the enclosure behind and out to the stable. There
were no animals and nothing but a stall half filled with dry sotols in the way of feed.
They walked out the back to a sink among the stones where water stood and a thin
stream flowed away over the sand. There were hoofprints about the tank and dry
. manure and some small birds ran mind essly along the rim of the little creek.
The sergeant had been squatting on his heels and now he rose and spat. Well, he said.
Is there any direction you caint see twenty mile in?
The recruits studied the emptiness about.
I dont believe the folks here is gone that long.
They drank and walked back toward the jacal. Horses were being led along the narrow
path.
The captain was standing with his thumbs in his belt.

I caint see where they've got to, said the sergeant.
What's in the shed.
Some old dry fodder.
The captain frowned. They ought to have a goat or a hog. Something. Chickens.
In a few minutes two men came dragging an old man from the stable. He was covered
with dust and dry chaff and he held one arm across his eyes. He was dragged moaning
to the captain's feet where he lay prostrate in what looked like windings of white cotton.
He put his hands over his ears and his elbows before his eyes like one called upon to
witness some appalling thing. The captain turned away in disgust. The sergeant toed him
with his boot. What's wrong with him? he said.
. He's pissing himself, Sergeant. He's pissing himself. The cap ain gestured at the man
with his gloves.
Yessir.
Well get him the hell out of here.
You want Candelario to talk to him?
He's a halfwit. Get him away from me.
They dragged the old man away. He had begun to babble but no one listened and in
the morning he was gone.
They bivouacked by the tank and the farrier saw to the mules and ponies that had
thrown shoes and they worked on the wagons by firelight far into the night. They set
forth in a crimson dawn where sky and earth closed in a razorous plane. Out there dark
little archipelagos of cloud and the vast world of sand and scrub shearing upward into
the shoreless void where those blue islands trembled and the earth grew uncertain,
gravely canted and veering out through tinctures of rose and the dark beyond the dawn
to the uttermost rebate of space.
They rode through regions of particolored stone upthrust in ragged kerfs and shelves of
. traprock reared in faults and anti lines curved back upon themselves and broken off
like stumps of great stone treeboles and stones the lightning had clove open, seeps
exploding in steam in some old storm. They rode past trapdykes of brown rock running

down the narrow chines of the ridges and onto the plain like the ruins of old walls,
such auguries everywhere of the hand of man before man was or any living thing.
They passed through a village then and now in ruins and they camped in the walls of a
tall mud church and burned the fallen timbers of the roof for their fire while owls cried
from the arches in the dark.
The following day on the skyline to the south they saw clouds of dust that lay across
the earth for miles. They rode on, watching the dust until it began to near and the
captain raised his hand for a halt and took from his saddlebag his old brass cavalry
telescope and uncoupled it and swept it slowly over the land. The sergeant sat his horse
beside him and after a while the captain handed him the glass.
Hell of a herd of something.
I believe it's horses.
How far off do you make them?
Hard to tell.
Call Candelario up here.
The sergeant turned and motioned for the Mexican. When he rode up he handed him
the glass and the Mexican raised it to his eye and squinted. Then he lowered the glass
and watched
with his naked eyes and then he raised it and looked again. Then he sat his horse with
the glass at his chest like a crucifix.
Well? said the captain.
He shook his head.
What the hell does that mean? They're not buffalo are they?
No. I think maybe horses.
Let me have the glass.
The Mexican handed him the telescope and he glassed the horizon again and collapsed

the tube shut with the heel of his hand and replaced it in his bag and raised his hand
and they went on.
They were cattle, mules, horses. There were several thousand head and they were
moving quarterwise toward the company. By late afternoon riders were visible to the
bare eye, a handful of ragged indians mending the outer flanks of the herd with their
nimble ponies. Others in hats, perhaps Mexicans. The sergeant dropped back to where
the captain was riding.
What do you make of that, Captain?
I make it a parcel of heathen stockthieves is what I make it. What do you?
Looks like it to me.
The captain watched through the glass. I suppose they've seen us, he said.
They've seen us.
How many riders do you make it?
A dozen maybe.
The captain tapped the instrument in his gloved hand. They dont seem concerned, do
they?
No sir. They dont.
The captain smiled grimly. We may see a little sport here before the day is out.
The first of the herd began to swing past them in a pall of yellow dust, rangy slatribbed
cattle with horns that grew agoggle and no two alike and small thin mules coalblack
that shouldered one another and reared their malletshaped heads above the backs of the
others and then more cattle and finally the first of the herders riding up the outer side
and keeping the stock between themselves and the mounted company. Behind them
came a herd of several hundred ponies. The sergeant looked for Candelario. He kept
backing along the ranks but he could not find him. He nudged his horse through the
column and moved up the far side. The lattermost of the drovers were now coming
through the dust and the captain was gesturing and shouting. The ponies had begun to
veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their way toward this armed
company met with on the plain. Already you could see through the dust on the ponies'

hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every
device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could
. hear above the pound ng of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes niade
from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their
mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies there
rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of
broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies.
A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or
biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery
and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain
dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an
umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in
headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and
. one in a pigeontailed coat worn back ards and otherwise naked and one in the armor
of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows
of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and
many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon
the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth
and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces
gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious,
all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell
. more horrible yet than the brim tone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and
yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right
knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
Oh my G-d, said the sergeant.
A rattling drove of arrows passed through the company and men tottered and dropped
. from their mounts. Horses were rear ng and plunging and the mongol hordes swung
up along their flanks and turned and rode full upon them with lances.
The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the gray
riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid's horse
sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now
he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an
arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have
reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another
arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses
down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran
from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare
loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their

shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped
standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced
pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and
was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and
some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered
brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses
with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in
their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks
in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel
hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of
the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then
rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their
breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping
from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar
bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the
clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about
the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and
hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange
white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so
slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon
the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of
the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather
and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were
feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as
they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the
wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and
tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust
and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.
V
Adrift on the Bolson de Mapimi - Sproule -
Tree of dead babies ?Scenes from a massacre -Sopilotes -
The murdered in the church - Night among the dead - Wolves -
The washers at the ford - Afoot westward - A mirage - An encounter
with bandits ?Attacked by a vampire ?Digging a well - A crossroads

in the waste - The carreta - Death of Sproule - Under arrest -
The captain's head ?Survivors ?On to Chihuahua ?
The city - The prison - Toadvine.
With darkness one soul rose wondrously from among the new slain dead and stole away
in the moonlight. The ground where he'd lain was soaked with blood and with urine
from the voided bladders of the animals and he went forth stained and stinking like
some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself. The savages had moved to
higher ground and he could see the light from their fires and hear them singing, a
strange and plaintive chanting up there where they'd gone to roast mules. He made his
way among the pale and dismembered, among the sprawled and legflung horses, and he
took a reckoning by the stars and set off south afoot. The night wore a thousand shapes
out there in the brush and he kept his eyes to the ground ahead. Starlight and waning
moon made a faint shadow of his wanderings on the dark of the desert and all along
the ridges the wolves were howling and moving north toward the slaughter. He walked
all night and still he could see the fires behind him.
With daylight he made his way toward some outcroppings of rock a mile across the
valley floor. He was climbing among the strewn and tumbled boulders when he heard a
voice calling somewhere in that vastness. He looked out over the plain but he could see
no one. When the voice called again he turned and sat to rest and soon he saw
something moving along the slope, a rag of a man clambering toward him over the talus
. slides. Pick ng his way with care, looking behind him. The kid could see that nothing
followed.
He wore a blanket over his shoulders and his shirtsleeve was ripped and dark with
blood and he carried that arm against him with his other hand. His name was Sproule.
Eight of them had escaped. His horse had carried off several arrows and it caved under
him in the night and the others had gone on, the captain among them.
They sat side by side among the rocks and watched the day lengthen on the plain
below.
Did you not save any of your possibles? Sproule said.
The kid spat and shook his head. He looked at Sproule.
How bad is your arm?

He pulled it to him. I've seen worse, he said.
They sat looking out over those reaches of sand and rock and wind.
What kind of Indians was them?
I dont know.
Sproule coughed deeply into his fist. He pulled his bloody arm against him. Damn if
they aint about a caution to the Christians, he said.
They laid up in the shade of a rock shelf until past noon, scratching out a place in the
gray lava dust to sleep, and they set forth in the afternoon down the valley following
the war trail and they were very small and they moved very slowly in the immensity of
that landscape.
Come evening they hove toward the rimrock again and Sproule pointed out a dark stain
on the face of the barren cliff. It looked like the black from old fires. The kid shielded
his eyes. The scalloped canyon walls rippled in the heat like drapery folds.
It might could be a seep, said Sproule.
It's a long ways up there.
Well if you see any water closer let's make for that.
The kid looked at him and they set off.
The site lay up a draw and their way was a jumble of fallen rock and scoria and
deadlylooking bayonet plants. Small black and olivecolored shrubs blasted under the sun.
They stumbled up the cracked clay floor of a dry watercourse. They rested and moved
on.
The seep lay high up among the ledges, vadose water dripping down the slick black rock
and monkeyflower and deathcamas hanging in a small and perilous garden. The water
that reached the canyon floor was no more than a trickle and they leaned by turns with
pursed lips to the stone like devouts at a shrine.
They passed the night in a shallow cave above this spot, an old reliquary of
flintknappings and ratchel scattered about on the stone floor with beads of shell and
. polished bone and the char oal of ancient fires. They shared the blanket in the cold

and Sproule coughed quietly in the dark and they rose from time to time to descend
and drink at the stone. They were gone before sunrise and the dawn found them on the
plain again.
They followed the trampled ground left by the warparty and in the afternoon they came
upon a mule that had failed and been lanced and left dead and then they came upon
another. The way narrowed through rocks and by and by they came to a bush that was
hung with dead babies.
They stopped side by side, reeling in the heat. These small victims, seven, eight of them,
had holes punched in their under-jaws and were hung so by their throats from the
broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky. Bald and pale and bloated,
larval to some unreckonable being. The castaways hobbled past, they looked back.
. Nothing moved. In the after oon they came upon a village on the plain where smoke
still rose from the ruins and all were gone to death. From a distance it looked like a
decaying brick kiln. They stood without the walls a long time listening to the silence
before they entered.
They went slowly through the little mud streets. There were goats and sheep slain in
their pens and pigs dead in the mud. They passed mud hovels where people lay
. murdered in all atti udes of death in the doorways and the floors, naked and swollen
and strange. They found plates of food half eaten and a cat came out and sat in the
sun and watched them without interest and flies snarled everywhere in the still hot air.
At the end of the street they came to a plaza with benches and trees where vultures
huddled in foul black rookeries. A dead horse lay in the square and some chickens were
pecking in a patch of spilled meal in a doorway. Charred poles lay smoldering where the
roofs had fallen through and a burro was standing in the open door of the church.
They sat on a bench and Sproule held his wounded arm to his chest and rocked back
and forth and blinked in the sun.
What do you want to do? said the kid.
Get a drink of water.
Other than that.
I dont know.
You want to try and head back?

To Texas?
I dont know where else.
We'd never make it.
Well you say.
I aint got no say.
He was coughing again. He held his chest with his good hand and sat as if he'd get his
breath.
What have you got, a cold?
I got consumption.
Consumption?
He nodded. I come out here for my health.
The kid looked at him. He shook his head and rose and walked off across the plaza
toward the church. There were buzzards squatting among the old carved wooden corbels
and he picked up a stone and squailed it at them but they never moved.
The shadows had grown long in the plaza and little coils of dust were moving in the
parched clay streets. The carrion birds sat about the topmost corners of the houses with
. their wings out tretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops. The kid
returned to the bench and propped up one foot and leaned on his knee. Sproule sat as
before, still holding his arm.
Son of a bitch is dealin me misery, he said.
The kid spat and looked off down the street. We better just hold up here for tonight.
You reckon it would be all right?
Who with?
What if them Indians was to come back?

What would they come back for?
Well what if they was to?
They wont come back.
He held his arm.
I wish you had a knife on you, the kid said.
I wish you did.
There's meat here if a man had a knife.
I aint hungry.
I think we ought to scout these houses and see what all's here.
You go on.
We need to find us a place to sleep.
Sproule looked at him. I dont need to go nowheres, he said.
Well. You suit yourself.
Sproule coughed and spat. I aim to, he said.
The kid turned and went on down the street.
The doorways were low and he had to stoop to clear the lintel beams, stepping down
into the cool and earthy rooms. There was no furniture save pallets for sleeping,
perhaps a wooden mealbin. He went from house to house. In one room the bones of a
small loom black and smoldering. In another a man, the charred flesh drawn taut, the
eyes cooked in their sockets. There was a niche in the mud wall with figures of saints
dressed in doll's clothes, the rude wooden faces brightly painted. Illustrations cut from
an old journal and pasted to the wall, a small picture of a queen, a gypsy card that was
the four of cups. There were strings of dried peppers and a few gourds. A glass bottle
that held weeds. Outside a bare dirt yard fenced with ocotillo and a round clay oven
caved through where black curd trembled in the light within.

He found a clay jar of beans and some dry tortillas and he took them to a house at the
end of the street where the embers of the roof were still smoldering and he warmed the
food in the ashes and ate, squatting there like some deserter scavenging the ruins of a
city he'd fled.
When he returned to the square Sproule was gone. All about lay in shadow. He crossed
the square and mounted the stone steps to the door of the church and entered. Sproule
was standing in the vestibule. Long buttresses of light fell from the high windows in the
western wall. There were no pews in the church and the stone floor was heaped with
the scalped and naked and partly eaten bodies of some forty souls who'd barricaded
. them elves in this house of G-d against the heathen. The savages had hacked holes in
the roof and shot them down from above and the floor was littered with arrowshafts
where they'd snapped them off to get the clothes from the bodies. The altars had been
hauled down and the tabernacle looted and the great sleeping G-d of the Mexicans
routed from his golden cup. The primitive painted saints in their frames hung cocked on
the walls as if an earthquake had visited and a dead Christ in a glass bier lay broken in
the chancel floor.
The murdered lay in a great pool of their communal blood. It had set up into a sort of
pudding crossed everywhere with the tracks of wolves or dogs and along the edges it
had dried and cracked into a burgundy ceramic. Blood lay in dark tongues on the floor
and blood grouted the flagstones and ran in the vestibule where the stones were cupped
from the feet of the faithful and their fathers before them and it had threaded its way
down the steps and dripped from the stones among the dark red tracks of the
scavengers.
Sproule turned and looked at the kid as if he'd know his thoughts but the kid just
shook his head. Flies clambered over the peeled and wigless skulls of the dead and flies
walked on their shrunken eyeballs.
Come on, said the kid.
They crossed the square in the last of the light and went down the narrow street. In
the doorway there lay a dead child with two buzzards sitting on it. Sproule shooed his
good hand at the buzzards and they bated and hissed and flapped clumsily but they did
not fly.
They set forth in the morning with first light while wolves slank from the doorways and
dissolved in the fog of the streets. They went by the southwest road the way the savages
had come. A little sandy stream, cottonwoods, three white goats. They waded a ford

where women lay dead at their wash.
They struggled all day across a terra damnata of smoking slag, passing from time to
time the bloated shapes of dead mules or horses. By evening they had drunk all the
water they carried. They slept in the sand and woke in the cool early morning dark and
went on and they walked the cinderland till they were near to fainting. In the afternoon
they came upon a carreta in the trace, tilted on its tongue, the great wheels cut from
rounds of a cottonwood trunk and pinned to the axletrees with tenons. They crawled
under it for shade and slept until dark and went on.
The rind of a moon that had been in the sky all day was gone and they followed the
trail through the desert by starlight, the Pleiades straight overhead and very small and
the Great Bear walking the mountains to the north.
My arm stinks, said Sproule.
What?
I said my arm stinks.
You want me to look at it?
What for? You caint do nothin for it.
Well. You suit yourself.
I aim to, said Sproule.
They went on. Twice in the night they heard the little prairie vipers rattle among the
scrub and they were afraid. With the dawn they were climbing among shale and
whinstone under the wall of a dark monocline where turrets stood like basalt prophets
and they passed by the side of the road little wooden crosses propped in cairns of stone
where travelers had met with death. The road winding up among the hills and the
castaways laboring upon the switchbacks, blackening under the sun, their eyeballs
inflamed and the painted spectra racing out at the corners. Climbing up through ocotillo
and pricklypear where the rocks trembled and sleared in the sun, rock and no water
and the sandy trace and they kept watch for any green thing that might tell of water
but there was no water. The ate pinole from a bag with their fingers and went on.
Through the noon heat and into the dusk where lizards lay with their leather chins flat
to the cooling rocks and fended off the world with thin smiles and eyes like cracked
stone plates.

They crested the mountain at sunset and they could see for miles. An immense lake lay
below them with the distant blue mountains standing in the windless span of water and
the shape of a soaring hawk and trees that shimmered in the heat and a distant city
very white against the blue and shaded hills. They sat and watched. They saw the sun
drop under the jagged rim of the earth to the west and they saw it flare behind the
. moun ains and they saw the face of the lake darken and the shape of the city dissolve
upon it. They slept among the rocks face up like dead men and in the morning when
they rose there was no city and no trees and no lake only a barren dusty plain.
Sproule groaned and collapsed back among the rocks. The kid looked at him. There
were blisters along his lower lip and his arm through the ripped shirt was swollen and
something foul had seeped through among the darker bloodstains. He turned back and
looked out over the valley.
Yonder comes somebody, he said.
Sproule didnt answer. The kid looked at him. I aint lyin, he said.
Indians, said Sproule. Aint it?
I dont know. Too far to tell.
What do you aim to do?
I dont know.
What happened to the lake?
I couldnt tell ye.
We both saw it.
People see what they want to see.
Then how come I aint seein it now? I sure as hell want to.
The kid looked out over the plain below.
What if it's indians? said Sproule.

Likely it will be.
Where can we hide at?
The kid spat dryly and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A lizard came out
from under a rock and crouched on its small cocked elbows over that piece of froth and
drank it dry and returned to the rock again leaving only a faint spot in the sand which
vanished almost instantly.
They waited all day. The kid made sorties down into the canyons in search of water but
he found none. Nothing moved in that purgatorial waste save carnivorous birds. By early
. after oon they could see the horsemen on the switchbacks coming up the face of the
mountain below them. They were Mexicans.
Sproule was sitting with his legs outstretched before him. I was worried about my old
boots lastin me, he said. He looked up. Go on, he said. Save yourself. He waved his
hand.
They were laid up under a ledge of rock in a narrow shade. The kid didnt answer.
Within the hour they could hear the dry scrabble of hooves among the rocks and the
clank of gear. The first horse to round the point of rock and pass through the gap in
the mountain was the captain's big bay and he carried the captain's saddle but he did
not carry the captain. The refugees stood by the side of the road. The riders looked
burnt and haggard coming up out of the sun and they sat their horses as if they had
no weight at all. There were seven of them, eight of them. They wore broadbrimmed
hats and leather vests and they carried escopetas across the pommels of their saddles
and as they rode past the leader nodded gravely to them from the captain's horse and
touched his hatbrim and they rode on.
Sproule and the kid looked after them. The kid called out and Sproule had started to
trot clumsily along behind the horses.
The riders began to slump and reel like drunks. Their heads lolled. Their guffaws echoed
among the rocks and they turned their mounts and sat them and regarded the
wanderers with huge grins.
Que quiere? cried the leader.
The riders cackled and slapped at one another. They had nudged their horses forward
and they began to ride them about without aim. The leader turned to the two afoot.

Buscan a los indios?
With this some of the men dismounted and fell to hugging one another and weeping
shamelessly. The leader looked at them and grinned, his teeth white and massive, made
for foraging.
Loonies, said Sproule. They're loonies.
The kid looked up at the leader. How about a drink of water? he said.
The leader sobered, he pulled a long face. Water? he said.
We aint got no water, said Sproule.
But my friend, how no? Is very dry here.
He reached behind him without turning and a leather canteen was passed across the
riders to his hand. He shook it and offered it down. The kid pulled the stopper and
drank and stood panting and drank again. The leader reached down and tapped the
canteen. Basta, he said.
He hung on gulping. He could not see the horseman's face darken. The man shucked
one boot backward out of the stirrup and kicked the canteen cleanly from between the
kid's hands leaving him there for a moment in a frozen gesture of calling with the
canteen rising and turning in the air and the lobes of water gleaming about it in the
sun before it clattered to the rocks. Sproule scrambled after it and snatched it up where
. it lay draining and began to drink, watching over the rim. The horse an and the kid
watched each other. Sproule sat back gasping and coughing.
The kid stepped across the rocks and took the canteen from him. The leader kneed his
horse forward and drew a sword from its place beneath his leg and leaning forward ran
the blade under the strap and raised it up. The point of the blade was about three
inches from the kid's face and the canteen strap was draped across the flat of it. The
kid had stopped and the rider raised the canteen gently from his hands and let it slide
down the blade and come to rest at his side. He turned to the men and smiled and
they once again began to hoot and to pummel one another like apes.
He swung the stopper up from where it hung by a thong and drove it home with the
heel of his hand. He pitched the canteen to the man behind him and looked down at
the travelers. Why you no hide? he said.

From you?
From I.
We were thirsty.
Very thirsty. Eh?
They didnt answer. He was tapping the flat of the sword lightly against the horn of his
. saddle and he seemed to be form ng words in his mind. He leaned slightly to them.
When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the
mother. Sometime the wolf. He smiled at them and raised the sword and ran it back
where it had come from and turned the horse smartly and trotted it through the horses
behind him and the men mounted up and followed and soon all were gone.
Sproule sat without moving. The kid looked at him but he would look away. He was
wounded in an enemy country far from home and although his eyes took in the alien
stones about yet the greater void beyond seemed to swallow up his soul.
They descended the mountain, going down over the rocks with their hands outheld
before them and their shadows contorted on the broken terrain like creatures seeking
their own forms. They reached the valley floor at dusk and set off across the blue and
cooling land, the mountains to the west a line of jagged slate set endwise in the earth
and the dry weeds heeling and twisting in a wind sprung from nowhere.
They walked on into the dark and they slept like dogs in the sand and had been
sleeping so when something black flapped up out of the night ground and perched on
Sproule's chest. Fine fingerbones stayed the leather wings with which it steadied as it
walked upon him. A wrinkled pug face, small and vicious, bare lips crimped in a
. horrible smile and teeth pale blue in the star ight. It leaned to him. It crafted in his
neck two narrow grooves and folding its wings over him it began to drink his blood.
Not soft enough. He woke, put up a hand. He shrieked and the bloodbat flailed and sat
back upon his chest and righted itself again and hissed and clicked its teeth.
The kid was up and had seized a rock but the bat sprang away and vanished in the
dark. Sproule was clawing at his neck and he was gibbering hysterically and when he
saw the kid standing there looking down at him he held out to him his bloodied hands
as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he
himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat
of the world. But the kid only spat into the darkness of the space between them. I

know your kind, he said. What's wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.
In the morning they crossed a dry wash and the kid hiked up it looking for a tank or a
hole but there was none. He picked out a sink in the wash and fell to digging with a
bone and after he had dug some two feet into the sand the sand turned damp and then
a little more and a slow seep of water began to fill into the furrows he dredged with
his fingers. He took off his shirt and pushed it down into the sand and watched it
darken and he watched the water rise slowly among the folds of cloth until there was
perhaps a cupful and then he lowered his head into the excavation and drank. Then he
sat and watched it fill again. He did this for over an hour. Then he put on the shirt
and went back down the wash.
Sproule didnt want to take off his shirt. He tried sucking up the water and he got a
mouthful of sand.
Why dont you let me use your shirt, he said.
The kid was squatting in the dry gravel of the wash. Suck on ye own shirt, he said.
He took off the shirt. It stuck to the skin and a yellow pus ran. His arm was swollen to
the size of his thigh and it was garishly discolored and small worms worked in the open
wound. He pushed the shirt down into the hole and leaned and drank.
In the afternoon they came to a crossroads, what else to call it. A faint wagon trace
that came from the north and crossed their path and went on to the south. They stood
. scanning the land cape for some guidance in that emptiness. Sproule sat where the
tracks crossed and looked out from the great caves in his skull where his eyes lay. He
said that he would not rise.
Yonder's a lake, said the kid.
He would not look.
It lay shimmering in the distance. Its edges rimed with salt. The kid studied it and
studied the roads. After a while he nodded toward the south. I believe this here is the
most traveled.
It's all right, said Sproule. You go on.
You suit yourself.

Sproule watched him set off. After a while he rose and followed.
They had gone perhaps two miles when they stopped to rest, Sproule sitting with his
legs out and his hands in his lap and the kid squatting a little ways from him. Blinking
and bearded and filthy in their rags.
Does that sound like thunder to you? said Sproule.
The kid raised his head.
Listen.
The kid looked at the sky, pale blue, unmarked save where the sun burned like a white
hole.
I can feel it in the ground, said Sproule.
It aint nothin.
Listen.
The kid rose and looked about. To the north a small movement of dust. He watched it.
It did not rise nor did it blow away.
It was a carreta, lumbering clumsily over the plain, a small mule to draw it. The driver
may have been asleep. When he saw the fugitives in the trace before him he halted the
mule and began to saw it around to go back and he did get it turned but by then the
kid had seized the raw leather headstall and hauled the animal to a standstill. Sproule
came hobbling up. From the rear of the wagon two children peered out. They were so
pale with dust, their hair so white and faces pinched, they looked like little gnomes
crouched there. At the sight of the kid before him the driver shrank back and the
woman next to him set up a high shrill chittering and began to point from one horizon
to the other but he pulled himself up into the bed of the cart and Sproule came
dragging after and they lay staring up at the hot canvas tarp while the two waifs drew
back into the corner and watched blackeyed as woodmice and the cart turned south
again and set off with a rising rumble and clatter.
There was a clay jar of water hung by a thong from the bow-stay and the kid took it
down and drank from it and gave it to Sproule. Then he took it back and drank the
rest. They lay in the floor of the cart among old hides and spills of salt and after a
while they slept.

It was dark when they entered the town. The jostle of the cart ceasing was what woke
them. The kid raised himself up and looked out. Starlight in a mud street. The wagon
empty. The mule wheezed and stamped in the traces. After a while the man came from
the shadows and led them along a lane into a yard and he backed the mule until the
cart was alongside a wall and then he unhitched the mule and led it away.
He lay back in the tilted cartbed. It was cold in the night and he lay with his knees
drawn up under a piece of hide that smelled of mold and urine and he slept and woke
all night and all night dogs barked and in the dawn cocks called and he heard horses
on the road.
In the first gray light flies began to land on him. They touched his face and woke him
and he brushed them away. After a while he sat up.
They were in a barren mudwalled courtyard and there was a house made of reeds and
clay. Chickens stepped about and clucked and scratched. A small boy came from the
house and pulled down his pants and shat in the yard and rose and went in again. The
kid looked at Sproule. He was lying with his face to the wagonboards. He was partly
covered with his blanket and flies were crawling on him. The kid reached to shake him.
He was cold and wooden. The flies rose, then they settled back.
The kid was standing by the cart pissing when the soldiers rode into the yard. They
seized him and tied his hands behind him and they looked in the cart and talked
among themselves and then they led him out into the street.
He was taken to an adobe building and put in an empty room. He sat in the floor
while a wild-eyed boy with an old musket watched him. After a while they came and
took him out again.
They led him through the narrow mud streets and he could hear music like a fanfare
growing the louder. First children walked with him and then old folk and finally a
throng of brown-skinned villagers all dressed in white cotton like attendants in an
institution, the women in dark rebozos, some with their breasts exposed, their faces
stained red with almagre, smoking small cigars. Their numbers swelled and the guards
with their shouldered fusils frowned and shouted at the jostlers and they went on along
the tall adobe wall of a church and into the plaza.
There was a bazaar in progress. A traveling medicine show, a primitive circus. They
passed stout willow cages clogged with vipers, with great limegreen serpents from some
more southerly latitude or beaded lizards with their black mouths wet with venom. A

reedy old leper held up handfuls of tapeworms from a jar for all to see and cried out
his medicines against them and they were pressed about by other rude apothecaries and
by vendors and mendicants until all came at last before a trestle whereon stood a glass
carboy of clear mescal. In this container with hair afloat and eyes turned upward in a
pale face sat a human head.
They dragged him forward with shouts and gestures. Mire, mire, they cried. He stood
before the jar and they urged his consideration of it and they tilted it around so that
the head should face him. It was Captain White. Lately at war among the heathen. The
kid looked into the drowned and sightless eyes of his old commander. He looked about
at the villagers and at the soldiers, their eyes all upon him, and he spat and wiped his
mouth. He aint no kin to me, he said.
They put him in an old stone corral with three other ragged refugees from the
expedition. They sat stunned and blinking against the wall or roved the perimeter
around in the dry tracks of mules and horses and retched and shat while small boys
hooted from the parapet.
He fell in with a thin boy from Georgia. I was sickern a dog, the boy said. I was afraid
I was goin to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.
I seen a rider on the captain's horse up in the country from here, the kid told him.
Aye, said the Georgian. They killed him and Clark and another boy I never did know
his name. We come on into town and the very next day they had us in the calabozo
and this selfsame son of a bitch is down there with the guards laughin and drinkin and
playin cards, him and the jefe, to see who gets the captain's horse and who gets his
pistols. I guess you seen the captain's head.
I seen it.
That's the worst thing I ever seen in my life.
Somebody ought to of pickled it a long time ago. By rights they ought to pickle mine.
For ever takin up with such a fool.
They drifted as the day advanced from wall to wall to keep out of the sun. The boy
from Georgia told him of his comrades displayed on slabs cold and dead in the market.
The captain headless in a wallow half eaten by hogs. He ran his heel out in the dust
and gouged a little place for it to rest. They fixin to send us to Chihuahua City, he said.

How do you know?
That's what they say. I dont know.
That's what who says?
Shipman yonder. He speaks the lingo some.
The kid regarded the man spoken of. He shook his head and spat dryly.
All day small boys perched on the walls and watched them by shifts and pointed and
jabbered. They'd walk around the parapet and try to piss down on sleepers in the shade
but the prisoners kept alert. Some at first threw stones but the kid picked one from the
dust the size of an egg and with it dropped a small child cleanly from the wall with no
sound other than the muted thud of its landing on the far side.
Now you gone and done it, said the Georgian.
The kid looked at him.
They'll be in here with whips and I dont know what all.
The kid spat. They aint about to come in here and eat no whips.
Nor did they. A woman brought them bowls of beans and charred tortillas on a plate of
unfired clay. She looked harried and she smiled at them and she had smuggled them
sweets under her shawl and there were pieces of meat in the bottom of the bowls that
had come from her own table.
Three days later mounted on little malandered mules they set out for the capital as
foretold.
They rode five days through desert and mountain and through dusty pueblos where the
populace turned out to see them. Their escorts in varied suits of timeworn finery, the
prisoners in rags. They'd been given blankets and squatting by the desert fires at night
sunblackened and bony and wrapped in these scrapes they looked like G-d's profoundest
peons. The soldiers none spoke english and they directed their charges with grunts or
gestures. They were indifferently armed and they were much afraid of the indians. They
rolled their tobacco in cornhusks and they sat by the fire in silence and listened to the
night. Their talk when they talked was of witches or worse and always they sought to
parcel from the darkness some voice or cry from among the cries that was no right

beast. La gente dice que el coyote es un brujo. Muchas veces el brujo es un coyote.
Y los indios tambien. Muchas veces llaman corno los coyotes.
Y que es eso?
Nada.
Un tecolote. Nada mas.
Quizas.
When they rode through the gap in the mountains and looked down on the city the
sergeant of the expedition halted the horses and spoke to the man behind him and he
in turn dismounted and took rawhide thongs from his saddlebag and approached the
prisoners and gestured for them to cross their wrists and hold them out, showing how
with his own hands. He tied them each in this manner and then they rode on.
They entered the city in a gantlet of flung offal, driven like cattle through the cobbled
streets with shouts going up behind for the soldiery who smiled as became them and
nodded among the flowers and proffered cups, herding the tattered fortune-seekers
through the plaza where water splashed in a fountain and idlers reclined on carven seats
of white porphyry and past the governor's palace and past the cathedral where vultures
squatted along the dusty entablatures and among the niches in the carved facade hard
by the figures of Christ and the apostles, the birds holding out their own dark vestments
in postures of strange benevolence while about them flapped on the wind the dried
scalps of slaughtered indians strung on cords, the long dull hair swinging like the
filaments of certain seaforms and the dry hides clapping against the stones.
They passed old alms-seekers by the church door with their seamy palms outheld and
maimed beggars sad-eyed in rags and children asleep in the shadows with flies walking
their dreamless faces. Dark coppers in a clackdish, the shriveled eyes of the blind.
Scribes crouched by the steps with their quills and inkpots and bowls of sand and lepers
moaning through the streets and naked dogs that seemed composed of bone entirely and
vendors of tamales and old women with faces dark and harrowed as the land squatting
. in the gutters over charcoal fires where black ned strips of anonymous meat sizzled
and spat. Small orphans were abroad like irate dwarfs and fools and sots drooling and
flailing about in the small markets of the metropolis and the prisoners rode past the
carnage in the meatstalls and the waxy smell where racks of guts hung black with flies
and flayings of meat in great red sheets now darkened with the advancing day and the
flensed and naked skulls of cows and sheep with their dull blue eyes glaring wildly and

the stiff bodies of deer and javelina and ducks and quail and parrots, all wild things
from the country round hanging head downward from hooks.
They were made to dismount and were driven afoot through the crowds and down old
stone steps and over a doorsill worn like soap and through an iron sallygate into a cool
stone cellar long a prison to take their place among the ghosts of old martyrs and
patriots while the gate clanked shut behind them.
When their eyes lost their blindness they could make out figures crouched along the
wall. Stirrings in beds of hay like nesting mice disturbed. A light snoring. Outside the
rattle of a cart and the dull clop of hooves in the street and through the stones a dim
clank of hammers from a smith's shop in another part of the dungeon. The kid looked
about. Blackened bits of candlewick lay here and there in pools of dirty grease on the
stone floor and strings of dried spittle hung from the walls. A few names scratched
where the light could find them out. He squatted and rubbed his eyes. Someone in
underwear crossed before him to a pail in the center of the room and stood and pissed.
This man then turned and came his way. He was tall and wore his hair to his
shoulders. He shuffled through the straw and stood looking down at him. You dont
know me, do ye? he said.
The kid spat and squinted up at him. I know ye, he said. I'd know your hide in a
tanyard.
VI
In the streets - Brassteeth - Los here'ticos -
A veteran of the late war - Mier - Doniphan - The Lipan burial -
Goldseekers - The scalphunters - The judge - Freed from the prison -
Et de ceo se mettent en le pays.
With daylight men rose from the hay and crouched on their haunches and regarded the
new arrivals without curiosity. They were half naked and they sucked their teeth and
snuffled and stirred and picked at themselves like apes. A chary light had washed a high
small window from the dark and an early streetvendor'd begun to cry his wares.
Their morning feed was bowls of cold pinole and they were fitted with chains and
routed out into the streets clanking and stinking. Overseen all day by a goldtoothed
pervert who carried a plaited rawhide quirt and harried them down the gutters on their

knees gathering up the filth. Under the wheels of vending-carts, the legs of beggars,
dragging behind them their sacks of refuse. In the afternoon they sat in the shade of a
wall and ate their dinner and watched two dogs hung together in the street sidle and
step.
How do you like city life? said Toadvine.
I dont like it worth a damn so far.
I keep waitin for it to take with me but it aint done it.
They watched the overseer covertly as he passed, his hands clasped behind his back, his
cap cocked over one eye. The kid spat.
I seen him first, said Toadvine.
Seen who first.
You know who. Old Brassteeth yonder.
The kid looked after the sauntering figure.
My biggest worry is that somethin will happen to him. I pray daily for the L-rd to
watch over him.
How you think you goin to get out of this jackpot that you're in?
We'll get out. It aint like the carcel.
What's the carcel?
State penitentiary. There's old pilgrims in there come down the trail back in the
twenties.
The kid watched the dogs.
After a while the guard came back along the wall kicking the feet of any who were
sleeping. The younger guard carried his escopeta at the ready as if there might be some
fabled uprising among these chained and tattered felons. Vamonos, vamonos, he called.
The prisoners rose and shuffled out into the sun. A small bell was ringing and a coach
was coming up the street. They stood along the curb and took off their hats. The

guidon passed ringing the bell and then the coach. It had an eye painted on the side
and four mules to draw it, taking the host to some soul. A fat priest tottered after
carrying an image. The guards were going among the prisoners snatching the hats from
the heads of the newcomers and pressing them into their infidel hands.
When the coach had passed they donned their hats again and moved on. The dogs
stood tail to tail. Two other dogs sat a little apart, squatting loosely in their skins, just
. frames of dogs in nap ess hides watching the coupled dogs and then watching the
prisoners clanking away up the street. All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms,
like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things
themselves had faded in men's minds.
He'd taken up a pallet between Toadvine and another Ken-tuckian, a veteran of the war.
This man had returned to claim some darkeyed love he'd left behind two years before
when Doniphan's command pulled east for Saltillo and the officers had had to drive
back hundreds of young girls dressed as boys that took the road behind the army. Now
he would stand in the street solitary in his chains and strangely unassuming, gazing out
across the tops of the heads of the townspeople, and at night he'd tell them of his years
in the west, an amiable warrior, a reticent man. He'd been at Mier where they fought
until the draintiles and the gutters and the spouts from the azoteas ran with blood by
the gallon and he told them how the brittle old Spanish bells would explode when hit
and how he sat against a wall with his shattered leg stretched out on the cobbles before
him listening to a lull in the firing that grew into a strange silence and in this silence
there grew a low rumbling that he took for thunder until a cannonball came around the
corner trundling over the stones like a wayward bowl and went past and down the
street and disappeared from sight. He told how they'd taken the city of Chihuahua, an
army of irregulars that fought in rags and underwear and how the cannonballs were
solid copper and came loping through the grass like runaway suns and even the horses
learned to sidestep or straddle them and how the dames of the city rode up into the
hills in buggies and picnicked and watched the battle and how at night as they sat by
the fires they could hear the moans of the dying out on the plain and see by its lantern
the deadcart moving among them like a hearse from limbo.
They had gravel enough, said the veteran, but they didnt know how to fight. They'd
stick. You heard stories about how they found em chained to the trailspades of their
pieces, limber-teams and all, but if they was I never seen it. We picked powder in the
locks yonder. Blowed them gates open. People in here looked like skinned rats. Whitest
Mexicans you'll ever see. Thowed theirselves down and commenced kissin our feet and
such. Old Bill, he just turned em all loose. Hell, he didnt know what they'd done. Just
told em not to steal nothin. Of course they stole everthing they could get their hands
on. Whipped two of em and they both died of it and the very next day another bunch

run off with some mules and Bill just flat out hung them fools. Which they did likewise
perish of. But I never reckoned I'd be in here my own self.
They were squatting crosslegged by candlelight eating from clay bowls with their fingers.
The kid looked up. He poked at the bowl.
What is this? he said.
That's prime bullmeat, son. From the corrida. You'll get it of a Sunday night.
You best keep chewin. Dont let it feel ye to weaken.
He chewed. He chewed and he told them of the encounter with the Comanche and they
chewed and listened and nodded.
I'm proud I missed that dance, said the veteran. Them is some cruel sons of bitches. I
know of one old boy up on the Llano near the dutch settlements, they caught him, took
his horse and all. Left him to walk it. He come crawlin into Fredericksburg on his
hands and knees buck naked about six days later and you know what they'd done? Cut
the bottoms of his feet off.
Toadvine shook his head. He gestured toward the veteran. Grannyrat here knows em, he
told the kid. Fought em. Aint ye, Granny?
The veteran waved his hand. Shot some stealin horses is all. Down towards Saltillo.
Wasnt nothin to it. There was a cave down there had been a Lipan burial. Must of
been a thousand indians in there all settin around. Had on their best robes and
blankets and all. Had their bows and their knives, whatever. Beads. The Mexicans
carried everthing off. Stripped em naked. Took it all. They carried off whole indians to
their homes and set em in the corner all dressed up but they begun to come apart
when they got out of that cave air and they had to be thowed out. Towards the last of
it they was some Americans went in there and scalped what was left of em and tried to
sell the scalps in Durango. I dont know if they had any luck about it or not. I expect
some of them injins had been dead a hundred year.
Toadvine was toweling up grease from his bowl with a folded tortilla. He squinted at
the kid in the candlelight. What do you reckon we could get for old Brassteeth's teeth?
he said.
They saw patched argonauts from the states driving mules through the streets on their
way south through the mountains to the coast. Goldseekers. Itinerant degenerates

. bleeding west ard like some heliotropic plague. They nodded or spoke to the prisoners
and dropped tobacco and coins in the street beside them.
They saw blackeyed young girls with painted faces smoking little cigars, going arm in
arm and eyeing them brazenly. They saw the governor himself erect and formal within
his silkmul-lioned sulky clatter forth from the double doors of the palace^ courtyard and
they saw one day a pack of viciouslooking humans mounted on unshod indian ponies
riding half drunk through the streets, bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals
stitched up with thews and armed with weapons of every description, revolvers of
. enormous weight and bowieknives the size of clay ores and short twobarreled rifles
with bores you could stick your thumbs in and the trappings of their horses fashioned
out of human skin and their bridles woven up from human hair and decorated with
human teeth and the riders wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened
human ears and the horses rawlooking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like
feral dogs and riding also in the company a number of halfnaked savages reeling in the
saddle, dangerous, filthy, brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land
where they and others like them fed on human flesh.
Foremost among them, outsized and childlike with his naked face, rode the judge. His
cheeks were ruddy and he was smiling and bowing to the ladies and doffing his filthy.
hat. The enormous dome of his head when he bared it was blinding white and per
ectly circumscribed about so that it looked to have been painted. He and the reeking
horde of rabble with him passed on through the stunned streets and hove up before the
governor's palace where their leader, a small blackhaired man, clapped for entrance by
kicking at the oaken doors with his boot. The doors were opened forthwith and they
rode in, rode in all, and the doors were closed again.
Gentlemens, said Toadvine, I'll guaranG-ddamntee ye I know what that there is about.
The following day the judge in the company of others stood in the street smoking a
cigar and rocking back on his heels. He wore a pair of good kidskin boots and he was
studying the prisoners where they knelt in the gutter clutching up the Olth with their
bare hands. The kid was watching the judge. When the judge's eyes fell upon him he
took the cigar from between his teeth and smiled. Or he seemed to smile. Then he put
the cigar between his teeth again.
That night Toadvine called them together and they crouched by the wall and spoke in
whispers.
His name is Glanton, said Toadvine. He's got a contract with Trias. They're to pay him
a hundred dollars a head for scalps and a thousand for Gomez's head. I told him there

was three of us. Gentlemens, we're gettin out of this shithole.
We aint got no outfits.
. He knows that. He said he'd find anybody that was a guar nteed hand and take it out
of their shares. So dont let on like you aint no seasoned indiankiller cause I claimed we
was three of the best.
Three days later they rode out singlefile through the streets with the governor and his
party, the governor on a pale gray stallion and the killers on their small warponies,
smiling and bowing and the lovely darkskinned girls throwing flowers from the windows
and some blowing kisses and small boys running alongside and old men waving their
hats and crying out huzzahs and Toadvine and the kid and the veteran bringing up the
rear, the veteran's feet tucked into tapaderos slung nearly to the ground, so long were
his legs, so short the horse's. Out to the edge of the city by the old stone aqueduct
where the governor gave them his blessing and drank their health and their fortune in a
simple ceremonial and they took the road upcountry.
VII
Black and white Jacksons - A meeting on the outskirts -
Whitneyville Colts - A trial - The judge among disputants -
Delaware indians ?The Vandiemenlander ?A hacienda ?
The town of Corralitos - Pasajeros de un pafs antiguo - Scene of
a massacre - Hiccius Doccius - A naming of fortunes -
Wheelless upon a dark river ?The felon wind ?Tertium quid ?
The town of Janos - Glanton takes a scalp -
Jackson takes the stage.
In this company there rode two men named Jackson, one black, one white, both
. forenamed John. Bad blood lay be ween them and as they rode up under the barren
mountains the white man would fall back alongside the other and take his shadow for
the shade that was in it and whisper to him. The black would check or start his horse
to shake him off. As if the white man were in violation of his person, had stumbled
onto some ritual dormant in his dark blood or his dark soul whereby the shape he
stood the sun from on that rocky ground bore something of the man himself and in so

doing lay imperiled. The white man laughed and crooned things to him that sounded
like the words of love. All watched to see how this would go with them but none would
caution either back from his course and when Glanton looked to the rear along the
column from time to time he seemed to simply reckon them among his number and
ride on.
. Earlier that morning the company had met in a courtyard be ind a house on the
outskirts of the city. Two men carried from a wagon a stenciled ordnance box from the
Baton Rouge arsenal and a Prussian jew named Speyer pried open the box with a
pritchel and a shoeing hammer and handed up a flat package in brown butcherpaper
. translucent with grease like a paper of bak ry goods. Glanton opened the package and
let the paper fall to the dirt. In his hand he held a longbarreled sixshot Colt's patent
. revolver. It was a huge sidearm meant for dragoons and it car ied in its long cylinders
a rifle's charge and weighed close to five pounds loaded. These pistols would drive the
half-ounce conical ball through six inches of hardwood and there were four dozen of
them in the case. Speyer was breaking out the gang-molds and flasks and tools and
Judge Holden was unwrapping another of the pistols. The men pressed about. Glanton
wiped the bore and chambers of the piece and took the flask from Speyer.
She's a stout looker, said one.
He charged the bores and seated a bullet and drove it home with the hinged lever
pinned to the underside of the barrel. When all the chambers were loaded he capped
them and looked about. In that courtyard other than merchants and buyers were a
number of living things. The first that Glanton drew sight upon was a cat that at that
precise moment appeared upon the high wall from the other side as silently as a bird
. alighting. It turned to pick its way among the cusps of broken glass set up ight in the
mud masonry. Glanton leveled the huge pistol in one hand and thumbed back the
hammer. The explosion in that dead silence was enormous. The cat simply disappeared.
. . There was no blood or cry, it just vanished. Speyer glanced uneasily at the
. . . . . Mexicans. They were watching Glanton. Glanton thumbed back the hammer
again and swung the pistol. A group of fowl in the corner of the courtyard that had
been pecking in the dry dust stood nervously, their heads at varied angles. The pistol
roared and one of the birds exploded in a cloud of feathers. The others began to trot
mutely, their long necks craned. He fired again. A second bird spun and lay kicking.
The others flared, piping thinly, and Glanton turned with the pistol and shot a small
goat that was standing with its throat pressed to the wall in terror and it fell stone
dead in the dust and he fired upon a clay garraffa that burst in a shower of potsherds
and water and he raised the pistol and swung toward the house and rang the bell in its
mud tower above the roof, a solemn tolling that hung on in the emptiness after the
echoes of the gunfire had died away.

A haze of gray gunsmoke lay over the courtyard. Glanton set the hammer at halfcock
and spun the cylinder and lowered the hammer again. A woman appeared in the
doorway of the house and one of the Mexicans spoke to her and she went in again.
Glanton looked at Holden and then he looked at Speyer. The jew smiled nervously.
They aint worth no fifty dollars.
Speyer looked grave. What is your life worth? he said.
In Texas five hundred but you'd have to discount the note with your ass.
Mr Riddle thinks that it's a fair price.
Mr Riddle aint payin it.
He's putting up the money.
Glanton turned the pistol in his hand and examined it.
I thought it was agreed, said Speyer.
Aint nothin agreed.
They were contracted for the war. You'll not see their like again.
Not till some money changes hands it aint agreed.
A detachment of soldiers, ten or a dozen of them, entered from the street with their
arms at the ready.
Que pasa aqui?
Glanton looked at the soldiers without interest.
Nada, said Speyer. Todo va bien.
Bien? The sergeant was looking at the dead birds, the goat.
The woman appeared at the door again.

Esta bien, said Holden. Negocios del Gobernador.
The sergeant looked at them and he looked at the woman in the door.
Somos amigos del Senor Riddle, said Speyer.
Andale, said Glanton. You and your halfassedlookin niggers.
The sergeant stepped forward and assumed a posture of authority. Glanton spat. The
judge had already crossed the space between them and now he took the sergeant aside
and fell to conversing with him. The sergeant came to his armpit and the judge spoke
warmly and gestured with a great expan-siveness of spirit. The soldiers squatted in the
dust with their muskets and regarded the judge without expression.
Dont you give that son of a bitch no money, said Glanton.
But the judge was already bringing the man forward for a formal presentation.
Le presento al sargento Aguilar, he called, hugging the ragged militant to him. The
sergeant held out his hand quite gravely. It occupied that space and the attention of all
who stood there like something presented for validation and then Speyer stepped
forward and took it.
Mucho gusto.
Igualmente, said the sergeant.
The judge escorted him from one to the next of the company, the sergeant formal and
the Americans muttering obscenities or shaking their heads silently. The soldiers squatted
on their heels and watched each movement in this charade with the same dull interest
and at length the judge hove up before the black.
That dark vexed face. He studied it and he drew the sergeant forward the better for
him to observe and then he began a laborious introduction in Spanish. He sketched for
the sergeant a problematic career of the man before them, his hands drafting with a
marvelous dexterity the shapes of what varied paths conspired here in the ultimate
. . authority of the extant s he told them ike strings drawn together through the eye of a
. ring. He adduced for their consideration references to the chil ren of Ham, the lost
tribes of Israelites, certain passages from the Greek poets, anthropological speculations as
. to the propa ation of the races in their dispersion and isolation through the agency of

geological cataclysm and an assessment of racial traits with respect to climatic and
geographical influences. The sergeant listened to this and more with great attention and
when the judge was done he stepped forward and held out his hand.
Jackson ignored him. He looked at the judge.
What did you tell him, Holden?
Dont insult him, man.
What did you tell him?
The sergeant's face had clouded. The judge took him about the shoulders and leaned
and spoke into his ear and the sergeant nodded and stepped back and saluted the black.
What did you tell him, Holden?
That shaking hands was not the custom in your land.
Before that. What did you say to him before that.
. The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the princi als here be in possession
of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with
. or with ut their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that
. . these facts o the extent that they can be readily made to do so hould find a
repository in the witness of some third party. Sergeant Aguilar is just such a party and
any slight to his office is but a secondary consideration when compared to divergences
in that larger protocol exacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny. Words are
things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority trans
.ends his ignorance of their meaning.
The black was sweating. A dark vein in his temple pulsed like a fuse. The company had
listened to the judge in silence. A few smiled. A halfwitted killer from Missouri guffawed
softly like an asthmatic. The judge turned again to the sergeant and they spoke together
and the judge and he crossed to where the crate stood in the courtyard and the judge
showed him one of the pistols and explained its workings with great patience. The
sergeant's men had risen and stood waiting. At the gate the judge doled coins into
. Aguilar's palm and he shook hands for ally with each ragged charge and complimented
them upon their military bearing and they exited into the street.
At noon that day the partisans rode out each man armed with a pair of the pistols and

took the road upcountry as told.
The outriders returned in the evening and the men dismounted for the first time that
day and recruited their horses in the sparse swale while Glanton conferred with the
scouts. Then they rode on until dark and made camp. Toadvine and the veteran and the
kid squatted at a small remove from the fires. They did not know that they were set
forth in that company in the place of three men slain in the desert. They watched the
Delawares, of whom there were a number in the party, and they too sat somewhat
apart, crouched on their heels, one pounding coffeebeans in a buckskin with a rock
while the others stared into the fire with eyes as black as gunbores. That night the kid
would see one of them sort with his hand among the absolute embers for a right coal
with which to light his pipe.
They were about in the morning before daybreak and they caught up and saddled their
mounts as soon as it was light enough to see. The jagged mountains were pure blue in
the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in
the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and
the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose
terminals burned worlds past all reckoning. As the riders came up through the mesquite
and pyracantha singlefile in a light clank of arms and chink of bitrings the sun climbed
. and the moon set and the horses and the dewsoaked mules com enced to steam in
flesh and in shadow.
Toadvine had fallen in with a fugitive from Vandiemen's Land named Bathcat who had
come west on legbail. He was from Wales by birth and he had but three fingers to his
. . right hand and few teeth. Perhaps he saw in Toadvine a fellow fugi ive n earless and
. branded felon who had chosen in life much as had he nd he offered to wager as to
which Jackson would kill which.
I dont know them boys, said Toadvine.
How do ye think then?
Toadvine spat quietly to one side and looked at the man. I wouldnt want to bet, he
said.
Not a gaming man?
Depends on the game.
The blackie will do for him. Take your odds.

Toadvine looked at him. The necklace of human ears he wore looked like a string of
dried black figs. He was big and raw-looking and one eyelid sagged where a knife had
severed the small muscles there and he was furnished with gear of every class, the fine
. with the shoddy. He wore good boots and he car ied a handsome rifle bound with
german silver but the rifle was slung in a cutoff bootleg and his shirt was in tatters and
his hat rancid.
Ye've not hunted the aborigines afore, said Bathcat.
Who says it?
I know it.
Toadvine didnt answer.
You'll find em right lively.
So I hear.
The Vandiemenlander smiled. Much is changed, he said. When I first come into this
country there was savages up on the San Saba had hardly seen white men. They come
into our camp and we shared our mess with em and they couldnt keep their eyes off
our knives. Next day they brought whole strings of horses into camp to trade. We didnt
know what they wanted. They had knives of their own, such as they was. But what it
was, you see, was they'd never seen sawed bones in a stew before.
Toadvine glanced at the man's forehead but the man's hat was pushed down almost to
his eyes. The man smiled and forked the hat back slightly with his thumb. The print of
the hatband lay on his forehead like a scar but there was no mark other. Only on the
inside of his lower arm was there tattooed a number which Toadvine would see in a
Chihuahua bathhouse and again when he would cut down the man's torso where it hung
skewered by its heels from a treelimb in the wastes of Pimeria Alta in the fall of that
year.
They rode up through cholla and nopal, a dwarf forest of spined things, through a stone
gap in the mountains and down among blooming artemisia and aloe. They crossed a
broad plain of desert grass dotted with palmilla. On the slopes were gray stone walls
that followed the ridgelines down to where they lay broached and tumbled upon the
plain. They did not noon nor did they siesta and the cotton eye of the moon squatted
at broad day in the throat of the mountains to the east and they were still riding when

it overtook them at its midnight meridian, sketching on the plain below a blue cameo of
. such dread pil rims clanking north.
They spent the night in the corral of a hacienda where all night men kept watchfires
burning on the azoteas or roofs. Two weeks before this a party of campesinos had been
hacked to death with their own hoes and partly eaten by hogs while the Apaches
rounded up what stock would drive and disappeared into the hills. Glanton ordered a
goat killed and this was done in the corral while the horses shied and trembled and in
. the flar ng light of the fires the men squatted and roasted the meat and ate it with
knives and wiped their fingers in their hair and turned in to sleep upon the beaten clay.
At dusk of the third day they rode into the town of Corralitos, the horses shuffling
through the caked ash and the sun glaring redly through the smoke. The smelter
. chimneys were ranged against an ashen sky and the globy lights of the furnaces glow
red under the dark of the hills. It had rained in the day and the windowlights of the
low mud houses were reflected in pools along the flooded road out of which great
dripping swine rose moaning before the advancing horses like oafish demons routed
from a fen. The houses were loopholed and parapeted and the air was filled with the
fumes of arsenic. The people had turned out to see the Texans, they called them,
standing solemnly along the way and noting the least of their gestures with looks of
awe, looks of wonder.
They camped in the plaza, blackening the cottonwoods with their fires and driving forth
. the sleeping birds, the flames light ng up the wretched town to its darkest pens and
bringing forth even the blind tottering with their hands outstretched toward that
conjectural day. Glanton and the judge with the Brown brothers rode out to the
hacienda of General Zuloaga where they were received and given their dinner and the
night passed without incident.
In the morning when they had saddled their mounts and were assembled in the square
to ride out they were approached by a family of itinerant magicians seeking safe passage
up-country as far as Janos. Glanton looked down at them from his place at the head of
the column. Their goods were piled up in tattered panniers lashed to the backs of three
burros and they were a man and his wife and a grown boy and a girl. They were
. dressed in fools costumes with stars and halfmoons em roidered on and the once
gaudy colors were faded and pale from the dust of the road and they looked a set of
right wander-folk cast on this evil terrain. The old man came forward and took the
bridle of Glanton's horse.
Get your hands off the horse, said Glanton.

. He spoke no english but he did as he was told. He com enced to put forth his case.
. He gestured, he pointed back to ard the others. Glanton watched him, who knows if he
heard at all. He turned and looked at the boy and at the two women and he looked
down at the man again.
What are you? he said.
The man held his ear toward Glanton and looked up with mouth agape.
I said what are you? Are you a show?
He looked back toward the others.
A show, said Glanton. Bufones.
The man's face brightened. Si, he said. Si, bufones. Todo. He turned to the boy.
Casimero! Los perros!
The boy ran to one of the burros and began to tug among the packings. He came up
with a pair of bald and bat-eared animals slightly larger than rats and pale brown in
color and he pitched them into the air and caught them on the palms of his hands
where they began to pirouette mindlessly.
Mire, mire! called the man. He was fishing about in his pockets and soon he was
juggling four small wooden balls in front of Glanton's horse. The horse snorted and
lifted its head and Glan-ton leaned over the saddle and spat and wiped his mouth with
the back of his hand.
Aint that the drizzlin shits, he said.
The man was juggling and calling back over his shoulder to the women and the dogs
were dancing and the women were turning to in preparation of something when Glanton
spoke to the man.
Dont start no more of that crazy shit. You want to ride with us you fall in in the back.
I promise you nothin. Vamonos.
He rode on. The company clanked into motion and the juggler ran shooing the women
toward the burros and the boy stood wide-eyed with the dogs under his arm until the
man spoke to him. They rode out through the rabble past great cones of slag and
tailings. The people watched them go. Some of the men stood hand in hand like lovers

and a small child led forth a blind man on a string to a place of vantage.
At noon they crossed the stony bottom of the Casas Grandes River and they rode along
a benchland above the gaunt rill of water past a place of bones where Mexican soldiers
had slaughtered an encampment of Apaches some years gone, women and children, the
bones and skulls scattered along the bench for half a mile and the tiny limbs and
. toothless paper skulls of in ants like the ossature of small apes at their place of
murder and old remnants of weathered basketry and broken pots among the gravel.
They rode on. The river led a limegreen corridor of trees down out of the barren
mountains. To the west lay the ragged Carcaj and to the north the Animas peaks dim
and blue.
They made camp that night on a windy plateau among pifion and juniper and the fires
leaned downwind in the darkness and hot chains of sparks raced among the scrub. The
. jugglers un oaded the burros and began to set up a large gray tent. The canvas was
scrawled with arcana and it flapped and lurched, stood towering, luffed and wrapped
them about. The girl lay on the ground holding to one corner. She began to drag
through the sand. The juggler took small steps. The woman's eyes were rigid in the
light. As the company watched the four of them all clutched to the snapping cloth were
towed mutely from sight beyond the reach of the firelight and into the howling desert
like supplicants at the skirts of some wild and irate G-ddess.
The pickets saw the tent lumber horribly away into the night. When the family of
jugglers returned they were arguing among themselves and the man went again to the
edge of the firelight and peered out upon the wrathful blackness and spoke to it and
gestured with his fist nor would he return until the woman sent the boy to fetch him.
Now he sat staring at the flames while the family unpacked. They watched him uneasily.
Glanton watched him also.
Showman, he said.
The juggler looked up. He put one finger to his chest.
You, said Glanton.
He rose and shuffled forward. Glanton was smoking a slender black cigar. He looked up
at the juggler.
You tell fortunes?
The juggler's eyes skittered. Como? he said.

Glanton put the cigar in his mouth and mimed a deal of cards with his hands. La
baraja, he said. Para adivinar la suerte.
The juggler tossed one hand aloft. Si, si, he said, shaking his head with vigor. Todo,
todo. He held up one finger and then turned and made his way to the trove of shoddy
. partly off oaded from the burros. When he returned he was smiling affably and
manipulating the cards very nimbly.
Venga, he called. Venga.
. The woman followed him. The juggler squatted before Glan on and spoke to him in a
low voice. He turned and looked at
the woman and he riffled the cards and rose and took her by the hand and led her
over the ground away from the fire and seated her facing out into the night. She swept
up her skirt and composed herself and he took from his shirt a kerchief and with it
bound her eyes.
Bueno, he called. Puedes ver?
No.
Nada?
Nada, said the woman.
Bueno, said the juggler.
He turned with the deck of cards and advanced toward Glanton. The woman sat like a
stone. Glanton waved him away.
Los caballeros, he said.
The juggler turned. The black was squatting by the fire watching and when the juggler
fanned the cards he rose and came forward.
The juggler looked up at him. He folded the cards and fanned them again and he made
a pass over them with his left hand and held them forth and Jackson took a card and
looked at it.

Bueno, said the juggler. Bueno. He admonished caution with a forefinger to his thin lips
and took the card and held it aloft and turned with it. The card popped once sharply.
He looked at the company seated about the fire. They were smoking, they were
watching. He made a slow sweep before him with the card outheld. It bore the picture
of a fool in harlequin and a cat. El tonto, he called.
El tonto, said the woman. She raised her chin slightly and she began a singsong chant.
The dark querent stood solemnly, like a man arraigned. His eyes shifted over the
company. The judge sat upwind from the fire naked to the waist, himself like some
great pale deity, and when the black's eyes reached his he smiled. The woman ceased.
The fire fled down the wind.
Quien, quien, cried the juggler.
She paused. El negro, she said.
El negro, cried the juggler, turning with the card. His clothes
snapped in the wind. The woman raised her voice and spoke again and the black turned
to his mates.
What does she say?
The juggler had turned and was making small bows to the company.
What does she say? Tobin?
The expriest shook his head. Idolatry, Blackie, idolatry. Do not mind her.
What does she say Judge?
The judge smiled. With his thumb he had been routing small life from the folds of his
hairless skin and now he held up one hand with the thumb and forefinger pressed.
together in a gesture that appeared to be a benediction until he flung something un
een into the fire before him. What does she say?
What does she say.
I think she means to say that in your fortune lie our fortunes all.
And what is that fortune?

The judge smiled blandly, his pleated brow not unlike a dolphin's. Are you a drinking
man, Jackie?
No more than some.
I think she'd have you beware the demon rum. Prudent counsel enough, what do you
think?
That aint no fortune.
Exactly so. The priest is right.
The black frowned at the judge but the judge leaned forward to regard him. Wrinkle not
thy sable brow at me, my friend. All will be known to you at last. To you as to every
man.
Now a number of the company seated there seemed to weigh the judge's words and
some turned to look at the black. He stood an uneasy honoree and at length he stepped
. back from the fire ight and the juggler rose and made a motion with the cards,
sweeping them in a fan before him and then proceeding along the perimeter past the
boots of the men with the cards outheld as if they would find their own subject.
Quien, quien, he whispered among them.
They were right loath all. When he came before the judge the judge, who sat with one
. hand splayed across the broad ex anse of his stomach, raised a finger and pointed.
Young Blasarius yonder, he said.
Como?
El joven.
El joven, whispered the juggler. He looked about him slowly with an air of mystery until
he found with his eyes the one so spoken. He moved past the adventurers quickening
his step. He stood before the kid, he squatted with the cards and fanned them with a
slow rhythmic motion akin to the movements of certain birds at court.
Una carta, una carta, he wheezed.

The kid looked at the man and he looked at the company about.
Si, si, said the juggler, offering the cards.
He took one. He'd not seen such cards before, yet the one he held seemed familiar to
him. He turned it upside down and regarded it and he turned it back.
The juggler took the boy's hand in his own and turned the card so he could see. Then
he took the card and held it up.
Cuatro de copas, he called out.
. The woman raised her head. She looked like a blindfold man equin raised awake by a
string.
Cuatro de copas, she said. She moved her shoulders. The wind went among her
garments and her hair.
Quie'n, called the juggler.
El hombre... she said. El hombre mas joven. El muchacho.
El muchacho, called the juggler. He turned the card for all to see. The woman sat like
that blind interlocutrix between Boaz and Jachin inscribed upon the one card in the
juggler's deck that they would not see come to light, true pillars and true card, false
prophetess for all. She began to chant.
The judge was laughing silently. He bent slightly the better to see the kid. The kid
looked at Tobin and at David Brown and he looked at Glanton himself but they were
. none laughing. The juggler kneeling before him watched him with a strange inten ity.
He followed the kid's gaze to the judge and back. When the kid looked down at him he
smiled a crooked smile.
Get the hell away from me, said the kid.
The juggler leaned his ear forward. A common gesture and one that served for any
tongue. The ear was dark and misshapen, as if in being put forth in this fashion it had
suffered no few clouts, or perhaps the very news men had for him had blighted it. The
kid spoke to him again but a man named Tate from Kentucky who had fought with
McCulloch's Rangers as had Tobin and others among them leaned and whispered to the
ragged soothsayer and he rose and made a slight bow and moved away. The woman had

ceased her chanting. The juggler stood flapping in the wind and the fire lashed a long
hot tail over the ground. Quien, quien, he called.
El jefe, said the judge.
The juggler's eyes sought out Glanton. He sat unmoved. The juggler looked at the old
woman where she sat apart, facing the dark, lightly tottering, racing the night in her
rags. He raised his finger to his lips and he spread his arms in a gesture of uncertainty.
El jefe, hissed the judge.
The man turned and went along the group at the fire and brought himself before
Glanton and crouched and offered up the cards, spreading them in both hands. If he
spoke his words were snatched away unheard. Glanton smiled, his eyes were small
against the stinging grit. He put one hand forth and paused, he looked at the juggler.
Then he took a card.
The juggler folded shut the deck and tucked it among his clothes. He reached for the
card in Glanton's hand. Perhaps he touched it, perhaps not. The card vanished. It was
in Glanton's hand and then it was not. The juggler's eyes snapped after it where it had
gone down the dark. Perhaps Glanton had seen the card's face. What could it have
meant to him? The juggler reached out to that naked bedlam beyond the fire's light but
in the doing he overbalanced and fell forward against Glanton and created a moment of
strange liaison with his old man's arms about the leader as if he would console him at
his scrawny bosom.
Glanton swore and flung him away and at that moment the old woman began to chant.
Glanton rose.
She raised her jaw, gibbering at the night.
Shut her up, said Glanton.
La carroza, la carroza, cried the beldam. Invertido. Carta de guerra, de venganza. La vi
sin ruedas sobre un rio obscuro...
Glanton called to her and she paused as if she'd heard him but it was not so. She
seemed to catch some new drift in her divinings.
Perdida, perdida. La carta esta perdida en la noche.

. The girl standing this while at the edge of the howling dark ess crossed herself silently.
The old malabarista was on his knees where he'd been flung. Perdida, perdida, he
whispered.
Un maleficio, cried the old woman. Que viento tan maleante ...
By G-d you will shut up, said Glanton, drawing his revolver.
Carroza de muertos, llena de huesos. El joven que .. .
The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames
delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element. He put his arms
. around Glanton. Some ne snatched the old woman's blindfold from her and she and
the juggler were clouted away and when the company turned in to sleep and the low
fire was roaring in the blast like a thing alive these four yet crouched at the edge of the
firelight among their strange chattels and watched how the ragged flames fled down the
wind as if sucked by some maelstrom out there in the void, some vortex in that waste
apposite to which man's transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate. As if beyond will
or fate he and his beasts and his trappings moved both in card and in substance under
consignment to some third and other destiny.
In the morning when they rode out it was that pale day with the sun not risen and the
wind had abated in the night and the things of the night were gone. The juggler on his
burro trotted out to the head of the column and fell in with Glanton and they rode on
together and they were so riding in the afternoon when the company entered the town
of Janos.
An ancient walled presidio composed wholly of mud, a tall mud church and mud
watchtowers and all of it rainwashed and lumpy and sloughing into a soft decay. The
advent of the riders bruited by scurvid curs that howled woundedly and slank among
the crumbling walls.
They rode past the church where old Spanish bells seagreen with age hung from a pole
between low mud dolmens. Darkeyed children watched from the hovels. The air was
heavy with the smoke from charcoal fires and a few old pelados sat mute in the
doorways and many of the houses were caved and ruinous and stood for pens. An old
man with soapy eyes lurched out at them and held forth his hand. Una corta caridad,
he croaked to the passing horses. Por Dios.
In the square two of the Delawares and the outrider Webster were squatting in the dust

with a weathered old woman the color of pipeclay. Dry old crone, half naked, her paps
like wrinkled aubergines hanging from under the shawl she wore. She stared at the
ground nor did she look up even when the horses stood all about her.
Glanton looked down the square. The town appeared empty. There was a small company
of soldiers garrisoned here but they did not turn out. Dust was blowing through the
streets. His horse leaned and sniffed at the old woman and jerked its head and
. trembled and Glanton patted the animal's neck and dis ounted.
She was in a meatcamp about eight mile up the river, said Webster. She caint walk.
How many were there?
We reckoned maybe fifteen or twenty. They didnt have no stock to amount to anything.
I dont know what she was doin there.
. Glanton crossed in front of his horse, passing the reins be ind his back.
Watch her, Cap. She bites.
She had raised her eyes to the level of his knees. Glanton pushed the horse back and
took one of the heavy saddle pistols from its scabbard and cocked it.
Watch yourself there.
Several of the men stepped back.
The woman looked up. Neither courage nor heartsink in those old eyes. He pointed with
his left hand and she turned to follow his hand with her gaze and he put the pistol to
her head and fired.
The explosion filled all that sad little park. Some of the horses shied and stepped. A
fistsized hole erupted out of the far side of the woman's head in a great vomit of gore
and she pitched over and lay slain in her blood without remedy. Glanton had already
put the pistol at halfcock and he flicked away the spent primer with his thumb and was
preparing to recharge the cylinder. McGill, he said.
A Mexican, solitary of his race in that company, came forward.
Get that receipt for us.

He took a skinning knife from his belt and stepped to where the old woman lay and
took up her hair and twisted it about his wrist and passed the blade of the knife about
her skull and ripped away the scalp.
Glanton looked at the men. They were stood some looking down at the old woman,
some already seeing to their mounts or their equipage. Only the recruits were watching
Glanton. He seated a pistolball in the mouth of the chamber and then he raised his
eyes and looked across the square. The juggler and his family stood aligned like
witnesses and beyond them in the long mud facade faces that had been watching from
. the doors and the naked windows dropped away like puppets in a gal ery before the
slow sweep of his eyes. He levered the ball home and capped the piece and spun the
heavy pistol in his hand and returned it to the scabbard at the horse's shoulder and
took the dripping trophy from McGill and turned it in the sun the way a man might
qualify the pelt of an animal and then handed it back and took up the trailing reins
and led his horse out through the square toward the water at the ford.
They made camp in a grove of cottonwoods across the creek just beyond the walls of
the town and with dark they drifted in small groups through the smoky streets. The
circus folk had set up a little pitchtent in the dusty plaza and had stood a few poles
about mounted with cressets of burning oil. The juggler was beating a sort of snaredrum
made of tin and rawhide and calling out in a high nasal voice his bill of entertainments
while the woman shrieked Pase pase pase, sweeping her arms about her in a gesture of
the greatest spectacle. Toadvine and the kid watched among the milling citizenry. Bathcat
leaned and spoke to them.
Look yonder, chappies.
They turned to look where he pointed. The black stood stripped to the waist behind the
tent and as the juggler turned with a sweep of his arm the girl gave him a shove and
he leaped from the tent and strode about with strange posturings under the lapsing flare
of the torches.
VIII
Another cantina, another advisor - Monte - A knifing ?The darkest corner of the tavern
the most conspicuous -
The sereno ?Riding north - The meatcamp ?
Grannyrat - Under the Animas peaks - A confrontation and
a killing - Another anchorite, another dawn.

They paused without the cantina and pooled their coins and Toadvine pushed aside the
dried cowhide that hung for a door and they entered a place where all was darkness
. and with ut definition. A lone lamp hung from a crosstree in the ceiling and in the
shadows dark figures sat smoking. They made their way across the room to a claytiled
bar. The place reeked of woodsmoke and sweat. A thin little man appeared before them
and placed his hands ceremonially upon the tiles.
Digame, he said.
Toadvine took off his hat and put it on the bar and swept a clawed hand through his
hair.
What have you got that a man could drink with just a minimum risk of blindness and
death.
Como?
He cocked his thumb at his throat. What have you got to drink, he said.
The barman turned and looked behind him at his wares. He seemed uncertain whether
anything there would answer their requirements.
Mescal?
Suit everbody?
Trot it out, said Bathcat.
The barman poured the measures from a clay jar into three dented tin cups and pushed
them forward with care like counters on a board.
Cuanto, said Toadvine.
The barman looked fearful. Seis? he said.
Seis what?
The man held up six fingers.
Centavos, said Bathcat.

Toadvine doled the coppers onto the bar and drained his cup and paid again. He
gestured at the cups all three with a wag of his finger. The kid took up his cup and
drained it and set it down again. The liquor was rank, sour, tasted faintly of creosote.
He was standing like the others with his back to the bar and he looked over the room.
At a table in the far corner men were playing cards by the light of a single tallow
candle. Along the wall opposite crouched figures seeming alien to the light who watched
the Americans with no expression at all.
There's a game for ye, said Toadvine. Play monte in the dark with a pack of niggers.
He raised the cup and drained it and set it on the bar and counted the remaining
coins. A man was shuffling toward them out of the gloom. He had a bottle under his
arm and he set it on the tiles with care together with his cup and spoke to the barman
and the barman brought him a clay pitcher of water. He turned the pitcher so that the
handle of it stood to his right and he looked at the kid. He was old and he wore a
flatcrowned hat of a type no longer much seen in that country and he was dressed in
dirty white cotton drawers and shirt. The huaraches he wore looked like dried and
blackened fish lashed to the floors of his feet.
You are Texas? he said.
The kid looked at Toadvine.
You are Texas, the old man said. I was Texas three year. He held up his hand. The
forefinger was gone at the first joint and perhaps he was showing them what happened
in Texas or perhaps he merely meant to count the years. He lowered the hand and
turned to the bar and poured wine into the cup and took up the jar of water and
poured it sparingly after. He drank and set the cup down and turned to Toadvine. He
wore thin white whiskers at the point of his chin and he wiped them with the back of
his hand before looking up again.
You are socieded de guerra. Contra los barbaros.
Toadvine didnt know. He looked like some loutish knight be-riddled by a troll.
The old man put a phantom rifle to his shoulder and made a noise with his mouth. He
looked at the Americans. You kill the Apache, no?
Toadvine looked at Bathcat. What does he want? he said.
The Vandiemenlander passed his own threefingered hand across his mouth but he

allowed no affinity. The old man's full he said. Or mad.
Toadvine propped his elbows on the tiles behind him. He looked at the old man and he
. spat on the floor. Craziern a run way nigger, aint ye? he said.
There was a groan from the far side of the room. A man rose and went along the wall
and bent to speak with others. The groans came again and the old man passed his hand
before his face twice and kissed the ends of his fingers and looked up.
How much monies they pay you? he said.
No one spoke.
You kill Gomez they pay you much monies.
The man in the dark of the far wall moaned again. Madre de Dios, he called.
Gomez, Gomez, said the old man. Even Gomez. Who can ride against the Tejanos? They
are soldiers. Que soldados tan valientes. La sangre de Gomez, sangre de la gente...
He looked up. Blood, he said. This country is give much blood. This Mexico. This is a
thirsty country. The blood of a thousand Christs. Nothing.
He made a gesture toward the world beyond where all the land lay under darkness and
all a great stained altarstone. He turned and poured his wine and poured again from
the waterjar, temperate old man, and drank.
The kid watched him. He watched him drink and he watched him wipe his mouth.
When he turned he spoke neither to the kid nor Toadvine but seemed to address the
room.
I pray to G-d for this country. I say that to you. I pray. I dont go in the church. What
I need to talk to them dolls there? I talk here.
He pointed to his chest. When he turned to the Americans his voice softened again. You
are fine caballeros, he said. You kill the barbaros. They cannot hide from you. But there
is another caballero and I think that no man hides from him. I was a soldier. It is like
a dream. When even the bones is gone in the desert the dreams is talk to you, you
dont wake up forever.
He drained his cup and took up his bottle and went softly away on his sandals into the

farther dim of the cantina. The man at the wall moaned again and called upon his G-d.
. The Vandiemenlander and the barman spoke together and the bar an gestured at the
dark in the corner and shook his head and the Americans chambered down their last
cups and Toadvine pushed the few tlacos toward the barman and they went out.
That was his son, said Bathcat.
Who was?
The lad in the corner cut with a knife.
He was cut?
One of the chaps at the table cut him. They were playin cards and one of them cut
him.
Why dont he leave.
I asked him the same myself.
What did he say?
He had a question for me. Said where would he go to?
They made their way through the narrow walled streets toward the gate and the fires of
the camp beyond. A voice was calling. It called: Las diez y media, tiempo serefio. It was
the watchman at his rounds and he passed them with his lantern calling softly the hour.
In the predawn dark the sounds about describe the scene to come. The first cries of
birds in the trees along the river and the clink of harness and the snuffle of horses and
the gentle sound of their cropping. In the darkened village roosters have begun. The air
smells of horses and charcoal. The camp has begun to stir. Sitting all about in the
accruing light are the children from the town. None of the men rising know how long
they have been there in darkness and silence.
When they rode through the square the dead squaw was gone and the dust was newly
raked. The juggler's lamps were stark and black atop their poles and the fire was cold
before the pitchtent. An old woman who had been chopping wood raised up and stood
with the axe in both hands as they passed.
They rode through the sacked indian camp at midmorning, the blackened sheets of meat

draped across the bushes or hung from poles like strange dark laundry. Deerhides were
pegged out on the ground and white or ruddled bones lay strewn over the rocks in a
primitive shambles. The horses cocked their ears and stepped quickly. They rode on. In
the afternoon black Jackson caught them up, his mount surbated and all but blown.
Glanton turned in the saddle and measured him with his eye. Then he nudged his horse
forward and the black fell in with his pale wayfellows and all rode on as before.
They did not miss the veteran until that evening. The judge made his way down
through the smoke of the cookfires and squatted before Toadvine and the kid.
What's become of Chambers, he said.
I believe he's quit.
Quit.
I believe he has.
Did he ride out this morning?
Not with us he never.
It was my understanding that you spoke for your group.
Toadvine spat. He appears to of spoke for hisself.
When did you last see him.
Seen him yesterday evenin.
But not this morning.
Not this mornin.
The judge regarded him.
Hell, said Toadvine. I allowed you knowed he was gone. It aint like he was so small
you never would miss him.
The judge looked at the kid. He looked at Toadvine again. Then he rose and went back.

In the morning two of the Delawares were gone. They rode on. By noon they had begun
. to climb toward the gap in the moun ains. Riding up through wild lavender or
soapweed, under the Animas peaks. The shadow of an eagle that had set forth from
those high and craggy fastnesses crossed the line of riders below and they looked up to
mark it where it rode in that brittle blue and faultless void. They came up through
pifion and scruboak and they crossed the gap through a high pine forest and rode on
through the mountains.
In the evening they came out upon a mesa that overlooked all the country to the north.
The sun to the west lay in a holocaust where there rose a steady column of small
desert bats and to the north along the trembling perimeter of the world dust was blow
.ng down the void like the smoke of distant armies. The crumpled butcherpaper
mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance
the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer
were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who
were themselves the color of the desert floor.
Glanton sat his horse and looked long out upon this scene. Sparse on the mesa the dry
weeds lashed in the wind like the earth's long echo of lance and spear in old encounters
forever unrecorded. All the sky seemed troubled and night came quickly over the
evening land and small gray birds flew crying softly after the fled sun. He chucked up
the horse. He passed and so passed all into the problematical destruction of darkness.
They camped that night on the foreplain at the foot of a talus slope and the murder
that had been reckoned upon took place. The white man Jackson had been drunk in
Janos and he had ridden red-eyed and sullen for two days through the mountains. He
now sat disheveled by the fire with his boots off drinking aguardiente from a flask,
circumscribed about by his companions and by the cries of wolves and providence of
night. He was sitting so when the black approached the fire and threw down his
apishamore and sat upon it and fell to stoking his pipe.
There were two fires in this camp and no rules real or tacit as to who should use them.
But when the white man looked to the other fire he saw that the Delawares and John
McGill and the new men in the company had taken their supper there and with a
gesture and a slurred oath he warned the black away.
Here beyond men's judgements all covenants were brittle. The black looked up from his
pipebowl. About that fire were men whose eyes gave back the light like coals socketed
hot in their skulls and men whose eyes did not, but the black man's eyes stood as
corridors for the ferrying through of naked and un-rectified night from what of it lay
behind to what was yet to come. Any man in this company can sit where it suits him,

he said.
The white man swung his head, one eye half closed, his lip loose. His gunbelt lay coiled
on the ground. He reached and drew the revolver and cocked it. Four men rose and
moved away.
You aim to shoot me? said the black.
You dont get your black ass away from this fire I'll kill you graveyard dead.
He looked to where Glanton sat. Glanton watched him. He put the pipe in his mouth
and rose and took up the apishamore and folded it over his arm.
Is that your final say?
Final as the judgement of G-d.
The black looked once more across the flames at Glanton and then he moved away in
the dark. The white man uncocked the revolver and placed it on the ground before him.
Two of the others came back to the fire and stood uneasily. Jackson sat with his legs
. crossed. One hand lay in his lap and the other was out tretched on his knee holding a
slender black cigarillo. The nearest man to him was Tobin and when the black stepped
out of the darkness bearing the bowieknife in both hands like some instrument of
ceremony Tobin started to rise. The white man looked up drunkenly and the black
stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head.
Two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his
neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at
the expriest's feet where it lay with eyes aghast. Tobin jerked his foot away and rose
and stepped back. The fire steamed and blackened and a gray cloud of smoke rose and
the columnar arches of blood slowly subsided until just the neck bubbled gently like a
stew and then that too was stilled. He was sat as before save headless, drenched in
blood, the cigarillo still between his fingers, leaning toward the dark and smoking grotto
in the flames where his life had gone.
Glanton rose. The men moved away. No one spoke. When they set out in the dawn the
headless man was sitting like a murdered anchorite discalced in ashes and sark.
Someone had taken his gun but the boots stood where he'd put them. The company
rode on. They had not gone forth one hour upon that plain before they were ridden
upon by the Apaches.

IX
An ambuscade - The dead Apache - Hollow ground ?
A gypsum lake - Trebillones - Snowblind horses - The Delawares
return - A probate - The ghost coach - The copper mines -
Squatters - A snakebit horse - The judge on geological evidence -
The dead boy - On parallax and false guidance in things past ?
The ciboleros.
They were crossing the western edge of the playa when Glanton halted. He turned and
placed one hand on the wooden cantle and looked toward the sun where it sat new
risen above the bald and flyspecked mountains to the east. The floor of the playa lay
smooth and unbroken by any track and the mountains in their blue islands stood
footless in the void like floating temples.
Toadvine and the kid sat their horses and gazed upon that desolation with the others.
Out on the playa a cold sea broke and water gone these thousand years lay riffled silver
. in the morn ng wind.
Sounds like a pack of hounds, said Toadvine.
It sounds like geese to me.
Suddenly Bathcat and one of the Delawares turned their horses and quirted them and
called out and the company turned and milled and began to line out down the lake bed
toward the thin line of scrub that marked the shore. Men were leaping from their
horses and hobbling them instantly with loops of rope ready made. By the time the
animals were secured and they had thrown themselves on the ground under the creosote
bushes with their weapons readied the riders were beginning to appear far out on the
lake bed, a thin frieze of mounted archers that trembled and veered in the rising heat.
They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they
were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with
the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in
the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated
again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there
began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks
riding huge and inverted and the horses' legs incredibly elongate trampling down the
high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and

. chimeric and the high wild cries carry ng that flat and barren pan like the cries of
souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.
They'll swing to their right, called Glanton, and as he spoke they did so, favoring their
bow arms. The arrows came lofting up in the blue with the sun on their fletchings and
then suddenly gaining speed and passing with a waney whistle like the flight of wild
ducks. The first rifle cracked.
The kid was lying on his belly holding the big Walker revolver in both hands and
letting off the shots slowly and with care as if he'd done it all before in a dream. The
warriors passed within a hundred feet, forty, fifty of them, and went on up the edge of
the lake and began to crumble in the serried planes of heat and to break up silently
and to vanish.
The company lay under the creosote recharging their pieces. One of the ponies was lying
in the sand breathing steadily and others stood that bore arrows with a curious patience.
. Tate and Doc Irving pulled back to see about them. The others lay watch ng the playa.
They walked out, Toadvine and Glanton and the judge. They picked up a short rifled
musket bound in rawhide and studded about the stock with brassheaded tacks in varied
designs. The judge looked north along the pale shore of the dry lake where the heathen
had fled. He handed the rifle to Toadvine and they went on.
The dead man lay in a sandy wash. He was naked save for skin boots and a pair of
wide Mexican drawers. The boots had pointed toes like buskins and they had parfleche
soles and high tops that were rolled down about the knees and tied. The sand in the
. wash was dark with blood. They stood there in the wind ess heat at the edge of the
dry lake and Glanton pushed him over with his boot. The painted face came up, sand
stuck to the eyeball, sand stuck to the rancid grease with which he'd smeared his torso.
You could see the hole where the ball from Toadvine's rifle had gone in above the lower
rib. The man's hair was long and black and dull with dust and a few lice scuttled.
There were slashes of white paint on the cheeks and there were chevrons of paint above
the nose and figures in dark red paint under the eyes and on the chin. He was old and
he bore a healed lance wound just above the hipbone and an old sabre wound across
the left cheek that ran to the corner of his eye. These wounds were decorated their
length with tattooed images, perhaps obscure with age, but without referents in the
known desert about.
The judge knelt with his knife and cut the strap of the tigre-skin warbag the man
carried and emptied it in the sand. It held an eyeshield made from a raven's wing, a
rosary of fruitseeds, a few gunflints, a handful of lead balls. It held also a calculus or

madstone from the inward parts of some beast and this the judge examined and
pocketed. The other effects he spread with the palm of his hand as if there were
something to be read there. Then he ripped open the man's drawers with his knife. Tied
alongside the dark genitals was a small skin bag and this the judge cut away and also
secured in the pocket of his vest. Lastly he seized the dark locks and swept them up
from the sand and cut away the scalp. Then they rose^and returned, leaving him to
scrutinize with his drying eyes the calamitous advance of the sun.
They rode all day upon a pale gastine sparsely grown with saltbush and panicgrass. In
the evening they entrained upon a hollow ground that rang so roundly under the horses'
hooves that they stepped and sidled and rolled their eyes like circus animals and that
night as they lay in that ground each heard, all heard, the dull boom of rock falling
somewhere far below them in the awful darkness inside the world.
On the day that followed they crossed a lake of gypsum so fine the ponies left no track
upon it. The riders wore masks of bone-black smeared about their eyes and some had
. blacked the eyes of their horses. The sun reflected off the pan burned the under ides
of their faces and shadow of horse and rider alike were painted upon the fine white
powder in purest indigo. Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling
and augered the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes
in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and
there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some
drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out
of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out
and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell
of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine
of his ruin?
That night they sat at the fire like ghosts in their dusty beards and clothing, rapt,
pyrolatrous. The fires died and small coals scampered down the plain and sand crept
past in the dark all night like armies of lice on the move. In the night some of the
horses began to scream and daybreak found several so crazed with snowblindness they
required to be shot. When they rode out the Mexican they called McGill was on his
third horse in as many days. He could not have blacked the eyes of the pony he'd
ridden coming up from the dry lake short of muzzling it like a dog and the horse he
now rode was wilder yet and there were only three animals left in the caballado.
That afternoon the two Delawares that had left them a day out of Janos caught them
up where they nooned at a mineral well. They had with them the veteran's horse, still
saddled. Glanton walked out to where the animal stood and took up the trailing reins
and led it to the fire where he removed the rifle from the scabbard and handed it to

David Brown and then began to go through the wallet strapped to the cantle and to
pitch the veteran's meagre effects into the fire. He undid the girthstraps and loosed the
other accoutrements and piled them onto the flames, blankets, saddle, all, the greasy
wool and leather sending up a foul gray smoke.
Then they rode on. They were moving north and for two days the Delawares read the
smokes on the distant peaks and then the smokes stopped and there were no more. As
they entered the foothills they came upon a dusty old diligence with six horses in the
traces grazing the dry grass in a fold among the barren scrag.
A deputation cut for the carriage and the horses jerked their heads and shied and went
trotting. The riders harried them about the basin until they were circling like paper
horses in a windtrap and the diligence rattling after with one broken wheel. The black
walked out waving his hat and called them off and he approached the yoked horses with
the hat outheld and talked to them where they stood trembling until he could reach the
trailing straps.
Glanton walked past him and opened the carriage door. The inside of the coach was
splintered up with new wood and a dead man slumped out and hung head down. There
was another man inside and a young boy and they lay enhearsed with their weapons in
a stink to drive a buzzard off a gutcart. Glanton took the guns and ammunition and
handed them out. Two men climbed to the freightdeck and cut away the ropes and the
tattered tarp and they kicked down a steamer trunk and an old rawhide dispatch box
and broke them open. Glanton cut the straps on the dispatch box with his knife and
tipped the box out in the sand. Letters penned for any destination save here began to
skitter and drift away down the canyon. There were a few tagged bags of ore samples in
the box and he emptied them on the ground and kicked at the lumps of ore and looked
about. He looked inside the coach again and then he spat and turned and looked the
horses over. They were big American horses but badly used up. He directed two of them
cut out of the traces and then he waved the black away from the lead horse and wafted
his hat at the animals. They set off down the floor of the canyon, mismatched and
sawing in the harness, the diligence swaying on its leather springs and the dead man
dangling out of \ the clapping door. They diminished upon the plain to the west first
the sound and then the shape of them dissolving in the heat rising off the sand until
they were no more than a mote struggling in that hallucinatory void and then nothing
at all. The riders rode on.
All afternoon they rode singlefile up thorugh the mountains. A small gray lanneret flew
about them as if seeking their banner and then it shied away over the plain below on
its slender falcon wings. They rode on through sandstone cities in the dusk of that day,
past castle and keep and windfashioned watchtower and stone granaries in sun and in

shadow. They rode through marl and terracotta and rifts of copper shale and they rode
through a wooded swag and out upon a promontory overlooking a bleak and barren
caldera where lay the abandoned ruins of Santa Rita del Cobre.
Here they made a dry and fireless camp. They sent down scouts and Glanton walked
out on the bluff and sat in the dusk watching the darkness deepen in the gulf below to
see if any light should show itself down there. The scouting party returned in the dark
. and it was still dark in the morning when the com any mounted and rode out.
They entered the caldera in a condition of half gray dawn, riding singlefile through the
shaley streets between rows of old adobes abandoned these dozen years past when the
Apaches cut off the wagontrains from Chihuahua and laid the works under siege. The
starving Mexicans had set out afoot on the long journey south but none ever arrived.
The Americans rode past the slag and rubble and the dark shapes of shaft mouths and
they rode past the smeltinghouse where piles of ore stood about and weathered wagons
and orecarts bonewhite in the dawn and the dark iron shapes of abandoned machinery.
They crossed a stony arroyo and rode on through that gutted terrain to a slight rise
where sat the old presidio, a large triangular building of adobe with round towers at the
corners. There was a single door in the east wall and as they approached they could see
rising the smoke that they had smelled on the morning air.
Glanton pounded on the door with his rawhidecovered club like a traveler at an inn. A
bluish light suffused the hills about and the tallest peaks to the north stood in the only
sun while all the caldera lay in darkness yet. The echo of his knocking clapped about
the stark and riven walls of rock and returned. The men sat their horses. Glanton gave
the door a kick.
Come out if you're white, he called.
Who's there? called a voice.
Glanton spat
Who is it? they called.
Open it, said Glanton.
They waited. Chains were drawn rattling across the wood. The tall door creaked inward
and a man stood before them at the ready with a rifle. Glanton touched his horse with
his knee and it raised its head along the door and forced it open and they rode
through.

In the gray murk within the compound they dismounted and tied. A few old
freightwagons stood about, some looted of their wheels by travelers. There was a lamp
burning in one of the offices and several men stood in the door. Glanton crossed the
triangle. The men stepped aside. We thought you was injins they said.
They were four left out of a party of seven that had set out for the mountains to
prospect for precious metals. They had been barricaded in the old presidio for three
days, fled here from the desert to the south pursued by the savages. One of the men
was shot through the lower chest and he lay propped against the wall in the office.
Irving came in and looked at him.
What have you done for him? he said.
Aint done nothin.
What do you want me to do for him?
Aint asked you to do nothin.
That's good, said Irving. Because there aint nothing to be done.
He looked at them. They were foul and ragged and half crazed. They'd been making
forays at night up the arroyo for wood and water and they had been feeding off a dead
mule that lay gutted and stinking in the far corner of the yard. The first thing they
asked for was whiskey and the next was tobacco. They had but two animals and one of
these had been snakebit in the desert and this thing now stood in the compound with
. its head enormously swollen and grotesque like some fabled equine idea ion out of an
Attic tragedy. It had been bitten on the nose and its eyes bulged out of the shapeless
head in a horror of agony and it tottered moaning toward the clustered horses of the
company with its long misshapen muzzle swinging and drooling and its breath wheezing
in the throttled pipes of its throat. The skin had split open along the bridge of its nose
and the bone shone through pinkish white and its small ears looked like paper spills
twisted into either side of a hairy loaf of dough. The American horses began to mill and
separate along the wall at its approach and it swung after them blindly. There was a
. flurry of thumps and kicks and the horses began to circle the^ com ound. A small
mottled stallion belonging to one of the Delawares came out of the remuda and struck
at the thing twice and then turned and buried its teeth in its neck. Out of the mad
horse's throat came a sound that brought the men to the door.
Why dont you shoot that thing? said Irving.

Sooner it dies the sooner it'll rot, they said.
Irving spat. You aim to eat it and it snakebit?
They looked at one another. They didnt know.
Irving shook his head and went out. Glanton and the judge looked at the squatters and
the squatters looked at the floor. Some of the roofbeams were half down into the room
and the floor was filled with mud and rubble. Into these ruinous works the morning sun
now slanted and Glanton could see crouched in a corner a Mexican or halfbreed boy
maybe twelve years old. He was naked save for a pair of old calzones and makeshift
sandals of uncured hide. He glared back at Glanton with a sort of terrified insolence.
Who's this child? said the judge.
They shrugged, they looked away.
Glanton spat and shook his head.
They posted guards atop the azotea and unsaddled the horses and drove them out to
graze and the judge took one of the packanimals and emptied out the panniers and
went off to explore the works. In the afternoon he sat in the compound breaking ore
samples with a hammer, the feldspar rich in red oxide of copper and native nuggets in
whose organic lobations he purported to read news of the earth's origins, holding an
extemporary lecture in geology to a small gathering who nodded and spat. A few would
quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and
other apostate supposings. The judge smiled.
Books lie, he said.
G-d dont lie.
No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.
He held up a chunk of rock.
He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.
The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him
correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until

they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools.
. That evening the main part of the company quartered them elves on the dry clay of
the compound under the stars. Before morning rain would drive them in, huddled in the
dark mud cubicles along the south wall. In the office of the presidio they'd built a fire
in the floor and the smoke rose through the ruined roof and Glanton and the judge and
their lieutenants sat about the blaze and smoked their pipes while the squatters stood
off to one side chewing the tobacco they'd been given and spitting at the wall. The
halfbreed boy watched them with his dark eyes. To the west among the low dark hills
. they could hear the howl ng of a wolf that the squatters did mistrust and the hunters
smiled among themselves. In a night so beclamored with the jackal-yapping of coyotes
and the cries of owls the howl of that old dog wolf was the one sound they knew to
issue from its right form, a solitary lobo, perhaps gray at the muzzle, hung like a
marionette from the moon with his long mouth gibbering.
It grew cold in the night and it blew stormy with wind and rain and soon all the wild
menagerie of that country grew mute. A horse put its long wet face in at the door and
Glanton looked up and spoke to it and it lifted its head and curled its lip and withdrew
into the rain and the night.
The squatters observed this as they observed everything with their shifting eyes and one
of them allowed that he would never make a pet of a horse. Glanton spat at the fire
and looked at the man where he sat horseless in his rags and he shook his head at the
wonderful invention of folly in its guises and forms. The rain had slacked and in the
stillness a long crack of thunder rolled overhead and clanged among the rocks and then
the rain came harder until it was pouring through the blackened opening in the roof
and steaming and hissing in the fire. One of the men rose and dragged up the rotted
ends of some old beams and piled them onto the flames. The smoke spread along the
sagging vigas above them and little streams of liquid clay started down from the sod
roof. Outside the compound lay under sheets of water that slashed about in the gusts
and the light of the fire falling from the door laid a pale band upon that shallow sea
along which the horses stood like roadside spectators waiting an event. From time to
time one of the men would rise and go out and his shadow would fall among the
animals and they would raise and lower their dripping heads and dap their hooves and
then wait in the rain again.
The men who had been on watch entered the room and stood steaming before the fire.
The black stood at the door neither in nor out. Someone had reported the judge naked
atop the walls, immense and pale in the revelations of lightning, striding the perimeter
up there and declaiming in the old epic mode. Glanton watched the fire silently and the
men composed themselves in their blankets in the drier places about the floor and soon

they were asleep.
In the morning the rain had ceased. The water stood in pools in the courtyard and the
. snakebit horse lay dead with its shape ess head stretched in the mud and the other
animals had gathered in the northeast corner under the tower and stood facing the wall.
The peaks to the north were white with snow in the new risen sun and when Toadvine
stepped out into the day the sun was just touching the upper walls of the compound
and the judge was standing in the gently steaming quiet picking his teeth with a thorn
as if he had just eaten.
Morning, said the judge.
Morning, said Toadvine.
Looks fair to clear.
It done has cleared, said Toadvine.
The judge turned his head and looked toward the pristine cobalt keep of the visible day.
An eagle was crossing the gorge with the sun very white on its head and tailfeathers.
So it has, said the judge. So it has.
. The squatters emerged and stood about the cantonment blink ng like birds. They had
elected among themselves to join the company and when Glanton came across the yard
leading his horse the spokesman for their group stepped forward to inform him of their
decision. Glanton didnt even look at him. He entered the cuartel and got his saddle and
gear. In the meantime someone had found the boy.
He was lying face down naked in one of the cubicles. Scattered about on the clay were
great numbers of old bones. As if he like others before him had stumbled upon a place
where something inimical lived. The squatters crowded in and stood about the corpse in
silence. Soon they were conversing senselessly about the merits and virtues of the dead
boy.
In the compound the scalphunters mounted up and turned their horses toward the gates
that now stood open to the east to welcome in the light and to invite their journey. As
they rode out the doomed men hosteled in that place came dragging the boy out and
laid him in the mud. His neck had been broken and his head hung straight down and
it flopped over strangely when they let him onto the ground. The hills beyond the
minepit were reflected grayly in the pools of rainwater in the courtyard and the partly

. eaten mule lay in the mud with its hindquarters miss ng like something from a chromo
of terrific war. Within the doorless cuartel the man who'd been shot sang church hymns
and cursed G-d alternately. The squatters stood about the dead boy with their wretched
firearms at rest like some tatterdemalion guard of honor. Glanton had given them a half
pound of rifle-powder and some primers and a small pig of lead and as the company
rode out some looked back at them, three men standing there without expression. No
one raised a hand in farewell. The dying man by the ashes of the fire was singing and
as they rode out they could hear the hymns of their childhood and they could hear
them as they ascended the arroyo and rode up through the low junipers still wet from
the rain. The dying man sang with great clarity and intention and the riders setting
forth upcountry may have ridden more slowly the longer to hear him for they were of
just these qualities themselves.
They rode that day through low hills barren save for the scrub evergreens. Everywhere
in this high parkland deer leapt and scattered and the hunters shot several from their
saddles and gutted and packed them and by evening they had acquired a retinue of half
a dozen wolves of varying size and color that trotted behind them singlefile and watched
over their own shoulders to see that each should follow in his place. At dusk they
halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them
and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and
sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground
behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become
altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably
along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind
them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in
things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some
fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.
As they rode that night upon the mesa they saw come toward them much like their own
image a party of riders pieced out of the darkness by the intermittent flare of the dry
lightning to the north. Glanton halted and sat his horse and the company halted behind
him. The silent riders hove on. When they were a hundred yards out they too halted
and all sat in silent speculation at this encounter.
Who are you? called Glanton.
Amigos, somos amigos.
They were counting each the other's number.
De donde viene? called the strangers.

A donde va? called the judge.
They were ciboleros down from the north, their packhorses laden with dried meat. They
were dressed in skins sewn with the ligaments of beasts and they sat their animals in
the way of men seldom off them. They carried lances with which they hunted the wild
buffalo on the plains and these weapons were dressed with tassels of feathers and
colored cloth and some carried bows and some carried old fusils with tasseled stoppers
in their bores. The dried meat was packed in hides and other than the few arms among
them they were innocent of civilized device as the rawest savage of that land.
They parleyed without dismounting and the ciboleros lighted their small cigarillos and
told that they were bound for the markets at Mesilla. The Americans might have traded
. for some of the meat but they carried no tantamount goods and the dis osition to
exchange was foreign to them. And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain,
each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions
without end upon other men's journeys.
X
Tobin - The skirmish on the Little Colorado -The Katabasis ?
How came the learned man - Clanton and the judge - A new course ?
The judge and the bats - Cuano - The deserters -
Saltpeter and charcoal - The malpais -Hoofprints - The volcano -
Brimstone - The matrix - The slaughter of the aborigines.
In the days to follow all trace of the Gilenos faded and they pushed deeper into the
. mountains. By fires of highland drift ood pale as bone they crouched in silence while
the flames yawed in the nightwinds ascending those stony draws. The kid sat with his
legs crossed mending a strap with an awl he'd borrowed from the expriest Tobin and
the frockless one looked on as he worked.
You've done this afore, said Tobin.
The kid wiped his nose with a swipe of his greasy sleeve and turned the piece in his
lap. Not me, he said.
Well you've the knack. More so than me. There's little equity in the L-rd's gifts.

The kid looked up at him and then bent to his work again.
That's so, said the expriest. Look around you. Study the judge.
I done studied him.
Mayhaps he aint to your liking, fair enough. But the man's a hand at anything. I've
never seen him turn to a task but what he didnt prove clever at it.
The lad drove the greased thread through the leather and hauled it taut.
He speaks dutch, said the expriest.
Dutch?
Aye.
The kid looked at the expriest, he bent to his mending.
. He does for I heard him do it. We cut a parcel of crazy pil rims down off the Llano
and the old man in the lead of them he spoke right up in dutch like we were all of us
in dutchland and the judge give him right back. Glanton come near fallin off his horse.
We none of us knew him to speak it. Asked where he'd learned it you know what he
said?
What did he say.
Said off a dutchman.
The expriest spat. I couldnt of learned it off ten dutchmen. What about you?
The kid shook his head.
No, said Tobin. The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale
peculiar to himself. It's no fair accountin and I dont doubt but what he'd be the first to
admit it and you put the query to him boldface.
Who?
The Almighty, the Almighty. The expriest shook his head. He glanced across the fire
toward the judge. That great hairless thing. You wouldnt think to look at him that he

could outdance the devil himself now would ye? G-d the man is a dancer, you'll not
take that away from him. And fiddle. He's the greatest fiddler I ever heard and that's
an end on it. The greatest. He can cut a trail, shoot a rifle, ride a horse, track a deer.
He's been all over the world. Him and the governor they sat up till breakfast and it was
Paris this and London that in five languages, you'd have give something to of heard
them. The governor's a learned man himself he is, but the judge .. .
The expriest shook his head. Oh it may be the L-rd's way of showin how little store he
sets by the learned. Whatever could it mean to one who knows all? He's an uncommon
love for the common man and G-dly wisdom resides in the least of things so that it
may well be that the voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such beings as
lives in silence themselves.
He watched the kid.
For let it go how it will, he said, G-d speaks in the least of creatures.
The kid thought him to mean birds or things that crawl but the expriest, watching, his
head slightly cocked, said: No man is give leave of that voice.
The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work.
I aint heard no voice, he said.
When it stops, said Tobin, you'll know you've heard it all your life.
Is that right?
Aye.
The kid turned the leather in his lap. The expriest watched him.
At night, said Tobin, when the horses are grazing and the company is asleep, who hears
them grazing?
Dont nobody hear them if they're asleep.
Aye. And if they cease their grazing who is it that wakes?
Every man.

Aye, said the expriest. Every man.
The kid looked up. And the judge? Does the voice speak to him?
The judge, said Tobin. He didn't answer.
I seen him before, said the kid. In Nacogdoches.
. Tobin smiled. Every man in the company claims to have en ountered that sootysouled
rascal in some other place.
Tobin rubbed his beard on the back of his hand. He saved us all, I have to give him
. that. We come down off the Little Col rado we didnt have a pound of powder in the
company. Pound. We'd not a dram hardly. There he set on a rock in the middle of the
greatest desert you'd ever want to see. Just perched on this rock like a man waitin for a
coach. Brown thought him a mirage. Might have shot him for one if he'd had aught to
shoot him with.
How come you to have no powder?
Shot it up all at the savages. Holed up nine days in a cave, lost most of the horses. We
were thirty-eight men when we left Chihuahua City and we were fourteen when the
judge found us. Mortally whipped, on the run. Every man jack of us knew that in that
G-dforsook land somewhere was a draw or a cul-desac or perhaps just a pile of rocks
and there we'd be driven to a stand with those empty guns. The judge. Give the devil
his due.
The kid held the tack in one hand, the awl in the other. He watched the expriest.
We'd been on the plain all night and well up into the next day. The Delawares kept
callin halts and droppin to the ground to give a listen. There was no place to run and
no place to hide. I dont know what they wanted to hear. We knew the bloody niggers
was out there and speakin for myself that was already an abundance of information, I
didnt need more. That sunrise we'd looked to be our last. We were all watchin the
backtrack, I dont know how far you could see. Fifteen, twenty miles.
Then about the meridian of that day we come upon the judge on his rock there in that
wilderness by his single self. Aye and there was no rock, just the one. Irving said he'd
brung it with him. I said that it was a merestone for to mark him out of nothing at all.
He had with him that selfsame rifle you see with him now, all mounted in german
silver and the name that he'd give it set with silver wire under the checkpiece in latin:

Et In Arcadia Ego. A reference to the lethal in it. Common enough for a man to name
his gun. I've heard Sweetlips and Hark From The Tombs and every sort of lady's name.
His is the first and only ever I seen with an inscription from the classics.
And there he set. No horse. Just him and his legs crossed, smilin as we rode up. Like
he'd been expectin us. He'd an old canvas kitbag and an old woolen benjamin over the
one shoulder. In the bag was a brace of pistols and a good assortment of specie, gold
and silver. He didnt even have a canteen. It was like... You couldnt tell where he'd
come from. Said he'd been with a wagon company and fell out to go it alone.
Davy wanted to leave him there. Didnt set well with his honor and it dont to this day.
Glanton just studied him. It was a day's work to even guess what he made of that
figure on that ground. I dont know to this day. They've a secret commerce. Some
terrible covenant. You mind. You'll see I'm right. He called for the last of two
packanimals we had and he cut the straps and left the wallets to lay where they fell
and the judge mounted up and he and Glanton rode side by side and soon they was
conversin like brothers. The judge sat that animal bareback like an indian and rode with
his grip and his rifle perched on the withers and he looked about him with the greatest
satisfaction in the world, as if everything had turned out just as he planned and the day
could not have been finer.
We'd not rode far before he struck us a new course about nine points to the east. He
pointed out a range of mountains maybe thirty mile distant and we pulled for those.
mountains and none of us asked what for. By then Glanton had give him the particu
ars of the situation in which he'd installed himself but if bein naked of arms in that
wilderness and half of all Apacheria in pursuit worried him at all he kept it to himself
entire.
The expriest had paused to rekindle his pipe, reaching into the raw fire for a coal as
did the red scouts and then setting it back among the flames as if it had a proper place
there.
Now what do you reckon it was in them mountains that we set out for? And how did
he come to know of it? How to find it? How to put it to use?
Tobin seemed to frame these questions to himself. He was regarding the fire and pulling
on his pipe. How indeed, he said. We reached the foothills in the early evenin and rode
up a dry arroyo and pushed on I guess till midnight and made camp with neither wood
nor water. Come mornin we could see them on the plain to the north maybe ten mile
out. They were ridin four and six abreast and there was no short supply of them and
they were in no hurry.

The judge had been up all the night by what the videttes said. Watchin the bats. He
would go up the side of the mountain and make notes in a little book and then he
would come back down. Could not have been more cheerful. Two men had deserted in
the night and that made us down to twelve and the judge thirteen. I gave him my best
study, the judge. Then and now. He appeared to be a lunatic and then not. Glanton I al
.ays knew was mad.
We left out with the first light up a little wooded draw. We were on the north slope
and there was willow and alder and cherry growin out of the rock, just little trees. The
judge would stop to botanize and then ride to catch up. My hand to G-d. Pressing
leaves into his book. Sure I never saw the equal to it and all the time the savages in
plain view below us. Ridin on that pan. G-d I'd put a crick in my neck I couldnt keep
my eyes off of them and they were a hundred souls if they were one.
We come out on some flinty ground where it was all juniper and we just went on. No
attempt to put their trackers at fault. We rode all that day. We saw no more of the
savages for they were come under the lee of the mountain and were somewhere on the
slopes below us. As soon as it was dusk and the bats was about the judge he altered
our course again, ridin along holdin onto his hat, lookin up at the little animals. We got
broke up and scattered all in the junipers and we halted to regroup and to recruit the
horses. We sat around in the dark, no one spoke a word. When the judge got back he
and Glanton whispered among themselves and then we moved on.
We led the horses in the dark. There was no trail, just steep scrabbly rock. When we
reached the cave some of the men thought that he meant for us to hide there and that
he was for a fact daft altogether. But it was the nitre. The nitre, you see. We left all
that we owned at the mouth of that cave and we filled our wallets and panniers and
our mochilas with the cave dirt and we left out at daybreak. When we topped the rise
above that place and looked back there was a great spout of bats being sucked down
into the cave, thousands of the creatures, and they continued so for an hour or more
and even then it was just that we could no longer see them.
The judge. We left him at a high pass, a little clearwater creek. Him and one of the
. Delawares. He told us to circle the moun ain and to return to that place in forty-eight
. hours. We un oaded all the containers onto the ground and took the two horses with
us and him and the Delaware commenced luggin the panniers and the wallets up that
little creek. I watched him go and I said that I would never set eyes on that man again.
Tobin looked at the kid. Never in this world. I thought Glan-ton would leave him. We
went on. The next day on the far side of the mountain we encountered the two lads

that had deserted us. Hangin upside down in a tree. They'd been skinned and I can tell
ye it does very little for a man's appearance. But if the savages had not guessed it
already now they knew for sure. That we'd none of us any powder.
We would not ride the animals. Just lead them, keep them off the rocks, hold their
noses if they snuffled. But in those two days the judge leached out the guano with
creekwater and woodash and precipitated it out and he built a clay kiln and burned
charcoal in it, doused the fire by day and fired it again come dark. When we found him
him and the Delaware was settin in the creek stark naked and they appeared at first to
. be drunk but on what none could surmise. The entire top of that moun ain was
covered with Apache Indians and there set he. He got up when he seen us and went to
the willows and come back with a pair of wallets and in one was about eight pounds of
pure crystal saltpetre and in the other about three pounds of fine alder charcoal. He'd
ground the charcoal to a powder in the hollow of a rock, you could have made ink of
it. He lashed the bags shut and put them across the pommel of Glanton's saddle and
him and the indian got their clothes and I was glad of it for I never seen a grown man
with not a hair to his body and him weighin twenty-four stone which he did then and
does now. And by my own warrant, for I added up the counters on the bar with my
own and sober eyes at a stockscale in Chihuahua City in that same month and year.
We went down the mountain with no scouts, nothin. Just straight out. We were dead
for sleep. It was dark when we reached the plain and we grouped and took a headcount
and then we rode out. The moon was about three quarters full and waxing and we were
like circus riders, not a sound, the horses on eggshells. We'd no way of knowin where
the savages was. The last clue we'd had of their vicinity was the poor buggers flayed in
the tree. We set out dead west across the desert. Doc Irving was before me and it was
that bright I could count the hairs on his head.
We rode all night and toward the morning just as the moon was down we come upon a
band of wolves. They scattered and come back, not a sound out of them no more than
smoke. They'd drift off and quarter around and circle the horses. Bold as brass. We cut
at them with our hobbles and they would slip past, you couldnt hear them on the
hardpan just their breath or they would mutter and grouse or pop their teeth. Glanton
halted and the things swirled around and slank off and come back. Two of the
. . Delawares backtracked off to the left a bit raver souls than me nd sure they found
. the kill. Twas a young buck ante ope new killed the evenin before. It was about half
consumed and we set upon it with our knives and took the rest of the meat with us
and we ate it raw in the saddle and it was the first meat we'd seen in six days. Froze
for it we were. Foragin on the mountain for pinon nuts like bears and glad to get them.
We left little more than bones for the lobos, but I would never shoot a wolf and I
know other men of the same sentiments.

In all this time the judge had spoke hardly a word. So at dawn we were on the edge of
a vast malpais and his honor takes up a position on some lava rocks there and he
commences to give us a address. It was like a sermon but it was no such sermon as
any man of us had ever heard before. Beyond the malpais was a volcanic peak and in
the sunrise it was many colors and there was dark little birds crossin down the wind
and the wind was flappin the judge's old benjamin about him and he pointed to that
stark and solitary mountain and delivered himself of an oration to what end I know not,
then or now, and he concluded with the tellin us that our mother the earth as he said
was round like an egg and contained all good things within her. Then he turned and
led the horse he had been ridin across that terrain of black and glassy slag, treacherous
to man and beast alike, and us behind him like the disciples of a new faith.
The expriest broke off and tapped the dead pipe against the heel of his boot. He looked
at the judge over the way where he sat with his torso bared to the flames as was his
practice. He turned and regarded the kid.
. The malpais. It was a maze. Ye'd run out upon a little promon ory and ye'd be balked
about by the steep crevasses, you wouldnt dare to jump them. Sharp black glass the
edges and sharp the flinty rocks below. We led the horses with every care and still they
were bleedin about their hooves. Our boots was cut to pieces. Clamberin over those old
caved and rimpled plates you could see well enough how things had gone in that place,
rocks melted and set up all wrinkled like a pudding, the earth stove through to the
molten core of her. Where for aught any man knows lies the locality of hell. For the
earth is a globe in the void and truth there's no up nor down to it and there's men in
this company besides myself seen little cloven hoof-prints in the stone clever as a little
doe in her going but what little doe ever trod melted rock? I'd not go behind scripture
but it may be that there has been sinners so notorious evil that the fires coughed em
up again and I could well see in the long ago how it was little devils with their
pitchforks had traversed that fiery vomit for to salvage back those souls that had by mis
.dventure been spewed up from their damnation onto the outer shelves of the world.
Aye. It's a notion, no more. But someplace in the scheme of things this world must
touch the other. And somethin put them little hooflet markings in the lava flow for I
seen them there myself.
The judge, he seemed not to take his eyes from that dead cone where it rose off the
. desert like a great chancre. We fol owed solemn as owls so that he turned to look
back and he did laugh when he seen our faces. At the foot of the mountain we drew
lots and we sent two men to go on with the horses. I watched them go. One of them is
at this fire tonight and I saw him lead them horses away over the slaglands like a
doomed man.

And we were not doomed ourselves 1 dont reckon. When I looked up he was already
upon the slope hand and foot, the judge was, his bag over his shoulder and his rifle for
. alpen tock. And so did we all go. Not halfway up we could already see the savages out
on the plain. We climbed on. I thought at worst we'd throw ourselves into the caldron
rather than be taken by those fiends. We climbed up and I reckon it was midday when
we reached the top. We were done in. The savages not ten miles out. I looked at the
men about me and sure they didnt look much. The dignity was gone out of them. They
were good hearts all, then and now, and I did not like to see them so and I thought
the judge had been sent among us for a curse. And yet he proved me wrong. At the
time he did. I'm of two minds again now.
He was the first to the rim of the cone for all the size of him and he stood gazin about
like he'd come for the view. Then he set down and he begun to scale at the rock with
his knife. One by one we straggled up and he set with his back to that gapin hole and
he was chippin away and he called upon us to do the same. It was brimstone. A weal
of brimstone all about the rim of the caldron, bright yellow and shining here and there
with the little flakes of silica but most pure flowers of sulphur. We chipped it loose and
chopped it fine with our knives till we had about two pounds of it and then the judge
. took the wallets and went to a cupped place in the rock and dumped out the char oal
and the nitre and stirred them about with his hand and poured the sulphur in.
I didnt know but what we'd be required to bleed into it like freemasons but it was not
so. He worked it up dry with his hands and all the while the savages down there on
the plain drawin nigh to us and when I turned back the judge was standin, the great
hairless oaf, and he'd took out his pizzle and he was pissin into the mixture, pissin with
a great vengeance and one hand aloft and he cried out for us to do likewise.
We were half mad anyways. All lined up. Delawares and all. Every man save Glanton
and he was a study. We hauled forth our members and at it we went and the judge on
his knees kneadin the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and
he was cryin out to us to piss, man, piss for your very souls for cant you see the
redskins yonder, and laughin the while and workin up this great mass in a foul black
dough, a devil's batter by the stink of it and him not a bloody dark pastryman himself I
dont suppose and he pulls out his knife and he commences to trowel it across the
southfacin rocks, spreadin it out thin with the knifeblade and watchin the sun with one
eye and him smeared with blacking and reekin of piss and sulphur and grinnin and
wieldin the knife with a dexterity that was wondrous like he did it every day of his life.
And when he was done he set back and wiped his hands on his chest and then he
watched the savages and so did we all.

They were on the malpais by then and they had a tracker who followed us every step
on that naked rock, fallin back at each blind head and callin out to the others. I dont
know what he followed. Scent perhaps. We could soon hear them talkin down there.
Then they seen us.
Well, G-d in his glory knows what they thought. They were scattered out across the lava
and one of them pointed and they all looked up. Thunderstruck no doubt. To see eleven
men perched on the topmost rim of that scalded atoll like misflown birds. They parleyed
. and we watched to see would they dis atch any of their number after the horses but
they did not. Their greed overcame all else and they started for the base of the cone,
scramblin over the lava for to see who would be first.
We had I would suppose an hour. We watched the savages and we watched the judge's
foul matrix dryin on the rocks and we watched a cloud that was making for the sun.
One by one we give up watchin the rocks or the savages either one, for the cloud did
look to be dead set for the sun and it would have took the better part of an hour to
have crossed it and that was the last hour we had. Well, the judge was sittin making
entries in his little book and he saw the cloud same as every other man and he put
down the book and watched it and we did all. No one spoke. There was none to curse
and none to pray, we just watched. And that cloud just cut the corner from the sun
and passed on and there was no shadow fell upon us and the judge took up his ledger
and went on with his entries as before. I watched him. Then I clambered down and
tested a patch of the stuff with my hand. There was heat comin off of it. I walked
along the rim and the savages was ascendin by every quarter for there was no route to
favor on that bald and gravel slope. I looked for rocks of any size to send down but
there was none there larger than your fist, just fine gravel and plates of scrag. I looked
at Glanton and he was watchin the judge and he seemed to have had his wits stole.
Well the judge closed up his little book and took his leather shirt and spread it out in
the little cupped place and called for us to bring the stuff to him. Every knife was out
and we went to scrapin it up and him cautionin us not to strike fire on them flints.
And we heaped it up in the shirt and he commenced to chop and grind it with his
knife. And Captain Glanton, he calls out.
Captain Glanton. Would ye believe it? Captain Glanton, he says. Come charge that
swivelbore of yours and let's see what manner of thing we have here.
Glanton come up with his rifle and he scooped his charger full and he charged both
barrels and patched two balls and drove them home and capped the piece and made to
step to the rim. But that was mver the judge's way.

Down the maw of that thing, he says, and Glanton never questioned it. He went down
the pitch of the inner rim to where lay the terminus of that terrible flue and he held
his piece out over it and pointed it straight down and cocked the hammer and fired.
You wouldnt hear a sound like it in a long day's ride. It give me the fidgets. He fired
both barrels and he looked at us and he looked at the judge. The judge just waved and
went on with his grindin and then he called us all about to fill our horns and flasks
. and we did, one by one, circlin past him like communi ants. And when all had shared
he filled his own flask and he got out his pistols and saw to the priming. The foremost
of the savages was not more than a furlong on the slope. We were ready to lay into
them but again the judge would not have it. He fired off his pistols down into the
caldron, spacin out the shots, and he fired all ten chambers and cautioned us back from
sight while he reloaded the pieces. All this gunfire had give the savages some pause no
doubt for they very likely reckoned us to be without powder altogether. And then the
judge, he steps up to the rim and he had with him a good white linen shirt from out
of his bag and he waved it to the redskins and he called down to them in Spanish.
Well it would have brought tears to your eyes. All dead save me, he called. Have mercy
on me. Todos muertos. Todos. Wavin the shirt. G-d it set them yappin on the slope like
. dogs and he turns to us, the judge, with that smile of his, and he says: Gen lemen.
That was all he said. He had the pistols stuck in his belt at the back and he drew them
one in each hand and he is as eitherhanded as a spider, he can write with both hands
at a time and I've seen him to do it, and he commenced to kill Indians. We needed no
second invitation. G-d it was a butchery. At the first fire we killed a round dozen and
we did not let up. Before the last poor nigger reached the bottom of the slope there
was fifty-eight of them lay slaughtered among the gravels. They just slid down the slope
like chaff down a hopper, some turned this way, some that, and they made a chain
. about the base of the mountain. We rested our rifle barrels on the brim tone and we
shot nine more on the lava where they ran. It was a stand, what it was. Wagers was
laid. The last of them shot was a reckonable part of a mile from the muzzles of the
guns and that on a dead run. It was sharp shootin all around and not a misfire in the
batch with that queer powder.
The expriest turned and looked at the kid. And that was the judge the first ever I saw
him. Aye. He's a thing to study.
The lad looked at Tobin. What's he a judge of? he said.
What's he a judge of?
What's he a judge of.

Tobin glanced off across the fire. Ah lad, he said. Hush now. The man will hear ye.
He's ears like a fox.
XI
Into the mountains - Old Ephraim - A Delaware carried off ?
The search - Another probate - In the gorge - The ruins - Keet seel -
The solerette - Representations and things -
The judge tells a story - A mule lost - Mescal pits -
Night scene with moon, blossoms, judge - The village - Clanton
on the management of animals - The trail out.
They rode on into the mountains and their way took them through high pine forests,
. wind in the trees, lonely bird alls. The shoeless mules slaloming through the dry grass
and pine needles. In the blue coulees on the north slopes narrow tailings of old snow.
They rode up switchbacks through a lonely aspen wood where the fallen leaves lay like
golden disclets in the damp black trail. The leaves shifted in a million spangles down
the pale corridors and Glanton took one and turned it like a tiny fan by its stem and
held it and let it fall and its perfection was not lost on him. They rode through a
narrow draw where the leaves were shingled up in ice and they crossed a high saddle at
sunset where wild doves were rocketing down the wind and passing through the gap a
few feet off the ground, veering wildly among the ponies and dropping off down into
the blue gulf below. They rode on into a dark fir forest, the little Spanish ponies
sucking at the thin air, and just at dusk as Glanton's horse was clambering over a fallen
log a lean blond bear rose up out of the swale on the far side where it had been
feeding and looked down at them with dim pig's eyes.
Glanton's horse reared and Glanton flattened himself along the horse's shoulder and
drew his pistol. One of the Delawares was next behind him and the horse he rode was
. falling back ard and he was trying to turn it, beating it about the head with his balled
fist, and the bear's long muzzle swung toward them in a stunned articulation, amazed
beyond reckoning, some foul gobbet dangling from its jaws and its chops dyed red with
blood. Glanton fired. The ball struck the bear in the chest and the bear leaned with a
strange moan and seized the Delaware and lifted him from the horse. Glanton fired
again into the thick ruff of fur forward of the bear's shoulder as it turned and the man
dangling from the bear's jaws looked down at them cheek and jowl with the brute and

one arm about its neck like some crazed defector in a gesture of defiant camaraderie.
All through the woods a bedlam of shouts and the whack of men beating the screaming
horses into submission. Glanton cocked the pistol a third time as the bear swung with
the indian dangling from its mouth like a doll and passed over him in a sea of
honey-colored hair smeared with blood and a reek of carrion and the rooty smell of the
creature itself. The shot rose and rose, a small core of metal scurrying toward the
distant beltways of matter grinding mutely to the west above them all. Several rifleshots
rang out and the beast loped horribly into the forest with his hostage and was lost
among the darkening trees.
The Delawares trailed the animal three days while the party moved on. The first day
they followed blood and they saw where the thing had rested and where the wounds
had stanched and the next day they followed the dragmarks through the duff of a high
forest floor and the day after they followed only the faintest trace across a high stone
mesa and then nothing. They cut for sign until dark and they slept on the naked flints
and the next day they rose and looked out on all that wild and stony country to the
north. The bear had carried off their kinsman like some fabled storybook beast and the
land had swallowed them up beyond all ransom or reprieve. They caught up their horses
and turned back. Nothing moved in that high wilderness save the wind. They did not
speak. They were men of another time for all that they bore Christian names and they
had lived all their lives in a wilderness as had their fathers before them. They'd learnt
war by warring, the generations driven from the eastern shore across a continent, from
the ashes at Gnadenhutten onto the prairies and across the outlet to the bloodlands of
the west. If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it
. was without measure or bound and there were con ained within it creatures more
horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet
not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness
contained there and whatever beasts.
. They cut the trail of the party early the next day and by night all of the day following
. they had overtaken them. The lost war ior's horse stood saddled in the caballado as
they had left it and they took down the bags and divided his estate among them and
that man's name was never said again. In the evening the judge came to the fire and
sat with them and questioned them and made a map upon the ground and scrutinized
it. Then he rose and trod it out with his boots and in the morning all rode on as
before.
Their way led now through dwarf oak and ilex and over a stony ground where black
trees stood footed in the seams on the slopes. They rode through sunlight and high
grass and in the late afternoon they came out upon an escarpment that seemed to rim
. the known world. Below them in the paling light smol ered the plains of San Agustin

stretching away to the northeast, the earth floating off in a long curve silent under
looms of smoke from the underground coal deposits burning there a thousand years.
The horses picked their way along the rim with care and the riders cast varied glances
out upon that ancient and naked land.
In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook
the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was. They rode in a
narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode
with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the
slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition
austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that
authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to
sun or man or G-d.
. They rode down from this country through a deep gorge, clat ering over the stones,
rifts of cool blue shade. In the dry sand of the arroyo floor old bones and broken
. shapes of painted pot ery and graven on the rocks above them pictographs of horse
and cougar and turtle and the mounted Spaniards helmeted and bucklered and
contemptuous of stone and silence and time itself. Lodged in faults and crevices a
hundred feet above them were nests of straw and jetsam from old high waters and the
riders could hear the mutter of thunder in some nameless distance and they kept watch
on the narrow shape of sky overhead for any darkness of impending rain, threading the
canyon's close pressed flanks, the dry white rocks of the dead river floor round and
smooth as arcane eggs.
That night they camped in the ruins of an older culture deep in the stone mountains, a
small valley with a clear run of water and good grass. Dwellings of mud and stone were
walled up beneath an overhanging cliff and the valley was traced with the work of old
acequias. The loose sand in the valley floor was strewn everywhere with pieces of
pottery and blackened bits of wood and it was crossed and recrossed with the tracks of
deer and other animals.
The judge walked the ruins at dusk, the old rooms still black with woodsmoke, old flints
and broken pottery among the ashes and small dry corncobs. A few rotting wooden
ladders yet leaned against the dwelling walls. He roamed through the ruinous kivas
picking up small artifacts and he sat upon a high wall and sketched in his book until
the light failed.
The moon rose full over the canyon and there was stark silence in the little valley. It
may be it was their own shadows kept the coyotes from abroad for there was no sound
of them or wind or bird in that place but only the light rill of water running over the

sand in the dark below their fires.
The judge all day had made small forays among the rocks of the gorge through which
they'd passed and now at the fire he spread part of a wagonsheet on the ground and
was sorting out his finds and arranging them before him. In his lap he held the leather
ledgerbook and he took up each piece, flint or potsherd or tool of bone, and deftly
sketched it into the book. He sketched with a practiced ease and there was no wrinkling
of that bald brow or pursing of those oddly childish lips. His fingers traced the
impression of old willow wicker on a piece of pottery clay and he put this into his book
with nice shadings, an, economy of pencil strokes. He is a draftsman as he is other
. things, well suf icient to the task. He looks up from time to time at the fire or at his
companions in arms or at the night beyond. Lastly he set before him the footpiece from
a suit of armor hammered out in a shop in Toledo three centuries before, a small steel
tapadero frail and shelled with rot. This the judge sketched in profile and in perspective,
citing the dimensions in his neat script, making marginal notes.
. Glanton watched him. When he had done he took up the lit le footguard and turned it
in his hand and studied it again and then he crushed it into a ball of foil and pitched
it into the fire. He gathered up the other artifacts and cast them also into the fire and
he shook out the wagonsheet and folded it away among his possibles together with the
notebook. Then he sat with his hands cupped in his lap and he seemed much satisfied
with the world, as if his counsel had been sought at its creation.
A Tennessean named Webster had been watching him and he asked the judge what he
aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the judge smiled and said that it was
his intention to expunge them from the memory of man. Webster smiled and the judge
laughed. Webster regarded him with one eye asquint and he said: Well you've been a
draftsman somewheres and them pictures is like enough the things themselves. But no
man can put all the world in a book. No more than everthing drawed in a book is so.
Well said, Marcus, spoke the judge.
But dont draw me, said Webster. For I dont want in your book.
My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the
book wherein it's writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no
book at all.
You're a formidable riddler and I'll not match words with ye. Only save my crusted mug
from out your ledger there for I'd not have it shown about perhaps to strangers.

The judge smiled. Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other
and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the
uttermost edge of the world.
I'll stand for my own witness, said Webster, but by now the others had begun to call to
him his conceit, and who would want to see his bloody portrait anyway and would there
. be fights break out in the great crowds awaiting its unveiling and per aps they could
tar and feather the picture, lacking the article itself. Until the judge raised his hand and
called for amnesty and told them that Webster's feelings were of a different kind and
not motivated by vanity at all and that he'd once drawn an old Hueco's portrait and
unwittingly chained the man to his own likeness. For he could not sleep for fear an
enemy might take it and deface it and so like was the portrait that he would not suffer
it creased nor anything to touch it and he made a journey across the desert with it to
where he'd heard the judge was to be found and he begged his counsel as to how he
. might preserve the thing and the judge took him deep into the moun ains and they
buried the portrait in the floor of a cave where it lies yet for aught the judge knew.
When he was done telling this Webster spat and wiped his mouth and eyed the judge
again. That man, he said, was no more than a ignorant heathen savage.
That's so, said the judge.
It aint like that with me.
Excellent, said the judge, reaching for his portmanteau. You've no objection to a sketch
then?
I'll sit for no portrait, said Webster. But it aint like you said.
The company fell silent. Someone rose to stoke the fire and the moon ascended and
grew small over the ruined dwellings and the little stream braided over the sands in the
valley floor shone like woven metal and save for the sound it made there was no sound
other.
What kind of indians has these here been, Judge?
The judge looked up.
Dead ones I'd say, what about you, Judge?
Not so dead, said the judge.

. They was passable masons, I'd say that. These niggers here bouts now aint no kind.
Not so dead, said the judge. Then he told them another story and it was this story.
In the western country of the Alleghenies some years ago when it was yet a wilderness
there was a man who kept a harness shop by the side of the Federal road. He did so
because it was his trade and yet he did little of it for there were few travelers in that
place. So that he fell into the habit before long of dressing himself as an indian and
taking up station a few miles above his shop and waiting there by the roadside to ask
whoever should come that way if they would give him money. At this time he had done
no person any injury.
One day a certain man came by and the harnessmaker in his beads and feathers
stepped from behind his tree and asked this certain man for some coins. He was a
young man and he refused and having recognized the harnessmaker for a white man
spoke to him in a way that made the harnessmaker ashamed so that he invited the
young man to come to his dwelling a few miles distant on the road.
This harnessmaker lived in a bark house he had built and he kept a wife and two
children all of whom reckoned the old man mad and were only waiting some chance to
escape him and the wild place he'd brought them to. They therefore welcomed the guest
and the woman gave him his supper. But while he ate the old man again began to try
to wheedle money from him and he said that they were poor as indeed they were and
the traveler listened to him and then he took out two coins which like the old man had
never seen and the old man took the coins and studied them and showed them to his
son and the stranger finished his meal and said to the old man that he might have
those coins.
But ingratitude is more common than you might think and the harnessmaker wasnt
satisfied and he began to question whether he ought not perhaps to have another such
coin for his wife. The traveler pushed back his plate and turned in his chair and gave
the old man a lecture and in this lecture the old man heard things he had once known
but forgotten and he heard some new things to go with them. The traveler concluded by
telling the old man that he was a loss to G-d and man alike and would remain so until
he took his brother into his heart as he would take himself in and he come upon his
own person in want in some desert place in the world.
Now as he was concluding this speech there passed in the road a nigger drawing a
funeral hearse for one of his own kind and it was painted pink and the nigger was
dressed in clothes of every color like a carnival clown and the young man pointed out

this nigger passing in the road and he said that even a black nigger...
Here the judge paused. He had been looking into the fire and he raised his head and
looked around him. His narration was much in the manner of a recital. He had not lost
the thread of his tale. He smiled at the listeners about.
Said that even a crazy black nigger was not less than a man among men. And then the
old man's son stood up and began an oration himself, pointing out at the road and
calling for a place to be made for the nigger. He used those words. That a place be
made. Of course by this time the nigger and hearse had passed on from sight. With this
the old man repented all over again and swore that the boy was right and the old
woman who was seated by the fire was amazed at all she had heard and when the
. guest an ounced that the time had come for his departure she had tears in her eyes
and the little girl came out from behind the bed and clung to his clothes.
The old man offered to walk him out the road so as to see him off on his journey and
to apprise him of which fork in the road to take and which not for there were scarcely
any waysigns in that part of the world.
As they walked out they spoke of life in such a wild place where such people as you
saw you saw but one and never again and by and by they came to the fork in the road
and here the traveler told the old man that he had come with him far enough > and he
thanked him and they took their departure each of the other and the stranger went on
his way. But the harnessmaker seemed unable to suffer the loss of his company and he
called to him and went with him again a little way upon the road. And by and by they
. came to a place where the road was dark ned in a deep wood and in this place the
old man killed the traveler. He killed him with a rock and he took his clothes and he
took his watch and his money and he buried him in a shallow grave by the side of the
road. Then he went home.
On the way he tore his own clothes and bloodied himself with a flint and he told his
wife they had been set upon by robbers and the young traveler murdered and him only
escaped. She began to cry and after a while she made him take her to the place and
she took wild primrose which grew in plenty thereabout and she put it on the stones
and she came there many times until she was old.
The harnessmaker lived until his son was grown and never did anyone harm again. As
he lay dying he called the son to him and told him what he had done. And the son
said that he forgave him if it was his to do so and the old man said that it was his to
do so and then he died.

But the boy was not sorry for he was jealous of the dead man and before he went away
he visited that place and cast away the rocks and dug up the bones and scattered them
. in the forest and then he went away. He went away to the west and he him elf
became a killer of men.
The old woman was still living at the time and she knew none of what had passed and
she thought that wild animals had dug the bones and scattered them. Perhaps she did
not find all the bones but such as she did she restored to the grave and she covered
them up and piled the stones over them and carried flowers to that place as before.
When she was an old woman she told people that it was her son buried there and
perhaps by that time it was so.
Here the judge looked up and smiled. There was a silence, then all began to shout at
once with every kind of disclaimer.
He was no harnessmaker he was a shoemaker and he was cleared of them charges,
called one.
And another: He never lived in no wilderness place, he had a shop dead in the center
of Cumberland Maryland.
They never knew where them bones come from. The old woman was crazy, known to be
so.
That was my brother in that casket and he was a minstrel dancer out of Cincinnati
Ohio was shot to death over a woman. And other protests until the judge raised both
hands for silence. Wait now, he said. For there's a rider to the tale. There was a young
bride waiting for that traveler with whose bones we are acquainted and she bore a child
in her womb that was the traveler's son. Now this son whose father's existence in this
world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it is in a bad way.
All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain.
The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the
father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He
will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see
. . him strug ling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he in erits bears
him false witness. He is broken before a frozen G-d and he will never find his way.
What is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many. The people who once lived
here are called the Anasazi. The old ones. They quit these parts, routed by drought or
. disease or by wan ering bands of marauders, quit these parts ages since and of them
there is no memory. They are rumors and ghosts in this land and they are much

revered. The tools, the art, the building?these things stand in judgement on the latter
races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like
phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of an ancient laughter. In
. their crude huts they crouch in dark ess and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock.
. All progres ions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and
a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead > fathers. Their spirit is entombed in
the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For
whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny
of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who
builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these
masons however primitive their works may seem to us.
None spoke. The judge sat half naked and sweating for all the night was cool. At length
the expriest Tobin looked up.
It strikes me, he said, that either son is equal in the way of disadvantage. So what is
the way of raising a child?
At a young age, said the judge, they should be put in a pit with wild dogs. They should
be set to puzzle out from their proper clues the one of three doors that does not harbor
wild lions. They should be made to run naked in the desert until...
Hold now, said Tobin. The question was put in all earnestness.
And the answer, said the judge. If G-d meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind
would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature
could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to
bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon
of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its
achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves
games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of
savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people,
with other sons.
The judge looked about him. He was sat before the fire naked save for his breeches and
his hands rested palm down upon his knees. His eyes were empty slots. None among
the company harbored any notion as to what this attitude implied, yet so like an icon
was he in his sitting that they grew cautious and spoke with circumspection among
themselves as if they would not waken something that had better been left sleeping.
The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules.

. It went skittering off down the can on wall with the contents of the panniers exploding
. sound essly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning
in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it
forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was. Glanton sat his horse and
studied the adamantine deep beneath him. A raven had set forth from the cliffs far
below to wheel and croak. In the acute light the sheer stone wall wore strange contours
. and the horse en on that promontory seemed very small even to themselves. Glanton
looked upward, briefly, as if there were anything to ascertain in that perfect china sky,
and then he chucked up his horse and they rode on.
Crossing the high mesas in the days to follow they began to come upon burnedout pits
in the ground where the Indians had cooked mescal and they rode through strange
. . forests of maguey he aloe or century plant ith immense flowering stalks that rose
forty feet into the desert air. Each dawn as they saddled their horses they watched the
pale mountains to the north and to the west for any trace of smoke. There was none.
The scouts would be already gone, riding out in the dark before the sun rose, and they
would not return until night, reckoning out the camp in that incoordinate waste by
. palest starlight or in black ess absolute where the company sat among the rocks
without fire or bread or camaraderie any more than banded apes. They crouched in
silence eating raw meat the Delawares had killed on the plain with arrows and they
slept among the bones. A lobeshaped moon rose over the black shapes of the mountains
dimming out the eastern stars and along the nearby ridge the white blooms of flowering
yuccas moved in the wind and in the night bats came from some nether part of the
world to stand on leather wings like dark satanic hummingbirds and feed at the mouths
of those flowers. Farther along the ridge and slightly elevated on a ledge of sandstone
squatted the judge, pale and v naked. He raised his hand and the bats flared in
confusion and then he lowered it and sat as before and soon they were feeding again.
Glanton would not turn back. His calculations concerning the enemy included every
duplicity. He spoke of ambushes. Even he in all his pride could not have believed that a
company of nineteen men had evacuated an area of ten thousand square miles of every
living human. Two days later when the scouts returned in the middle of the afternoon
and reported finding the Apache villages abandoned he would not ride in. They camped
on the mesa and made false fires and lay all night with their rifles on that stony heath.
In the morning they caught up the horses and descended into a wild valley strewn with
grass huts and the remains of old cookfires. They dismounted and moved among the
shelters, frail structures of saplings and weeds stuck into the ground and bent to at the
top to form a rounded hovel over which a few rags of hide or old blankets remained.
The grounds were strewn with bones and knappings of flint or quartzite and they found
pieces of jars and old baskets and broken stone mortars and rifts of dried beanpods
from the mesquite and a child's straw doll and a primitive onestringed fiddie that had

been crushed and a part of a necklace of dried melonseeds.
The hovel doors were waist high and faced the east and few of the shelters were tall
enough to be stood in. The last one that Glanton and David Brown entered was
defended by a large and vicious dog. Brown drew his belt pistol but Glanton stopped
him. He dropped to one knee and spoke to the animal. It crouched against the rear
wall of the hogan and bared its teeth and swung its head from side to side, the ears
. flattened along ide its skull.
He'll bite you, said Brown.
Get me a piece of jerky.
He crouched, talking to the dog. The dog watched him.
You wont man that son of a bitch, said Brown.
I can man anything that eats. Get me a piece of jerky.
When Brown came back with the dried meat the dog was looking about uneasily. When
. they rode west out of the can on it was trotting with a slight limp at the heels of
Glanton's horse.
They followed an old stone trail up out of the valley and through a high pass, the
mules clambering along the ledges like goats. Glanton led his horse and called after the
others, and yet darkness overtook them and they were benighted in that place, strung
out along a fault in the wall of the gorge. He led them cursing upward through the
profoundest dark but the way grew so narrow and the footing so treacherous they were
obliged to halt. The Delawares came back afoot, having left their horses at the top of
the pass, and Glanton threatened to shoot them all were they attacked in that place.
They passed the night each man at the feet of his horse where it stood in the trail
. between a sheer rise and a sheer fall. Glan on sat at the head of the column with his
guns laid out before him. He watched the dog. In the morning they rose and went on,
picking up the other scouts and their horses at the top of the pass and sending them
. on again. They rode through the moun ains all that day and if Glanton slept none saw
him do so.
The Delawares had reckoned the village empty ten days and the Gilenos had decamped
in small bands by every egress. There was no trail to follow. The company rode on
through the mountains singlefile. The scouts were gone for two days. On the third day

they rode into camp with their horses all but ruined. That morning they'd seen fires
atop a thin blue mesa fifty miles to the south.
XII
Crossing the border - Storms - Ice and lightning ?
The slain argonauts - The azimuth - Rendezvous - Councils of war ?
Slaughter of the Gilenos - Death of Juan Miguel - The dead in
the lake - The chief - An Apache child - On the desert - Night fires -
El virote - A surgery - The judge takes a scalp - Un hacendado ?
Callego - Ciudad de Chihuahua.
For the next two weeks they would ride by night, they would make no fire. They had
struck the shoes from their horses and filled the nailholes in with clay and those who
still had tobacco used their pouches to spit in and they slept in caves and on bare
stone. They rode their horses through the tracks of their dismounting and they buried
their stool like cats and they barely spoke at all. Crossing those barren gravel reefs in
the night they seemed remote and without substance. Like a patrol condemned to ride
. out some ancient curse. A thing surmised from the black ess by the creak of leather
and the chink of metal.
They cut the throats of the packanimals and jerked and divided the meat and they
traveled under the cape of the wild mountains upon a broad soda plain with dry
thunder to the south and rumors of light. Under a gibbous moon horse and rider
spanceled to their shadows on the snowblue ground and in each flare of lightning as the
storm advanced those selfsame forms rearing with a terrible redundancy behind them
like some third aspect of their presence hammered out black and wild upon the naked
grounds. They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were
antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For
although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing
that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable
more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is
nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.
They crossed the del Norte and rode south into a land more hostile yet. All day they
crouched like owls under the niggard acacia shade and peered out upon that cooking
world. Dust-devils stood on the horizon like the smoke of distant fires but of living
thing there was none. They eyed the sun in its circus and at dusk they rode out upon
the cooling plain where the western sky was the color of blood. At a desert well they

dismounted and drank jaw to jaw with their horses and remounted and rode on. The
little desert wolves yapped in the dark and Glanton's dog trotted beneath the horse's
. belly, its footfalls stitched pre isely among the hooves.
That night they were visited with a plague of hail out of a faultless sky and the horses
. shied and moaned and the men dis ounted and sat upon the ground with their saddles
over their heads while the hail leaped in the sand like small lucent eggs concocted
alchemically out of the desert darkness. When they resaddled and rode on they went for
miles through cobbled ice while a polar moon rose like a blind cat's eye up over the
rim of the world. In the night they passed the lights of a village on the plain but they
did not alter from their course.
Toward the morning they saw fires on the horizon. Glanton sent the Delawares. Already
the dawnstar burned pale in the east. When they returned they squatted with Glanton
and the judge and the Brown brothers and spoke and gestured and then all remounted
and all rode on.
Five wagons smoldered on the desert floor and the riders dismounted and moved among
the bodies of the dead argonauts in silence, those right pilgrims nameless among the
stones with their terrible wounds, the viscera spilled from their sides and the naked
torsos bristling with arrowshafts. Some by their beards were men but yet wore strange
. menstrual wounds be ween their legs and no man's parts for these had been cut away
and hung dark and strange from out their grinning mouths. In their wigs of dried blood
they lay gazing up with ape's eyes at brother sun now rising in the east.
The wagons were no more than embers armatured with the blackened shapes of
hoop-iron and tires, the redhot axles quaking deep within the coals. The riders squatted
at the fires and boiled water and drank coffee and roasted meat and lay down to sleep
among the dead.
When the company set forth in the evening they continued south as before. The tracks
of the murderers bore on to the west but they were white men who preyed on travelers
in that wilderness and disguised their work to be that of the savages. Notions of chance
. and fate are the preoccupation of men en aged in rash undertakings. The trail of the
argonauts terminated in ashes as told and in the convergence of such vectors in such a
waste wherein the hearts and enterprise of one small nation have been swallowed up
and carried off by another the expriest asked if some might not see the hand of a
cynical G-d conducting with what austerity and what mock surprise so lethal a
congruence. The posting of witnesses by a third and other path altogether might also be
called in evidence as appearing to beggar chance, yet the judge, who had put his horse
forward until he was abreast of the speculants, said that in this was expressed the very

nature of the witness and that his proximity was no third thing but rather the prime,
for what could be said to occur unobserved? The Delawares went on ahead in the dusk
and the Mexican John McGill led the column, dropping from time to time from his
horse to lie flat on his belly and skylight the outriders on the desert before them and
then remount again without halting his pony or the company which followed. They
moved like migrants under a drifting star and their track across the land reflected in its
faint arcature the movements of the earth itself. To the west the cloudbanks stood above
the mountains like the dark warp of the very firmament and the starsprent reaches of
the galaxies hung in a vast aura above the riders' heads.
Two mornings later the Delawares returned from their dawn reconnaissance and reported
the Gilenos camped along the shore of a shallow lake less than four hours to the south.
They had with them their women and children and they were many. Glanton when he
rose from this council walked out on the desert alone and stood for a long time looking
out upon the darkness downcountry.
They saw to their arms, drawing the charges from their pieces and reloading them. They
spoke in low voices among themselves although the desert round lay like a great barren
plate gently quaking in the heat. In the afternoon a detachment led the horses out to
water and led them back again and with dark Glanton and his lieutenants followed the
Delawares out to scout the enemy's position.
They'd driven a stick into the ground on a rise north of the camp and when the angle
of the Dipper had swung about to this inclination Toadvine and the Vandiemanlander
set the company in motion and they rode forth south after the others trammeled to
chords of rawest destiny.
They reached the north end of the lake in the cool hours before dawn and turned along
the shore. The water was very black and along the beach there lay a wrack of foam and
. they could hear ducks talking far out on the lake. The embers of the encamp ent's fires
lay below them in a gentle curve like the lights of a distant port. Before them on that
lonely strand a solitary rider sat his horse. It was one of the Delawares and he turned
his horse without speaking and they followed him up through the brush onto the desert.
The party was crouched in a stand of willow a half mile from the fires of the enemy.
They had muffled the heads of the horses with blankets and the hooded beasts stood
rigid and ceremonial behind them. The new riders dismounted and bound their own
horses and they sat upon the ground while Glanton addressed them.
We got a hour, maybe more. When we ride in it's ever man to his own. Dont leave a
dog alive if you can help it.

How many is there, John?
Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?
There's enough to go around, said the judge.
Dont waste powder and ball on anything that caint shoot back. If we dont kill ever
nigger here we need to be whipped and sent home.
This was the extent of their council. The hour that followed was a long hour. They led
the blindfolded horses down and stood looking out over the encampment but they were
watching the horizon to the east. A bird called. Glanton turned to his horse and
unhooded it like a falconer at morning. A wind had risen and the horse lifted its head
and sniffed the air. The other men followed. The blankets lay where they had fallen.
They mounted, pistols in hand, saps of rawhide and riverrock looped about their wrists
like the implements of some primitive equestrian game. Glanton looked back at them
and then nudged forth his horse.
As they trotted out onto the white salt shore an old man rose from the bushes where
he'd been squatting and turned to face them. The dogs that had been waiting on to
contest his stool bolted yapping. Ducks began to rise by ones and pairs out on the lake.
Someone clubbed the old man down and the riders put rowels to their mounts and
lined out for the camp behind the dogs with their clubs whirling and the dogs howling
in a tableau of some hellish hunt, the partisans nineteen in number bearing down upon
the encampment where there lay sleeping upward of a thousand souls.
Glanton rode his horse completely through the first wickiup trampling the occupants
underfoot. Figures were scrambling out of the low doorways. The raiders went through
the village at full gallop and turned and came back. A warrior stepped into their path
and leveled a lance and Glanton shot him dead. Three others ran and he shot the first
two with shots so closely executed that they fell together and the third one seemed to
be coming apart as he ran, hit by half a dozen pistolballs.
Within that first minute the slaughter had become general.
Women were screaming and naked children and one old man tottered forth waving a
pair of white pantaloons. The horsemen moved among them and slew them with clubs
or knives. A hundred tethered dogs were howling and others were racing crazed among
the huts ripping at one another and at the tied dogs nor would this bedlam and clamor
cease or diminish from the first moment the riders entered the village. Already a

number of the huts were afire and a whole enfilade of refugees had begun streaming
north along the shore wailing crazily with the riders among them like herdsmen clubbing
down the laggards first.
When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the village people were running out
under the horses' hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were
moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and
dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy.
There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in
Spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke
with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and
swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that
the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came
shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous
knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's
warhorse.
By now a small band of warriors had mounted themselves out of the scattered remuda
and they advanced upon the village and rattled a drove of arrows among the burning
huts. Glanton drew his rifle from its scabbard and shot the two lead horses and
resheathed the rifle and drew his pistol and began to fire between the actual ears of his
horse. The mounted indians floundered among the down and kicking horses and they
milled and circled and were shot down one by one until the dozen survivors among
them turned and fled up the lake past the groaning column of refugees and disappeared
in a drifting wake of soda ash.
Glanton turned his horse. The dead lay awash in the shallows like the victims of some
disaster at sea and they were strewn along the salt foreshore in a havoc of blood and
entrails. Riders were towing bodies out of the bloody waters of the lake and the froth
that rode lightly on the beach was a pale pink in the rising light. They moved among
the dead harvesting the long black locks with their knives and leaving their victims
rawskulled and strange jn their bloody cauls. The loosed horses from the remuda came
pounding down the reeking strand and disappeared in the smoke and after a while they
came pounding back. Men were wading about in the red waters hacking aimlessly at the
dead and some lay coupled to the bludgeoned bodies of young women dead or dying on
the beach. One of the Delawares passed with a collection of heads like some strange
vendor bound for market, the hair twisted about his wrist and the heads dangling and
turning together. Glanton knew that every moment on this ground must be contested
later in the desert and he rode among the men and urged them on.
McGill came out of the crackling fires and stood staring bleakly at the scene about. He

had been skewered through with a lance and he held the stock of it before him. It was
fashioned from a sotol stalk and the point of an old cavalry sword bound to the haft
curved from out the small of his back. The kid waded out of the water and approached
him and the Mexican sat down carefully in the sand.
Get away from him, said Glanton.
McGill turned to look at Glanton and as he did so Glanton leveled his pistol and shot
him through the head. He reholstered the gun and stood his empty rifle upright against
the saddle and held it with his knee while he measured powder down the barrels.
Someone shouted to him. The horse trembled and stepped back and Glanton spoke to it
softly and patched two balls and drove them home. He was watching a rise to the north
where a band of mounted Apaches were grouped against the sky.
They were perhaps a quarter mile distant, five, six of them, their cries thin and lost.
Glanton brought the rifle to the crook of his arm and capped one drum and rotated the
barrels and capped the other. He did not take his eyes from the Apaches. Webster
stepped from his horse and drew his rifle and slid the ramrod from the thimbles and
. went to one knee, the ramrod up ight in the sand, resting the rifle's forestock upon the
fist with which he held it. The rifle had set triggers and he cocked the rear one and
laid his face against the cheekpiece. He reckoned the drift of the wind and he reckoned
against the sun on the side of the silver foresight and he held high and touched off the
. piece. Glanton sat immobile. The shot was flat and dead in the empti ess and the gray
smoke drifted away. The leader of the group on the rise sat his horse. Then he slowly
pitched sideways and fell to the ground.
Glanton gave a whoop and surged forward. Four men followed. The warriors on the rise
had dismounted and were lifting up the fallen man. Glanton turned in the saddle
without taking his eyes from the Indians and held out his rifle to the nearest man. This
man was Sam Tate and he took the rifle and reined his horse so short he nearly threw
it. Glanton and three rode on and Tate drew the ramrod for a rest and crouched and
fired. The horse that carried the wounded chief faltered, ran on. He swiveled the barrels
and fired the second charge and it plowed to the ground. The Apaches reined with shrill
cries. Glanton leaned forward and spoke into his horse's ear. The indians raised up their
leader to a new mount and riding double they flailed at their horses and set out again.
Glanton had drawn his pistol and he gestured with it to the men behind and one pulled
up his horse and leaped to the ground and went flat on his belly and drew and cocked
his own pistol and pulled down the loading lever and stuck it in the sand and holding
the gun in both hands with his chin buried in the ground he sighted along the barrel.
The horses were two hundred yards out and moving fast. With the second shot the pony
that bore the leader bucked and a rider alongside reached and took the reins. They were

attempting to take the leader off the wounded animal in mid-stride when the animal
collapsed.
Glanton was first to reach the dying man and he knelt with that alien and barbarous
head cradled between his thighs like some reeking outland nurse and dared off the
savages with his revolver. They circled on the plain and shook their bows and lofted a
few arrows at him and then turned and rode on. Blood bubbled from the man's chest
and he turned his lost eyes upward, already glazed, the capillaries breaking up. In those
dark pools there sat each a small and perfect sun.
He rode back to the camp at the fore of his small column with the chiefs head hanging
by its hair from his belt. The men were stringing up scalps on strips of leather whang
and some of the dead lay with broad slices of hide cut from their backs to be used for
the making of belts and harness. The dead Mexican McGill had been scalped and the
bloody skulls were already blackening in the sun. Most of the wickiups were burned to
the ground and because some gold coins had been found a few of the men were kicking
through the smoldering ashes. Glanton cursed them on, taking up a lance and mounting
the head upon it where it bobbed and leered like a carnival head and riding up and
back, calling to them to round up the caballado and move out. When he turned his
horse he saw the judge sitting on the ground. The judge had taken off his hat and was
drinking water from a leather bottle. He looked up at Glanton.
It's not him.
What's not?
The judge nodded. That.
Glanton turned the shaft. The head with its long dark locks swung about to face him.
Who do you think it is if it aint him?
The judge shook his head. It's not Gomez. He nodded toward the thing. That gentleman
is sangre puro. Gomez is Mexican.
He aint all Mexican.
You cant be all Mexican. It's like being all mongrel. But that's not Gomez because I've
seen Gomez and it's not him.
Will it pass for him?

No.
Glanton looked toward the north. He looked down at the judge. You aint seen my dog
have ye? he said.
The judge shook his head. Do you intend to drive that stock?
Until I'm made to quit.
That might be soon.
That might be.
How long do you think it will take these yahoos to regroup?
Glanton spat. It wasnt a question and he didnt answer it. Where's your horse? he said.
Gone.
Well if you aim to ride with us you better be for gettin you another one. He looked at
the head on the pole. You was some kind of G-ddamned chief, he said. He nudged the
horse forward with his heels and rode out along the water's edge. The Dela-wares were
wading about in the lake feeling for sunken bodies with their feet. He sat there a
moment and then he turned the horse and rode up through the sacked encampment. He
rode warily, his pistol across his thigh. He followed the tracks coming down from the
desert where they'd ridden in. When he returned he had with him the scalp of the old
man who had first stood up out of the bushes at dawn.
Within the hour they were mounted and riding south leaving behind them on the
scourged shore of the lake a shambles of blood and salt and ashes and driving before
them a half a thousand horses and mules. The judge rode at the head of the column
bearing on the saddle before him a strange dark child covered with ash. Part of its hair
was burned away and it rode mute and stoic watching the land advance before it with
huge black eyes like some changeling. The men as they rode turned black in the sun
from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust
until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed.
They rode all day with Glanton bringing up the rear of the column. Toward noon the
dog caught them up. His chest was dark with blood and Glanton carried him on the
pommel of the saddle until he could recruit himself. In the long afternoon he trotted in

the shadow of the horse and in the twilight he trotted far out on the plain where the
tall shapes of the horses skated over the chaparral on spider legs.
By now there was a thin line of dust to the north and they rode on into dark and the
Delawares dismounted and lay with their ears to the ground and then they mounted up
and all rode on again.
When they halted Glanton ordered fires built and the wounded seen to. One of the
mares had foaled in the desert and this frail form soon hung skewered on a paloverde
pole over the raked coals while the Delawares passed among themselves a gourd
containing the curdled milk taken from its stomach. From a slight rise to the west of
the camp the fires of the enemy were visible ten miles to the north. The company
squatted in their bloodstiffened hides and counted the scalps and strung them on poles,
the blueblack hair dull and clotted with blood. David Brown went among these haggard
butchers as they crouched before the flames but he could find him no surgeon. He
carried an arrow in his thigh, fletching and all, and none would touch it. Least of all
would Doc Irving, for Brown called him a mortician and a barber and they kept their
distance one from the other.
Boys, said Brown, I'd doctorfy it myself but I caint get no straight grip.
The judge looked up at him and smiled.
Will you do her, Holden?
No, Davy, I wont. But I tell you what I will do.
What's that.
I'll write a policy on your life against every mishap save the noose.
Damn you then.
The judge chuckled. Brown glared about him. Will none of ye help a man?
None spoke.
Damn all of ye then, he said.
He sat and stretched his leg out on the ground and looked at it, he bloodier than most.
He gripped the shaft and bore down on it. The sweat stood on his forehead. He held

his leg and swore softly. Some watched, some did not. The kid rose. I'll try her, he said.
Good lad, said Brown.
He fetched his saddle to lean against. He turned his leg to the fire for the light and
folded his belt and held it and hissed down at the boy kneeling there. Grip her stout,
lad. And drive her straight. Then he gripped the belt in his teeth and lay back.
The kid took hold of the shaft close to the man's thigh and pressed forward with his
weight. Brown seized the ground on either side of him and his head flew back and his
wet teeth shone in the firelight. The kid took a new grip and bore down again. The
veins in the man's neck stood like ropes and he cursed the boy's soul. On the fourth
essay the point of the arrow came through the flesh of the man's thigh and blood ran
over the ground. The kid sat back on his heels and passed the sleeve of his shirt across
his brow.
Brown let the belt fall from his teeth. Is it through? he said.
It is.
The point? Is it the point? Speak up, man.
The kid drew his knife and cut away the bloody point deftly and handed it up. Brown
held it to the firelight and smiled. The point was of hammered copper and it was
cocked in its blood-soaked bindings on the shaft but it had held.
Stout lad, ye'll make a shadetree sawbones yet. Now draw her.
The kid withdrew the shaft from the man's leg smoothly and the man bowed on the
ground in a lurid female motion and wheezed raggedly through his teeth. He lay there a
moment and then he sat up and took the shaft from the kid and threw it in the fire
and rose and went off to make his bed.
When the kid returned to his own blanket the expriest leaned to him and hissed at his
ear.
Fool, he said. G-d will not love ye forever.
The kid turned to look at him.
Dont you know he'd of took you with him? He'd of took you, boy. Like a bride to the

altar.
They rose up and moved on sometime after midnight. Glanton had ordered the fires
built up and they rode out with the flames lighting all the grounds about and the
shadowshapes of the desert brush reeling on the sands and the riders treading their thin
and flaring shadows until they had crossed altogether into the darkness which so well
became them.
The horses and mules were ranged far out over the desert and they picked them up for
miles to the south and drove them on. The sourceless summer lightning marked out of
the night dark mountain ranges at the rim of the world and the halfwild horses on the
plain before them trotted in those bluish strobes like horses called forth quivering out of
the abyss.
In the smoking dawn the party riding ragged and bloody with their baled peltries looked
less like victors than the harried afterguard of some ruined army retreating across the
meridians of chaos and old night, the horses stumbling, the men tottering asleep in the
saddles. The broached day discovered the same barren countryside about and the smoke
from their fires of the night before stood thin and windless to the north. The pale dust
of the enemy who were to hound them to the gates of the city seemed no nearer and
they shambled on through the rising heat driving the crazed horses before them.
Midmorning they watered at a stagnant pothole that had already been walked through
by three hundred animals, the riders hazing them out of the water and dismounting to
drink from their hats and then riding on again down the dry bed of the stream and
clattering over the stony ground, dry rocks and boulders and then the desert soil again
red and sandy and the constant mountains about them thinly grassed and grown with
ocotillo and sotol and the secular aloes blooming like phantasmagoria in a fever land. At
dusk they sent riders west to build fires on the prairie and the company lay down in
the dark and slept while bats crossed silently overhead among the stars. When they rode
on in the morning it was still dark and the horses all but fainting. Day found the
heathen much advanced upon them. They fought their first stand the dawn following
and they fought them running for eight days and nights on the plain and among the
rocks in the mountains and from the walls and azoteas of abandoned haciendas and
they lost not a man.
On the third night they crouched in the keep of old walls of slumped mud with the
fires of the enemy not a mile distant on the desert. The judge sat with the Apache boy
before the fire and it watched everything with dark berry eyes and some of the men
played with it and made it laugh and they gave it jerky and it sat chewing and
watching gravely the figures that passed above it. They covered it with a blanket and in

the morning the judge was dandling it on one knee while the men saddled their horses.
Toadvine saw him with the child as he passed with his saddle but when he came back
ten minutes later leading his horse the child was dead and the judge had scalped it.
Toadvine put the muzzle of his pistol against the great dome of the judge's head.
G-ddamn you, Holden.
You either shoot or take that away. Do it now.
Toadvine put the pistol in his belt. The judge smiled and wiped the scalp on the leg of
his trousers and rose and turned away. Another ten minutes and they were on the plain
again in full flight from the Apaches.
On the afternoon of the fifth day they were crossing a dry pan at a walk, driving the
horses before them, the indians behind just out of rifle range calling out to them in
Spanish. From time to time one of the company would dismount with rifle and wiping
stick and the indians would flare like quail, pulling their ponies around and standing
behind them. To the east trembling in the heat stood the thin white walls of a hacienda
and the trees thin and green and rigid rising from it like a scene viewed in a diorama.
. . An hour later they were driving the horses erhaps now a hundred head long these
walls and down a worn trail toward a spring. A young man rode out and welcomed
them formally in Spanish. No one answered. The young rider looked down along the
creek where the fields were laid out with acequias and where the workers in their dusty
white costumes stood poised with hoes among the new cotton or waist-high corn. He
looked back to the northwest. The Apaches, seventy, eighty of them, were just coming
past the first of a row of jacales and defiling along the path and into the shade of the
trees.
The peons in the fields saw them at about the same time. They flung their implements
from them and began to run, some shrieking, some with their hands atop their heads.
The young Don looked at the Americans and he looked at the approaching savages
again. He called out something in Spanish. The Americans drove the horses up out of
the spring and on through the grove of cottonwoods. The last they saw of him he had
drawn a small pistol from his boot and had turned to face the indians.
That evening they led the Apaches through the town of Gallego, the street a mud gutter
patrolled by swine and wretched hairless dogs. It appeared deserted. The young corn in
. the road ide fields had been washed by recent rains and stood white and luminous,
bleached almost transparent by the sun. They rode most of the night and the next day
the indians were still there.

They fought them again at Encinillas and they fought them in the dry passes going
toward El Sauz and beyond in the low foothills from which they could already see the
churchspires of the city to the south. On the twenty-first of July in the year eighteen
forty-nine they rode into the city of Chihuahua to a hero's welcome, driving the
harlequin horses before them through the dust of the streets in a pandemonium of teeth
and whited eyes. Small boys ran among the hooves and the victors in their gory rags
smiled through the filth and the dust and the caked blood as they bore on poles the
desiccated heads of the enemy through that fantasy of music and flowers.
XIII
At the baths - Merchants - Trophies of war -The banquet ?
Trias - The ball - North - Coyame - The border - The Hueco tanks -
Massacre of the Tiguas - Carrizal - A desert spring ?
The Medanos - An inquest concerning teeth -Nacori - The cantina -
A desperate encounter - Into the mountains ?
A village decimated - Mounted lancers - A skirmish -
Pursuing the survivors - The plains of Chihuahua ?
Slaughter of the soldiers - A burial -Chihuahua - Westward.
Their progress was swelled by new riders, by boys on mule-_ back and old men in
plaited hats and a deputation that took charge of the captured horses and mules and
hazed them on through the narrow streets toward the bullring where they could be kept.
The tattered campaigners surged on, some now holding aloft cups that had been pressed
upon them, waving to the ladies clustered on the balconies their putrescent hats and
elevating the bobbing heads with those strange halflidded looks of ennui into which the
features had dried, all so hemmed about now by the citizenry that they seemed the
vanguard of some ragged uprising and heralded before by a pair of drummers one
witless and both barefoot and by a trumpeter who marched with one arm raised above
his head in a martial gesture and playing the while. In this manner they passed through
the standing portals of the governor's palace, over the worn stone sills and into the
courtyard where the broomed hooves of the mercenaries' shoeless horses subsided upon
the cobbles with a curious turtlelike clatter. Hundreds of onlookers pressed about as the
dried scalps were counted out upon the stones. Soldiers with muskets kept back the
crowds and young girls watched the Americans with huge black eyes and boys crept
forth to touch the grisly trophies. There were one hundred and twenty-eight scalps and
eight heads and the governor's lieutenant and his retinue came down into the courtyard
to welcome them and admire their work. They were promised full payment in gold at

the dinner to be held in their honor that evening at the Riddle and Stephens Hotel and
with this the Americans sent up a cheer and mounted their horses again. Old women in
black rebozos ran forth to kiss the hems of their reeking shirts and hold up their dark
little hands in blessing and the riders wheeled their gaunted mounts and pushed through
the clamoring multitude and into the street.
They moved on to the public baths where they descended one by one into the waters,
each more pale than the one before and all tattooed, branded, sutured, the great
. puckered scars in ugurated G-d knows where by what barbarous surgeons across chests
and abdomens like the tracks of gigantic millipedes, some deformed, fingers missing,
eyes, their foreheads and arms stamped with letters and numbers as if they were articles
. requiring inven ory. Citizens of both sexes withdrew along the walls and watched the
water turn into a thin gruel of blood and filth and none could take their eyes from the
judge who had disrobed last of all and now walked the perimeter of the baths with a
. cigar in his mouth and a regal air, testing the waters with one toe, surpris ngly petite.
He shone like the moon so pale he was and not a hair to be seen anywhere upon that
vast corpus, not in any crevice nor in the great bores of his nose and not upon his
chest nor in his ears nor any tuft at all above his eyes nor to the lids thereof. The
immense and gleaming dome of his naked skull looked like a cap for bathing pulled
down to the otherwise darkened skin of his face and neck. As that great bulk lowered
itself into the bath the waters rose perceptibly and when he had submerged himself to
. the eyes he looked about with consider ble pleasure, the eyes slightly crinkled, as if he
were smiling under the water like some pale and bloated manatee surfaced in a bog
while behind his small and close-set ear the wedged cigar smoked gently just above the
waterline.
By now merchants had spread their wares all along the clay tiles behind them, suits of
European cloth and cut and shirts of colored silks and closenapped beaver hats and fine
Spanish leather boots, silverheaded canes and riding crops and silvermounted saddles
and carven pipes and hideout guns and a group of Toledo swords with ivory hilts and
nicely chased blades and barbers were setting up chairs to receive them, crying out the
names of celebrated patrons upon whom they had attended, and all of these
entrepreneurs assuring the company of credit on the most generous terms.
. When they crossed the square attired in their new haber ashery, some with coatsleeves
barely past their elbows, the scalps were being strung about the iron fretwork of the
gazebo like decorations for some barbaric celebration. The severed heads had been raised
on poles above the lampstandards where they now contemplated with their caved and
pagan eyes the dry hides of their kinsmen and forebears strung across the stone facade
of the cathedral and clacking lightly in the wind. Later when the lamps were lit the
heads in the soft glare of the up-light assumed the look of tragic masks and within a

few days they would become mottled white and altogether leprous with the droppings of
the birds that roosted upon them.
This Angel Trias who was governor had been sent abroad as a young man for his
education and was widely read in the classics and was a student of languages. He was
also a man among men and the rough warriors he'd hired for the protection of the state
seemed to warm something in him. When the lieutenant invited Glanton and his officers
to dine Glanton replied that he and his men did not keep separate mess. The lieutenant
yielded the point with a smile and Trias had done the same. They arrived in good
order, shaved and shorn and turned out in their new boots and finery, the Delawares
strangely austere and menacing in their morningcoats, all to gather about the table set
for them. Cigars were presented and glasses of sherry poured and the governor standing
at the head of the table made them welcome and issued orders to his chamberlain that
every need be seen to. Soldiers attended them, fetching extra glasses, pouring the wine,
lighting cigars from a wick in a silver holder designed for just that purpose. The judge
arrived last of all, dressed in a well-cut suit of unbleached linen that had been made for
him that very afternoon. Whole bolts of cloth exhausted and squads of tailors as well in
that fabrication. His feet were encased in nicely polished gray kid boots and in his hand
he held a panama hat that had been spliced together from two such lesser hats by such
painstaking work that the joinery did scarcely show at all.
Trias had already taken his seat when the judge made his appearance but no sooner
had the governor seen him than he rose again and they shook hands cordially and the
governor had him seated at his right and they at once fell into conversation in a tongue
none other in that room spoke at all saving for random vile epithets drifted down from
the north. The expriest was sat opposite the kid and he raised his brows and motioned
toward the head of the table with a swing of his eyes. The kid, in the first starched
collar he'd ever owned and the first cravat, sat mute as a tailor's dummy at that board.
By now the table was fully commenced and there was a tandem run of dishes, fish and
fowl and beef and wild meats of the countryside and a roast shoat on a platter and
casseroles of savories and trifles and glaces and bottles of wine and brandy from the
vineyards at El Paso. Patriotic toasts were drunk, the governor's aides raising their
glasses to Washington and Franklin and the Americans responding with yet more of
their own country's heroes, ignorant alike of diplomacy and any name at all from the
pantheon of their sister republic. They fell to and they continued to eat until they had
exhausted first the banquet and then the larder of the hotel altogether. Couriers were
sent abroad through the city to fetch more only to have this also vanish and more sent
for until Riddle's cook barricaded the door with his body and the soldiers in attendance.
took to simply dumping great trays of pastries, fried meatskins, rounds of cheese
. hatever they could find ut upon the table.

The governor had tapped his glass and risen to speak in his well-phrased english, but
the bloated and belching mercenaries were leering about and were calling for more drink
and some had not ceased to scream out toasts, now degenerated into obscene pledges to
the whores of various southern cities. The bursar was introduced to cheers, catcalls,
hoisted bumpers. Glanton took charge of the long canvas bag stamped with the state
cartouche and cutting the governor short he rose and dumped the gold out onto the
table among the bones and rinds and pools of spilled drink and in a brisk drumhead
disbursement divided out the pile of gold with the blade of his knife so that each man
was paid his spoken share and no further ceremony to it. A sort of skiffle band had
struck up a lugubrious air in one corner of the hall and first up was the judge who
ushered the players and their instruments into the adjoining ballroom where a number
of ladies who had been sent for sat already about the walls on benches and fanned
themselves without apparent alarm.
The Americans debouched into the dancing hall by ones and twos and by groups, chairs
pushed back, chairs pushed over to lie where they fell. Wall lamps in their tin reflectors
had been lit all about the room and the celebrants foregathered there cast conflicting
shadows. The scalphunters stood grinning at the dames, churlishlooking in their
shrunken clothes, sucking their teeth, armed with knives and pistols and mad about the
eyes. The judge was in close conference with the band and soon a quadrille was struck
up. A great lurching and stomping ensued while the judge, affable, gallant, squired first
one and then another of the ladies through the steps with an easy niceness. By
midnight the governor had excused himself and members of the band had begun to slip
away. A blind street harpist stood terrified upon the banquet table among the bones and
platters and a horde of luridlooking whores had infiltrated the dance.
Pistolfire soon became general and Mr Riddle, who was acting American consul in the
city, descended to remonstrate with the revelers and was warned away. Fights broke out.
Furniture was disassembled, men waving chairlegs, candlestands. Two whores grappled
and pitched into a sideboard and went to the floor in a crash of brandyglasses. Jackson,
pistols drawn, lurched into the street vowing to Shoot the ass off Jesus Christ, the
longlegged white son of a bitch. At dawn the shapes of insensate topers lay snoring
about the floor among dark patches of drying blood. Bathcat and the harpist lay asleep
upon the banquet table in one another's arms. A family of thieves were tiptoeing
through the wreckage turning out the pockets of the sleepers and the remains of a
bonfire that had consumed a good part of the hotel's furnishings smoldered in the street
before the door.
These scenes and scenes like them were repeated night after night. The citizenry made
address to the governor but he was much like the sorcerer's apprentice who could

indeed provoke the imp to do his will but could in no way make him cease again. The
baths had become bordellos, the attendants driven off. The white stone fountain in the
plaza was filled at night with naked and drunken men. Cantinas were evacuated as if by
fire with the appearance of any two of the company and the Americans found
themselves in ghost taverns with drinks on the tables and cigars still burning in the clay
ashtrays. Horses were ridden indoors and out and as the gold began to dwindle away
shopkeepers found themselves presented with debits scrawled on butcherpaper in a
foreign language for whole shelves of goods. Stores began to close. Charcoal scrawls
appeared on the limewashed walls. Mejor los indios. The evening streets stood empty
and there were no paseos and the young girls of the city were boarded up and seen no
more.
. On the fifteenth of August they rode out. A week later a com any of drovers reported
them investing the town of Coyame eighty miles to the northeast.
The village of Coyame had for some years been laid under annual contribution by
Gomez and his band. When Glanton and his men rode in they were fallen upon as
saints. Women ran alongside the horses to touch their boots and presents of every kind
were pressed upon them until each man rode with an embarrassment of melons and
pastries and trussed chickens gathered in the bow of his saddle. When they rode out
three days later the streets stood empty, not even a dog followed them to the gates.
They traveled northeast as far as the town of Presidio on the Texas border and they
crossed the horses and rode dripping through the streets. A soil where Glanton was
subject to arrest. He rode out alone on the desert and sat the horse and he and the
horse and the dog looked out across the rolling scrubland and the barren peppercorn
hills and the mountains and the flat brush country and running plain beyond where four
hundred miles to the east were the wife and child that he would not see again. His
shadow grew long before him on the banded wash of sand. He would not follow. He
had taken off his hat for the evening wind to cool him and at length he put it on again
and turned the horse and rode back.
They wandered the borderland for weeks seeking some sign of the Apache. Deployed
. upon that plain they moved in a con tant elision, ordained agents of the actual
dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what
would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. Spectre horsemen, pale
with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at
venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute
rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous
and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a
time before nomenclature was and each was all.

They killed wild meat and they took what they required by way of commissary from the
pueblos and estancias through which they passed. One evening almost within sight of
the town of El Paso they looked off toward the north where the Gilenos wintered and
they knew they would not be going there. They camped that night at the Hueco tanks, a
group of natural stone cisterns in the desert. The rocks about in every sheltered place
were covered with ancient paintings and the judge was soon among them copying out
those certain ones into his book to take away with him. They were of men and animals
and of the chase and there were curious birds and arcane maps and there were
constructions of such singular vision as to justify every fear of man and the things that
. . are in him. Of these etchings ome bright yet with color here were hundreds, and yet
the judge went among them with assurance, tracing out the very ones which he
required. When he had done and while there yet was light he returned to a certain
stone ledge and sat a while and studied again the work there. Then he rose and with a
piece of broken chert he scappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a
raw place on the stone where it had been. Then he put up his book and returned to
the camp.
In the morning they rode out to the south. Little was said, nor were they quarrelsome
among themselves. In three days they would fall upon a band of peaceful Tiguas camped
on the river and slaughter them every soul.
On the eve of that day they crouched about the fire where it hissed in a softly falling
rain and they ran balls and cut patches as if the fate of the aborigines had been cast
into shape by some other agency altogether. As if such destinies were prefigured in the
very rock for those with eyes to read. No man stood to tender them a defense. Toadvine
and the kid conferred together and when they rode out at noon the day following they
trotted their horses alongside Bathcat. They rode in silence. Them sons of bitches aint
botherin nobody, Toadvine said. The Vandieman-lander looked at him. He looked at the
livid letters tattooed on his forehead and at the lank greasy hair that hung from his
earless skull. He looked at the necklace of gold teeth at his chest. They rode on.
They approached those wretched pavilions in the long light of the day's failing, coming
up from downwind along the south bank of the river where they could smell the
woodsmoke of the cookfires. When the first dogs barked Glanton roweled his horse
forward and they came out of the trees and across the dry scrub with the long necks of
the horses leaning out of the dust avid as hounds and the riders quirting them on into
the sun where the shapes of the women rising up from their tasks stood flat and rigid
in silhouette for a moment before they could quite believe in the reality of that dusty
pandemoniac pounding down upon them. They stood dumb, barefoot, clad in the
unbleached cotton of the country. They clutched cooking ladles, naked children. At the

first fire a dozen of them crumpled and fell.
The others had begun to run, old people flinging up their hands, children tottering and
blinking in the pistolfire. A few young men ran out with drawn bows and were shot
down and then the riders were all through the village trampling down the grass
wickiups and bludgeoning the shrieking householders.
Long past dark that night when the moon was already up a party of women that had
been upriver drying fish returned to the village and wandered howling through the ruins.
A few fires still smoldered on the ground and dogs slank off from among the corpses.
An old woman knelt at the blackened stones before her door and poked brush into the
coals and blew back a flame from the ashes and began to right the overturned pots. All
about her the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or luminescent
melons cooling on some mesa of the moon. In the days to come the frail black rebuses
of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of
few suns all trace of the destruction of these people would be erased. The desert wind
would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any
pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place
died.
. The Americans entered the town of Carrizal late in the after oon of the second day
following, their horses festooned with the reeking scalps of the Tiguas. This town had
fallen almost to ruin. Many of the houses stood empty and the presidio was collapsing
back into the earth out of which it had been raised and the inhabitants seemed
themselves made vacant by old terrors. They watched the passing of that bloodstained
argosy through their streets with dark and solemn eyes. Those riders seemed journeyed
from a legendary world and they left behind a strange tainture like an afterimage on the
eye and the air they disturbed was altered and electric. They passed along the ruinous
walls of the cemetery where the dead were trestled up in niches and the grounds strewn
with bones and skulls and broken pots like some more ancient ossuary. Other ragged
folk appeared in the dusty streets behind them and stood looking after.
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 head tall. 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 com any dismounted and
crowded through the doorway and took tables. Tobin volunteered to guard the horses.
. He stood watch ng 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 con inued 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 en ountered 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 door ay 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 dra
.ooned 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 breath ng 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 morn ng 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 black ess 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 with 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.
For a while they rode almost parallel toward the gates of the city, the two parties
bloody and ragged, the horses stumbling. Glanton called out to them to surrender but
they rode on. He drew his rifle. They were shambling along the road like dumb things.
He pulled up his horse and it stood with its legs spread and its flanks heaving and he
leveled the rifle and fired.
They were for the most part no longer even armed. There were nine of them and they
halted and turned and then they charged across that intermittent ground of rock and
scrub and were shot down in the space of a minute.
The horses were caught and herded back to the road and the saddles and trappings cut

away. The bodies of the dead were stripped and their uniforms and weapons burned
along with the saddles and other gear and the Americans dug a pit in the road and
buried them in a common grave, the naked bodies with their wounds like the victims of
surgical experimentation lying in the pit gaping sightlessly at the desert sky as the dirt
was pushed over them. They trampled the spot with their horses until it looked much
like the road again and the smoking gunlocks and sabreblades and girthrings were
dragged from the ashes of the fire and carried away and buried in a separate place and
the riderless horses hazed off into the desert and in the evening the wind carried away
the ashes and the wind blew in the night and fanned the last smoldering billets and
drove forth the last fragile race of sparks fugitive as flintstrikings in the unanimous dark
of the world.
They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of the citizenry for
whose protection they had contracted. The scalps of the slain villagers were strung from
the windows of the governor's house and the partisans were paid out of the all but
exhausted coffers and the Sociedad was disbanded and the bounty rescinded. Within a
week of their quitting the city there would be a price of eight thousand pesos posted for
Glanton's head. They rode out on the north road as would parties bound for El Paso
but before they were even quite out of sight of the city they had turned their tragic
mounts to the west and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that
day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun.
XIV
Mountain storms - Tierras quemadas, tierras despobladas -
Jesiis Maria - The inn - Shopkeepers - A bodega - The fiddler -
The priest - Las Animas - The procession -Cazando las almas -
Clanton takes a fit - Dogs for sale - The judge prestidigitant -
The flag - A shootout - An exodus - The conducta - Blood and
mercury - At the ford - Jackson restored - The jungle -
An herbalist ?The judge collects specimens ?The point of view for
his work as a scientist - Ures ?The populace - Los pordioseros ?
A fandango - Pariah dogs - Clanton and judge.

All to the north the rain had dragged black tendrils down from the thunderclouds like
tracings of lampblack fallen in a beaker and in the night they could hear the drum of
rain miles away on the prairie. They ascended through a rocky pass and lightning
. shaped out the distant shivering mountains and light ing rang the stones about and
tufts of blue fire clung to the horses like incandescent elementals that would not be
driven off. Soft smelterlights advanced upon the metal of the harness, lights ran blue
and liquid on the barrels of the guns. Mad jackhares started and checked in the blue
glare and high among those clanging crags jokin roehawks crouched in their feathers or
cracked a yellow eye at the thunder underfoot.
They rode for days through the rain and they rode through rain and hail and rain
again. In that gray storm light they crossed a flooded plain with the footed shapes of
the horses reflected in the water among clouds and mountains and the riders slumped
forward and rightly skeptic of the shimmering cities on the distant shore of that sea
whereon they trod miraculous. They climbed up through rolling grasslands where small
birds shied away chittering down the wind and a buzzard labored up from among bones
with wings that went whoop whoop whoop like a child's toy swung on a string and in
the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of
primal blood.
They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wild-flowers, acres of golden
groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory and a
vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like a gingham print to the farthest
serried rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising out of nothing like
. the backs of seabeasts in a de onian dawn. It was raining again and they rode
slouched under slickers hacked from greasy halfcured hides and so cowled in these
primitive skins before the gray and driving rain they looked like wardens of some dim
sect sent forth to proselytize among the very beasts of the land. The country before
them lay clouded and dark. They rode through the long twilight and the sun set and no
moon rose and to the west the mountains shuddered again and again in clattering
frames and burned to final darkness and the rain hissed in the blind night land. They
went up through the foothills among pine trees and barren rock and they went up
. through juniper and spruce and the rare great aloes and the ris ng stalks of the yuccas
. with their pale blooms silent and un arthly among the evergreens.
In the night they followed a mountain torrent in a wild gorge choked with mossy rocks
and they rode under dark grottoes where the water dripped and spattered and tasted of
iron and they saw the silver filaments of cascades divided upon the faces of distant
buttes that appeared as signs and wonders in the heavens themselves so dark was the
ground of their origins. They crossed the blackened wood of a burn and they rode
through a region of cloven rock where great boulders lay halved with smooth uncentered

faces and on the slopes of those ferric grounds old paths of fire and the blackened
bones of trees assassinated in the mountain storms. On the day following they began to
encounter holly and oak, hardwood forests much like those they had quit in their youth.
In pockets on the north slopes hail lay nested like tectites among the leaves and the
nights were cool. They traveled through the high country deeper into the mountains
where the storms had their lairs, a fiery clangorous region where white flames ran on
the peaks and the ground bore the burnt smell of broken flint. At night the wolves in
the dark forests of the world below called to them as if they were friends to man and
Glanton's dog trotted moaning among the endlessly articulating legs of the horses.
Nine days out of Chihuahua they passed through a gap in the mountains and began to
descend by a trail that ran carved along the solid stone face of a bluff a thousand feet
above the clouds. A great stone mammoth watched from the gray escarpment above
them. They picked their way down singlefile. They passed through a tunnel hewn in the
rock and on the other side miles below them in a gorge lay the roofs of a town.
They descended by rocky switchbacks and across the beds of streams where small trout
stood on their pale fins and studied the noses of the drinking horses. Sheets of mist
that smelled and tasted of metal rose out of the gorge and crossed over them and
moved on through the woods. They nudged the horses through the ford and down the
trace and at three oclock in the afternoon in a thin and drizzling rain they rode into
the old stone town of Jesus Maria.
They clattered over the rainwashed cobbles stuck with leaves and crossed a stone bridge
and rode up the street under the dripping eaves of the galleried buildings and along a
mountain torrent that ran through the town. Small oremills had been ground into the
polished rocks in the river and the hills above the town were everywhere tunneled and
scaffolded and scarred with drifts and tailings. The raggletag advent of the riders was
howled about by a few wet dogs crouched in doorways and they turned into a narrow
street and halted dripping before the door of an inn.
Glanton pounded on the door and it opened and a young boy looked out. A woman
appeared and looked at them and went back in. Finally a man came and opened the
gate. He was slightly drunk and he held the gate while the horsemen rode through one
by one into the little flooded courtyard and then he closed the gate behind them.
In the morning the rain had stopped and they appeared in the streets, tattered, stinking,
ornamented with human parts like cannibals. They carried the huge pistols stuck in their
belts and the vile skins they wore were deeply stained with blood and smoke and
gunblack. The sun was out and the old women on their knees with bucket and rag
washing the stones before the shopdoors turned and looked after them and shopkeepers

. set ing out their wares nodded them a wary good morning. They were a strange
clientele among such commerce. They stood blinking before the doorways where finches
hung in small withy cages and green and brassy parrots that stood on one foot and
. croaked uneasily. There were ristras of dried fruit and pep ers and clusters of tinware
that hung like chimes and there were hogskins filled with pulque that swung from the
beams like bloated swine in a knacker's yard. They sent for cups. A fiddler appeared
and crouched on a stone doorsill and began to saw out some Moorish folktune and
none who passed on their morning errands could take their eyes from those pale and
rancid giants.
By noon they'd found a bodega run by a man named Frank Carroll, a low doggery once
a stable whose shed doors stood open to the street to admit the only light. The fiddler
had followed in what seemed a great sadness and he took up his station just without
the door where he could watch the outlanders drink and clack their gold doubloons on
the board. In the doorway there was an old man taking the sun and he leaned with a
goathorn eartrumpet to the rising din within and nodded in continual agreement
although no word was spoken in any language he had understanding of.
The judge had spied the musician and he called to him and tossed a coin that clinked
upon the stones. The fiddler held it briefly to the light as if it might not serve and then
slipped it away among his clothes and fitted his instrument beneath his chin and struck
up an air that was old among the mountebanks of Spain two hundred years before. The
judge stepped into the sunlit doorway and executed upon the stones a series of steps
with a strange precision and he and the fiddler seemed alien minstrels met by chance in
. this medieval town. The judge re oved his hat and bowed to a pair of ladies detoured
into the street to bypass the doggery and he pirouetted hugely on his mincing feet and
poured pulque from his cup into the old man's eartrumpet. The old man quickly
stoppered the horn with the ball of his thumb and he held the horn with care before
him while he augered his ear with one finger and then he drank.
. By dark the streets were filled with besotted bedlamites lurch ng and cursing and
ringing the churchbells with pistolballs in a G-dless charivari until the priest emerged
bearing before him the crucified Christ and exhorting them with fragments of latin in a
singsong chant. This man was drubbed in the street and prodded obscenely and they
flung gold coins at him as he lay clutching his image. When he rose he disdained to
take up the coins until some small boys ran out to gather them and then he ordered
them brought to him while the barbarians whooped and drank him a toast.
Spectators drifted away, the narrow street emptied. Some of the Americans had
wandered into the cold waters of the stream and were splashing about and they
clambered dripping into the street and stood dark and smoking and apocalyptic in the

dim lampfall. The night was cold and they shambled steaming through the cobbled town
like fairybook beasts and it had begun to rain again.
The day that followed was the feast of Las Animas and there was a parade through the
streets and a horsedrawn cart that bore a rude Christ in a stained and ancient
. catafalque. Lay aco ytes followed all in company and the priest went before ringing a
small bell. A barefoot brotherhood clad in black marched in the rear bearing sceptres of
weeds. The Christ jostled past, a poor figure of straw with carven head and feet. He
wore a crown of mountain briars and on his brow were painted drops of blood and on
his old dry wooden cheeks blue tears. The villagers knelt and blessed themselves and
some stepped forward and touched the garment the figure wore and kissed their
. fingertips. The pa ade trundled past mournfully and small children sat in the doorways
eating pastry skulls and watching the parade and the rain in the streets.
The judge sat alone in the cantina. He also watched the rain, his eyes small in his great
naked face. He'd filled his pockets with little candy deathsheads and he sat by the door
and offered these to children passing on the walk under the eaves but they shied away
like little horses.
. In the evening groups of townfolk descended from the ceme ery on the side of the hill
and later in the dark by candle or lamp light they emerged again and made their way
up to the church to pray. None but passed clutches of Americans crazed with drink and
these grimy visitants would doff their hats oafishly and totter and grin and make
obscene suggestions to the young girls. Carroll had closed his squalid bistro at dusk but
opened it again to save the doors being stove. Sometime in the night a party of
horsemen bound for California arrived, every man of them slumped in exhaustion. Yet
within the hour they'd ridden out again. By midnight when the souls of the dead were
rumored to be about the scalphunters were again howling in the streets and discharging
their pistols in spite of rain or death and this continued sporadically until dawn.
By noon the day following Glanton in his drunkenness was taken with a kind of fit and
he lurched crazed and disheveled into the little courtyard and began to open fire with
his pistols. In the afternoon he lay bound to his bed like a madman while the judge sat
with him and cooled his brow with rags of water and spoke to him in a low voice.
Outside voices called across the steep hillsides. A little girl was missing and parties of
citizens had turned out to search the mineshafts. After a while Glanton slept and the
judge rose and went out.
It was gray and raining, leaves were blowing down. A ragged stripling stepped from a
doorway by a wooden rainspout and tugged at the judge's elbow. He had two pups in
his shirtfront and these he offered for sale, dragging one forth by the neck.

The judge was looking off up the street. When he looked down at the boy the boy
hauled forth the other dog. They hung limply. Perros a vende, he said.
Cuanto quieres? said the judge.
The boy looked at one and then the other of the animals. As if he'd pick one to suit
the judge's character, such dogs existing somewhere perhaps. He thrust forth the
lefthand animal. Cin-cuenta centavos, he said.
The pup squirmed and drew back in his fist like an animal backing down a hole, its
pale blue eyes impartial, befrighted alike of the cold and the rain and the judge.
Ambos, said the judge. He sought in his pockets for coins.
The dogvendor took this for a bargaining device and studied the dogs anew to better
determine their worth, but the judge had dredged from his polluted clothes a small gold
coin worth a bushel of suchpriced dogs. He laid the coin in the palm of his hand and
held it out and with the other hand took the pups from their keeper, holding them in
one fist like a pair of socks. He gestured with the gold.
Andale, he said.
The boy stared at the coin.
The judge made a fist and opened it. The coin was gone. He wove his fingers in the
empty air and reached behind the boy's ear and took the coin and handed it to him.
The boy held the coin in both hands before him like a small ciborium and he looked up
. at the judge. But the judge had set forth, dogs dan ling. He crossed upon the stone
bridge and he looked down into the swollen waters and raised the dogs and pitched
them in.
At the farther end the bridge gave onto a small street that ran along the river. Here the
Vandiemenlander stood urinating from a stone wall into the water. When he saw the
judge commit the dogs from the bridge he drew his pistol and called out.
The dogs disappeared in the foam. They swept one and the next down a broad green
race over sheets of polished rock into the pool below. The Vandiemenlander raised and
cocked the pistol. In the clear waters of the pool willow leaves turned like jade dace.
The pistol bucked in his hand and one of the dogs leaped in the water and he cocked it
again and fired again and a pink stain diffused. He cocked and fired the pistol a third

time and the other dog also blossomed and sank.
The judge continued on across the bridge. When the boy ran up and looked down into
the water he was still holding the coin. The Vandiemenlander stood in the street
opposite with his pizzle in one hand and the revolver in the other. The smoke had
drifted off downstream and there was nothing in the pool at all.
Sometime in the late afternoon Glanton woke and managed to struggle free of his
bindings. The first news they had of him was in front of the cuartel where he cut down
the Mexican flag with his knife and tied it to the tail of a mule. Then he mounted the
mule and goaded it through the square dragging the sacred bandera in the mud behind
him.
He made a circuit of the streets and emerged in the plaza again, kicking the animal
viciously in the flanks. As he turned a shot rang out and the mule fell stone dead under
. him with a musketball lodged in its brain. Glanton rolled clear and scram led to his
feet firing wildly. An old woman sank soundlessly to the stones. The judge and Tobin
and Doc Irving came from Frank Carroll's on a dead run and knelt in the shadow of a
wall and began to fire at the upper windows. Another half dozen Americans came
around the corner at the far side of the square and in a flurry of gunfire two of them
fell. Slags of lead were whining off the stones and gunsmoke hung over the streets in
the damp air. Glanton and John Gunn had made their way along the walls to the shed
behind the posada where the horses were stabled and they began bringing the animals
out. Three more of the company entered the yard at a run and commenced to tote gear
out of the building and to saddle horses. Gunfire was now continual in the street and
two Americans lay dead and others lay calling out. When the company rode out thirty
minutes later they ran a gantlet of ragged fusil fire and rocks and bottles and they left
six of their number behind.
An hour later Carroll and another American named Sanford who'd been residing in the
town caught them up. The citizens had torched the saloon. The priest had baptized the
wounded Americans and then stood back while they were shot through the head.
Before dark they encountered laboring up the western slope of the mountain a conducta
of one hundred and twenty-two mules bearing flasks of quicksilver for the mines. They
could hear the whipcrack and cry of the arrieros on the switchbacks far below them and
. they could see the burdened animals plod ing like goats along a faultline in the sheer
rock wall. Bad luck. Twenty-six days from the sea and less than two hours out from the
mines. The mules wheezed and scrabbled in the talus and the drivers in their ragged
and colorful costumes harried them on. When the first of them saw the riders above
them he stood in the stirrups and looked back. The column of mules wound down the

trail for a half mile or more and as they bunched and halted there were sections of the
train visible on the separate switchbacks far below, eight and ten mules, facing now this
way, now that, the tails of the animals picked clean as bones by those behind and the
mercury within the guttapercha flasks pulsing heavily as if they carried secret beasts,
things in pairs that stirred and breathed uneasily within those bloated satchels. The
. mule eer turned and looked up the trail. Already Glanton was upon him. He greeted
. the American cordially. Glanton rode past with ut speaking, taking the upper side in
. that rocky strait and shoul ering the drover's mule dangerously among the loose shales.
The man's face clouded and he turned and called back down the trail. The other riders
were now pushing past him, their eyes narrow and their faces black as stokers with
gunsoot. He stood down off his mule and drew his escopeta from under the fender of
the saddle. David Brown was opposite him at this point, his pistol already in his hand
at the off side of his horse. He swung it over the pommel and shot the man squarely in
the chest. The man sat down heavily and Brown shot him again and he pitched off
down the rocks into the abyss below.
. The others of the company hardly turned to advise them elves of what had occurred.
Every man of them was firing point blank at the muleteers. They fell from their mounts
and lay in the trail or slid from the escarpment and vanished. The drivers below got
their animals turned and were attempting to flee back down the trail and the laden
. packmules were beginning to clam er white-eyed at the sheer wall of the bluff like
enormous rats. The riders pushed between them and the rock and methodically rode
them from the escarpment, the animals dropping silently as martyrs, turning sedately in
the empty air and exploding on the rocks below in startling bursts of blood and silver
as the flasks broke open and the mercury loomed wobbling in the air in great sheets
and lobes and small trembling satellites and all its forms grouping below and racing in
the stone arroyos like the imbreachment of some ultimate alchemic work decocted from
out the secret dark of the earth's heart, the fleeing stag of the ancients fugitive on the
mountainside and bright and quick in the dry path of the storm channels and shaping
out the sockets in the rock and hurrying from ledge to ledge down the slope
shimmering and deft as eels.
The muleteers benched out in a swag on the trail where the precipice was almost
negotiable and they rode and fell crashing down through the scrub juniper and pine in
a confusion of cries while the horsemen herded the lag mules off after them and rode
wildly down the rock trail like men themselves at the mercy of something terrible.
Carroll and Sanford had become detached from the company and when they reached the
bench where the last of the arrieros had disappeared they reined their horses and
looked back up the trail. It was empty save for a few dead men from the conducta. Half
a hundred mules had been ridden off the escarpment and in the curve of the bluff they
could see the broken shapes of the animals strewn down the rocks and they could see

the bright shapes of the quicksilver pooled in the evening light. The horses stamped and
arched their necks. The riders looked off down into that calamitous gulf and they looked
at each other but they required no conference and they pulled the mouths of the horses
about and roweled them on down the mountain.
. They caught up with the company at dusk. They were dis ounted at the far side of a
river and the kid and one of the Delawares were hazing the lathered horses back from
the edge of the water. They put their animals to the ford and crossed, the water up
under the horses' bellies and the horses picking their way over the rocks and glancing
wildly upstream where a cataract thundered out of the darkening forest into the flecked
. and seeth ng pool below. When they rode up out of the ford the judge stepped forward
and took Carroll's horse by the jaw.
Where's the nigger? he said.
He looked at the judge. They were all but at eyelevel and he on horseback. I dont
know, he said.
The judge looked at Glanton. Glanton spat.
How many men did you see in the square?
I didnt have time to take no headcount. There was three or four shot that I know of.
But not the nigger?
I never saw him.
Sanford pushed his horse forward. There was no nigger in the square, he said. I seen
them shoot them boys and they were ever one white as you and me.
The judge turned loose Carroll's horse and went to get his own animal. Two of the
Delawares detached themselves from the company. When they rode out up the trail it
was almost dark and the company had pulled back into the woods and posted videttes
at the ford and they made no fire.
No riders came down the trail. The early part of the night was dark but the first relief
at the ford saw it begin to clear and the moon came out over the canyon and they saw
a bear come down and pause at the far side of the river and test the air with his nose
. and turn back. About daybreak the judge and the Dela ares returned. They had the
black with them. He was naked save for a blanket he'd wrapped himself in. He didnt

even have boots. He was riding one of the bonetailed packmules from the conducta and
he was shivering with cold. The only thing he'd saved was his pistol. He was holding it
against his chest under the blanket for he had no other place to carry it.
The way down out of the mountains toward the western sea led them through green
gorges thick with vines where paroquets and gaudy macaws leered and croaked. The trail
followed a river and the river was up and muddy and there were many fords and they
. crossed and recrossed the river continually. Pale cas ades hung down the sheer
mountain wall above them, blowing off of the high slick rock in wild vapors. In eight
days they passed no other riders. On the ninth they saw an old man trying to get off
the trail below them, caning a pair of burros through the woods. As they came abreast
of this spot they halted and Glanton turned into the woods where the wet leaves were
. shuffled up and he tracked down the old man sitting in the shrubbery soli ary as a
gnome. The burros looked up and twitched their ears and then lowered their heads to
browse again. The old man watched him.
For que se esconde? said Glanton.
The old man didnt answer.
De donde viene?
The old man seemed unwilling to reckon even "with the idea of a dialogue. He squatted
in the leaves with his arms folded. Glanton leaned and spat. He gestured with his chin
at the burros.
Que tiene alia?
The old man shrugged. Hierbas, he said.
Glanton looked at the animals and he looked at the old man. He turned his horse back
toward the trail to rejoin the party.
For que me busca? called the old man after him.
They moved on. There were eagles and other birds in the valley and many deer and
there were wild orchids and brakes of bamboo. The river here was sizeable and it swept
past enormous boulders and waterfalls fell everywhere out of the high tangled jungle.
The judge had taken to riding ahead with one of the Delawares and he carried his rifle
loaded with the small hard seeds of the nopal fruit and in the evening he would dress
. . ex ertly the colorful birds he'd shot, rubbing the skins with gun owder and stuffing

them with balls of dried grass and packing them away in his wallets. He pressed the
. leaves of trees and plants into his book and he stalked tiptoe the mountain butter lies
with his shirt outheld in both hands, speaking to them in a low whisper, no curious
study himself. Toadvine sat watching him as he made his notations in the ledger,
. holding the book toward the fire for the light, and he asked him what was his pur ose
in all this.
The judge's quill ceased its scratching. He looked at Toadvine. Then he continued to
write again.
Toadvine spat into the fire.
The judge wrote on and then he folded the ledger shut and laid it to one side and
pressed his hands together and passed them down over his nose and mouth and placed
them palm down on his knees.
Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists
without my consent.
. He looked about at the dark forest in which they were biv uacked. He nodded toward
the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or
nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath
yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the
existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he
be properly suzerain of the earth.
What's a suzerain?
A keeper. A keeper or overL-rd.
Why not say keeper then?
Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other
rulers. His authority countermands local judgements.
Toadvine spat.
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my
claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous.
In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my
dispensation.

Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with
everthing on this earth, he said.
The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the world are
forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will
. erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of sin ling out the
. thread of order from the tapestry will by the deci ion alone have taken charge of the
world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms
of his own fate.
I dont see what that has to do with catchin birds.
The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.
That would be a hell of a zoo.
The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so.
In the night a caravan passed, the heads of the horses and mules muffled in serapes,
led along silently in the dark, the riders cautioning one to the other with their fingers
to their lips. The judge atop a great boulder overlooking the trail watched them go-In
the morning they rode on. They forded the muddy Yaqui River and they rode through
stands of sunflowers tall as a man on horseback, the dead faces dished toward the west.
. The coun ry began to open up and they began to come upon plantings of corn on the
hillsides and a few clearings in the wilderness where there were grass huts and orange
and tamarind trees. Of humans they saw none. On the second of December of eighteen
forty-nine they rode into the town of Ures, capital of the state of Sonora. They'd not
trotted half the length of the town before they had drawn about them a following of
rabble unmatched for variety and sordidness by any they had yet encountered, beggars
and proctors of beggars and whores and pimps and vendors and filthy children and
whole deputations of the blind and the maimed and the importunate all crying out por
dios and some who rode astride the backs of porters and hied them after and great
numbers of folk of every age and condition who were merely curious. Females of
domestic reputation lounged upon the balconies they passed with faces gotten up in
indigo and almagre gaudy as the rumps of apes and they peered from behind their fans
with a kind of lurid coyness like transvestites in a madhouse. The judge and Glanton
rode at the head of the little column and conferred between themselves. The horses
cantered nervously and if the riders roweled an occasional hand clutching at the
trappings of their mounts those hands withdrew in silence.

They put up that night at a hostel at the edge of the town run by a German who
turned over the premises to them entirely and was seen no more for either service or
. payment. Glanton wan ered through the tall and dusty rooms with their withy ceilings
and at length he found an old criada cowering in what must have passed for a kitchen
although it contained nothing culinary save a brazier and a few clay pots. He set her to
work heating water for baths and pressed a handful of silver coins on her and charged
her with setting them some kind of board. She stared at the coins without moving until
he shooed her away and she went off down the hallway holding the coins cupped in her
hands like a bird. She disappeared up the stairwell calling out and soon there were a
number of women busy about the place.
When Glanton turned to go back down the hall there were four or five horses standing
in it. He slapped them away with his hat and went to the door and looked out at the
silent mob of spectators.
Mozos de cuadra, he called. Venga. Pronto.
. Two boys pushed through and approached the door and a num er of others followed.
Glanton motioned the tallest of them forward and placed one hand on top of his head
and turned him around and looked at the others.
Este hombre es el jefe, he said. The jefe stood solemnly, his eyes cutting about. Glanton
turned his head around and looked at him.
Te encargo todo, entiendes? Caballos, sillas, todo.
Si. Entiendo.
Bueno. Andale. Hay caballos en la casa.
The jefe turned and shouted out the names of his friends and half a dozen came
forward and they entered the house. When Glanton went down the hall they were
. leading those animals?known mankillers some oward the door, scolding them, the least
of the boys hardly taller than the legs of the animal he'd taken in charge. Glanton went
out to the back of the building and looked about for the expriest whom it pleased him
to send for whores and drink but he could not be found. In trying to arrive at a detail
which might reasonably be expected to return at all he settled on Doc Irving and Shelby
and gave them a fistful of coins and returned to the kitchen again.
By dark there were a half dozen young goats roasting on spits in the yard behind the
hostel, their blackened figures shining in the smoky light. The judge strolled the grounds

in his linen suit and directed the chefs with a wave of his cigar and he in turn was
followed by a string band of six musicians, all of them old, all serious, who stayed with
him at every turn some three paces to the rear and playing the while. A skin of pulque
hung from a tripod in the center of the yard and Irving had returned with between
twenty and thirty whores of every age and size and there were deployed before the door
of the building whole trains of wagons and carts overseen by impromptu sutlers crying
. out each his bill of particulars and surrounded by a shifting gal ery of townspeople and
dozens of halfbroken horses for trade that reared and whinnied and desolatelooking
cattle and sheep and pigs together with their owners until the town that Glanton and
the judge had hoped to lay clear of was almost entirely at their door in a carnival
underwritten with that mood of festivity and growing ugliness common to gatherings in
that quarter of the world. The bonfire in the courtyard had been stoked to such heights
that from the street the entire rear of the premises appeared to be in flames and new
merchants with their goods and new spectators were arriving regularly together with
sullen groups of Yaqui indians in loincloths who would be hired for their labor.
By midnight there were fires in the street and dancing and drunkenness and the house
rang with the shrill cries of the whores and rival packs of dogs had infiltrated the now
partly darkened and smoking yard in the back where a vicious dogfight broke out over
the charred racks of goatbones and where the first gunfire of the night erupted and
wounded dogs howled and dragged themselves about until Glanton himself went out and
killed them with his knife, a lurid scene in the flickering light, the wounded dogs silent
save for the pop of their teeth, dragging themselves across the lot like seals or other
things and crouching under the walls while Glanton walked them down and clove their
skulls with the huge copperbacked beltknife. He was no more than back inside the
. house before new dogs were mutter ng at the spits.
By the small hours of the morning most of the lamps within the hostel had smoked out
and the rooms were filled with drunken snoring. The sutlers and their carts were gone
and the blackened rings of the burnedout fires lay in the road like bomb-craters, the
smoldering billets dragged forth to sustain the one last fire about which sat old men
. and boys smoking and exchang ng tales. As the mountains to the east began to shape
. them elves out of the dawn these figures too drifted away. In the yard at the rear of
the premises the surviving dogs had dragged the bones about everywhere and the dead
dogs lay in dark shingles of their own blood dried in the dust and cocks had begun to
crow. When the judge and Glanton appeared at the front door in their suits, the judge
in white and Glanton in black, the only person about was one of the small hostlers
asleep on the steps.
Joven, said the judge.

The boy leaped up.
Eres mozo del caballado?
Si senor. A su servicio.
Nuestros caballos, he said. He would describe the animals but the boy was already on
the run.
It was cold and a wind was blowing. The sun not up. The judge stood at the steps and
. Glanton walked up and down study ng the ground. In ten minutes the boy and another
appeared leading the two horses saddled and groomed at a nice trot up the street, the
boys at a dead run, barefoot, the breath of the horses pluming and their heads turning
smartly from side to side.
XV
A new contract - Sloat - The massacre on the Nacozari -
Encounter with Elias - Pursued north - A lottery - Shelby and the
kid - A horse lamed - A norther - An ambush -Escape - War on
the plains - A descent - The burning tree - On the track -
The trophies ?The kid rejoins his command -The judge -
A desert sacrifice - The scouts do not return - The ogdoad -
Santa Cruz - The militia ?Snow - A hospice -The stable.
In the fifth of December they rode out north in the cold darkness before daybreak
carrying with them a contract signed by the governor of the state of Sonora for the
furnishing of Apache scalps. The streets were silent and empty. Carroll and Sanford had
defected from the company and with them now rode a boy named Sloat who had been
left sick to die in this place by one of the gold trains bound for the coast weeks earlier.
When Glanton asked him if he were kin to the commodore of that name the boy spat
quietly and said No, nor him to me. He rode near the head of the column and he must
have counted himself well out of that place yet if he gave thanks to any G-d at all it
was ill timed for the country was not done with him.

They rode north onto the broad Sonoran desert and in that cauterized waste they
wandered aimlessly for weeks pursuing rumor and shadow. A few small scattered bands
. of Chiricahua raiders supposedly seen by herdsmen on some squalid and deso ate
ranch. A few peons waylaid and slain. Two weeks out they massacred a pueblo on the
Nacozari River and two days later as they rode toward Ures with the scalps they
encountered a party of armed Sonoran cavalry on the plains west of Baviacora under
General Elias. A running fight ensued in which three of Glanton's party were killed and
another seven wounded, four of whom could not ride.
That night they could see the fires of the army less than ten miles to the south. They
sat out the night in darkness and the wounded called for water and in the cold stillness
before dawn the fires out there were still burning. At sunrise the Delawares rode into
the camp and sat on the ground with Glanton and Brown and the judge. In the eastern
light the fires on the plain faded like an evil dream and the country lay bare and
sparkling in the pure air. Elias was moving upon them out there with over five hundred
troops.
They rose and began to saddle the horses. Glanton fetched down a quiver made from
ocelot skin and counted out the arrows in it so that there was one for each man and he
tore a piece of red flannel into strips and tied these about the footings of four of the
shafts and then replaced the counted arrows into the quiver.
He sat on the ground with the quiver upright between his knees while the company
filed past. When the kid selected among the shafts to draw one he saw the judge
watching him and he paused. He looked at Glanton. He let go the arrow he'd chosen
and sorted out another and drew that one. It carried the red tassel. He looked at the
judge again and the judge was not watching and he moved on and took his place with
Tate and Webster. They were joined finally by a man named Harlan from Texas who
had drawn the last arrow and the four of them stood together while the rest saddled
their horses and led them out.
Of the wounded men two were Delawares and one a Mexican. The fourth was Dick
. Shelby and he alone sat watching the prep rations for departure. The Delawares
. remaining in the com any conferred among themselves and one of them approached
the four Americans and studied them each in turn. He walked past them and turned
and came back and took the arrow from Webster. Webster looked at Glanton where he
stood with his horse. Then the Delaware took Harlan's arrow. Glanton turned and with
his forehead against the ribs of his horse he tightened the girthstraps and then mounted
up. He adjusted his hat. No one spoke. Harlan and Webster went to get their animals.
. Glan on sat his horse while the company filed past and then he turned and followed
them out onto the plain.

The Delaware had gone for his horse and he brought it up still hobbled through the
wallowed places in the sand where the men had slept. Of the wounded Indians one was
silent, breathing heavily with his eyes closed. The other was chanting rhythmically. The
Delaware let drop the reins and took down his warclub from his bag and stepped
astraddle of the man and swung the club and crushed his skull with a single blow. The
man humped up in a little shuddering spasm and then lay still. The other was
. dispatched in the same way and then the Dela are raised the horse's leg and undid the
hobble and slid it clear and rose and put the hobble and the club in the bag and
mounted up and turned the horse. He looked at the two men standing there. His face
and chest were freckled with blood. He touched up the horse with his heels and rode
out.
Tate squatted in the sand, his hands dangling in front of him. He turned and looked at
the kid.
Who gets the Mexican? he said.
. The kid didnt answer. They looked at Shelby. He was watch ng them.
Tate had a clutch of small pebbles in his hand and he let them drop one by one into
the sand. He looked at the kid.
Go on if you want to, the kid said.
He looked at the Delawares dead in their blankets. You might not do it, he said.
That aint your worry.
Glanton might come back.
He might.
Tate looked over to where the Mexican was lying and he looked at the kid again. I'm
still held to it, he said.
The kid didnt answer.
You know what they'll do to them?
The kid spat. I can guess, he said.

No you caint.
I said you could go. You do what you want.
Tate rose and looked to the south but the desert there lay in all its clarity uninhabited
by any approaching armies. He shrugged up his shoulders in the cold. Injins, he said. It
dont mean nothin to them. He crossed the campground and brought his horse around
and led it up and mounted it. He looked at the Mexican, wheezing softly, a pink froth
on his lips. He looked at the kid and then he nudged the pony up through the scraggly
acacia and was gone.
. The kid sat in the sand and stared off to the south. The Mexi an was shot through the
lungs and would die anyway but Shelby had had his hip shattered by a ball and he was
clear in his head. He lay watching the kid. He was from a prominent Kentucky family
and had attended Transylvania College and like many another young man of his class
he'd gone west because of a woman. He watched the kid and he watched the enormous
sun where it sat boiling on the edge of the desert. Any roadagent or gambler would
have known that the first to speak would lose but Shelby had already lost it all.
Why dont you just get on with it? he said.
The kid looked at him.
If I had a gun I'd shoot you, Shelby said.
The kid didnt answer.
You know that, dont you?
You aint got a gun, the kid said.
He looked to the south again. Something moving, perhaps the first lines of heat. No
dust in the morning so early. When he looked at Shelby again Shelby was crying.
You wont thank me if I let you off, he said.
Do it then you son of a bitch.
The kid sat. A light wind was blowing out of the north and some doves had begun to
. call in the thicket of greasewood be ind them.

If you want me just to leave you I will.
Shelby didnt answer.
He pushed a furrow in the sand with the heel of his boot. You'll have to say.
Will you leave me a gun?
You know I caint leave you no gun.
You're no better than him. Are you?
The kid didnt answer.
What if he comes back.
Glanton.
Yes.
What if he does.
He'll kill me.
You wont be out nothin.
You son of a bitch.
The kid rose.
Will you hide me?
Hide you?
Yes.
The kid spat. You caint hide. Where you goin to hide at?
Will he come back?

I dont know.
This is a terrible place to die in.
Where's a good one?
Shelby wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. Can you see them? he said.
Not yet.
Will you pull me up under that bush?
The kid turned and looked at him. He looked off down-country again and then he
. crossed the basin and squatted be ind Shelby and took him up under the arms and
raised him. Shelby's head rolled back and he looked up and then he snatched at the
butt of the pistol stuck in the kid's belt. The kid seized his arm. He let him down and
stepped away and turned him loose. When he returned through the basin leading the
horse the man was crying again. He took the pistol from his belt and jammed it among
his belongings lashed to the cantle and took his canteen down and went to him.
He had his face turned away. The kid filled his flask from his own and reseated the
stopper where it hung by its thong and drove it home with the heel of his hand. Then
he rose and looked off to the south.
Yonder they come, he said.
Shelby raised up on one elbow.
. The kid looked at him and he looked at the faint and form ess articulation along the
horizon to the south. Shelby lay back. He was staring up at the sky. A dark overcast
was moving down from the north and the wind was up. A clutch of leaves scuttled out
of the willow bracken at the edge of the sand and then scuttled back again. The kid
crossed to where the horse stood waiting and took the pistol and stuck it in his belt
and hung the canteen over the saddlehorn and mounted up and looked back at the
wounded man. Then he rode out.
. He was trotting north on the plain when he saw another horse an on the grounds
before him perhaps a mile distant. He could not make him out and he rode more
slowly. After a while he saw that the rider was leading the horse and after a while he
could see that the horse was not walking right.

It was Tate. He sat by the wayside watching the kid as he rode up. The horse stood on
three legs. Tate said nothing. He took off his hat and looked inside it and put it on
again. The kid was turned in the saddle and he was looking to the south. Then he
looked at Tate.
Can he walk?
Not much.
He got down and drew up the horse's leg. The frog of the hoof was split and bloody
and the animal's shoulder quivered. He let the hoof down. The sun was about two hours
high and now there was dust on the horizon. He looked at Tate.
What do you want to do?
I dont know. Lead him awhile. See how he does.
He aint goin to do.
I know it.
We could ride and tie.
You might just keep ridin.
I might anyway.
Tate looked at him. Go on if you want, he said.
The kid spat. Come on, he said.
I hate to leave the saddle. Hate to leave the horse far as that goes.
The kid picked up the trailing reins of his own animal. You might change your mind
about what you hate to leave, he said.
They set out leading both horses. The damaged animal kept wanting to stop. Tate
coaxed it along. Come on fool, he said. You aint goin to like them niggers a bit more
than me.
By noon the sun was a pale blur overhead and a cold wind was blowing out of the

north. They leaned into it man and animal. The wind bore stinging bits of grit and they
set their hats low over their faces and pushed on. Dried desert chaff passed along with
the seething migrant sands. Another hour and there was no track visible from the main
party of riders before them. The sky lay gray and of a piece in every direction as far as
they could see and the wind did not abate. After a while it began to snow.
The kid had taken down his blanket and wrapped himself in it. He turned and stood
with his back to the wind and the horse leaned and laid its cheek against his. Its
eyelashes were thatched with snow. When Tate came up he stopped and they stood look
.ng out downwind where the snow was blowing. They could see no more than a few
feet.
Aint this hell, he said.
Will your horse lead?
Hell no. I caint hardly make him foller.
We get turned around we might just run plumb into the Spaniards.
I never saw it turn so cold so quick.
What do you want to do.
We better go on.
We could pull for the high country. As long as we keep goin uphill we'll know we aint
got in a circle.
We'll get cut off. We never will find Glanton.
We're cut off now.
Tate turned and stared bleakly to where the whirling flakes blew down from the north.
Let's go, he said. We caint stand here.
They led the horses on. Already the ground was white. They took turns riding the good
horse and leading the lame. They climbed for hours up a long rocky wash and the snow
did not diminish. They began to come upon pinon and dwarf oak and open parkland
and the snow on those high meadows was soon a foot deep and the horses were
blowing and smoking like steamengines and it was colder and growing dark.

They were rolled in their blankets asleep in the snow when the scouts from Elias's
forward company came upon them. They'd ridden all night the only track there was,
pushing on not to lose the march of those shallow pans as they filled with snow. They
were five men and they came up through the evergreens in the dark and all but
stumbled upon the sleepers, two mounds in the snow one of which broke open and up
out of which a figure sat suddenly like some terrible hatching.
The snow had stopped falling. The kid could see them and their animals clearly on that
pale ground, the men in midstride and the horses blowing cold. He had his boots in
one hand and his pistol in the other and he came up out of the blanket and leveled the
pistol and discharged it into the chest of the man nearest him and turned to run. His
feet slid and he went to one knee. A musket fired behind him. He rose again, running
down a darkened slash of pinon and turning out along the face of the slope. There were
other shots behind him and when he turned he could see a man coming down through
the trees. The man stopped and raised his elbows and the kid dove headlong. The
musketball went racketing off among the branches. He rolled over and cocked the pistol.
The barrel must have been full of snow because when he fired a hoop of orange light
sprang out about it and the shot made a strange sound. He felt to see if the gun had
burst but it had not. He could not see the man any more and he picked himself up and
ran on. At the foot of the slope he sat gasping in the cold air and pulled on the boots
and watched back among the trees. Nothing moved. He rose and stuck the pistol in his
belt and went on.
The rising sun found him crouched under a rocky promontory watching the country to
the south. He sat so for an hour or more. A group of deer moved up the far side of
the arroyo feeding and feeding moved on. After a while he rose and went on along the
ridge.
He walked all day through those wild uplands, eating hand-fuls of snow from the
evergreen boughs as he went. He followed gametrails through the firs and in the
evening he hiked along the rimrock where he could see the tilted desert to the
. southwest patched with shapes of snow that roughly reproduced the pat erns of cloud
cover already moved on to the south. Ice had frozen on the rock and the myriad of
icicles among the conifers glistened blood red in the reflected light of the sunset spread
across the prairie to the west. He sat with his back to a rock and felt the warmth of
the sun on his face and watched it pool and flare and drain away dragging with it all
that pink and rose and crimson sky. An icy wind sprang up and the junipers darkened
suddenly against the snow and then there was just stillness and cold.
He rose and moved on, hurrying along the shaly rocks. He walked all night. The stars

swung counterclockwise in their course and the Great Bear turned and the Pleiades
winked in the very roof of the vault. He walked until his toes grew numb and fairly
rattled in his boots. His path upon the rimrock was leading him deeper into the
mountains along the edge of a great gorge and he could see no place to descend out of
that country. He sat and wrestled off the boots and held his frozen feet each by turn in
his arms. They did not warm and his jaw was in a seizure of cold and when he went to
put the boots back on again his feet were like clubs to poke into them. When he got
them on and stood up and stamped numbly he knew that he could not stop again until
the sun rose.
It grew colder and the night lay long before him. He kept moving, following in the
darkness the naked chines of rock blown bare of snow. The stars burned with a lidless
. fixity and they drew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stum ling among
the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in.
that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning mat
er crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings. In the predawn light he
made his way out upon a promontory and there received first of any creature in that
country the warmth of the sun's ascending.
He slept curled among the stones, the pistol clutched to his chest. His feet thawed and
burned and he woke and lay staring up at a sky of china blue where very high there
circled two black hawks about the sun slowly and perfectly opposed like paper birds
upon a pole.
He moved north all day and in the long light of the evening he saw from that high
rimland the collision of armies remote and silent upon the plain below. The dark little
. horses circled and the landscape shifted in the paling light and the moun ains beyond
. brooded in darkening silhouette. The distant horse en rode and parried and a faint
drift of smoke passed over them and they moved on up the deepening shade of the
valley floor leaving behind them the shapes of mortal men who had lost their lives in
that place. He watched all this pass below him mute and ordered and senseless until
the warring horsemen were gone in the sudden rush of dark that fell over the desert.
All that land lay cold and blue and without definition and the sun shone solely on the
high rocks where he stood. He moved on and soon he was in darkness himself and the
wind came up off the desert and frayed wires of lightning stood again and again along
the western terminals of the world. He made his way along the escarpment until he
came to a break in the wall cut through by a canyon running back into the mountains.
He stood looking down into this gulf where the tops of the twisted evergreens hissed in
the wind and then he started down.
The snow lay in deep pockets on the slope and he floundered down through them,

steadying himself along the naked rocks until his hands were numb with cold. He
crossed with care a gravel slide and made his way down the far side among the rubble
stone and small gnarled trees. He fell and fell again, scrabbling for a handpurchase in
the dark, rising and feeling in his belt for the pistol. He was at this work the night
long. When he reached the benchland above the canyon floor he could hear a stream
running in the gorge below him and he went stumbling along with his hands in his
armpits like a fugitive in a madman's waistcoat. He reached a sandy wash and followed
it down and it took him at last out upon the desert again where he stood tottering in
the cold and casting about dumbly for some star in the overcast.
Most of the snow had blown or melted from off the plain on which he found himself.
Tandem storms were blowing down-country from the north and the thunder trundled
away in the distance and the air was cold and smelled of wet stone. He struck out
across the barren pan, nothing but sparse tufts of grass and the widely scattered
palmilla standing solitary and silent against the lowering sky like other beings posted
there. To the east the mountains stood footed blackly into the desert and before him
were bluffs or promontories that ran out like headlands massive and sombre upon the
desert floor. He clopped on woodenly, half frozen, his feet senseless. He'd been without
food for almost two days and he'd had little rest. He cited the terrain before him in the
periodic flare of the lightning and trudged on and in this manner he rounded a dark
cape of rock off to his right and came to a halt, shivering and blowing into his clawed
and palsied hands. In the distance before him a fire burned on the prairie, a solitary
flame frayed by the wind that freshened and faded and shed scattered sparks down the
storm like hot scurf blown from some unreckonable forge howling in the waste. He sat
and watched it. He could not judge how far it was. He lay on his stomach to skylight
the terrain to see what men were there but there was no sky and no light. He lay for a
. long time watch ng but he saw nothing move.
When he went on again the fire seemed to recede before him. A troop of figures passed
between him and the light. Then again. Wolves perhaps. He went on.
It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left
afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt
in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended
companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that
crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and
vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a
. chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basi isks that jet blood from their eyes
and the small sandvipers like seemly G-ds, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A
constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce
before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.

When the sun rose he was asleep under the smoldering skeleton of a blackened scrog.
The storm had long passed off to the south and the new sky was raw and blue and the
spire of smoke from the burnt tree stood vertically in the still dawn like a slender stylus
marking the hour with its particular and faintly breathing shadow upon the face of a
terrain that was without other designation. All the creatures that had been at vigil with
him in the night were gone and about him lay only the strange coral shapes of fulgurite
in their scorched furrows fused out of the sand where ball lightning had run upon the
ground in the night hissing and stinking of sulphur.
Seated tailorwise in the eye of that cratered waste he watched the world tend away at
the edges to a shimmering surmise that ringed the desert round. After a while he rose.
and made his way to the edge of the pan and up the dry course of an arroyo, fol
owing the small demonic tracks of javelinas until he came upon them drinking at a
. standing pool of water. They flushed snort ng into the chaparral and he lay in the wet
trampled sand and drank and rested and drank again.
In the afternoon he started across the valley floor with the weight of the water swinging
in his gut. Three hours later he stood in the long arc of horsetracks coming up from
the south where the party had passed. He followed the edge of the tracks and sorted
out single riders and he reckoned their number and he reckoned them to be riding at a
canter. He followed the trace for several miles and he could tell by the alternation of
tracks ridden over that all these riders had passed together and he could tell by the
small rocks overturned and holes stepped into that they had passed in the night. He
stood looking out from under his hand long downcountry for any dust or rumor of
Elias. There was nothing. He went on. A mile further and he came upon a strange
blackened mass in the trail like a burnt carcass of some unG-dly beast. He circled it.
The tracks of wolves and coyotes had walked through the horse and boot prints, little
sallies and sorties that fetched up to the edge of that incinerated shape and flared away
again.
It was the remains of the scalps taken on the Nacozari and they had been burned
. unredeemed in a green and stinking bon ire so that nothing remained of the poblanos
save this charred coagulate of their preterite lives. The cremation had been sited upon a
. rise of ground and he studied every quarter of the ter ain about but there was nothing
. to be seen. He went on, follow ng the tracks with their suggestion of pursuit and
darkness, trailing them through the deepening twilight. With sunset it grew cold, yet
nothing like so cold as in the mountains. His fast had weakened him and he sat in the
sand to rest and woke sprawled and twisted on the ground. The moon was up, a half
moon that sat like a child's boat in the gap of the black paper mountains to the east.
. He rose and went on. Coyotes were yap ing out there and his feet reeled beneath him.

An hour more of such progress and he came upon a horse.
It had been standing in the trace and it moved off in the dark and stood again. He
halted with his pistol drawn. The horse went past, a dark shape, rider or none he could
not tell. It circled and came back.
He spoke to it. He could hear its deep pulmonary breathing out there and he could
hear it move and when it came back he could smell it. He followed it about for the
better part of an hour, talking to it, whistling, holding out his hands. When he got near
enough to touch it at last he took hold of it by the mane and it went trotting as before
and he ran alongside and clung to it and finally wrapped his legs about one foreleg and
brought it to the ground in a heap.
He was the first up. The animal was struggling to rise and he thought it was injured in
the fall but it was not. He cinched his belt about its muzzle and mounted it and it rose
and stood trembling under him with its legs spread. He patted it along the withers and
spoke to it and it moved forward uncertainly.
He reckoned it one of the packhorses purchased in Ures. It stopped and he urged it
forward but it did not go. He brought his bootheels sharply up under its ribs and it
. squatted on its hindquarters and went crabbing sideways. He reached and un id the
belt from its muzzle and kicked it forward and gave it a whack with the belt and it
stepped out right smartly. He twisted a good handful of the mane in his fist and
jammed the pistol securely in his waist and rode on, perched upon the raw spine of the
animal with the vertebra articulating palpable and discrete under the hide.
In their riding they were joined by another horse that came off the desert and walked
alongside them and it was still there when dawn broke. In the night too the tracks of
the riders had been joined by a larger party and it was a broad and trampled causeway
that now led up the valley floor to the north. With daylight he leaned down with his
. face against the horse's shoul er and studied the tracks. They were unshod Indian
ponies and there were perhaps a hundred of them. Nor had they joined the riders but
rather been joined by them. He pushed on. The little horse that had come to them in
the night had moved off some leagues and now paced them with a watchful eye and the
horse he rode was nervous and ill for want of water.
By noon the animal was failing. He tried to coax it out of the track to catch the other
horse but it would not quit the course it was set upon. He sucked on a pebble and
surveyed the countryside. Then he saw riders ahead of him. They'd not been there, then
they were there. He realized it was their vicinity that was the source of the unrest in
the two horses and he rode on watching now the animals and now the skyline to the

north. The hack that he straddled trembled and pushed ahead and after a while he
could see that the riders wore hats. He urged the horse on and when he rode up the
party were halted and seated on the ground all watching his approach.
They looked bad. They were used up and bloody and black about the eyes and they had
bound up their wounds with linens that were filthy and bloodstained and their clothes
were crusted with dried blood and powderblack. Glanton's eyes in their dark sockets
were burning centroids of murder and he and his haggard riders stared balefully at the.
kid as if he were no part of them for all they were so like in wretchedness of circum
tance. The kid slid down from the horse and stood among them gaunt and parched and
crazedlooking. Someone threw him a canteen.
They had lost four men. The others were ahead on scout. Elias had forced on through
the mountains all night and all the day following and had ridden upon them through
the snow in the dark on the plain forty miles to the south. They'd been harried north
over the desert like cattle and had deliberately taken the track of the warparty in order
to lose their pursuers. They did not know how far the Mexicans were behind them and
they did not know how far the Apaches were ahead.
He drank from the canteen and looked them over. Of the missing he'd no way of
knowing which were ahead with the scouts and which were dead in the desert. The
horse that Toad-vine brought him was the one the recruit Sloat had ridden out of Ures.
When they moved out a half hour later two of the horses would not rise and were left
behind. He sat a hideless and rickety saddle astride the dead man's horse and he rode
slumped and tottering and soon his legs and arms were dangling and he jostled along in
his sleep like a mounted marionette. He woke to find the expriest alongside him. He
slept again. When he woke next it was the judge was there. He too had lost his hat and
he rode with a woven wreath of desert scrub about his head like some egregious
saltland bard and he looked down upon the refugee with the same smile, as if the world
were pleasing even to him alone.
They rode all the rest of that day, up through low rolling hills covered with cholla and
whitethorn. From time to time one of the spare horses would stop and stand swaying in
the track and grow small behind them. They rode down a long north slope in the cold
blue evening and through a barren bajada grown only with sporadic ocotillo and stands
of grama and they made camp in the flat and all night the wind blew and they could
see other fires burning on the desert to the north. The judge walked out and looked
over the horses and selected from that sorry remuda the animal least likely in
appearance and caught it up. He led it past the fire and called for someone to come
hold it. No one rose. The expriest leaned to the kid.

Pay him no mind lad.
The judge called again from the dark beyond the fire and the expriest placed a
cautionary hand upon the kid's arm. But the kid rose and spat into the fire. He turned
and eyed the expriest.
You think I'm afraid of him?
The expriest didnt answer and the kid turned and went out into the darkness where the
judge waited.
He stood holding the horse. Just his teeth glistened in the firelight. Together they led
the animal off a little ways and the kid held the woven reata while the judge took up a
round rock weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and crushed the horse's skull with a
single blow. Blood shot out of its ears and it slammed to the ground so hard that one
of its forelegs broke under it with a dull snap.
They skinned out the hindquarters without gutting the animal and the men cut steaks
from it and roasted them over the fire and cut the rest of the meat in strips and hung
it to smoke. The scouts did not come in and they posted videttes and turned in to sleep
each man with his weapons at his breast.
Midmorning of the day following they crossed an alkali pan whereon were convoked an
. assembly of men's heads. The com any halted and Glanton and the judge rode forward.
The heads were eight in number and each wore a hat and they formed a ring all facing
outward. Glanton and the judge circled them and the judge halted and stepped down
and pushed over one of the heads with his boot. As if to satisfy himself that no man
stood buried in the sand beneath it. The other heads glared blindly out of their wrinkled
eyes like fellows of some righteous initiate given up to vows of silence and of death.
The riders looked off to the north. They rode on. Beyond a shallow rise in cold ash lay
the blackened wreckage of a pair of wagons and the nude torsos of the party. The wind
had shifted the ashes and the iron axletrees marked the shapes of the wagons as
keelsons do the bones of ships on the sea's floors. The bodies had been partly eaten
and rooks flew up as the riders approached and a pair of buzzards began to trot off
across the sand with their wings outheld like soiled chorines, their boiled-looking heads
jerking obscenely.
They went on. They crossed a dry estuary of the desert flat and in the afternoon they
rode up through a series of narrow defiles into a rolling hill country. They could smell
the smoke of pinonwood fires and before dark they rode into the town of Santa Cruz.

This town like all the presidios along the border was much reduced from its former
estate and many of the buildings were uninhabited and ruinous. The coming of the
riders had been cried before them and the way stood lined with inhabitants watching
dumbly as they passed, the old women in black rebozos and the men armed with old
muskets and miquelets or guns fabricated out of parts rudely let into stocks of
cottonwood that had been shaped with axes like clubhouse guns for boys. There were
even guns among them with no locks at all that were fired by jamming a cigarillo
against the vent in the barrel, sending the gunstones from the riverbed with which they
. were loaded whissing through the air on flights of their own eccentric selec ion like the
paths of meteorites. The Americans pushed their horses forward. It had begun to snow
again and a cold wind blew down the narrow street before them. Even in their wretched
state they glared from their saddles at this falstaffian militia with undisguised contempt.
They stood among their horses in the squalid little alameda while the wind ransacked
the trees and the birds nesting in the gray twilight cried out and clutched the limbs and
the snow swirled and blew across the little square and shrouded the shapes of the mud
buildings beyond and made mute the cries of the vendors who'd followed them. Glanton
and the Mexican he'd set out with returned and the company mounted up and filed out
down the street until they came to an old wooden gate that led into a courtyard. The
courtyard was dusted with snow and within were contained barnyard fowl and
. animals?goats, a burro hat clawed and scrabbled blindly at the walls as the riders
entered. In one corner stood a tripod of blackened sticks and there was a large
bloodstain that had been partly snowed over and showed a faint pale rose in the last
light. A man came out of the house and he and Glanton spoke and the man talked with
the Mexican and then he motioned them in out of the weather.
They sat in the floor of a long room with a high ceiling and smokestained vigas while a
woman and a girl brought bowls of guisado made from goat and a clay plate heaped
with blue tortillas and they were served bowls of beans and of coffee and a cornmeal
porridge in which sat little chunks of raw brown peloncillo sugar. Outside it was dark
and the snow swirled down. There was no fire in the room and the food steamed
ponderously. When they had eaten they sat smoking and the women gathered up the
bowls and after a while a boy came with a lantern and led them out.
They crossed the yard among the snuffling horses and the boy opened a rough wooden
door in an adobe shed and stood by holding the lamp aloft. They brought their saddles
and their blankets. In the yard the horses stamped in the cold.
The shed held a mare with a suckling colt and the boy would have put her out but they
. called to him to leave her. They car ied straw from a stall and pitched it down and he

held the lamp for them while they spread their bedding. The barn smelled of clay and
straw and manure and in the soiled yellow light of the lamp their breath rolled smoking
through the cold. When they had arranged their blankets the boy lowered the lamp and
stepped into the yard and pulled the door shut behind, leaving them in profound and
absolute darkness.
No one moved. In that cold stable the shutting of the door may have evoked in some
hearts other hostels and not of their choosing. The mare sniffed uneasily and the young
colt stepped about. Then one by one they began to divest themselves of their outer
clothes, the hide slickers and raw wool serapes and vests, and one by one they
propagated about themselves a great crackling of sparks and each man was seen to wear
. a shroud of palest fire. Their arms aloft pulling at their clothes were lumi ous and
each obscure soul was enveloped in audible shapes of light as if it had always been so.
The mare at the far end of the stable snorted and shied at this luminosity in beings so
en-darkened and the little horse turned and hid his face in the web of his dam's flank.
XVI
The Santa Cruz valley - San Bernardino - Wild bulls ?
Tumacacori ?The mission ?A hermit - Tubac -The lost scouts -
San Xavier del Bac ?The presidio of Tucson -Scavengers ?
The Chiricahuas - A risky encounter - Mangas Colorado - Lieutenant
Couts - Recruiting in the plaza - A wild man -Murder of Owens -
In the cantina ?Mr Bell is examined - The judge on evidence ?
Dogfreaks - A fandango - Judge and meteorite.
It was colder yet in the morning when they rode out. There was no one in the streets
and there were no tracks in the new snow. At the edge of the town they saw where
wolves had crossed the road.
They rode out by a small river, skim ice, a frozen marsh where ducks walked up and
back muttering. That afternoon they traversed a lush valley where the dead winter grass
reached to the horses' bellies. Empty fields where the crops had rotted and orchards of
apple and quince and pomegranate where the fruit had dried and fallen to the ground.
They found deer yarded up in the meadows and the tracks of cattle and that night as
they sat about their fire roasting the ribs and haunches of a young doe they could hear
the lowing of bulls in the dark.

The following day they rode past the ruins of the old hacienda at San Bernardino. On
that range they saw wild bulls so old that they bore Spanish brands on their hips and
several of these animals charged the little company and were shot down and left on the
ground until one came out of a stand of acacia in a wash and buried its horns to the
boss in the ribs of a horse ridden by James Miller. He'd lifted his foot out of the near
stirrup when he saw it coming and the impact all but jarred him from the saddle. The
horse screamed and kicked but the bull had planted its feet and it lifted the animal
rider and all clear of the ground before Miller could get his pistol free and when he put
the muzzle to the bull's forehead and fired and the whole grotesque assembly collapsed
he stepped clear of the wreckage and walked off in disgust with the smoking gun
dangling in his hand. The horse was struggling to rise and he went back and shot it
and put the gun in his belt and commenced to unbuckle the girthstraps. The horse was
lying square atop the dead bull and it took him some tugging to get the saddle free.
The other riders had stopped to watch and someone hazed forward the last spare horse
out of the remuda but other than that they offered him no help.
They rode on, following the course of the Santa Cruz, up through stands of immense
riverbottom cottonwoods. They did not cut the sign of the Apache again and they found
no trace of the missing scouts. The following day they passed the old mission at San
Jose de Tumacacori and the judge rode off to look at the church which stood about a
mile off the track. He'd given a short disquisition on the history and architecture of the
mission and those who heard it would not believe that he had never been there. Three
of the party rode with him and Glanton watched them go with dark misgiving. He and
the others rode on a short distance and then he halted and turned back.
The old church was in ruins and the door stood open to the high walled enclosure.
When Glanton and his men rode through the crumbling portal four horses stood
riderless in the empty compound among the dead fruit trees and grapevines. Glanton
rode with his rifle upright before him, the buttplate on his thigh. His dog heeled to the
horse and they approached cautiously the sagging walls of the church. They would have
ridden their horses through the door but as they reached it there was a rifleshot from
inside and pigeons flapped up and they slipped down from their mounts and crouched
behind them with their rifles. Glanton looked back at the others and then walked his
horse forward to where he could see into the interior. Part of the upper wall was fallen
in and most of the roof and there was a man lying in the floor. Glanton led the horse
into the sacristy and stood looking down with the others.
The man in the floor was dying and he was dressed altogether in homemade clothes of
sheephide even to boots and a strange cap. They turned him over on the cracked clay
tiles and his jaw moved and a bloody spittle formed along his lower lip. His eyes were
. dull and there was fear in them and there was some hing else. John Prewett stood the

butt of his rifle in the floor and swung his horn about to recharge the piece. I seen
anothern run, he said. They's two of em.
The man in the floor began to move. He had one arm lying in his groin and he moved
it slightly and pointed. At them or at the height from which he had fallen or to his
destination in eternity they did not know. Then he died.
Glanton looked about the ruins. Where did this son of a bitch come from? he said.
Prewett nodded toward the crumbling mud parapet. He was up yonder. I didnt know
what he was. Still dont. I shot the son of a bitch out of there.
Glanton looked at the judge.
I think he was an imbecile, the judge said.
Glanton led his horse through the church and out by a small door in the nave into the
yard. He was sitting there when they brought the other hermit out. Jackson prodded
him forward with the barrel of his rifle, a small thin man, not young. The one they'd
killed was his brother. They had jumped ship on the coast long ago and made their way
to this place. He was terrified and he spoke no english and little Spanish. The judge
spoke to him in german. They had been here for years. The brother had his wits stole
in this place and the man now before them in his hides and his peculiar bootees was
not altogether sane. They left him there. As they rode out he was trotting up and back
in the yard calling out. He seemed not to be aware that his brother was dead in the
church.
The judge caught Glanton up and they rode side by side out to the road.
Glanton spat. Ort to of shot that one too, he said.
The judge smiled.
I dont like to see white men that way, Glanton said. Dutch or whatever. I dont like to
see it.
They rode north along the river trace. The woods were bare and the leaves on the
ground clutched little scales of ice and the mottled and bony limbs of the cottonwoods
were stark and heavy against the quilted desert sky. In the evening they passed through
Tubac, abandoned, wheat dead in the winter fields and grass growing in the street.
There was a blind man on a stoop watching the plaza and as they passed he raised his

head to listen.
They rode out onto the desert to camp. There was no wind and the silence out there
. was greatly favored by every kind of fugi ive as was the open country itself and no
mountains close at hand for enemies to black themselves against. They were caught up
and saddled in the morning before light, all riding together, their arms at the ready.
. Each man scanned the terrain and the move ents of the least of creatures were logged
into their collective cognizance until they were federated with invisible wires of vigilance
. and advanced upon that landscape with a single reso ance. They passed abandoned
haciendas and roadside graves and by midmorning they had picked up the track of the
Apaches again coming in off the desert to the west and advancing before them through
the loose sand of the riverbottom. The riders got down and pinched up samples of the
forced sand at the rim of the tracks and tested it between their fingers and calibrated
its moisture against the sun and let it fall and looked off up the river through the
naked trees. They remounted and rode on.
They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked
paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened
shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals
where they'd been roasted until their heaas had charred and the brains bubbled in the
skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held
with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and
their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests.
Some of the men pushed forward with their knives and cut the bodies down and they
left them there in the ashes. The two darker forms were the last of the Delawares and
the other two were the Vandiemenlander and a man from the east named Gilchrist.
Among their barbarous hosts they had met with neither favor nor discrimination but had
suffered and died impartially.
They rode that night through the mission of San Xavier del Bac, the church solemn and
stark in the starlight. Not a dog barked. The clusters of Papago huts seemed without
. tenant. The air was cold and clear and the country there and beyond lay in a dark ess
unclaimed by so much as an owl. A pale green meteor came up the valley floor behind
them and passed overhead and vanished silently in the void.
At dawn on the outskirts of the presidio of Tucson they passed the ruins of several
haciendas and they passed more roadside markers where people had been murdered. Out
on the plain stood a small estancia where the buildings were still smoking and along the
segments of a fence constructed from the bones of cactus sat vultures shoulder to
shoulder facing east to the promised sun, lifting one foot and then the other and
holding out their wings like cloaks. They saw the bones of pigs that had died in a

claywalled lot and they saw a wolf in a melonpatch that crouched between its thin
elbows and watched them as they passed. The town lay on the plain to the north in a
thin line of pale walls and they grouped their horses along a low esker of gravel and
surveyed it and the country and the naked ranges of mountains beyond. The stones of
the desert lay in dark tethers of shadow and a wind was blowing out of the sun where
it sat squat and pulsing at the eastern reaches of the earth. They chucked up their
horses and sallied out onto the flat as did the Apache track before them two days old
and a hundred riders strong.
They rode with their rifles on their knees, fanned out, riding abreast. The desert sunrise
flared over the ground before them and ringdoves rose out of the chaparral by ones and
by pairs and whistled away with thin calls. A thousand yards out and they could see the
Apaches camped along the south wall. Their animals were grazing among the willows in
the periodic river basin to the west of the town and what seemed to be rocks or debris
under the wall was the sordid collection of leantos and wickiups thrown up with poles
and hides and wagonsheets.
They rode on. A few dogs had begun to bark. Glanton's dog was quartering back and
forth nervously and a deputation of riders had set out from the camp.
They were Chiricahuas, twenty, twenty-five of them. Even with the sun up it was not
above freezing and yet they sat their horses half naked, naught but boots and
breechclouts and the plumed hide helmets they wore, stoneage savages daubed with clay
paints in obscure charges, greasy, stinking, the paint on the horses pale under the dust
and the horses prancing and blowing cold. They carried lances and bows and a few had
muskets and they had long black hair and dead black eyes that cut among the riders
studying their arms, the sclera bloodshot and opaque. None spoke even to another and
they shouldered their horses through the party in a sort of ritual movement as if certain
points of ground must be trod in a certain sequence as in a child's game yet with some
terrible forfeit at hand.
The leader of these jackal warriors was a small dark man in cast-off Mexican military
attire and he carried a sword and he carried in a torn and gaudy baldric one of the
Whitneyville Colts that had belonged to the scouts. He sat his horse before Glanton and
assessed the position of the other riders and then asked in good Spanish where were
they bound. He'd no sooner spoken than Glanton's horse leaned its jaw forward and
seized the man's horse by the ear. Blood flew. The horse screamed and reared and the
Apache struggled to keep his seat and drew his sword and found himself staring into
the black lemniscate that was the paired bores of Glanton's doublerifle. Glanton slapped
the muzzle of his horse twice hard and it tossed its head with one eye blinking and
blood dripping from its mouth. The Apache wrenched his pony's head around and when

Glanton spun to look at his men he found them frozen in deadlock with the savages,
they and their arms wired into a construction taut and fragile as those puzzles wherein
the placement of each piece is predicated upon every other and they in turn so that
none can move for bringing down the structure entire.
The leader was the first to speak. He gestured at the bloodied ear of his mount and
spoke- angrily in apache, his dark eyes avoiding Glanton. The judge pushed his horse
forward.
Vaya tranquilo, he said. Un accidente, nada mas.
Mire, said the Apache. Mire la oreja de mi caballo.
He steadied the animal's head to show it but it jerked loose and slung the broken ear
about so that blood sprayed the riders. Horseblood or any blood a tremor ran that
. perilous architecture and the ponies stood rigid and quivering in the reddened sun ise
and the desert under them hummed like a snaredrum. The tensile properties of this
unratified truce were abused to the utmost of their enduring when the judge stood
slightly in the saddle and raised his arm and spoke out a greeting beyond them.
Another eight or ten mounted warriors had ridden out from the wall. Their leader was a
huge man with a huge head and he was dressed in overalls cut off at the knees to
accommodate the leggingtops of his moccasins and he wore a checked shirt and a red
scarf. He carried no arms but the men at either side of him were armed with
shortbarreled rifles and they also carried the saddle pistols and other accoutrements of
the murdered scouts. As they approached the other savages deferred and gave way
before them. The Indian whose horse had been bitten pointed out this injury to them
but the leader only nodded affably. He turned his mount quarterwise to the judge and it
arched its neck and he sat it well. Buenos dias, he said. De donde viene?
The judge smiled and touched the withered garland at his brow, forgetting possibly that
he had no hat. He presented his chief Glanton very formally. Introductions were
exchanged. The man's name was Mangas and he was cordial and spoke Spanish well.
When the rider of the injured horse again put forth his claim for consideration this man
dismounted and took hold of the animal's head and examined it. He was bandylegged
for all his height and he was strangely proportioned. He looked up at the Americans
and he looked at the other riders and waved his hand at them.
Andale, he said. He turned to Glanton. Ellos son amigables. Un poco borracho, nada
mas.

The Apache riders had begun to extricate themselves from among the Americans like
men backing out of a thornthicket. The Americans stood their rifles upright and Mangas
led the injured horse forward and turned its head up, containing the animal solely with
his hands and the white eye rolling crazily. After some discussion it became plain that
. whatever the assess ent of damage levied there was no specie acceptable by way of
payment other than whiskey.
Glanton spat and eyed the man. No hay Whiskey, he said.
Silence fell. The Apaches looked from one to the other. They looked at the saddle
wallets and canteens and gourds. Como? said Mangas.
No hay whiskey, said Glanton.
Mangas let go the rough hide headstall of the horse. His men watched him. He looked
toward the walled town and he looked at the judge. No whiskey? he said.
No whiskey.
His among the clouded faces seemed unperturbed. He looked over the Americans, their
gear. In truth they did not look like men who might have whiskey they hadnt drunk.
The judge and Glanton sat their mounts and offered nothing further in the way of
parley.
Hay whiskey en Tucson, said Mangas.
Sin duda, said the judge. Y soldados tambien. He put forward his horse, his rifle in one
hand and the reins in the other. Glanton moved. The horse behind him shifted into
motion. Then Glanton stopped.
Tiene oro? he said.
Si.
Cuanto.
Bastante.
Glanton looked at the judge then at Mangas again. Bueno, he said. Tres dias. Aqui. Un
barril de whiskey.

Un barril?
Un barril. He nudged the pony and the Apaches gave way and Glanton and the judge
and those who followed rode single-file toward the gates of the squalid mud town that
sat burning in the winter sunrise on the plain.
The lieutenant in charge of the little garrison was named Gouts. He had been to the
coast with Major Graham's command and returned here four days ago to find the town
under an informal investment by the Apaches. They were drunk on tiswin they'd brewed
and there had been shooting in the night two nights running and an incessant clamor
for whiskey. The garrison had a twelvepound demiculverin loaded with musketballs
mounted on the revetment and Gouts expected the savages would withdraw when they
could get nothing more to drink. He was very formal and he addressed Glanton as
Captain. None of the tattered partisans had even dismounted. They looked about at the
bleak and ruinous town. A blindfolded burro tethered to a pole was turning a pugmill,
. circling endlessly, the wooden millshaft creak ng in its blocks. Chickens and smaller
birds were scratching at the base of the mill. The pole was a good four feet off the
ground yet the birds ducked or squatted each time it passed overhead. In the dust of
the plaza lay a number of men apparently asleep. White, indian, Mexican. Some covered
with blankets and some not. At the far end of the square there was a public
whippingpost that was dark about its base where dogs had pissed on it. The lieutenant
followed their gaze. Glanton pushed back his hat and looked down from his horse.
Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said.
It was the first word any of them had spoken. Gouts looked them over. Haggard and
haunted and blacked by the sun. The lines and pores of their skin deeply grimed with
gunblack where they'd washed the bores of their weapons. Even the horses looked alien
to any he'd ever seen, decked as they were in human hair and teeth and skin. Save for
their guns and buckles and a few pieces of metal in the harness of the animals there
was nothing about these arrivals to suggest even the discovery of the wheel.
There are several places, said the lieutenant. None open yet though, I'm afraid.
They're fixin to get that way, said Glanton. He nudged the horse forward. He did not
speak again and none of the others had spoken at all. As they crossed the plaza a few
vagrants raised their heads up out of their blankets and looked after them.
. The bar they entered was a square mud room and the pro rietor set about serving
them in his underwear. They sat on a bench at a wooden table in the gloom drinking
sullenly.

Where you all from? said the proprietor.
Glanton and the judge went out to see if they could recruit any men from the rabble
reposing in the dust of the square. Some of them were sitting, squinting in the sun. A
man with a bowieknife was offering to cut blades with anyone at a wager to see who
had the better steel. The judge went among them with his smile.
Captain what all you got in them saddlegrips?
Glanton turned. He and the judge carried their valises across their shoulders. The man
who'd spoken was propped against a post with one knee drawn up to support his elbow.
These bags? said Glanton.
Them bags.
These here bags are full of gold and silver, said Glanton, for they were.
The idler grinned and spat.
That's why he's a wantin to go to Californy, said another. Account of he's done got a
satchel full of gold now.
The judge smiled benignly at the wastrels. You're liable to take a chill out here, he said.
Who's for the gold fields now.
One man rose and took a few steps away and began to piss in the street.
Maybe the wild man'll go with ye, called another. Him and Cloyce'll make ye good
hands.
They been tryin to go for long enough.
Glanton and the judge sought them out. A rude tent thrown up out of an old tarp. A
sign that said: See The Wild Man Two Bits. They passed behind a wagonsheet where
within a crude cage of paloverde poles crouched a naked imbecile. The floor of the cage
was littered with filth and trodden food and flies clambered about everywhere. The idiot
. was small and mis hapen and his face was smeared with feces and he sat peering at
them with dull hostility silently chewing a turd.

The owner came from the rear shaking his head at them. Aint nobody allowed in here.
We aint open.
Glanton looked about the wretched enclosure. The tent smelled of oil and smoke and
excrement. The judge squatted to study the imbecile.
Is that thing yours? Glanton said.
Yes. Yes he is.
Glanton spat. Man told us you was wantin to go to Californy.
Well, said the owner. Yes, that's right. That is right.
What do you figure to do with that thing?
Take him with me.
How you aim to haul him?
Got a pony and cart. To haul him in.
You got any money?
The judge raised up. This is Captain Glanton, he said. He's leading an expedition to
California. He's willing to take a few passengers under the protection of his company
provided they can find themselves adequately.
Well now yes. Got some money. How much money are we talking about?
How much have you got? said Glanton.
Well. Adequate, I would say. I'd say adequate in money.
Glanton studied the man. I'll tell you what I'll do with you, he said. Are you wantin to
go to Californy or are you just mouth?
California, said the owner. By all means.
I'll carry ye for a hundred dollars, paid in advance.

The man's eyes shifted from Glanton to the judge and back. I like some of having that
much, he said.
We'll be here a couple of days, said Glanton. You find us some more fares and we'll
adjust your tariff accordingly.
The captain will treat you right, said the judge. You can be assured of that.
Yessir, said the owner.
As they passed out by the cage Glanton turned to look at the idiot again. You let
women see that thing? he said.
I dont know, said the owner. There's none ever asked.
By noon the company had moved on to an eatinghouse. There were three or four men
inside when they entered and they got up and left. There was a mud oven in the lot
behind the building and the bed of a wrecked wagon with a few pots and a kettle on it.
An old woman in a gray shawl was cutting up beefribs with an axe while two dogs sat
watching. A tall thin man in a bloodstained apron entered the room from the rear and
looked them over. He leaned and placed both hands on the table before them.
Gentlemen, he said, we dont mind servin people of color. Glad to do it. But we ast for
em to set over here at this other table here. Bight over here.
He stepped back and held out one hand in a strange gesture of hospice. His guests
looked at one another.
What in the hell is he talkin about?
Just right over here, said the man.
Toadvine looked down the table to where Jackson sat. Several looked toward Glanton.
His hands were at rest on the board in front of him and his head was slightly bent like
a man at grace. The judge sat smiling, his arms crossed. They were all slightly drunk.
He thinks we're niggers.
. They sat in silence. The old woman in the court had com enced wailing some dolorous
air and the man was standing with his hand outheld. Piled just within the door were
the satchels and holsters and arms of the company.

Glanton raised his head. He looked at the man.
What's your name? he said.
Name's Owens. I own this place.
Mr Owens, if you was anything at all other than a G-ddamn fool you could take one
look at these here men and know for a stone fact they aint a one of em goin to get up
from where they're at to go set somewheres else.
Well I caint serve you.
You suit yourself about that. Ask her what she's got, Tommy.
Harlan was sitting at the end of the table and he leaned out and called to the old
woman at her pots and asked her in Spanish what she had to eat.
She looked toward the house. Huesos, she said.
Huesos, said Harlan.
Tell her to bring em, Tommy.
She wont bring you nothin without I tell her to. I own this place.
Harlan was calling out the open door.
I know for a fact that man yonder's a nigger, said Owens.
Jackson looked up at him.
Brown turned toward the owner.
Have you got a gun? he said.
A gun?
A gun. Have you got a gun.
Not on me I aint.

Brown pulled a small fiveshot Colt from his belt and pitched it to him. He caught it
and stood holding it uncertainly.
You got one now. Now shoot the nigger.
Wait a G-ddamn minute, said Owens.
Shoot him, said Brown.
Jackson had risen and he pulled one of the big pistols from his belt. Owens pointed the
pistol at him. You put that down, he said.
You better forget about givin orders and shoot the son of a bitch.
Put it down. G-ddamn, man. Tell him to put it down.
Shoot him.
He cocked the pistol.
Jackson fired. He simply passed his left hand over the top of the revolver he was
holding in a gesture brief as flintspark and tripped the hammer. The big pistol jumped
and a double handful of Owens's brains went out the back of his skull and plopped in
the floor behind him. He sank without a sound and lay crumpled up with his face in
the floor and one eye open and the blood welling up out of the destruction at the back
of his head. Jackson sat down. Brown rose and retrieved his pistol and let the hammer
back down and put it in his belt. Most terrible nigger I ever seen, he said. Find some
plates, Charlie. I doubt the old lady is out there any more.
They were drinking in a cantina not a hundred feet from this scene when the lieutenant
and a half dozen armed troopers entered the premises. The cantina was a single room
and there was a hole in the ceiling where a trunk of sunlight fell through onto the mud
floor and figures crossing the room steered with care past the edge of this column of
light as if it might be hot to the touch. They were a hardbit denizenry and they
. shambled to the bar and back in their rags and skins like cavefolk ex hanging at some
nameless trade. The lieutenant circled this reeking solarium and stood before Glanton.
Captain, we're going to have to take whoever's responsible for the death of Mr Owens
into custody.

Glanton looked up. Who's Mr Owens? he said.
Mr Owens is the gentleman who ran the eatinghouse down here. He's been shot to
death.
Sorry to hear it, said Glanton. Set down.
Gouts ignored the invitation. Captain, you dont aim to deny that one of your men shot
him do you?
I aim exactly that, said Glanton.
Captain, it wont hold water.
The judge emerged from the darkness. Evening, Lieutenant, he said. Are these men the
witnesses?
Gouts looked at his corporal. No, he said. They aint witnesses. Hell, Captain. You all
were seen to enter the premises and seen to leave after the shot was fired. Are you
going to deny that you and your men took your dinner there?
Deny ever G-ddamned word of it, said Glanton.
Well by G-d I believe I can prove that you ate there.
Kindly address your remarks to me, Lieutenant, said the judge. I represent Captain
Glanton in all legal matters. I think you should know first of all that the captain does
not propose to be called a liar and I would think twice before I involved myself with
him in an affair of honor. Secondly I have been with him all day and I can assure you
that neither he nor any of his men have ever set foot in the premises to which you
allude.
. The lieutenant seemed stunned at the baldness of these dis laimers. He looked from
the judge to Glanton and back again. I will be damned, he said. Then he turned and
pushed past the men and quit the place.
Glanton tilted his chair and leaned his back to the wall. They'd recruited two men from
among the town's indigents, an unpromising pair that sat gawking at the end of the
bench with their hats in their hands. Glanton's dark eye passed over them and alighted
on the owner of the imbecile who sat alone across the room watching him.

You a drinkin man? said Glanton.
How's that?
Glanton exhaled slowly through his nose.
Yes, said the owner. Yes I am.
There was a common wooden pail on the table before Glanton with a tin dipper in it
and it was about a third full of wagonyard whiskey drawn off from a cask at the bar.
Glanton nodded toward it.
I aint a carryin it to ye.
The owner rose and picked up his cup and came across to the table. He took up the
dipper and poured his cup and set the dipper back in the bucket. He gestured slightly
with the cup and raised and drained it.
Much obliged.
Where's your ape at?
The man looked at the judge. He looked at Glanton again.
I dont take him out much.
Where'd you get that thing at?
He was left to me. Mama died. There was nobody to take him to raise. They shipped
him to me. Joplin Missouri. Just put him in a box and shipped him. Took five weeks.
Didnt bother him a bit. I opened up the box and there he set.
Get ye another drink there.
He took up the dipper and filled his cup again.
Big as life. Never hurt him a bit. I had him a hair suit made but he ate it.
Aint everbody in this town seen the son of a bitch?
Yes. Yes they have. I need to get to California. I may charge four bits out there.

You may get tarred and feathered out there.
I've been that. State of Arkansas. Claimed I'd given him something. Drugged him. They
took him off and waited for him to get better but of course he didnt do it. They had a
special preacher come and pray over him. Finally I got him back. I could have been
somebody in this world wasnt for him.
Do I understand you correctly, said the judge, that the imbecile is your brother?
Yessir, said the man. That's the truth of the matter.
The judge reached and took hold of the man's head in his hands and began to explore
its contours. The man's eyes darted about and he held onto the judge's wrists. The
judge had his entire head in his grip like an immense and dangerous faith healer. The
man was standing tiptoe as if to better accommodate him in his investigations and when
the judge let go of him he took a step back and looked at Glanton with eyes that were
white in the gloom. The recruits at the end of the bench sat watching with their jaws
down and the judge narrowed an eye at the man and studied him and then reached
and gripped him again, holding him by the forehead while he prodded along the back of
his skull with the ball of his thumb. When the judge put him down the man stepped
back and fell over the bench and the recruits commenced to bob up and down and to
wheeze and croak. The owner of the idiot looked about the tawdry grogshop, passing up
each face as if it did not quite suffice. He picked himself up and moved past the end of
the bench. When he was halfway across the room the judge called out to him.
Has he always been like that? said the judge.
Yessir. He was born that way.
He turned to go. Glanton emptied his cup and set it before him and looked up. Were
you? he said. But the owner pushed open the door and vanished in the blinding light
without.
The lieutenant came again in the evening. He and the judge sat together and the judge
went over points of law with him. The lieutenant nodded, his lips pursed. The judge
translated for him latin terms of jurisprudence. He cited cases civil and martial. He
quoted Coke and Blackstone, Anaximander, Thales.
In the morning there was new trouble. A young Mexican girl had been abducted. Parts
of her clothes were found torn and bloodied under the north wall, over which she could

only have been thrown. In the desert were drag marks. A shoe. The father of the child
knelt clutching a bloodstained rag to his chest and none could persuade him to rise and
none to leave. That night fires were lit in the streets and a beef killed and Glanton and
his men were host to a motley collection of citizens and soldiers and reduced indians or
tontos as their brothers outside the gates would name them. A keg of whiskey was
broached and soon men were reeling aimlessly through the smoke. A merchant of that
town brought forth a litter of dogs one of whom had six legs and another two and a
third with four eyes in its head. He offered these for sale to Glanton and Glanton
warned the man away and threatened to shoot them.
The beef was stripped to the bones and the bones themselves carried off and vigas were
dragged from the ruined buildings and piled onto the blazed By now many of Glanton's
men were naked and lurching about and the judge soon had them dancing while he
fiddled on a crude instrument he'd commandeered and the filthy hides of which they'd
divested themselves smoked and stank and blackened in the flames and the red sparks
rose like the souls of the small life they'd harbored.
By midnight the citizens had cleared out and there were armed and naked men
pounding on doors demanding drink and women. In the early morning hours when the
fires had burned to heaps of coals and a few sparks scampered in the wind down the
cold clay streets feral dogs trotted around the cookfire snatching out the blackened
scraps of meat and men lay huddled naked in the doorways clutching their elbows and
snoring in the cold.
By noon they were abroad again, wandering red-eyed in the streets, fitted out for the
most part in new shirts and breeches. They collected the remaining horses from the
farrier and he stood them to a drink. He was a small sturdy man named Pacheco and
he had for anvil an enormous iron meteorite shaped like a great molar and the judge
on a wager lifted the thing and on a further wager lifted it over his head. Several men
pushed forward to feel the iron and to rock it where it stood, nor did the judge lose
this opportunity to ventilate himself upon the ferric nature of heavenly bodies and their
powers and claims. Two lines were drawn in the dirt ten feet apart and a third round
of wagers was laid, coins from half a dozen countries in both gold and silver and even
a few boletas or notes of discounted script from the mines near Tubac. The judge seized.
that great slag wandered for what millennia from what unreckonable corner of the uni
erse and he raised it overhead and stood tottering and then lunged forward. It cleared
the mark by a foot and he shared with no one the specie piled on the saddleblanket at
the farrier's feet for not even Glanton had been willing to underwrite this third trial.
XVII

Leaving Tucson - A new cooperage - An exchange - Saguaro forests -
Clanton at the fire ?Garcia's command ?The paraselene ?The G-dfire - The expriest on
astronomy - The judge on the extraterrestrial,
on order, on teleology in the universe - A coin trick -
Glanton's dog ?Dead animals ?The sands ?A crucifixion ?The judge
on war - The priest does not say - Tierras quebradas, tierras
desamparadas - The Tinajas Atlas - Un hueso de piedra - The
Colorado ?Argonauts ?Yumas ?The ferrymen ?To the Yuma camp.
They rode out at dusk. The corporal in the gatehouse above the portal came out and
called to them to halt but they did not. They rode twenty-one men and a dog and a
little flatbed cart aboard which the idiot and his cage had been lashed as if for a sea
journey. Lashed on behind the cage rode the whiskey keg they'd drained the night
. before. The keg had been dis antled and rebound by a man Glanton had appointed
cooper pro-tern to the expedition and it now contained within it a flask made from a
common sheep's stomach and holding perhaps three quarts of whiskey. This flask was
fitted to the bung at the inside and the rest of the keg was filled with water. So
provisioned they passed out through the gates and beyond the walls onto the prairie
where it lay pulsing in the banded twilight. The little cart jostled and creaked and the
idiot clutched at the bars of his cage and croaked hoarsely after the sun.
Glanton rode at the fore of the column in a new Ringgold saddle ironbound that he'd
traded for and he wore a new hat which was black and became him. The recruits now
five in number grinned at one another and looked back at the sentry. David Brown rode
at the rear and he was leaving his brother here for what would prove forever and his
mood was foul enough for him to have shot the sentry with no provocation at all. When
the sentry called again he swung about with his rifle and the man had the sense to
duck under the parapet and they heard no more from him. In the long dusk the
savages rode out to meet them and the whiskey was exchanged for upon a Saltillo
. blanket spread on the ground. Glanton paid little atten ion to the proceedings. When
the savages had counted out gold and silver to the judge's satisfaction Glanton stepped
onto the blanket and kicked the coins together with his bootheel and then stepped away
and directed Brown to take up the blanket. Mangas and his lieutenants exchanged dark
. looks but the Amer cans mounted up and rode out and none looked back save the
recruits. They'd become privy to the details of the business and one of them fell in

alongside Brown and asked if the Apaches would not follow them.
They wont ride at night, said Brown.
The recruit looked back at the figures gathered about the keg in that scoured and
darkening waste.
Why wont they? he said.
Brown spat. Because it's dark, he said.
They rode west from the town across the base of a small mountain through a dogtown
. strewn with old broken earthen are from a crockery furnace that once had been there.
The keeper of the idiot rode downside of the trestled cage and the idiot clutched the
poles and watched the land pass in silence.
They rode that night through forests of saguaro up into the hills to the west. The sky
was all overcast and those fluted columns passing in the dark were like the ruins of
vast temples ordered and grave and silent save for the soft cries of elf owls among
them. The terrain was thick with cholla and clumps of it clung to the horses with spikes
that would drive through a bootsole to the bones within and a wind came up through
the hills and all night it sang with a wild viper sound through that countless reach of
spines. They rode on and the land grew more spare and they reached the first of a
series of jornadas where there would be no water at all and there they camped. That
night Glanton stared long into the embers of the fire. All about him his men were
sleeping but much was changed. So many gone, defected or dead. The Delawares all
slain. He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him.
He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow
for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with
. men and na ions, whether it should cease. He'd long forsworn all weighing of
consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to
contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would
be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so
and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all
ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon
them.
Across from him sat the vast abhorrence of the judge. Half naked, scribbling in his
ledger. In the thornforest through which they'd passed the little desert wolves yapped
and on the dry plain before them others answered and the wind fanned the coals that
he watched. The bones of cholla that glowed there in their incandescent basketry pulsed

like burning holothurians in the phosphorous dark of the sea's deeps. The idiot in his
cage had been drawn close to the fire and he watched it tirelessly. When Glanton raised
his head he saw the kid across the fire from him, squatting in his blanket, watching the
judge.
Two days later they encountered a ragged legion under the command of Colonel Garcia.
They were troops from Sonora seeking a band of Apaches under Pablo and they
numbered close to a hundred riders. Of these some were without hats and some without
pantaloons and some were naked under their coats and they were armed with derelict
weapons, old fusils and Tower muskets, some with bows and arrows or nothing more
than ropes with which to garrote the enemy.
Glanton?and?his?men?reviewed?this?company?with?stony amazement. The Mexicans
pressed about with their hands out-held for tobacco and Glanton and the colonel
. exchanged rudi entary civilities and then Glanton pushed on through that importunate
horde. They were of another nation, those riders, and all that land to the south out of
which they'd originated and whatever lands to the east toward which they were bound
were dead to him and both the ground and any sojourners upon it remote and arguable
of substance. This feeling communicated itself through the company before Glanton had
moved entirely clear of them and each man turned his horse and each man followed
and not even the judge spoke to excuse himself from out of that encounter.
They rode on into the darkness and the moonblanched waste lay before them cold and
. pale and the moon sat in a ring over ead and in that ring lay a mock moon with its
own cold gray and nacre seas. They made camp on a low bench of land where walls of
dry aggregate marked an old river course and they struck up a fire about which they sat
in silence, the eyes of the dog and of the idiot and certain other men glowing red as
coals in their heads where they turned. The flames sawed in the wind and the embers
paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing
. eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does con ain
within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are
divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the
last ever to be. By and by the judge rose and moved away on some obscure mission
and after a while someone asked the expriest if it were true that at one time there had
been two moons in the sky and the expriest eyed the false moon above them and said
that it may well have been so. But certainly the wise high G-d in his dismay at the
proliferation of lunacy on this earth must have wetted a thumb and leaned down out of
the abyss and pinched it hissing into extinction. And could he find some alter means by
which the birds could mend their paths in the darkness he might have done with this
one too.

The question was then put as to whether there were on Mars or other planets in the
void men or creatures like them and at this the judge who had returned to the fire and
stood half naked and sweating spoke and said that there were not and that there were
no men anywhere in the universe save those upon the earth. All listened as he spoke,
those who had turned to watch him and those who would not.
. The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is pos ible. Had you not seen it
all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it
is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras
having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose
. ultimate destina ion after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and
calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any
latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in
this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in
creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so
. that you shall not lose your way. For ex stence has its own order and that no man's
mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
Brown spat into the fire. That's some more of your craziness, he said.
The judge smiled. He placed the palms of his hands upon his chest and breathed the
night air and he stepped closer and squatted and held up one hand. He turned that
hand and there was a gold coin between his fingers.
Where is the coin, Davy?
I'll notify you where to put the coin.
The judge swung his hand and the coin winked overhead in the firelight. It must have
been fastened to some subtle lead, horsehair perhaps, for it circled the fire and returned
to the judge and he caught it in his hand and smiled.
The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether, said the judge.
Moons, coins, men. His hands moved as if he were pulling something from one fist in a
. series of elon ations. Watch the coin, Davy, he said.
He flung it and it cut an arc through the firelight and was gone in the darkness
beyond. They watched the night where it had vanished and they watched the judge and
. in their watch ng some the one and some the other they were a common witness.

The coin, Davy, the coin, whispered the judge. He sat erect and raised his hand and
smiled around.
The coin returned back out of the night and crossed the fire with a faint high droning
and the judge's raised hand was empty and then it held the coin. There was a light slap
and it held the coin. Even so some claimed that he had thrown the coin away and
palmed another like it and made the sound with his tongue for he was himself a
cunning old malabarista and he said himself as he put the coin away what all men
knew that there are coins and false coins. In the morning some did walk over the
ground where the coin had gone but if any man found it he kept it to himself and with
sunrise they were mounted and riding again.
The cart with the idiot in his cage trundled along at the rear and now Glanton's dog
fell back to trot alongside, perhaps out of some custodial instinct such as children will
evoke in animals. But Glanton called the dog to him and when it did not come he
dropped back along the little column and leaned down and quirted it viciously with his
hobble rope and drove it out before him.
. They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, single rees, dead mules, wagons.
. Saddletrees eaten bare of their raw ide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light
chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood. They rode through a region where
iron will not rust nor tin tarnish. The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches
of dried hide lay like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless void and
they passed lurid and austere the black and desiccated shapes of horses and mules that
travelers had stood afoot. These parched beasts had died with their necks stretched in
agony in the sand and now upright and blind and lurching askew with scraps of
blackened leather hanging from the fretwork of their ribs they leaned with their long
. mouths howling after the end ess tandem suns that passed above them. The riders rode
on. They crossed a vast dry lake with rows of dead volcanoes ranged beyond it like the
works of enormous insects. To the south lay broken shapes of scoria in a lava bed as
far as the eye could see. Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself
in whorls strangely symmetric like iron filings in a field and these shapes flared and
drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away
. over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained yet some resi ue of
sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to
. register even to the uttermost gran lation of reality.
On a rise at the western edge of the playa they passed a crude wooden cross where
Maricopas had crucified an Apache. The mummied corpse hung from the crosstree with
its mouth gaped in a raw hole, a thing of leather and bone scoured by the pumice

. winds off the lake and the pale tree of the ribs show ng through the scraps of hide
that hung from the breast. They rode on. The horses trudged sullenly the alien ground
and the round earth rolled beneath them silently milling the greater void wherein they
were contained. In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a
strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put
forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for
the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more
. luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democ acy of
such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become
endowed with unguessed kinships.
They grew gaunted and lank under the white suns of those days and their hollow
burnedout eyes were like those of noctambulants surprised by day. Crouched under their
. hats they seemed fugi ives on some grander scale, like beings for whom the sun
hungered. Even the judge grew silent and speculative. He'd spoke of purging oneself of
those things that lay claim to a man but that body receiving his remarks counted
themselves well done with any claims at all. They rode on and the wind drove the fine
gray dust before them and they rode an army of gray-beards, gray men, gray horses.
The mountains to the north lay sunwise in corrugated folds and the days were cool and
the nights were cold and they sat about the fire each in his round of darkness in that
round of dark while the idiot watched from his cage at the edge of the light. The judge
cracked with the back of an axe the shinbone on an antelope and the hot marrow
dripped smoking on the stones. They watched him. The subject was war.
The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the
black.
The judge smiled, his face shining with grease. What right man would have it any other
way? he said.
The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving. Yet there's many a bloody
tale of war inside it.
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask
men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for
him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and
will be. That way and not some other way.
He turned to Brown, from whom he'd heard some whispered slur or demurrer. Ah Davy,
he said. It's your own trade we honor here. Why not rather take a small bow. Let each
. ac nowledge each.

My trade?
Certainly.
What is my trade?
War. War is your trade. Is it not?
And it aint yours?
Mine too. Very much so.
What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?
All other trades are contained in that of war.
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that
fought, those that did not.
That's your notion.
The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is
nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in
the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance
require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of
the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves
. sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the princi als and define them. But
trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that
which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard
such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored
clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man's hand or that man
at his. What more certain validation of a man's worth could there be? This enhancement
of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The
selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a
dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance
either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the

decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his
hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at
once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of
divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will
which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game
because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is G-d.
Brown studied the judge. You're crazy Holden. Crazy at last.
The judge smiled.
Might does not make right, said living. The man that wins in some combat is not
vindicated morally.
Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchise-ment of the powerful in
. favor of the weak. Historical law sub erts it at every turn. A moral view can never be
proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought
thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives
evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further
argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the
historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what
great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the
separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in
capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his
judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no
. special pleading. Here are con iderations of equity and rectitude and moral right
rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised.
Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of
right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual,
natural.
The judge searched out the circle for disputants. But what says the priest? he said.
Tobin looked up. The priest does not say.
The priest does not say, said the judge. Nihil dicit. But the priest has said. For the
priest has put by the robes of his craft and taken up the tools of that higher calling
which all men honor. The priest also would be no G-dserver but a G-d himself.
Tobin shook his head. You've a blasphemous tongue, Holden. And in truth I was never
a priest but only a novitiate to the order.

Journeyman priest or apprentice priest, said the judge. Men of G-d and men of war
have strange affinities.
I'll not secondsay you in your notions, said Tobin. Dont ask it.
Ah Priest, said the judge. What could I ask of you that you've not already given?
On the day following they crossed the malpais afoot, leading the horses upon a lakebed
of lava all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood, threading those badlands
of dark amber glass like the remnants of some dim legion scrabbling up out of a land
accursed, shouldering the little cart over the rifts and ledges, the idiot clinging to the
bars and calling hoarsely after the sun like some queer unruly G-d abducted from a race
of degenerates. They crossed a cinderland of caked slurry and volcanic ash imponderable
as the burnedout floor of hell and they climbed up through a low range of barren
granite hills to a stark promontory where the judge, triangulating from known points of
landscape, reckoned anew their course. A gravel flat stretched away to the horizon. Far
to the south beyond the black volcanic hills lay a lone albino ridge, sand or gypsum,
like the back of some pale seabeast surfaced among the dark archipelagos. They went
on. In a day's ride they reached the stone tanks and the water they sought and they
drank and bailed water down from the higher tanks to the dry ones below for the
horses.
At all desert watering places there are bones but the judge that evening carried to the
fire one such as none there had ever seen before, a great femur from some beast long
. extinct that he'd found weathered out of a bluff and that he now sat measur ng with
the tailor's tape he carried and sketching into his log. All in that company had heard
the judge on paleontology save for the new recruits and they sat watching and putting
to him such queries as they could conceive of. He answered them with care, amplifying
their own questions for them, as if they might be apprentice scholars. They nodded
dully and reached to touch that pillar of stained and petrified bone, perhaps to sense
with their fingers the temporal immensities of which the judge spoke.
The keeper led the imbecile down from its cage and tethered it by the fire with a
braided horsehair rope that it could not chew through and it stood leaning in its collar
with its hands outheld as if it yearned for the flames. Glanton's dog rose and sat
watching it and the idiot swayed and drooled with its dull eyes falsely brightened by the
fire. The judge had been holding the femur upright in order to better illustrate its
analogies to the prevalent bones of the country about and he let it fall in the sand and
closed his book.

There is no mystery to it, he said.
The recruits blinked dully.
Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.
He rose and moved away into the darkness beyond the fire. Aye, said the expriest
watching, his pipe cold in his teeth. And no mystery. As if he were no mystery himself,
the bloody old hoodwinker.
Three days later they reached the Colorado. They stood at the edge of the river
watching the roiled and claycolored waters coming down in a flat and steady seething
out of the desert. Two cranes rose from the shore and flapped away and the horses and
mules led down the bank ventured uncertainly into the eddying shoals and stood
drinking and looking up with their muzzles dripping at the passing current and the
shore beyond.
Upriver they encountered in camp the remnants of a wagon train laid waste by cholera.
The survivors moved among their noonday cookfires or stared hollowly at the ragged
dragoons riding up out of the willows. Their chattels were scattered about over the sand
and the wretched estates of the deceased stood separate to be parceled out among them.
There were in the camp a number of Yuma indians. The men wore their hair hacked to
length with knives or plastered up in wigs of mud and they shambled about with heavy
clubs dangling in their hands. Both they and the women were tattooed of face and the
women were naked save for skirts of willowbark woven into string and many of them
were lovely and many more bore the marks of syphilis.
Glanton moved through this balesome depot with his dog at heel and his rifle in his
hand. The Yumas were swimming the few sorry mules left to the party across the river
and he stood on the bank and watched them. Downriver they'd drowned one of the
animals and towed it ashore to be butchered. An old man in a shacto coat and a long
beard sat with his boots at his side and his feet in the river.
Where's your all's horses? said Glanton.
We ate them.
Glanton studied the river.
How do you aim to cross?

On the ferry.
He looked crossriver to where the old man gestured. What does he get to cross ye? he
said.
Dollar a head.
Glanton turned and studied the pilgrims on the beach. The dog was drinking from the
river and he said something to it and it came up and sat by his knee.
The ferryboat put out from the far bank and crossed to a landing upstream where there
was a deadman built of driftlogs. The boat was contrived from a pair of old wagonboxes
. fitted to ether and caulked with pitch. A group of people had shouldered up their
dunnage and stood waiting. Glanton turned and went up the bank to get his horse.
. The ferryman was a doctor from New York state named Lin oln. He was supervising
the loading, the travelers stepping aboard and squatting along the rails of the scow with
their parcels and looking out uncertainly at the broad water. A half-mastiff dog sat on
the bank watching. At Glanton's approach it stood bristling. The doctor turned and
shaded his eyes with his hand and Glanton introduced himself. They shook hands. A
pleasure, Captain Glanton. I am at your service.
Glanton nodded. The doctor gave instructions to the two men working for him and he
and Glanton walked out along the downriver path, Glanton leading the horse and the
doctor's dog following some ten paces behind.
Glanton's party was camped on a bench of sand partially shaded by river willows. As he
and the doctor approached the idiot rose in his cage and seized the bars and
. commenced hoot ng as if he'd warn the doctor back. The doctor went wide of the
thing, glancing at his host, but Glanton's lieutenants had come forward and soon the
doctor and the judge were deep in discourse to the exclusion of anyone else.
In the evening Glanton and the judge and a detail of five men rode downriver into the
Yuma encampment. They rode through a pale wood of willow and sycamore flaked with
clay from the high water and they rode past old acequias and small winter fields where
the dry husks of corn rattled lightly in the wind and they crossed the river at the
AlG-dones ford. When the dogs announced them the sun was already down and the
western land red and smoking and they rode singlefile in cameo detailed by the winey
light with their dark sides to the river. Cookfires from the camp smoldered among the
trees and a delegation of mounted savages rode out to meet them.

They halted and sat their horses. The party approaching were clad in such fool's regalia
and withal bore themselves with such aplomb that the paler riders were hard put to
. keep their com osure. The leader was a man named Caballo en Pelo and this old
mogul wore a belted wool overcoat that would have served a far colder climate and
. beneath it a woman's blouse of em roidered silk and a pair of pantaloons of gray
cassinette. He was small and wiry and he had lost an eye to the Maricopas and he
presented the Americans with a strange priapic leer that may have at one time been a
smile. At his right rode a lesser chieftain named Pascual in a frogged coat out at the
elbows and who wore in his nose a bone hung with small pendants. The third man was
Pablo and he was clad in a scarlet coat with tarnished braiding and tarnished epaulettes
. of silver wire. He was bare ooted and bare of leg and he wore on his face a pair of
round green goggles. In this attire they arranged themselves before the Americans and
nodded austerely.
Brown spat on the ground in disgust and Glanton shook his head.
Aint you a crazylookin bunch of niggers, he said.
Only the judge seemed to weigh them up at all and he was sober in the doing, judging
as perhaps he did that things are seldom what they seem.
Buenas tardes, he said.
The mogul tossed his chin, a small gesture darkened with a certain ambiguity. Buenas
tardes, he said. De donde viene?
XVIII
The return to camp - The idiot delivered -Sarah Borginnis ?
A confrontation - Bathed in the river - The tumbril burned - James
Robert in camp - Another baptism - Judge and fool.
Then they rode out of the Yuma camp it was in the dark of early morning. Cancer,
Virgo, Leo raced the ecliptic down the southern night and to the north the constellation
of Cassiopeia burned like a witch's signature on the black face of the firmament. In the
nightlong parley they'd come to terms with the Yumas in conspiring to seize the ferry.
They rode upriver among the floodstained trees talking quietly among themselves like
men returning late from a social, from a wedding or a death.
By daylight the women at the crossing had discovered the idiot in his cage. They

gathered about him, apparently unap-palled by the nakedness and filth. They crooned to
. him and they consulted among themselves and a woman named Sarah Borgin is led
them to seek out the brother. She was a huge woman with a great red face and she
read him riot.
What's your name anyways? she said.
Cloyce Bell mam.
What's his.
His name's James Robert but there dont anybody call him it.
If your mother was to see him what do you reckon she'd say.
I dont know. She's dead.
Aint you ashamed?
No mam.
Dont you sass me.
I'm not trying to. You want him just take him. I'll give him to you. I cant do any more
than what I've done.
Damn if you aint a sorry specimen. She turned to the other women.
You all help me. We need to bathe him and get some clothes on him. Somebody run
get some soap.
Mam, said the keeper.
You all just take him on to the river.
Toadvine and the kid passed them as they were dragging the cart along. They stepped
off the path and watched them go by. The idiot was clutching the bars and hooting at
the water and some of the women had started up a hymn.
Where are they takin it? said Toadvine.

The kid didnt know. They were backing the cart through the loose sand toward the edge
of the river and they let it down and opened the cage. The Borginnis woman stood
. before the im ecile.
James Robert come out of there.
She reached in and took him by the hand. He peered past her at the water, then he
reached for her.
A sigh went up from the women, several of whom had hiked their skirts and tucked
them at the waist and now stood in the river to receive him.
She handed him down, him clinging to her neck. When his feet touched the ground he
turned to the water. She was smeared with feces but she seemed not to notice. She
looked back at those on the riverbank.
Burn that thing, she said.
Someone ran to the fire for a brand and while they led James Robert into the waters
the cage was torched and began to burn.
He clutched at their skirts, he reached with a clawed hand, gibbering, drooling.
He sees hisself in it, they said.
Shoo. Imagine having this child penned up like a wild animal.
The flames from the burning cart crackled in the dry air and the noise must have
caught the idiot's attention for he turned his dead black eyes upon it. He knows, they
said. All agreed. The Borginnis woman waded out with her dress ballooning about her
and took him deeper and swirled him about grown man that he was in her great stout
arms. She held him up, she crooned to him. Her pale hair floated on the water.
His old companions saw him that night before the migrants' fires in a coarse woven
wool suit. His thin neck turned warily in the collar of his outsized shirt. They'd greased
his hair and combed it flat upon his skull so that it looked painted on. They brought
him sweets and he sat drooling and watched the fire, greatly to their admiration. In the
dark the river ran on and a fishcolored moon rose over the desert east and set their
shadows by their sides in the barren light. The fires drew down and the smoke stood
gray and chambered in the night. The little jackal wolves cried from across the river and
the camp dogs stirred and muttered. The Borginnis took the idiot to his pallet under a

wagon-sheet and stripped him to his new underwear and she tucked him into his
blanket and kissed him goodnight and the camp grew quiet. When the idiot crossed that
. blue and smoky amphi heatre he was naked once again, shambling past the fires like a
. balden groundsloth. He paused and tested the air and he shuf led on. He went wide of
the landing and stumbled through the shore willows, whimpering and pushing with his
thin arms at things in the night. Then he was standing alone on the shore. He hooted
softly and his voice passed from him like a gift that was also needed so that no sound
of it echoed back. He entered the water. Before the river reached much past his waist
he'd lost his footing and sunk from sight.
Now the judge on his midnight rounds was passing along at just this place stark naked
. . himself uch encounters being com oner than men suppose or who would survive any
. . crossing by night nd he stepped into the river and seized up the drown ng idiot,
snatching it aloft by the heels like a great midwife and slapping it on the back to let
the water out. A birth scene or a baptism or some ritual not yet inaugurated into any
canon. He twisted the water from its hair and he gathered the naked and sobbing fool
into his arms and carried it up into the camp and restored it among its fellows.
XIX
The howitzer - The Yumas attack - A skirmish -Clanton
appropriates the ferry - The hanged Judas -The coffers - A deputation
for the coast ?San Diego ?Arranging for supplies ?Brown at
the farrier's - A dispute - Webster and Toadvine freed - The ocean -
An altercation - A man burned alive - Brown in durance vile -
Tales of treasure ?An escape ?A murder in the mountains ?Glanton
leaves Yuma - The alcalde hanged - Hostages -Returns to Yuma -
Doctor and judge, nigger and fool - Dawn on the river - Carts without
wheels ?Murder of Jackson ?The Yuma massacre.
The doctor had been bound for California when the ferry fell into his hands for the
most by chance. In the ensuing months he'd amassed a considerable wealth in gold and
. silver and jewelry. He and the two men who worked for him had taken up resi ence

on the west bank of the river overlooking the ferrylanding among the abutments of an
unfinished hillside fortification made from mud and rock. In addition to the pair of
. freightwagons he'd inherited from Major Graham's command he had also a moun ain
. . howitzer bronze twelvepounder with a bore the size of a saucer nd this piece stood
idle and unloaded in its wooden truck. In the doctor's crude quarters he and Glanton
and the judge together with Brown and Irving sat drinking tea and Glanton sketched for
the doctor a few of their indian adventures and advised him strongly to secure his
position. The doctor demurred. He claimed to get along well with the Yumas. Glanton
told him to his face that any man who trusted an indian was a fool. The doctor colored
. but he held his tongue. The judge inter ened. He asked the doctor did he consider the
pilgrims huddled on the far shore to be under his protection. The doctor said that he
did so consider them. The judge spoke reasonably and with concern and when Glanton
and his detail returned down the hill to cross to their camp they had the doctor's
permission to fortify the hill and charge the howitzer and to this end they set about
running the last of their lead until they had close on to a hatful of rifleballs.
They loaded the howitzer that evening with something like a pound of powder and the
entire cast of shot and they trundled the piece to a place of advantage overlooking the
river and the landing below.
Two days later the Yumas attacked the crossing. The scows were on the west bank of
the river discharging cargo as arranged and the travelers stood by to claim their goods.
The savages came both mounted and afoot out of the willows with no warning and
swarmed across the open ground toward the ferry. On the hill above them Brown and
Long Webster swung the howitzer and steadied it and Brown crammed his lighted cigar
into the touch-hole.
Even over that open terrain the concussion was immense. The howitzer in its truck
. leaped from the ground and clattered smok ng backward across the packed clay. On
the floodplain below the fort a terrible destruction had passed and upward of a dozen of
the Yumas lay dead or writhing in the sand. A great howl went up among them and
Glanton and his riders defiled out of the wooded littoral upriver and rode upon them
and they cried out in rage at their betrayal. Their horses began to mill and they pulled
them about and loosed arrows at the approaching dragoons and were shot down in
volleys of pistolfire and the debarkees at the crossing scrabbled up their arms from
among the dunnage and knelt and set up a fire from that quarter while the women and
children lay prone among the trunks and freightboxes. The horses of the Yumas reared
and screamed and churned about in the loose sand with their hoopshaped nostrils and
whited eyes and the survivors made for the willows from which they'd emerged leaving
on the field the wounded and the dying and the dead. Glanton and his men did not
. pursue them. They dis ounted and walked methodically among the fallen dispatching

them man and horse alike each with a pistolball through the brain while the ferry
travelers watched and then they took the scalps.
The doctor stood on the low parapet of the works in silence and watched the bodies
dragged down the landing and booted and shoved into the river. He turned and looked
at Brown and Webster. They'd hauled the howitzer back to its position and Brown sat
easily on the warm barrel smoking his cigar and watching the activity below. The doctor
turned and walked back to his quarters.
Nor did he appear the following day. Glanton took charge of the operation of the ferry.
People who had been waiting three days to cross at a dollar a head were now told that
the fare was four dollars. And even this tariff was in effect for no more than a few
days. Soon they were operating a sort of procrustean ferry where the fares were tailored
to accommodate the purses of the travelers. Ultimately all pretense was dropped and the
. immi rants were robbed outright. Travelers were beaten and their arms and goods
appropriated and they were sent destitute and beggared into the desert. The doctor came
down to remonstrate with them and was paid his share of the revenues and sent back.
Horses were taken and women violated and bodies began to drift past the Yuma camp
. downriver. As these outrages multi lied the doctor barricaded himself in his quarters
and was seen no more.
. In the following month a company from Kentucky under Gen ral Patterson arrived and
disdaining to bargain with Glanton constructed a ferry downriver and crossed and moved
on. This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named
Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan's headless body floated
anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black,
silent rider to the sea.
Easter in that year fell on the last day of March and at dawn on that day the kid
together with Toadvine and a boy named Billy Carr crossed the river to cut willow poles
at a place where they grew upstream from the encampment of immigrants. Passing
through this place before it was yet good light they encountered a party of Sonorans up
and about and they saw hanging from a scaffold a poor Judas fashioned from straw and
old rags who wore on his canvas face a painted scowl that reflected in the hand that
had executed it no more than a child's conception of the man and his crime. The
. Sonorans had been up since mid ight drinking and they had lit a bonfire on the bench
of loam where the gibbet stood and as the Americans passed along the edge of their
camp they called out to them in Spanish. Someone had brought a long cane from the
fire tipped with lighted tow and the Judas was being set afire. Its raggedy clothes were
packed with squibs and rockets and as the fire took hold it began to blow apart piece
by piece in a shower of burning rags and straw. Until at last a bomb in its breeches

went off and blew the thing to pieces in a stink of soot and sulphur and the men
cheered and small boys threw a few last stones at the blackened remnants dangling
from the noose. The kid was the last to pass through the clearing and the Sonorans
called out to him and offered him wine from a goatskin but he shrugged up his rag of
a coat about his shoulders and hurried on.
By now Glanton had enslaved a number of Sonorans and he kept crews of them
working at the fortification of the hill. There were also detained in their camp a dozen
or more indian and Mexican girls, some little more than children. Glanton supervised
. with some interest the raising of the walls about him but other ise left his men to
pursue the business at the crossing with a terrible latitude. He seemed to take little
account of the wealth they were amassing although daily he'd open the brass lock with
which the wood and leather trunk in his quarters was secured and raise the lid and
empty whole sacks of valuables into it, the trunk already holding thousands of dollars in
gold and silver coins as well as jewelry, watches, pistols, raw gold in little leather stives,
silver in bars, knives, silverware, plate, teeth.
On the second of April David Brown with Long Webster and Toadvine set out for the
town of San Diego on the old Mexican coast for the purpose of obtaining supplies. They
took with them a string of packanimals and they left at sunset, riding up out of the
trees and looking back at the river and then walking the horses sideways down the
dunes into the cool blue dusk.
They crossed the desert in five days without incident and rode up through the coastal
range and led the mules through the snow in the gap and descended the western slope
and entered the town in a slow drizzle of rain. Their hide clothing was heavy with water
and the animals were stained with the silt that had leached out of them and their
trappings. Mounted U S cavalry passed them in the mud of the street and in the
distance beyond they could hear the sea boom shuddering on the gray and stony coast.
Brown took from the horn of his saddle a fibre morral filled with coins and the three of
them dismounted and entered a whiskey grocer's and unannounced they upended the
sack on the grocer's board.
There were doubloons minted in Spain and in Guadalajara and half doubloons and gold
dollars and tiny gold half dollars and French coins of ten franc value and gold eagles
and half eagles and ring dollars and dollars minted in North Carolina and Georgia that
were twenty-two carats pure. The grocer weighed them out by stacks in a common scale,
sorted by their mintings, and he drew corks and poured measures round in small tin
cups whereon the gills were stamped. They drank and set down the cups again and he
pushed the bottle across the raw sashmilled boards of the counter.

They had drafted a list of supplies to be contracted for and when they'd agreed on the
price of flour and coffee and a few other staples they turned into the street each with a
bottle in his fist. They went down the plankboard walkway and crossed through the mud
and they went past rows of rawlooking shacks and crossed a small plaza beyond which
they could see the low sea rolling and a small encampment of tents and a street where
the squatting houses were made of hides ranged like curious dorys along the selvage of
sea oats above the beach and quite black and shining in the rain.
It was in one of these that Brown woke the next morning. He had little recollection of
the prior night and there was no one in the hut with him. The remainder of their
money was in a bag around his neck. He pushed open the framed hide door and
stepped out into the darkness and the mist. They'd neither put up nor -fed their
animals and he made his way back to the grocer's where they were tied and sat on the
walkway and watched the dawn come down from the hills behind the town.
Noon he was red-eyed and reeking before the alcalde's door demanding the release of
his companions. The alcalde vacated out the back of the premises and shortly there
. arrived an Ameri an corporal and two soldiers who warned him away. An hour later he
. was at the farriery. Standing warily in the doorway peer ng into the gloom until he
could make out the shape of things within.
The farrier was at his bench and Brown entered and laid before him a polished
mahogany case with a brass nameplate bradded to the lid. He unsnapped the catches
and opened the case and raised from their recess within a pair of shotgun barrels and
he took up the stock with the other hand. He hooked the barrels into the patent breech
and stood the shotgun on the bench and pushed the fitted pin home to secure the
forearm. He cocked the hammers with his thumbs and let them fall again. The shotgun
was English made and had damascus barrels and engraved locks and the stock was burl
mahogany. He looked up. The farrier was watching him.
You work on guns? said Brown.
I do some.
I need these barrels cut down.
The man took the gun and held it in his hands. There was a raised center rib between
the barrels and inlaid in gold the maker's name, London. There were two platinum
bands in the patent breech and the locks and the hammers were chased with scrollwork
. cut deeply in the steel and there were partridges en raved at either end of the maker's

name there. The purple barrels were welded up from triple skelps and the hammered
iron and steel bore a watered figure like the markings of some alien and antique
serpent, rare and beautiful and lethal, and the wood was figured with a deep red feather
grain at the butt and held a small springloaded silver capbox in the toe.
The farrier turned the gun in his hands and looked at Brown. He looked down at the
case. It was lined with green baize and there were little fitted compartments that held a
wadcutter, a pewter powderflask, cleaning jags, a patent pewter capper.
You need what? he said.
Cut the barrels down. Long about in here. He held a finger across the piece.
I cant do that.
Brown looked at him. You cant do it?
No sir.
He looked around the shop. Well, he said. I'd of thought any damn fool could saw the
barrels off a shotgun.
There's something wrong with you. Why would anybody want to cut the barrels off a
gun like this?
What did you say? said Brown.
The man tendered the gun nervously. I just meant that I dont see why anybody would
want to ruin a good gun like this here. What would you take for it?
It aint for sale. You think there's something wrong with me?
No I dont. I didnt mean it that way.
Are you goin to cut them barrels down or aint ye?
I cant do that.
Cant or wont?
You pick the one that best suits you.

Brown took the shotgun and laid it on the bench.
What would you have to have to do it? he said.
I aint doin it.
If a man wanted it done what would be a fair price?
I dont know. A dollar.
Brown reached into his pocket and came up with a handful of coins. He laid a two and
a half dollar gold piece on the bench. Now, he said. I'm payin you two and a half
dollars.
The farrier looked at the coin nervously. I dont need your money, he said. You cant pay
me to butcher that there gun.
You done been paid.
No I aint.
Yonder it lays. Now you can either get to sawin or you can default. In the case of
which I aim to take it out of your ass.
The farrier didnt take his eyes off Brown. He began to back away from the bench and
then he turned and ran.
. When the sergeant of the guard arrived Brown had the shot un chucked up in the
benchvise and was working at the barrels with a hacksaw. The sergeant walked around
to where he could see his face. What do you want, said Brown.
This man says you threatened his life.
What man?
This man. The sergeant nodded toward the door of the shed.
Brown continued to saw. You call that a man? he said.
I never give him no leave to come in here and use my tools neither, said the farrier.

How about it? said the sergeant.
How about what?
How do you answer to this man's charges?
He's a liar.
You never threatened him?
That's right.
The hell he never.
I dont threaten people. I told him I'd whip his ass and that's as good as notarized.
You dont call that a threat?
Brown looked up. It was not no threat. It was a promise.
He bent to the work again and another few passes with the saw and the barrels
dropped to the dirt. He laid down the saw and backed off the jaws of the vise and
lifted out the shotgun and unpinned the barrels from the stock and fitted the pieces into
the case and shut the lid and latched it.
What was the argument about? said the sergeant.
Wasnt no argument that I know of.
You better ask him where he got that gun he's just ruined. He's stole that somewheres,
you can wager on it.
Where'd you get the shotgun? said the sergeant.
Brown bent down and picked up the severed barrels. They were about eighteen inches
long and he had them by the small end. He came around the bench and walked past
the sergeant. He put the guncase under his arm. At the door he turned. The farrier was
nowhere in sight. He looked at the sergeant.
I believe that man has done withdrawed his charges, he said. Like as not he was drunk.

As he was crossing the plaza toward the little mud cabildo he encountered Toadvine and
Webster newly released. They were wildlooking and they stank. The three of them went
down to the beach and sat looking out at the long gray swells and passing Brown's
bottle among them. They'd none of them seen an ocean before. Brown walked down and
held his hand to the sheet of spume that ran up the dark sand. He lifted his hand and
tasted the salt on his fingers and he looked downcoast and up and then they went back
up the beach toward the town.
They spent the afternoon drinking in a lazarous bodega run by a Mexican. Some soldiers
came in. An altercation took place. Toadvine was on his feet, swaying. A peacemaker
rose from among the soldiers and soon the principals were seated again. But minutes
later Brown on his way back from the bar poured a pitcher of aguardiente over a young
soldier and set him afire with his cigar. The man ran outside mute save for the whoosh
of the flames and the flames were pale blue and then invisible in the sunlight and he
fought them in the street like a man beset with bees or madness and then he fell over
in the road and burned up. By the time they got to him with a bucket of water he had
blackened and shriveled in the mud like an enormous spider.
Brown woke in a dark little cell manacled and crazed with thirst. The first thing he
consulted for was the bag of coins. It was still inside his shirt. He rose up from the
straw and put one eye to the judas hole. It was day. He called out for someone to
come. He sat and with his chained hands counted out the coins and put them back in
the bag.
In the evening he was brought his supper by a soldier. The soldier's name was Petit
and Brown showed him his necklace of ears and he showed him the coins. Petit said he
wanted no part of his schemes. Brown told him how he had thirty thousand dollars
buried in the desert. He told him of the ferry, installing himself in Glanton's place. He
showed him the coins again and he spoke familiarly of their places of origin,
supplementing the judge's reports with impromptu data. Even shares, he hissed. You and
me.
. He studied the recruit through the bars. Petit wiped his fore ead with his sleeve.
Brown scooped the coins back into the poke and handed them out to him.
You think we caint trust one another? he said.
The boy stood holding the sack of coins uncertainly. He tried to push it back through
the bars. Brown stepped away and held his hands up.

Dont be a fool, he hissed. What do you think I'd of give to have had such a chance at
your age?
When Petit was gone he sat in the straw and looked at the thin metal plate of beans
and the tortillas. After a while he ate. Outside it was raining again and he could hear
riders passing in the mud of the street and soon it was dark.
They left two nights later. They had each a passable saddle-horse and a rifle and
blanket and they had a mule that carried provisions of dried corn and beef and dates.
They rode up into the dripping hills and in the first light Brown raised the rifle and
shot the boy through the back of the head. The horse lurched forward and the boy
toppled backward, the entire foreplate of his skull gone and the brains exposed. Brown
halted his mount and got down and retrieved the sack of coins and took the boy's knife
and took his rifle and his powderflask and his coat and he cut the ears from the boy's
head and strung them onto his scapular and then he mounted up and rode on. The
packmule followed and after a while so did the horse the boy had been riding.
When Webster and Toadvine rode into the camp at Yuma they had neither provisions
nor the mules they'd left with. Glanton took five men and rode out at dusk leaving the
judge in charge of the ferry. They reached San Diego in the dead of night and were
directed to the alcalde's house. This man came to the door in nightshirt and stockingcap
. holding a candle before him. Glan on pushed him back into the parlor and sent his
men on to the rear of the house from whence they heard directly a woman's screams
and a few dull slaps and then silence.
The alcalde was a man in his sixties and he turned to go to his wife's aid and was
struck down with a pistolbarrel. He stood up again holding his head. Glanton pushed
him on to the rear room. He had in his hand a rope already fashioned into a noose
and he turned the alcalde around and put the noose over his head and pulled it taut.
The wife was sitting up in bed and at this she commenced to scream again. One of her
eyes was swollen and closing rapidly and now one of the recruits hit her flush in the
mouth and she fell over in the tousled bedding and put her hands over her head.
Glanton held the candle aloft and directed one of the recruits to boost the other on his
shoulders and the boy reached along the top of one of the vigas until he found a space
and he fitted the end of the rope through and let it down and they hauled on it and
. raised the mute and strug ling alcalde into the air. They'd not tied his hands and he
groped wildly overhead for the rope and pulled himself up to save strangling and he
kicked his feet and revolved slowly in the candlelight.
Valgame Dios, he gasped. Que quiere?

I want my money, said Glanton. I want my money and I want my packmules and I
want David Brown.
Como? wheezed the old man.
Someone had lit a lamp. The old woman raised up and saw first the shadow and then
the form of her husband dangling from the rope and she began to crawl across the bed
toward him.
Digame, gasped the alcalde.
Someone reached to seize the wife but Glanton motioned him away and she staggered
. out of the bed and took hold of her hus and about the knees to hold him up. She was
. sobbing and pray ng for mercy to Glanton and to G-d impartially.
Glanton walked around to where he could see the man's face. I want my money, he
said. My money and my mules and the man I sent out here. El hombre que tiene
usted. Mi companero.
No no, gasped the hanged man. Biiscale. No man is here.
Where is he?
He is no here.
Yes he's here. In the juzgado.
No no. Madre de Jesus. No here. He is gone. Siete, ocho dias.
Where is the juzgado?
Como?
El juzgado. Donde esta?
The old woman turned loose with one arm long enough to point, her face pressed to
the man's leg. Alia, she said. Alia.
Two men went out, one holding the stub of the candle and shielding the flame with his
cupped hand before him. When they came back they reported the little dungeon in the
building out back empty.

. Glanton studied the alcalde. The old woman was visibly tot ering. They'd halfhitched
the rope about the tailpost of the bed and he loosed the rope and the alcalde and the
wife collapsed into the floor.
They left them bound and gagged and rode out to visit the grocer. Three days later the
alcalde and the grocer and the alcalde's wife were found tied and lying in their own
excrement in an abandoned hut at the edge of the ocean eight miles south of the
settlement. They'd been left a pan of water from which they drank like dogs and they
had howled at the booming surf in that wayplace until they were mute as stones.
Glanton and his men were two days and nights in the streets crazed with liquor. The
sergeant in charge of the small garrison of American troops confronted them in a
drinking exchange on the evening of the second day and he and the three men with
him were beaten senseless and stripped of their arms. At dawn when the soldiers kicked
in the hostel door there was no one in the room.
Glanton returned to Yuma alone, his men gone to the gold fields. On that bonestrewn
. waste he encountered wretched par els of foot-travelers who called out to him and men
. dead where they'd fallen and men who would die and groups of folks clus ered about a
last wagon or cart shouting hoarsely at the mules or oxen and goading them on as if
they bore in those frail caissons the covenant itself and these animals would die and the
people with them and they called out to that lone horseman to warn him of the danger
at the crossing and the horseman rode on all contrary to the tide of refugees like some.
storied hero toward what beast of war or plague or famine with what set to his re
entless jaw.
When he reached Yuma he was drunk. Behind him on a string were two small jacks
laden with whiskey and biscuit. He sat his horse and looked down at the river who was
keeper of the crossroads of all that world and his dog came to him and nuzzled his foot
in the strirrup.
A young Mexican girl was crouched naked under the shade of the wall. She watched
him ride past, covering her breasts with her hands. She wore a rawhide collar about her
neck and she was chained to a post and there was a clay bowl of blackened meatscraps
beside her. Glanton tied the jacks to the post and rode inside on the horse.
There was no one about. He rode down to the landing. While he was watching the river
the doctor came scrambling down the bank and seized Glanton by the foot and began to
plead with him in a senseless jabber. He'd not seen to his person in weeks and he was
filthy and disheveled and he tugged at Glanton's trouserleg and pointed toward the

fortifications on the hill. That man, he said. That man.
Glanton slid his boot from the stirrup and pushed the doctor away with his foot and
turned the horse and rode back up the hill. The judge was standing on the rise in
silhouette against the evening sun like some great balden archimandrite. He was
wrapped in a mantle of freeflowing cloth beneath which he was naked. The black man
Jackson came out of one of the stone bunkers dressed in a similar garb and stood
beside him. Glanton rode back up along the crest of the hill to his quarters.
All night gunfire drifted intermittently across the water and laughter and drunken oaths.
When day broke no one appeared. The ferry lay at its moorings and across the river a
man came down to the landing and blew a horn and waited and then went back.
The ferry stood idle all that day. By evening the drunkenness and revelry had begun
afresh and the shrieks of young girls carried across the water to the pilgrims huddled in
their camp. Someone had given the idiot whiskey mixed with sarsaparilla and this thing
which could little more than walk had commenced to dance before the fire with loping
simian steps, moving with great gravity and smacking its loose wet lips.
. At dawn the black walked out to the landing and stood uri ating in the river. The
scows lay downstream against the bank with a few inches of sandy water standing in
the floorboards. He pulled his robes about him and stepped aboard the thwart and
balanced there. The water ran over the boards toward him. He stood looking out. The
sun was not up and there was a low skein of mist on the water. Downstream some
ducks moved out from the willows. They circled in the eddy water and then flapped out
across the open river and rose and circled and bent their way upstream. In the floor of
the scow was a small coin. Perhaps once lodged under the tongue of some passenger.
He bent to fetch it. He stood up and wiped the grit from the piece and held it up and
as he did so a long cane arrow passed through his upper abdomen and flew on and fell
far out in the river and sank and backed to the surface again and began to turn and to
drift downstream.
. He faced around, his robes sustained about him. He was hold ng his wound and with
his other hand he ravaged among his clothes for the weapons that were not there and
were not there. A second arrow passed him on the left and two more struck and lodged
fast in his chest and in his groin. They were a full four feet in length and they lofted
slightly with his movements like ceremonial wands and he seized his thigh where the
dark arterial blood was spurting along the shaft and took a step toward the shore and
fell sideways into the river.
The water was shallow and he was moving weakly to regain his feet when the first of

the Yumas leaped aboard the scow. Completely naked, his hair dyed orange, his face
painted black with a crimson line dividing it from widow's peak to chin. He stamped his
feet twice on the boards and flared his arms like some wild thaumaturge out of an
atavistic drama and reached and seized the black by his robes where he lay in the
reddening waters and raised him up and stove in his head with his warclub.
They swarmed up the hill toward the fortifications where the Americans lay sleeping and
some were mounted and some afoot and all of them armed with bows and clubs and.
their faces blacked or pale with fard and their hair bound up in clay. The first quar
ers they entered were Lincoln's. When they emerged a few minutes later one of them
carried the doctor's dripping head by the hair and others were dragging behind them
the doctor's dog, bound at the muzzle, jerking and bucking across the dry clay of the
concourse. They entered a wickiup of willowpoles and canvas and slew Gunn and Wilson
and Henderson Smith each in turn as they reared up drunkenly and they moved on
among the rude half walls in total silence glistening with paint and grease and blood
among the bands of light where the risen sun now touched the higher ground.
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 cham ion 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 prefigura-tion 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?
Goon.
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 Toad-vine 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
. him elf 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 peri dic 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
assailants 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, tak ng their dead with them, lofting a flurry of arrows and howling out
. bloodoaths in their stoneage tongue or invocations to what ver G-ds 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 sun ight.
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 meas ring 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 strange ess 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 vesti-ture and driven together with his fool into the
wilderness to die.
. Those who travel in desert places do indeed meet with crea ures surpassing all

description. The watchers at the well rose the better to witness these arrivals. The
. imbecile was fairly lop ng 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 medi val
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 bucket ul 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 watch ng its reflection in the pool and it
watched the judge drink and it watched the water calm itself once more. The judge
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 G-d 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.
The judge followed him with his eyes. The kid circled the floor of the well, no part of
which was altogether beyond the judge's reach, and he knelt opposite the imbecile and
pulled the stopper from the flask and submerged the flask in the basin. He and the
imbecile watched the water run in at the neck of the flask and they watched it bubble
. and they watched it cease. The kid stop ered the flask and leaned and drank from the
pool and then he sat back and looked at Toadvine.

Are you goin with us?
. Toadvine looked at the judge. I dont know, he said. I'm sub ect to arrest. They'll arrest
me in California.
Arrest ye?
Toadvine didnt answer. He was sitting in the sand and he made a tripod of three
fingers and stuck them in the sand before him and then he lifted and turned them and
poked them in again so that there were six holes in the form of a star or a hexagon
and then he rubbed them out again. He looked up.
You wouldnt think that a man would run plumb out of country out here, would ye?
The kid rose and slung the flask by its strap over his shoulder. His trouserleg was black
with blood and the bloody stump of the shaft jutted from his thigh like a peg for
hanging implements upon. He spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and
he looked at Toadvine. It aint country you've run out of, he said. Then he made his
way across the sink and up the bank. The judge followed him with his eyes and when
the kid reached the sunlight at the top he turned and looked back and the judge was
holding open the satchel between his naked thighs.
Five hundred dollars, he said. Powder and ball included.
The expriest was at the kid's side. Do him, he hissed.
. The kid took the pistol but the expriest clung to his arm whis ering and when the kid
pulled away he spoke aloud, such was his fear.
. You'll get no second chance lad. Do it. He is naked. He is un rmed. G-d's blood, do
you think you'll best him any other way? Do it, lad. Do it for the love of G-d. Do it or
I swear your life is forfeit.
The judge smiled, he tapped his temple. The priest, he said. The priest has been too
long in the sun. Seven-fifty and that's my best offer. It's a seller's market.
The kid put the pistol in his belt. Then with the expriest at his elbow importunate he
circled the crater and they set out west across the pan. Toadvine climbed up and
watched them. After a while there was nothing to see.
That day their way took them upon a vast mosaic pavement cobbled up from tiny

. blocks of jasper, carnelian, agate. A thou and acres wide where the wind sang in the
groutless interstices. Traversing this ground toward the east riding one horse and leading
. another came David Brown. The horse he led was sad led and bridled and the kid
stood with his thumbs in his belt and watched while he rode up and looked down at
. his old com anions.
We heard you were in the juzgado, said Tobin.
I was, said Brown. I aint now. His eyes catalogued them in every part. He looked at the
piece of arrowshaft protruding from the kid's leg and he looked into the expriest's eyes.
Where's your outfits? he said.
You're lookin at them.
You fall out with Glanton?
Glanton's dead.
Brown spat a dry white spot in that vast and broken plateland. He had a small stone in
his mouth against the thirst and he shifted it with his jaw and looked at them. The
Yumas, he said.
Aye, said the expriest.
All rubbed out?
Toadvine and the judge are at the well back yonder.
The judge, said Brown.
The horses stared bleakly at the crazed stone floor whereon they stood.
The rest gone under? Smith? Dorsey? The nigger?
All, said Tobin.
Brown looked east across the desert. How far to the well?
We left about an hour past daybreak.
Is he armed?

He is not.
He studied their faces. The priest dont lie, he said.
No one spoke. He sat fingering the scapular of dried ears. Then he turned the horse
. and rode on, leading the riderless ani al behind. He rode watching back at them. Then
he stopped again.
Did you see him dead? he called. Glanton?
I did, called the expriest. For he had so.
He rode on, turned slightly in the saddle, the rifle on his knee. He kept watch behind
him on those pilgrims and they on him. When he was well diminished on the pan they
turned and went on.
By noon the day following they had begun to come again upon abandoned gear from
the caravans, cast shoes and pieces of harness and bones and the dried carcasses of
mules with the alparejas still buckled about. They trod the faint arc of an ancient lake
shore where broken shells lay like bits of pottery frail and ribbed among the sands and
in the early evening they descended among a series of dunes and spoilbanks to Carrizo
Creek, a seep that welled out of the stones and ran off down the desert and vanished
again. Thousands of sheep had perished here and the travelers made their way among
the yellowed bones and carcasses with their rags of tattered wool and they knelt among
bones to drink. When the kid raised his dripping head from the water a rifleball dished
his reflection from the pool and the echoes of the shot clattered about the bonestrewn
slopes and clanged away in the desert and died.
He spun on his belly and clambered sideways, scanning the skyline. He saw the horses
first, standing nose to nose in a notch among the dunes to the south. He saw the judge
clad in the gusseted clothing of his recent associates. He was holding the mouth of the
upright rifle in his fist and pouring powder from a flask down the bore. The imbecile,
naked save for a hat, squatted in the sands at his feet.
The kid scuttled to a low place in the ground and lay flat with the pistol in his fist and
the creek trickling past his elbow. He turned to look for the expriest but he could not
find him. He could see through the lattice of bones the judge and his charge on the hill
in the sun and he raised the pistol and rested it in the saddle of a rancid pelvis and
fired. He saw the sand jump on the slope behind the judge and the judge leveled the
rifle and fired and the rifleball whacked through the bones and the shots rolled away

over the dunelands.
The kid lay with his heart hammering in the sand. He thumbed back the hammer again
and raised his head. The idiot sat as before and the judge was trudging sedately along
the skyline looking over the windrowed bones below him for an advantage. The kid
began to move again. He moved into the creek on his belly and lay drinking, holding
up the pistol and the powderflask and sucking at the water. Then he moved out the far
side and down a trampled corridor through the sands where wolves had gone to and
fro. Off to his left he thought he heard the expriest hiss at him and he could hear the
creek and he lay listening. He set the hammer at halfcock and rotated the cylinder and
. re harged the empty chamber and capped the piece and raised up to look. The shallow
. ridge along which the judge had ad anced was empty and the two horses were coming
. toward him across the sand to the south. He cocked the pistol and lay watch ng. They
approached freely over the barren pitch, nudging the air with their heads, their tails
whisking. Then he saw the idiot shambling along behind them like some dim neolithic
. herdsman. To his right he saw the judge appear from the dunes and recon oitre and
drop from sight again. The horses continued on and there was a scrabbling behind him
and when the kid turned the expriest was in the corridor hissing at him.
Shoot him, he called.
The kid spun about to look for the judge but the expriest called again in his hoarse
whisper.
The fool. Shoot the fool.
He raised his pistol. The horses stepped one and the next through a break in the
yellowed palings and the imbecile shambled after and disappeared. He looked back at
Tobin but the expriest was gone. He moved along the corridor until he came to the
creek again, already slightly roiled from the drinking horses above him. His leg had
begun to bleed and he lay soaking it in the cold water and he drank and palmed water
over the back of his neck. The marblings of blood that swung from his thigh were like
thin red leeches in the current. He looked at the sun.
Hello called the judge, his voice off to the west. As if there were new riders to the
creek and he addressed them.
The kid lay listening. There were no new riders. After a while the judge called out
again. Come out, he called. There's plenty of water for everybody.
The kid had swung the powderflask around to his back to keep it out of the creek and

. he held the pistol up and waited. Up tream the horses had stopped drinking. Then
. they started drink ng again.
When he moved out on the far side of the creek he came upon the hand and foot
tracks left by the expriest among the prints of cats and foxes and the little desert pigs.
He entered a clearing in that senseless midden and sat listening. His leather clothes
were heavy and stiff with water and his leg was throbbing. A horse's head came up
streaming water at the muzzle a hundred feet away over the bones and dropped from
sight again. When the judge called out his voice was in a new place. He called out for
them to be friends. The kid watched a small caravan of ants bearing off among the
arches of sheepribs. In the watching his eyes met the eyes of a small viper coiled under
a flap of hide. He wiped his mouth and began to move again. In a culdesac the tracks
. of the expriest terminated and came back. He lay listen ng. It was hours till dark.
. After a while he heard the idiot slob ering somewhere among the bones.
He heard the wind coming in off the desert and he heard his own breathing. When he
raised his head to look out he saw the expriest stumbling among the bones and holding
aloft a cross he'd fashioned out of the shins of a ram and he'd lashed them together
with strips of hide and he was holding the thing before him like some mad dowser in
the bleak of desert and calling out in a tongue both alien and extinct.
The kid stood up, the revolver in both hands. He wheeled. He saw the judge and the
judge was in another quarter altogether and he had the rifle already at his shoulder.
. When he fired Tobin turned around facing the way he'd come and sat down still hold
ng the cross. The judge put down the rifle and took up another. The kid tried to steady
the barrel of the pistol and he let off the shot and then dropped to the sand. The heavy
ball of the rifle passed overhead like an asteroid and chattered and chopped among the
bones fanned over the rise of ground beyond. He raised to his knees and looked for the
judge but the judge was not there. He reloaded the empty chamber and began to move
again on his elbows toward the spot where he'd seen the expriest fall, taking his
bearings by the sun and pausing from time to time to listen. The ground was trampled
. with the tracks of preda ors come in from the plains for the carrion and the wind
carrying through the breaks bore with it a sour reek like the stink of a rancid dishclout
. and there was no sound except the wind any here at all.
He found Tobin kneeling in the creek bathing his wound with a piece of linen torn
. from his shirt. The ball had passed com letely through his neck. It had narrowly
missed the carotid artery yet he could not make the blood to stop. He looked at the kid
crouched among the skulls and upturned ribtines.
You've got to kill the horses, he said. You've no other chance out of here. He'll ride you

down.
We could take the horses.
Dont be a fool lad. What other bait has he?
We can get out as soon as it comes dark.
Do you think there'll be no day again?
The kid watched him. Will it not stop? he said.
It will not.
What do you think?
I've got to stop it.
The blood was running between his fingers.
Where is the judge? said the kid.
Where indeed.
If I kill him we can take the horses.
You'll not kill him. Dont be a fool. Shoot the horses.
The kid looked off up the shallow sandy creek.
Go on lad.
. He looked at the expriest and at the slow gouts of blood drop ing in the water like
roseblooms how they swelled and were made pale. He moved away up the creek.
When he came to where the horses had entered the water they were gone. The sand on
the side where they'd gone out was still wet. He pushed the revolver along before him,
moving on the heels of his hands. For all his caution he found the idiot watching him
before ever he saw it.
It was sitting motionless in a bower of bones with the broken sunlight stenciled over its

vacant face and it was watching like a wild thing in a wood. The kid looked at it and
then he shoved on past in the tracks of the horses. The loose neck swiveled slowly and
the dull jaw drooled. When he looked back it was still watching. Its wrists were lying in
the sand before it and although there was no expression to its face yet it seemed a
creature beset with a great woe.
When he saw the horses they were standing on a rise of ground above the creek and
looking toward the west. He lay quietly and studied the terrain. Then he moved out
along the edge of the wash and sat with his back to the bone salients and cocked the
pistol and took a rest with his elbows on his knees.
The horses had seen him come out of the wash and they were watching him. When
they heard the pistol cock they pricked their ears and began to walk toward him across
. the sand. He shot the forward horse in the chest and it fell over and lay breath ng
heavily with the blood running out of its nose. The other one stopped and stood
uncertainly and he cocked the pistol and shot it as it turned. It began to trot among
the dunes and he shot it again and its front legs buckled and it pitched forward and
rolled onto its side. It raised its head once and then it lay still.
He sat listening. Nothing moved. The first horse lay as it had fallen, the sand about its
head darkening with blood. The smoke drifted away down the draw and thinned and
vanished. He moved back down the wash and crouched under the ribs of a dead mule
and recharged the pistol and then moved on toward the creek again. He did not go
back the way he'd come and he did not see the imbecile again. When he came to the
creek he drank and bathed his leg and lay listening as before.
Throw that gun out now, said the judge.
He froze.
The voice was not fifty feet away.
I know what you've done. The priest put you up to it and I'll take that as a mitigation
in the act and the intent. Which I would any man in his wrongdoing. But there's the
question of property. You bring me the pistol now.
The kid lay without moving. He heard the judge wade the creek upstream. He lay
counting slowly under his breath. When the roiled water reached him he stopped
counting and let go on the current a dry twist of grass and tolled it away downstream.
At that same count it was scarcely out of sight among the bones. He moved out of the
water and looked at the sun and began to make his way back to where he'd left Tobin.

He found the expriest's tracks still wet where he'd left the creek and the way of his
. progress marked with blood. He fol owed through the sand until he came to that place
where the expriest had circled upon himself and lay hissing at him from his place of
cover.
Did you do for them lad?
He raised his hand.
Aye. I heard the shots all three. The fool as well, aye lad?
He didnt answer.
Good lad, hissed the expriest. He'd bound up his neck in his shirt and he was naked to
the waist and he squatted among those rancid pickets and eyed the sun. The shadows
were long on the dunes and in the shadow the bones of the beasts that had died there
lay skewed in a curious congress of garbled armatures upon the sands. They'd close to
two hours till dark and the expriest said so. They lay under the boardlike hide of a
dead ox and listened to the judge calling to them. He called out points of jurisprudence,
he cited cases. He expounded upon those laws pertaining to property rights in beasts
mansuete and he quoted from cases of attainder insofar as he reckoned them germane
to the corruption of blood in the prior and felonious owners of the horses now dead
among the bones. Then he spoke of other things. The expriest leaned to the kid. Dont
listen, he said.
I aint listenin.
Stop your ears.
Stop yours.
The priest cupped his hands over his ears and looked at the kid. His eyes were bright
. from the bloodloss and he was pos essed of a great earnestness. Do it, he whispered.
Do you think he speaks to me?
The kid turned away. He marked the sun squatting at the western rim of the waste and
they spoke no more until it was dark and then they rose and made their way out.
They stole up from the basin and set off across the shallow dunes and they looked a
last time back at the valley where flickering in the wind at the edge of the revetment

stood the judge's nightfire for all to see. They did not speculate as to what it fed upon
for fuel and they were well advanced on the desert before the moon rose.
There were wolves and jackals in that region and they cried all the forepart of the night
until the moon came up and then they ceased as if surprised by its rising. Then they
began again. The pilgrims were weak from their wounds. They lay down to rest but
never for long and never without scanning the skyline to the east for any figure
intruded upon it and they shivered in the barren desert wind coming out of whatever
G-dless quadrant cold and sterile and bearing news of nothing at all. When day came
they made their way to a slight rise on that endless flat and squatted in the loose shale
and watched the sun's rising. It was cold and the expriest in his rags and his collar of
blood hugged himself. On this small promontory they slept and when they woke it was
midmorning and the sun well advanced. They sat up and looked out. Coming toward
them over the plain in the middle distance they could see the figure of the judge, the
figure of the fool.
XXI
Desert castaways - The backtrack - A hideout -The wind takes
a side - The judge returns - An address - Los Dieguenos - San
Felipe - Hospitality of the savages - Into the mountains -
Grizzlies - San Diego - The sea.
. The kid looked at Tobin but the expriest sat without expres ion. He was drawn and
. wretchedlooking and the approach ng travelers seemed to evoke in him no recognition.
He raised his head slightly and he spoke without looking at the kid. Go on, he said.
Save yourself.
The kid took the water bottle from the shales and unstoppered it and drank and handed
it across. The expriest drank and they sat watching and then they rose and turned and
set out again.
They were much reduced by their wounds and their hunger and they made a poor show
as they staggered onward. By noon their water was gone and they sat studying the
barrenness about. A wind blew down from the north. Their mouths were dry. The desert
upon which they were entrained was desert absolute and it was devoid of feature
altogether and there was nothing to mark their progress upon it. The earth fell away on
. every side equally in its arcature and by these limits were they circum cribed and of

them were they locus. They rose and went on. The sky was luminous. There was no
trace to follow other than the bits of cast-off left by travelers even to the bones of men
. drifted out of their graves in the scalloped sands. In the after oon the terrain began to
rise before them and at the crest of a shallow esker they stood and looked back to see
the judge much as before some two miles distant on the plain. They went on.
The approach to any watering place in that desert was marked by the carcasses of
perished animals in increasing number and so it was now, as if the wells were ringed
about by some hazard lethal to creatures. The travelers looked back. The judge was out
of sight beyond the rise. Before them lay the whitened boards of a wagon and further
on the shapes of mule and ox with the hide scoured bald as canvas by the constant
abrasion of the sand.
The kid stood studying this place and then he backtracked some hundred yards and
stood looking down at his shallow footprints in the sand. He looked upon the drifted
slope of the esker which they had descended and he knelt and held his hand against
the ground and he listened to the faint silica hiss of the wind.
When he lifted his hand there was a thin ridge of sand that had drifted against it and
he watched this ridge slowly vanish before him.
. The expriest when he returned to him presented a grave ap earance. The kid knelt and
studied him where he sat.
We got to hide, he said.
Hide?
Yes.
Where do you aim to hide?
Here. We'll hide here.
You cant hide, lad.
We can hide.
You think he cant follow your track?
The wind's taking it. It's gone from the slope yonder.

Gone?
Ever trace.
The expriest shook his head.
Come on. We got to get goin.
You cant hide.
Get up.
The expriest shook his head. Ah lad, he said.
Get up, said the kid.
Go on, go on. He waved his hand.
. The lad spoke to him. He aint nothin. You told me so your elf. Men are made of the
dust of the earth. You said it was no pair ... pair...
Parable.
No parable. That it was a naked fact and the judge was a man like all men.
Face him down then, said the expriest. Face him down if he is so.
And him with a rifle and me with a pistol. Him with two rifles. Get up from there.
Tobin rose. He stood unsteadily, he leaned against the kid. They set out, veering off
from the drifted track and down past the wagon.
They passed the first of the racks of bones and went on to where a pair of mules lay
dead in the traces and here the kid knelt with a piece of board and began to scoop
them a shelter, watching the skyline to the east as he worked. Then they lay prone in
the lee of those sour bones like sated scavengers and awaited the arrival of the judge
and the passing of the judge if he would so pass.
They'd not long to wait. He appeared upon the rise and paused momentarily before
starting down, he and his drooling manciple. The ground before him was drifted and

rolling and although it could be fairly reconnoitred from the rise the judge did not scan
the country nor did he seem to miss the fugitives from his purview. He descended the
ridge and started across the flats, the idiot before him on a leather lead. He carried the
two rifles that had belonged to Brown and he wore a pair of canteens crossed upon his
chest and he carried a powderhorn and flask and his portmanteau and a canvas
rucksack that must have belonged to Brown also. More strangely he carried a parasol
made from rotted scraps of hide stretched over a framework of rib bones bound with
strips of tug. The handle had been the foreleg of some creature and the judge
approaching was clothed in little more than confetti so rent was his costume to
accommodate his figure. Bearing before him that morbid umbrella with the idiot in its
. rawhide collar pulling at the lead he seemed some de enerate entrepreneur fleeing from
a medicine show and the outrage of the citizens who'd sacked it.
They advanced across the flats and the kid on his belly in the sand wallow watched
them through the ribs of the dead mules. He could see his own tracks and Tobin's
coming across the sand, dim and rounded but tracks for that, and he watched the judge
and he watched the tracks and he listened to the sand moving on the desert floor. The
judge was perhaps a hundred yards out when he stopped and surveyed the ground. The
idiot squatted on all fours and leaned into the lead like some naked species of lemur. It
swung its head and sniffed at the air, as if it were being used for tracking. It had lost
its hat, or perhaps the judge had replevined it, for he now wore a rough and curious
pair of pampooties cut from a piece of hide and strapped to the soles of his feet with
wrappings of hemp salvaged from some desert wreck. The imbecile lunged in its collar
and croaked, its forearms dangling at its chest. When they passed the wagon and
continued on the kid knew they were beyond the point where he and Tobin had turned
off from the trace. He looked at the tracks. Faint shapes that backed across the sands
and vanished. The expriest at his side seized his arm and hissed and gestured toward
the passing judge and the wind rattled the scraps of hide at the carcass and the judge
and the idiot passed on across the sands and disappeared from sight.
They lay without speaking. The expriest raised himself slightly and looked out and he
looked at the kid. The kid lowered the hammer of the pistol.
Ye'll get no such a chance as that again.
The kid put the pistol in his belt and rose onto his knees and looked out.
And what now?
The kid didnt answer.

He'll be waiting at the next well.
Let him wait.
We could go back to the creek.
And do what.
Wait for a party to come through.
Through from where? There aint no ferry.
There's game comes to the creek.
Tobin was looking out through the bones and hide. When the kid didnt answer he
looked up. We could go there, he said.
I got four rounds, the kid said.
He rose and looked out across the scavenged ground and the expriest rose and looked
with him. What they saw was the judge returning.
The kid swore and dropped to his belly. The expriest crouched. They pushed down into
the wallow and with their chins in the sand like lizards they watched the judge traverse
again the grounds before them.
With his leashed fool and his equipage and the parasol dipping in the wind like a great
. black flower he passed among the wreck ge until he was again upon the slope of the
sand esker. At the crest he turned and the imbecile squatted at his knees and the judge
. lowered the parasol before him and addressed the country ide about.
The priest has led you to this, boy. I know you would not hide. I know too that you've
not the heart of a common assassin. I've passed before your gunsights twice this hour
and will pass a third time. Why not show yourself?
No assassin, called the judge. And no partisan either. There's a flawed place in the
fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You
alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.
The imbecile stood and raised its hands to its face and yammered weirdly and sat again.

You think I've killed Brown and Toadvine? They are alive as you and me. They are alive
and in possession of the fruits of their election. Do you understand? Ask the priest. The
priest knows. The priest does not lie.
The judge raised the parasol and adjusted his parcels. Perhaps, he called, perhaps you
have seen this place in a dream. That you would die here. Then he descended the esker
and passed once more across the boneyard led by the tethered fool until the two were
shimmering and insubstantial in the waves of heat and then they were gone altogether.
They would have died if the indians had not found them. All the early part of the night
they'd kept Sirius at their left on the southwest horizon and Cetus out there fording the
void and Orion and Betelgeuse turning overhead and they had slept curled and shivering
in the darkness of the plains and woke to find the heavens all changed and the stars by
which they'd traveled not to be found, as if their sleep had encompassed whole seasons.
In the auburn dawn they saw the halfnaked savages crouched or standing all in a row
along a rise to the north. They got up and went on, their shadows so long and so
narrow raising with mock stealth each thin articulated leg. The mountains to the west
were whited out against the daybreak. The aborigines moved along the sand ridge. After
a while the expriest sat down and the kid stood over him with the pistol and the
savages came down from the dunes and approached by starts and checks across the
plain like painted sprites.
They were Dieguenos. They were armed with short bows and they drew about the
travelers and knelt and gave them water out of a gourd. They'd seen such pilgrims
before and with sufferings more terrible. They eked a desperate living from that land
and they knew that nothing excepting some savage pursuit could drive men to such
plight and they watched each day for that thing to gather itself out of its terrible
incubation in the house of the sun and muster along the edge of the eastern world and
whether it be armies or plague or pestilence or something altogether unspeakable they
waited with a strange equanimity.
. They led the refugees into their camp at San Felipe, a collec ion of crude huts made
from reeds and housing a population of filthy and beggarly creatures dressed largely in
the cotton shirts of the argonauts who'd passed there, shirts and nothing more. They
fetched them a stew of lizards and pocketmice hot in clay bowls and a sort of pinole
. made from dried and pounded grass oppers and they crouched about and watched
them with great solemnity as they ate.
One reached and touched the grips of the pistol in the kid's belt and drew back again.
Pistola, he said.

The kid ate.
The savages nodded.
Quiero mirar su pistola, the man said.
The kid didnt answer. When the man reached for the pistol he intercepted his hand and
put it from him. When he turned loose the man reached again and the kid pushed his
hand away again.
The man grinned. He reached a third time. The kid set the bowl between his legs and
drew the pistol and cocked it and put the muzzle against the man's forehead.
They sat quite still. The others watched. After a while the kid lowered the pistol and let
down the hammer and put it in his belt and picked up the bowl and commenced eating
again. The man gestured toward the pistol and spoke to his friends and they nodded
and then they sat as before.
Que pasa con ustedes.
The kid watched the man over the rim of the bowl with his dark and hollow eyes.
The indian looked at the expriest.
Que pasa con ustedes.
The expriest in his black and crusted cravat turned his whole torso to look at the man
who'd spoken. He looked at the kid. He'd been eating with his fingers and he licked
them and wiped them on the filthy leg of his trousers.
Las Yumas, he said.
They sucked in air and clucked their tongues.
Son muy malos, said the speaker.
Claro.
No tiene companeros?
The kid and the expriest eyed each other.

Si, said the kid. Muchos. He waved his hand to the east. Llegaran. Muchos companeros.
The indians received this news without expression. A woman brought more of the pinole
but they had been without food too long to have appetites and they waved her away.
In the afternoon they bathed in the creek and slept on the ground. When they woke
they were being watched by a group of naked children and a few dogs. When they went
up through the camp they saw the indians sitting along a ledge of rock watching
tirelessly the land to the east for whatever might come out of it. No one spoke to them
of the judge and they did not ask. The dogs and children followed them out of the
camp and they took the trail up into the low hills to the west where the sun was
already going.
They reached Warner's Ranch late the following day and they restored themselves at the
hot sulphur springs there. There was no one about. They moved on. The country to the
west was rolling and grassy and beyond were mountains running to the coast. They slept
that night among dwarf cedars and in the morning the grass was frozen and they could
hear the wind in the frozen grass and they could hear the cries of birds that seemed a
charm against the sullen shores of the void out of which they had ascended.
All that day they climbed through a highland park forested with Joshua trees and
rimmed about by bald granite peaks. In the evening flocks of eagles went up through
the pass before them and they could see on those grassy benches the great shambling
figures of bears like cattle grazing on some upland heath. There were skifts of snow in
the lee of the stone ledges and in the night a light snow fell upon them. Reefs of mist
were blowing across the slopes when they set out shivering in the dawn and in the new
snow they saw the tracks of the bears that had come down to take their wind just
before daylight.
That day there was no sun only a paleness in the haze and the country was white with
frost and the shrubs were like polar isomers of their own shapes. Wild rams ghosted
away up those rocky draws and the wind swirled down cold and gray from the snowy
reeks above them, a smoking region of wild vapors blowing down through the gap as if
the world up there were all afire. They spoke less and less between them until at last
they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a
journey. They drank from the cold mountain streams and bathed their wounds and they
shot a young doe at a spring and ate what they could and smoked thin sheets of the
meat to carry with them. Although they saw no more bears they saw sign of their
vicinity and they moved off over the slopes a good mile from their meatcamp before
they put down for the night. In the morning they crossed a bed of thunderstones

clustered on that heath like the ossified eggs of some primal groundbird. They trod the
shadowline under the mountains keeping just in the sun for the warmth of it and that
afternoon they first saw the sea, far below them, blue and serene under clouds.
The trail went down through the low hills and picked up the wagontrack and they
followed where the locked wheels had skidded and the iron tires scarred the rock and
the sea down there darkened to black and the sun fell and all the land about went blue
and cold. They slept shivering under a wooded boss among owlcries and a scent of
juniper while the stars swarmed in the bottomless night.
It was evening of the following day when they entered San Diego. The expriest turned
off to find them a doctor but the kid wandered on through the raw mud streets and out
past the houses of hide in their rows and across the gravel strand to the beach.
Loose strands of ambercolored kelp lay in a rubbery wrack at the tideline. A dead seal.
Beyond the inner bay part of a reef in a thin line like something foundered there on
which the sea was teething. He squatted in the sand and watched the sun on the
hammered face of the water. Out there island clouds emplaned upon a salmoncolored
othersea. Seafowl in silhouette. Downshore the dull surf boomed. There was a horse
standing there staring out upon the darkening waters and a young colt that cavorted
and trotted off and came back.
He sat watching while the sun dipped hissing in the swells. The horse stood darkly
against the sky. The surf boomed in the dark and the sea's black hide heaved in the
cobbled starlight and the long pale combers loped out of the night and broke along the
beach.
He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tide-pools bright as smelterpots
among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing
through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked
in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was
watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry
their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
XXII
Under arrest - The judge pays a call - An arraignment ?
Soldier, priest, magistrate - On his own recognizance - He sees a
surgeon - The arrowshaft removed from his leg - Delirium ?He

journeys to Los Angeles ?A public hanging ?Los ahorcados ?
Looking for the expriest - Another fool - The scapular - To
Sacramento ?A traveler in the west ?He abandons his party ?
The penitent brothers - The deathcart -Another massacre -
The eldress in the rocks.
Going back through the streets past the yellow windowlights and barking dogs he
encountered a detachment of soldiers but they took him for an older man in the dark
and passed on. He entered a tavern and sat in a darkened corner watching the groups
of men at the tables. No one asked him what he wanted in that place. He seemed to be
waiting for someone to come for him and after a while four soldiers entered and
arrested him. They didnt even ask him his name.
In his cell he began to speak with a strange urgency of things few men have seen in a
lifetime and his jailers said that his mind had come uncottered by the acts of blood in
which he had participated. One morning he woke to find the judge standing at his cage,
hat in hand, smiling down at him. He was dressed in a suit of gray linen and he wore
new polished boots. His coat was unbuttoned and in his waistcoat he carried a
watchchain and a stickpin and in his belt a leathercovered clip that held a small
silvermounted derringer stocked in rosewood. He looked down the hallway of the crude
mud building and donned the hat and smiled again at the prisoner.
Well, he said. How are you?
The kid didnt answer.
They wanted to know from me if you were always crazy, said the judge. They said it
was the country. The country turned them out.
Where's Tobin?
I told them that the cretin had been a respected Doctor of Divinity from Harvard
College as recently as March of this year. That his wits had stood him as far west as
. the Aquarius Moun ains. It was the ensuing country that carried them off. Together
with his clothes.
And Toadvine and Brown. Where are they?
. In the desert where you left them. A cruel thing. Your com anions in arms. The judge

shook his head.
What do they aim to do with me?
I believe it is their intention to hang you.
What did you tell them?
Told them the truth. That you were the person responsible. Not that we have all the
details. But they understand that it was you and none other who shaped events along
such a calamitous course. Eventuating in the massacre at the ford by the savages with
whom you conspired. Means and ends are of little moment here. Idle speculations. But
even though you carry the draft of your murderous plan with you to the grave it will
nonetheless be known in all its infamy to your Maker and as that is so so shall it be
made known to the least of men. All in the fullness of time.
You're the one that's crazy, said the kid.
The judge smiled. No, he said. It was never me. But why lurk there in the shadows?
Come here where we can talk, you and me.
The kid stood against the far wall. Hardly more than a shadow himself.
Come up, said the judge. Come up, for I've yet more to tell you.
He looked down the hallway. Dont be afraid, he said. I'll speak softly. It's not for the
world's ears but for yours only. Let me see you. Dont you know that I'd have loved you
like a son?
He reached through the bars. Come here, he said. Let me touch you.
The kid stood with his back to the wall.
Come here if you're not afraid, whispered the judge.
I aint afraid of you.
The judge smiled. He spoke softly into the dim mud cubicle. You came forward, he said,
to take part in a work. But you were a witness against yourself. You sat in judgement
on your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and
you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all its

enterprise. Hear me, man. I spoke in the desert for you and you only and you turned a
deaf ear to me. If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay. Even the cretin acted
in good faith according to his parts. For it was required of no man to give more than
he possessed nor was any man's share compared to another's. Only each was called
upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not. Can you tell me who
that one was?
It was you, whispered the kid. You were the one.
The judge watched him through the bars, he shook his head. What joins men together,
he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. But if I was your
enemy with whom would you have shared me? With whom? The priest? Where is he
now? Look at me. Our animosities were formed and waiting before ever we two met.
Yet even so you could have changed it all.
You, said the kid. It was you.
It was never me, said the judge. Listen to me. Do you think Glanton was a fool? Dont
you know he'd have killed you?
Lies, said the kid. Lies, by G-d lies.
Think again, said the judge.
He never took part in your craziness.
The judge smiled. He took his watch from his waistcoat and opened it and held it to
the failing light.
For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?
He looked up. He pressed the case shut and restored the instrument to his person.
Time to be going, he said. I have errands.
The kid closed his eyes. When he opened them the judge was gone. That night he
called the corporal to him and they sat on either side of the bars while the kid told the
soldier of the horde of gold and silver coins hid in the mountains not far from this
place. He talked for a long time. The corporal had set the candle on the floor between
them and he watched him as one might watch a glib and lying child. When he was
finished the corporal rose and took the candle with him, leaving him in darkness.

He was released two days later. A Spanish priest had come to baptize him and had
flung water at him through the bars like a priest casting out spirits. An hour later when
they came for him he grew giddy with fear. He was taken before the alcalde and this
man spoke to him in a fatherly manner in the Spanish language and then he was
turned out into the streets.
The doctor that he found was a young man of good family from the east. He cut open
his trouserleg with scissors and looked at the blackened shaft of the arrow and moved it
about. A soft fistula had formed about it.
Do you have any pain? he said.
The kid didnt answer.
He pressed about the wound with his thumb. He said that he could perform the surgery
and that it would cost one hundred dollars.
The kid rose from the table and limped out.
The day following as he sat in the plaza a boy came and led him again to the shack
behind the hotel and the doctor told him that they would operate in the morning.
He sold the pistol to an Englishman for forty dollars and woke at dawn in a lot
underneath some boards where he'd crawled in the night. It was raining and he went
down through the empty mud streets and hammered at the grocer's door until the man
let him in. When he appeared at the surgeon's office he was very drunk, holding onto
the doorjamb, a quart bottle half full of whiskey clutched in his hand.
The surgeon's assistant was a student from Sinaloa who had apprenticed himself here.
An altercation ensued at the door until the surgeon himself came from the rear of the
premises.
You'll have to come back tomorrow, he said.
I dont aim to be no soberer then.
The surgeon studied him. All right, he said. Let me have the whiskey.
He entered and the apprentice shut the door behind him.
You wont need the whiskey, said the doctor. Let me have it.

Why wont I need it?
We have spirits of ether. You wont need the whiskey.
Is it stronger?
Much stronger. In any case I cant operate on a man and him dead drunk.
He looked at the assistant and then he looked at the surgeon. He set the bottle on the
table.
Good, said the surgeon. I want you to go with Marcelo. He will draw you a bath and
give you clean linen and show you to a bed.
He pulled his watch from his vest and held it in his palm and read it.
It is a quarter past eight. We'll operate at one. Get some rest. If you require anything
please let us know.
The assistant led him across the courtyard to a whitewashed adobe building in the rear.
A bay that held four iron beds all empty. He bathed in a large riveted copper boiler
that looked to have been salvaged from a ship and he lay on the rough mattress and
listened to children playing somewhere beyond the wall. He did not sleep. When they
came for him he was still drunk. He was led out and laid on a trestle in an empty
room adjoining the bay and the assistant pressed an icy cloth to his nose and told him
to breathe deeply.
In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A
great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something
wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his
origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what
unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore
of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon
the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any
ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. In the white and empty room
he stood in his bespoken suit with his hat in his hand and he peered down with his
small and lashless pig's eyes wherein this child just sixteen years on earth could read
whole bodies of decisions not accountable to the courts of men and he saw his own
name which nowhere else could he have ciphered out at all logged into the records as a
thing already accomplished, a traveler known in jurisdictions existing only in the claims

of certain pensioners or on old dated maps.
In his delirium he ransacked the linens of his pallet for arms but there were none. The
judge smiled. The fool was no longer there but another man and this other man he
could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The
judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who
worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men's
fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his
becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his
gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold
slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual
specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the
night does not end.
The light in the room altered, a door closed. He opened his eyes. His leg was swathed
in sheeting and it was propped up with small rolls of reed matting. He was desperate
with thirst and his head was booming and his leg was like an evil visitant in the bed
with him such was the pain. By and by the assistant came with water for him. He did
not sleep again. The water that he drank ran out through his skin and drenched the
bedding and he lay without moving as if to outwit the pain and his face was gray and
drawn and his long hair damp and matted.
A week more and he was hobbling through the town on crutches provided him by the
surgeon. He inquired at every door for news of the expriest but no one knew him.
In June of that year he was in Los Angeles quartered in a hostel that was no more
than a common dosshouse, he and forty other men of every nationality. On the morning
of the eleventh all rose up still in darkness and turned out to witness a public hanging
at the carcel. When he arrived it was paling light and already such a horde of
spectators at the gate that he could not well see the proceedings. He stood at the edge
of the crowd while day broke and speeches were said. Then abruptly two bound figures
rose vertically from among their fellows to the top of the gatehouse and there they hung
and there they died. Bottles were handed about and the witnesses who had stood in
silence began to talk again.
In the evening when he returned to that place there was no one there at all. A guard
leaned in the gatehouse portal chewing tobacco and the hanged men at their rope-ends
looked like effigies for to frighten birds. As he drew near he saw that it was Toad-vine
and Brown.
He'd little money and then he'd none but he was in every dramhouse and gamingroom,

every cockpit and doggery. A quiet youth in a suit too large and the same broken boots
he'd come off the desert in. Standing just within the door of a foul saloon with his eyes
shifting under the brim of the hat he wore and the light from a wallsconce on the side
of his face he was taken for a male whore and set up to drinks and then shown to the
rear of the premises. He left his patron senseless in a mudroom there where there was
no light. Other men found him on their own sordid missions and other men took his
purse and watch. Later still someone took his shoes.
. He heard no news of the priest and he'd quit asking. Return ng to his lodging one
morning at daybreak in a gray rain he saw a face slobbering in an upper window and
he climbed the stairwell and rapped at the door. A woman in a silk kimono opened the
door and looked out at him. Behind her in the room a candle burned at a table and in
the pale light at the window a halfwit sat in a pen with a cat. It turned to look at him,
not the judge's fool but just some other fool. When the woman asked him what he
. wanted he turned without speaking and de cended the stairwell into the rain and the
mud in the street.
With his last two dollars he bought from a soldier the scapular of heathen ears that
Brown had worn to the scaffold. He was wearing them the next morning when he hired
out to an independent conductor from the state of Missouri and he was wearing them
when they set out for Fremont on the Sacramento River with a train of wagons and
packanimals. If the conductor had any curiosity about the necklace he kept it to himself.
He was at this employment for some months and he left it without notice. He traveled
about from place to place. He did not avoid the company of other men. He was treated
with a certain deference as one who had got onto terms with life beyond what his years
could account for. By now he'd come by a horse and a revolver, the rudiments of an
outfit. He worked at different trades. He had a bible that he'd found at the mining
camps and he carried this book with him no word of which could he read. In his dark
and frugal clothes some took him for a sort of preacher but he was no witness to them,
neither of things at hand nor things to come, he least of any man. They were remote
places for news that he traveled in and in those uncertain times men toasted the
ascension of rulers already deposed and hailed the coronation of kings murdered and in
their graves. Of such corporal histories even as these he bore no tidings and although it
was the custom in that wilderness to stop with any traveler and exchange the news he
seemed to travel with no news at all, as if the doings of the world were too slanderous
for him to truck with, or perhaps too trivial.
He saw men killed with guns and with knives and with ropes and he saw women fought
over to the death whose value they themselves set at two dollars. He saw ships from
the land of China chained in the small harbors and bales of tea and silks and spices

broken open with swords by small yellow men with speech like cats. On that lonely
coast where the steep rocks cradled a dark and muttersome sea he saw vultures at their
soaring whose wingspan so dwarfed all lesser birds that the eagles shrieking underneath
were more like terns or plovers. He saw piles of gold a hat would scarcely have covered
wagered on the turn of a card and lost and he saw bears and lions turned loose in pits
to fight wild bulls to the death and he was twice in the city of San Francisco and twice
saw it burn and never went back, riding out on horseback along the road to the south
where all night the shape of the city burned against the sky and burned again in the
black waters of the sea where dolphins rolled through the flames, fire in the lake,
through the fall of burning timbers and the cries of the lost. He never saw the expriest
again. Of the judge he heard rumor everywhere.
In the spring of his twenty-eighth year he set out with others upon the desert to the
east, he one of five at hire to see a party through the wilderness to their homes halfway
. across the conti ent. Seven days from the coast at a desert well he left them. They
were just a band of pilgrims returning to their homes, men and women, already dusty
and travelworn.
He set the horse's face north toward the stone mountains running thinly under the edge
of the sky and he rode the stars down and the sun up. It was no country he had ever
seen and there was no track to follow into those mountains and there was no track out.
Yet in the deepest fastness of those rocks he met with men who seemed unable to abide
the silence of the world.
He first saw them laboring over the plain in the dusk among flowering ocotillo that
burned in the final light like horned candelabra. They were led by a pitero piping a
reed and then in procession a clanging of tambourines and matracas and men naked to
. the waist in black capes and hoods who flailed them elves with whips of braided yucca
and men who bore on their naked backs great loads of cholla and a man tied to a rope
who was pulled this way and that by his companions and a hooded man in a white
robe who bore a heavy wooden cross on his shoulders. They were all of them barefoot
and they left a trail of blood across the rocks and they were followed by a rude carreta
in which sat a carved wooden skeleton who rattled along stiffly holding before him a
bow and arrow. He shared his cart with a load of stones and they went trundling over
the rocks drawn by ropes tied to the heads and ankles of the bearers and accompanied
by a deputation of women who carried small desert flowers in their folded hands or
. torches of sotol or primi ive lanterns of pierced tin.
This troubled sect traversed slowly the ground under the bluff where the watcher stood
and made their way over the broken scree of a fan washed out of the draw above them
and wailing and piping and clanging they passed between the granite walls into the

upper valley and disappeared in the coming darkness like heralds of some unspeakable
. calamity leaving only bloody foot rints on the stone.
He bivouacked in a barren swale and he and the horse lay down together and all night
the dry wind blew down the desert and the wind was all but silent for there was
nothing of resonance among those rocks. In the dawn he and the horse stood watching
the east where the light commenced and then he saddled the horse and led it down a
scrabbled trail through a canyon where he found a tank deep under a pitch of boulders.
The water lay in darkness and the stones were cool and he drank and fetched water for
the horse in his hat. Then he led the animal up onto the ridge and they went on, the
man watching the tableland to the south and the mountains to the north and the horse
clattering along behind.
By and by the horse began to toss its head and soon it would not go. He stood holding
the hackamore and studying the country. Then he saw the pilgrims. They were scattered
about below him in a stone coulee dead in their blood. He took down his rifle and
squatted and listened. He led the horse under the shade of the rock wall and hobbled it
and moved along the rock and down the slope.
The company of penitents lay hacked and butchered among the stones in every attitude.
Many lay about the fallen cross and some were mutilated and some were without heads.
Perhaps they'd gathered under the cross for shelter but the hole into which it had been
set and the cairn of rocks about its base showed how it had been pushed over and how
the hooded alter-christ had been cut down and disemboweled who now lay with the
scraps of rope by which he had been bound still tied about his wrists and ankles.
The kid rose and looked about at this desolate scene and then he saw alone and upright
in a small niche in the rocks an old woman kneeling in a faded rebozo with her eyes
cast down.
He made his way among the corpses and stood before her. She was very old and her
face was gray and leathery and sand had collected in the folds of her clothing. She did
not look up. The shawl that covered her head was much faded of its color yet it bore
like a patent woven into the fabric the figures of stars and quartermoons and other
insignia of a provenance unknown to him. He spoke to her in a low voice. He told her
that he was an American and that he was a long way from the country of his birth and
that he had no family and that he had traveled much and seen many things and had
. been at war and endured hard hips. He told her that he would convey her to a safe
place, some party of her countrypeople who would welcome her and that she should join
them for he could not leave her in this place or she would surely die.

He knelt on one knee, resting the rifle before him like a staff. Abuelita, he said. No
puedes escucharme?
He reached into the little cove and touched her arm. She moved slightly, her whole
body, light and rigid. She weighed nothing. She was just a dried shell and she had been
dead in that place for years.
XXIII
On the north Texas plains - An old buffalo hunter ?
The millennial herds - The bonepickers - Night on the prairie -
The callers - Apache ears - Elrod takes a stand - A killing -
Bearing off the dead - Fort Griffin - The Beehive - A stageshow -
The judge - Killing a bear - The judge speaks of old times -
In preparation for the dance - The judge on war, destiny, the
supremacy of man - The dancehall - The whore -The jakes and what
was encountered there - Sie miissen schlafen aberlch muss tanzen.
In the late winter of eighteen seventy-eight he was on the plains of north Texas. He
crossed the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River on a morning when skim ice lay
along the sandy shore and he rode through a dark dwarf forest of black and twisted
mesquite trees. He made his camp that night on a piece of high ground where there
was a windbreak formed of a tree felled by lightning. He'd no sooner got his fire to
burn than he saw across the prairie in the darkness another fire. Like his it twisted in
the wind, like his it warmed one man alone.
It was an old hunter in camp and the hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of
the buffalo and the stands he'd made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise with
the dead animals scattered over the grounds and the herd beginning to mill and the
riflebarrel so hot the wiping patches sizzled in the bore and the animals by the
thousands and tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of
ground and the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock and the
shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot
loose at the tang and their shoulders were yellow and blue to the elbow and the tandem
wagons groaned away over the prairie twenty and twenty-two ox teams and the flint

hides by the ton and hundred ton and the meat rotting on the ground and the air
whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and
. feed ng with the wolves half crazed and wallowing in the carrion.
I seen Studebaker wagons with six and eight ox teams headed out for the grounds not
haulin a thing but lead. Just pure galena. Tons of it. On this ground alone between the
Arkansas River and the Concho there was eight million carcasses for that's how many
hides reached the railhead. Two year ago we pulled out from Griffin for a last hunt. We
ransacked the country. Six weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed
them and come in. They're gone. Ever one of them that G-d ever made is gone as if
they'd never been at all.
The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the
fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter
pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there's other worlds like this, he said. Or if
this is the only one.
When he came upon the bonepickers he'd been riding three days in a country he'd
never seen. The plains were sere and burntlook-ing and the small trees black and
misshapen and haunted by ravens and everywhere the ragged packs of jackal wolves and
. the crazed and sunchalked bones of the vanished herds. He dis ounted and led the
horse. Here and there within the arc of ribs a few flat discs of darkened lead like old
medallions of some order of the hunt. In the distance teams of oxen bore along slowly
and the heavy wagons creaked dryly. Into these barrows the pickers tossed the bones,
kicking down the calcined architecture, breaking apart the great frames with axes. The
bones clattered in the wagons, they plowed on in a pale dust. He watched them pass,
ragged, filthy, the oxen galled and mad-looking. None spoke to him. In the distance he
could see a train of wagons moving off to the northeast with great tottering loads of
bones and further to the north other teams of pickers at their work.
He mounted and rode on. The bones had been gathered into windrows ten feet high
and hundreds long or into great conical hills topped with the signs or brands of their
. owners. He over ook one of the lumbering carts, a boy riding the near wheel ox and
driving with a jerkline and a jockeystick. Two youths squatting atop a mound of skulls
and pelvic bones leered down at him.
Their fires dotted the plain that night and he sat with his back to the wind and drank
from an army canteen and ate a handful of parched corn for his supper. All across
. those reaches the yam er and yap of the starving wolves relayed and to the north the
silent lightning rigged a broken lyre upon the world's dark rim. The air smelled of rain
but no rain fell and the creaking bone-carts passed in the night like darkened ships and

he could smell the oxen and hear their breath. The sour smell of the bones was
everywhere. Toward midnight a party hailed him as he squatted at his coals.
Come up, he said.
They came up out of the dark, sullen wretches dressed in skins. They carried old
military guns save for one who had a buffalo rifle and they had no coats and one of
them wore green hide boots peeled whole from the hocks of some animal and the toes
gathered shut with leader.
Evenin stranger, called out the eldest child among them.
He looked at them. They were four and a halfgrown boy and they halted at the edge of
the light and arranged themselves there.
Come up, he said.
They shuffled forward. Three of them squatted and two stood.
Where's ye outfit? said one.
He aint out for bones.
You aint got nary chew of tobacca about your clothes have ye?
He shook his head.
Nary drink of whiskey neither I dont reckon.
He aint got no whiskey.
Where ye headed mister?
Are you headed twards Griffin?
He looked them over. I am, he said.
Coin for the whores I'll bet ye.
He aint goin for the whores.

It's full of whores, Griffin is.
Hell, he's probably been there more'n you.
You been to Griffin mister?
Not yet.
Full of whores. Full plumb up.
They say you can get clapped a day's ride out when the wind is right.
They set in a tree in front of this here place and you can look up and see their
bloomers. I've counted high as eight in that tree early of a evenin. Set up there like
. coons and smoke ciga ettes and holler down at ye.
It's set up to be the biggest town for sin in all Texas.
It's as lively a place for murders as you'd care to visit.
Scrapes with knives. About any kind of meanness you can name.
He looked at them from one to the other. He reached and took up a stick and roused
the fire with it and put the stick in the flames. You all like meanness? he said.
We dont hold with it.
Like to drink whiskey?
He's just talkin. He aint no whiskey drinker.
Hell, you just now seen him drink it not a hour ago.
I seen him puke it back up too. What's them things around your neck there mister?
He pulled the aged scapular from his shirtfront and looked at it. It's ears, he said.
It's what?
Ears.

What kind of ears?
He tugged at the thong and looked down at them. They were perfectly black and hard
and dry and of no shape at all.
Humans, he said. Human ears.
Aint done it, said the one with the rifle.
Dont call him a liar Elrod, he's liable to shoot ye. Let's see them things mister if you
dont care.
He slipped the scapular over his head and handed it across to the boy who'd spoken.
They pressed about and felt the strange dried pendants.
Niggers, aint it? they said.
Docked them niggers' ears so they'd know em when they run off.
How many is there mister?
I dont know. Used to be near a hundred.
They held the thing up and turned it in the firelight.
Nigger ears, by G-d.
They aint niggers.
They aint?
No.
What are they?
Injins.
The hell they are.
Elrod you done been told.

How come them to be so black as that if they aint niggers.
They turned that way. They got blacker till they couldnt black no more.
Where'd you get em at?
Killed them sons of bitches. Didnt ye mister?
You been a scout on the prairies, aint ye?
I bought them ears in California off a soldier in a saloon didnt have no money to drink
on.
He reached and took the scapular from them.
Shoot. I bet he's been a scout on the prairie killed ever one of them sons of bitches.
The one called Elrod followed the trophies with his chin and sniffed the air. I dont see
what you want with them things, he said. I wouldnt have em.
The others looked at him uneasily.
You dont know where them ears come from. That old boy you bought em off of might
of said they was injins but that dont make it so.
The man didnt answer.
Them ears could of come off of cannibals or any other kind of foreign nigger. They tell
me you can buy the whole heads in New Orleans. Sailors brings em in and you can buy
em for five dollars all day long them heads.
Hush Elrod.
The man sat holding the necklace in his hands. They wasnt cannibals, he said. They was
Apaches. I knowed the man that docked em. Knowed him and rode with him and seen
him hung.
Elrod looked at the others and grinned. Apaches, he said. I bet them old Apaches would
give a watermelon a pure fit, what about you all?
The man looked up wearily. You aint callin me a liar are ye son?

I aint ye son.
How old are you?
That's some more of your business.
How old are you?
He's fifteen.
You hush your damn mouth.
He turned to the man. He dont speak for me, he said.
He's done spoke. I was fifteen year old when I was first shot.
I ain't never been shot.
You aint sixteen yet neither.
You aim to shoot me?
I aim to try to keep from it.
Come on Elrod.
You aint goin to shoot nobody. Maybe in the back or them asleep.
Elrod we're gone.
I knowed you for what you was when I seen ye.
You better go on.
Set there and talk about shootin somebody. They aint nobody done it yet.
. The other four stood at the limits of the firelight. The young st of them was casting
glances out at the dark sanctuary of the prairie night.
Go on, the man said. They're waitin on ye.

He spat into the man's fire and wiped his mouth. Out on the prairie to the north a
train of yoked wagons was passing and the oxen were pale and silent in the starlight
and the wagons creaked faintly in the distance and a lantern with a red glass followed
them out like an alien eye. This country was filled with violent children orphaned by
war. His companions had started back to fetch him and perhaps this emboldened him
the more and perhaps he said other things to the man for when they got to the fire the
man had risen to his feet. You keep him away from me, he said. I see him back here
I'll kill him.
When they had gone he built up the fire and caught the horse and took the hobbles off
and tied it and saddled it and then he moved off apart and spread his blanket and lay
down in the dark.
When he woke there was still no light in the east. The boy was standing by the ashes
of the fire with the rifle in his hand. The horse had snuffed and now it snuffed again.
I knowed you'd be hid out, the boy called.
He pushed back the blanket and rolled onto his stomach and cocked the pistol and
leveled it at the sky where the clustered stars were burning for eternity. He centered the
foresight in the milled groove of the framestrap and holding the piece so he swung it
through the dark of the trees with both hands to the darker shape of the visitor.
I'm right here, he said.
The boy swung with the rifle and fired.
You wouldnt of lived anyway, the man said.
It was gray dawn when the others came up. They had no horses. They led the
halfgrown boy to where the dead youth was lying on his back with his hands composed
upon his chest.
We dont want no trouble mister. We just want to take him with us.
Take him.
I knowed we'd bury him on this prairie.
They come out here from Kentucky mister. This tyke and his brother. His momma and

daddy both dead. His grandaddy was killed by a lunatic and buried in the woods like a
dog. He's never knowed good fortune in his life and now he aint got a soul in this
world.
Randall you take a good look at the man that has made you a orphan.
The orphan in his large clothes holding the old musket with the mended stock stared at
him woodenly. He was maybe twelve years old and he looked not so much dullwitted as
insane. Two of the others were going through the dead boy's pockets.
Where's his rifle at mister?
The man stood with his hand on his belt. He nodded to where the rifle stood against a
tree.
They brought it over and presented it to the brother. It was a Sharp's fifty calibre and
holding it and the musket he stood inanely armed, his eyes skittering.
One of the older boys handed him the dead boy's hat and then he turned to the man.
He give forty dollars for that rifle in Little Rock. You can buy em in Griffin for ten.
They aint worth nothin. Randall, are you ready to go?
He did not assist as a bearer for he was too small. When they set out across the prairie
with his brother's body carried up on their shoulders he followed behind carrying the
musket and the dead boy's rifle and the dead boy's hat. The man watched them go. Out
there was nothing. They were simply bearing the body off over the bonestrewn waste
toward a naked horizon. The orphan turned once to look back at him and then he
hurried to catch up.
In the afternoon he rode through the McKenzie crossing of the Clear Fork of the Brazos
River and he and the horse walked side by side down the twilight toward the town
where in the long red dusk and in the darkness the random aggregate of the lamps
formed slowly a false shore of hospice cradled on the low plain before them. They
. passed enormous ricks of bones, colos al dikes composed of horned skulls and the
crescent ribs like old ivory bows heaped in the aftermath of some legendary battle, great
levees of them curving away over the plain into the night.
They entered the town in a light rain falling. The horse nickered and snuffed shyly at
the hocks of the other animals standing at stall before the lamplit bagnios they passed.
Fiddle-music issued into the solitary mud street and lean dogs crossed before them from
shadow to shadow. At the end of the town he led the horse to a rail and tied it among

others and stepped up the low wooden stairs into the dim light that fell from the door
.ay there. He looked back a last time at the street and at the random windowlights let
into the darkness and at the last pale light in the west and the low dark hills around.
Then he pushed open the door and entered.
A dimly seething rabble had coagulated within. As if the raw board structure erected for
their containment occupied some ultimate sink into which they had gravitated from off
. the sur ounding flatlands. An old man in a tyrolean costume was shuffling among the
rough tables with his hat outheld while a little girl in a smock cranked a barrel organ
and a bear in a crinoline twirled strangely upon a board stage defined by a row of
tallow candles that dripped and sputtered in their pools of grease.
He made his way through the crowd to the bar where several men in gaitered shirts
were drawing beer or pouring whiskey. Young boys worked behind them fetching crates
of bottles and racks of glasses steaming from the scullery to the rear. The bar was
covered with zinc and he placed his elbows upon it and spun a silver coin before him
and slapped it flat.
Speak or forever, said the barman.
A whiskey.
Whiskey it is. He set up a glass and uncorked a bottle and poured perhaps half a gill
and took the coin.
He stood looking at the whiskey. Then he took his hat off and placed it on the bar and
took up the glass and drank it very deliberately and set the empty glass down again. He
wiped his mouth and turned around and placed his elbows on the bar behind him.
Watching him across the layered smoke in the yellow light was the judge.
He was sitting at one of the tables. He wore a round hat with a narrow brim and he
was among every kind of man, herder and bullwhacker and drover and freighter and
miner and hunter and soldier and pedlar and gambler and drifter and drunkard and
thief and he was among the dregs of the earth in beggary a thousand years and he was
among the scapegrace scions of eastern dynasties and in all that motley assemblage he
sat by them and yet alone as if he were some other sort of man entire and he seemed
little changed or none in all these years.
He turned away from those eyes and stood looking down at the empty tumbler between
his fists. When he looked up the barman was watching him. He raised his forefinger

and the barman brought the whiskey.
He paid, he lifted the glass and drank. There was a mirror along the backbar but it
held only smoke and phantoms. The barrel organ was groaning and creaking and the
bear with tongue aloll was revolving heavily on the boards.
When he turned the judge had risen and was speaking with other men. The showman
made his way through the throng shaking the coins in his hat. Garishly clad whores
were going out through a door at the rear of the premises and he watched them and he
watched the bear and when he looked back across the room the judge was not there.
The showman seemed to be in altercation with the men standing at the table. Another
man rose. The showman gestured with his hat. One of them pointed toward the bar. He
shook his head. Their voices were incoherent in the din. On the boards the bear was
dancing for all that his heart was worth and the girl cranked the organ handle and the
shadow of the act which the candlelight constructed upon the wall might have gone
begging for referents in any daylight world. When he looked back the showman had
donned the hat and he stood with his hands on his hips. One of the men had drawn a
longbarreled cavalry pistol from his belt. He turned and leveled the pistol toward the
stage.
Some dove for the floor, some reached for their own arms. The owner of the bear stood
like a pitchman at a shooting gal-ery. The shot was thunderous and in the afterclap all
sound in that room ceased. The bear had been shot through the mid-section. He let out
a low moan and he began to dance faster, dancing in silence save for the slap of his
great footpads on the planks. Blood was running down his groin. The little girl strapped
into the barrel organ stood frozen, the crank at rest on the upswing. The man with the
pistol fired again and the pistol bucked and roared and the black smoke rolled and the
bear groaned and began to reel drunkenly. He was holding his chest and a thin foam of
blood swung from his jaw and he began to totter and to cry like a child and he took a
few last steps, dancing, and crashed to the boards.
Someone had seized the pistol arm of the man who'd done the shooting and the gun
was waving aloft. The owner of the bear stood stunned, clutching the brim of his
oldworld hat.
Shot the G-ddamned bear, said the barman.
The little girl had unbuckled herself out of the barrel organ and it clattered wheezing to
the floor. She ran forward and knelt and gathered the great shaggy head up in her arms
and began to rock back and forth sobbing. Most of the men in the room had risen and
they stood in the smoky yellow space with their hands on their sidearms. Whole flocks

of whores were scuttling toward the rear and a woman mounted to the boards and
stepped past the bear and held out her hands.
It's all over, she said. It's all over.
Do you believe it's all over, son?
He turned. The judge was standing at the bar looking down at him. He smiled, he
removed his hat. The great pale dome of his skull shone like an enormous
. phosphorescent egg in the lamp ight.
The last of the true. The last of the true. I'd say they're all gone under now saving me
and thee. Would you not?
He tried to see past him. That great corpus enshadowed him from all beyond. He could
hear the woman announcing the commencement of dancing in the hall to the rear.
And some are not yet born who shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's soul, said the
judge. He turned slightly. Plenty of time for the dance.
I aint studyin no dance.
The judge smiled.
The tyrolean and another man were bent over the bear. The girl was sobbing, the front
of her dress dark with blood. The judge leaned across the bar and seized a bottle and
snapped the cork out of it with his thumb. The cork whined off into the blackness
above the lamps like a bullet. He rifled a great drink down his throat and leaned back
against the bar. You're here for the dance, he said.
I got to go.
The judge looked aggrieved. Go? he said.
He nodded. He reached and took hold of his hat where it lay on the bar but he did
not take it up and he did not move.
What man would not be a dancer if he could, said the judge. It's a great thing, the
dance.
The woman was kneeling and had her arm around the little girl. The candles sputtered

and the great hairy mound of the bear dead in its crinoline lay like some monster slain
in the commission of unnatural acts. The judge poured the tumbler full where it stood
. empty alongside the hat and nudged it for ard.
Drink up, he said. Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee.
He looked at the glass. The judge smiled and gestured with the bottle. He took up the
glass and drank.
The judge watched him. Was it always your idea, he said, that if you did not speak you
would not be recognized?
You seen me,
The judge ignored this. I recognized you when I first saw you and yet you were a
disappointment to me. Then and now. Even so at the last I find you here with me.
I aint with you.
The judge raised his bald brow. Not? he said. He looked about him in a puzzled and
artful way and he was a passable thespian.
I never come here huntin you.
What then? said the judge.
What would I want with you? I come here same reason as any man.
And what reason is that?
What reason is what?
That these men are here.
They come here to have a good time.
The judge watched him. He began to point out various men in the room and to ask if
these men were here for a good time or if indeed they knew why they were here at all.
Everbody dont have to have a reason to be someplace.

That's so, said the judge. They do not have to have a reason. But order is not set aside
because of their indifference.
He regarded the judge warily.
Let me put it this way, said the judge. If it is so that they themselves have no reason
and yet are indeed here must they not be here by reason of some other? And if this is
so can you guess who that other might be?
No. Can you?
I know him well.
He poured the tumbler full once more and he took a drink himself from the bottle and
he wiped his mouth and turned to regard the room. This is an orchestration for an
event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper
time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which
we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history
and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves
as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of
those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he
has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he
might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if
plan there be.
He smiled, his great teeth shone. He drank.
An event, a ceremony. The orchestration thereof. The overture carries certain marks of
decisiveness. It includes the slaying of a large bear. The evening's progress will not
appear strange or unusual even to those who question the Tightness of the events so
ordered.
A ceremony then. One could well argue that there are not categories of no ceremony
but only ceremonies of greater or lesser degree and deferring to this argument we will
say that this is a ceremony of a certain magnitude perhaps more commonly called a
ritual. A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are
but mock rituals. Here every man knows the false at once. Never doubt it. That feeling
in the breast that evokes a child's memory of loneliness such as when the others have
gone and only the game is left with its solitary participant. A solitary game, without
opponent. Where only the rules are at hazard. Dont look away. We are not speaking in
mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair.

It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the
mortar which bonds? The judge leaned closer. What do you think death is, man? Of
whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind
riddles or are they not some part of every man's jurisdiction? What is death if not an
agency? And whom does he intend toward? Look at me.
I dont like craziness.
Nor I. Nor I. Bear with me. Look at them now. Pick a man, any man. That man there.
See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his
face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a man's life is no bargain masks the actual
case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done,
never will do. That's the way of things with him and his life is so balked about by
difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a
walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all. Can he say, such a man, that
there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no
cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe
. that the wreckage of his existence is un ntailed? No liens, no creditors? That G-ds of
vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are
. for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers alto ether they must evoke only
the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail? To whom is he talking,
man? Cant you see him?
The man was indeed muttering to himself and peering bale-fully about the room wherein
it seemed there was no friend to him.
A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or nill. Any man who
could discover Mis own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come
at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is
as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. This
desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart
but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.
He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing
nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and
now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's
memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
He took up the tumbler the judge had poured and he drank and set it down again. He
looked at the judge. I been everwhere, he said. This is just one more place.

The judge arched his brow. Did you post witnesses? he said. To report to you on the
continuing existence of those places once you'd quit them?
That's crazy.
Is it? Where is yesterday? Where is Glanton and Brown and where is the priest? He
leaned closer. Where is Shelby, whom you left to the mercies of Elias in the desert, and
where is Tate whom you abandoned in the mountains? Where are the ladies, ah the fair
and tender ladies with whom you danced at the governor's ball when you were a hero
anointed with the blood of the enemies of the republic you'd elected to defend? And
where is the fiddler and where the dance?
I guess you can tell me.
I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those
honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the
dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and
the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer
and can you guess who that might be?
You aint nothin.
You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered up
himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror
in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can
dance.
Even a dumb animal can dance.
The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage
for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and
without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps.
Bears that dance, bears that dont.
He drifted with the crowd toward the door at the rear. In the anteroom sat men at
cards, dim in the smoke. He moved on. A woman was taking chits from the men as
they passed through to the shed at the rear of the building. She looked up at him. He
had no chit. She directed him to a table where a woman was selling the chits and
stuffing the money with a piece of shingle through a narrow slit into an iron strongbox.
He paid his dollar and took the stamped brass token and rendered it up at the door
and passed through.

He found himself in a large hall with a platform for the musicians at one end and a
large homemade sheetiron stove at the other. Whole squadrons of whores were working
the floor. In their stained peignoirs, in their green stockings and melon-colored drawers
they drifted through the smoky oil light like makebelieve wantons, at once childlike and
lewd. A dark little dwarf of a whore took his arm and smiled up at him.
I seen you right away, she said. I always pick the one I want.
She led him through a door where an old Mexican woman was handing out towels and
candles and they ascended like refugees of some sordid disaster the darkened plankboard
stairwell to the upper rooms.
Lying in the little cubicle with his trousers about his knees he watched her. He watched
her take up her clothes and don them and he watched her hold the candle to the
mirror and study her face there. She turned and looked at him.
Let's go, she said. I got to go.
Goon.
You cant lay there. Come on. I got to go.
He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the little iron cot and stood and pulled
his trousers up and buttoned them and buckled his belt. His hat was on the floor and
he picked it up and slapped it against the side of his leg and put it on.
You need to get down there and get you a drink, she said. You'll be all right.
I'm all right now.
He went out. He turned at the end of the hallway and looked back. Then he went down
the stairs. She had come to the door. She stood in the hallway holding the candle and
brushing her hair back with one hand and she watched him descend into the dark of
the stairwell and then she pulled the door shut behind her.
He stood at the edge of the dancefloor. A ring of people had taken the floor and were
holding hands and grinning and calling out to one another. A fiddler sat on a stool on
the stage and a man walked up and down calling out the order of the dance and
gesturing and stepping in the way he wished them to go. Outside in the darkened lot
groups of wretched Tonkawas stood in the mud with their faces composed in strange

lost portraits within the sashwork of the windowlights. The fiddler rose and set the
fiddle to his jaw. There was a shout and the music began and the ring of dancers began
to rotate ponderously with a great shuffling. He went out the back.
The rain had stopped and the air was cold. He stood in the yard. Stars were falling
. across the sky myriad and random, speed ng along brief vectors from their origins in
night to their destinies in dust and nothingness. Within the hall the fiddle squealed and
the dancers shuffled and stomped. In the street men were calling for the little girl
whose bear was dead for she was lost. They went among the darkened lots with lanterns
and torches calling out to her.
. He went down the walkboard toward the jakes. He stood out ide listening to the voices
fading away and he looked again at the silent tracks of the stars where they died over
the darkened hills. Then he opened the rough board door of the jakes and stepped in.
The judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and
. gathered him in his arms against his im ense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden
. barlatch home be ind him.
. In the saloon two men who wanted to buy the hide were look ng for the owner of the
bear. The bear lay on the stage in an immense pool of blood. All the candles had gone
out save one and it guttered uneasily in its grease like a votive lamp. In the dancehall a
young man had joined the fiddler and he kept the measure of the music with a pair of
spoons which he clapped between his knees. The whores sashayed half naked, some with
their breasts exposed. In the mudded dogyard behind the premises two men went down
the boards toward the jakes. A third man was standing there urinating into the mud.
Is someone in there? the first man said.
The man who was relieving himself did not look up. I wouldnt go in there if I was you,
he said.
Is there somebody in there?
I wouldnt go in.
He hitched himself up and buttoned his trousers and stepped past them and went up
the walk toward the lights. The first man watched him go and then opened the door of
the jakes.
Good G-d almighty, he said.

What is it?
He didnt answer. He stepped past the other and went back up the walk. The other man
stood looking after him. Then he opened the door and looked in.
In the saloon they had rolled the dead bear onto a wagonsheet and there was a general
call for hands. In the anteroom the tobacco smoke circled the lamps like an evil fog and
the men bid and dealt in a low mutter.
There was a lull in the dancing and a second fiddler took the stage and the two
plucked their strings and turned the little hardwood pegs until they were satisfied. Many
among the dancers were staggering drunk through the room and some had rid
themselves of shirts and jackets and stood barechested and sweating even though the
room was cold enough to cloud their breath. An enormous whore stood clapping her
hands at the bandstand and calling drunkenly for the music. She wore nothing but a
. pair of men's drawers and some of her sisters were like ise clad in what appeared to
. be trophies ats or pantaloons or blue twill cavalry jackets. As the music sawed up there
was a lively cry from all and a caller stood to the front and called out the dance and
the dancers stomped and hooted and lurched against one another.
And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers
grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he
is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to
the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he
says. He says he'll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws
back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He
wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he
swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a
pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never
sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a
great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will
never die.
THE END
EPILOGUE
In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is
making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into
the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the

fire out of the rock which G-d has put there. On the plain behind him are the
wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in
the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet
so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality
and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of
the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the
verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and
perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are
the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in
the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again.