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 watching 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 windless 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 undersides 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.