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 pilgrims 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 flaring 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 glowered 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 lighting 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 embroidered 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 commenced to put forth his case. He gestured, he pointed back toward 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 infants 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 unloaded 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 goddess.
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.