Within the cantina the Americans had no more than seated themselves before a muttered insult from a nearby table brought three or four of them to their feet. The kid addressed the table in his wretched Spanish and demanded which among those sullen inebriates had spoken. Before any could own it the first of the funeral rockets exploded in the street as told and the entire company of Americans made for the door. A drunk at the table rose to his feet with a knife and lurched after them. His friends called after him but he waved them away.
John Dorsey and Henderson Smith, two boys from Missouri, were the first into the street. They were followed by Charlie Brown and the judge. The judge could see over their heads and he raised one hand to those behind him. The bier was just passing. The fiddler and the cornetist were making little bows to each other and their steps suggested the martial style of the air they played. It’s a funeral, said the judge. As he spoke the drunk with the knife now reeling in the doorway sank the blade deep into the back of a man named Grimley. None saw it but the judge. Grimley put a hand on the rough wood frame of the door. I’m killed, he said. The judge drew his belt pistol and leveled it above the heads of the men and shot the drunk through the middle of the forehead.
The Americans outside the door were all but looking down the barrel of the judge’s pistol when he fired and most of them dove to the ground. Dorsey rolled clear and got to his feet and collided with the workers who’d been paying their respects to the passing cortege. They were putting their hats on when the judge fired. The dead man fell backward into the cantina, blood spouting from his head. When Grimley turned they could see the wooden handle of the knife protruding from his bloody shirt.
Other knives were already in play. Dorsey was grappling with the Mexicans and Henderson Smith had drawn his bowie and half severed a man’s arm with it and the man was standing with the dark arterial blood spraying between his fingers where he tried to hold the wound shut. The judge got Dorsey to his feet and they backed toward the cantina with the Mexicans feinting and jabbing at them with their knives. From inside came the uninterrupted sound of gunfire and the doorframe was filling up with smoke. The judge turned at the door and stepped over the several corpses sprawled there. Inside the huge pistols roared without intermission and the twenty or so Mexicans who’d been in the room were strewn about in every position, shot to pieces among the overturned chairs and the tables with the fresh splinters blown out of the wood and the mud walls pocked everywhere by the big conical bullets. The survivors were making for the daylight in the doorway and the first of these encountered the judge there and cut at him with his knife. But the judge was like a cat and he sidestepped the man and seized his arm and broke it and picked the man up by his head. He put him against the wall and smiled at him but the man had begun to bleed from the ears and the blood was running down between the judge’s fingers and over his hands and when the judge turned him loose there was something wrong with his head and he slid to the floor and did not get up. Those behind him had meanwhile met with a great battery of gunfire and the doorway was jammed with the dead and dying when there was suddenly a great ringing silence in the room. The judge stood with his back to the wall. The smoke drifted through like fog and the shrouded figures stood frozen. In the center of the room Toadvine and the kid were standing back to back with their pistols at port like duellists. The judge stepped to the door and shouted across the stacked bodies to the expriest where he stood among the horses with his pistol drawn.
The laggards, Priest, the laggards.
They’d not have shot men in public in a town so large but there was no help for it. Three men were running down the street and two others were legging it across the square. Of other souls abroad there were none. Tobin stepped from between the horses and leveled the big pistol in both hands and began to fire, the pistol bucking and dropping back and the runners wobbling and pitching headlong. He shot the two in the plaza and swung and shot down the runners in the street. The last one fell in a doorway and Tobin turned and drew the other pistol from his belt and stepped to the other side of the horse and looked up the street and across the square for any sign of movement there or among the buildings. The judge stepped back from the doorway into the cantina where the Americans stood looking at each other and at the bodies in a sort of wonder. They looked at Glanton. His eyes cut across the smoking room. His hat lying on a table. He stepped over and got it and set it on his head and squared it. He looked about. The men were reloading the empty chambers in their pistols. Hair, boys, he said. The string aint run on this trade yet.
When they left the cantina ten minutes later the streets were deserted. They had scalped the entire body of the dead, sliding about in a floor that had been packed clay and was now a wine-colored mud. There were twenty-eight Mexicans inside the tavern and eight more in the street including the five the expriest had shot. They mounted up. Grimley sat slumped sideways against the mud wall of the building. He did not look up. He was holding his pistol in his lap and looking off down the street and they turned and rode out along the north side of the plaza and disappeared.
It was thirty minutes before anyone appeared in the street. They spoke in whispers. As they approached the cantina one of the men from inside appeared in the doorway like a bloody apparition. He had been scalped and the blood was all run down into his eyes and he was holding shut a huge hole in his chest where a pink froth breathed in and out. One of the citizens laid a hand on his shoulder.
A dónde vas? he said.
A casa, said the man.
The next town they entered was two days deeper into the sierras. They never knew what it was called. A collection of mud huts pitched on the naked plateau. As they rode in the people ran before them like harried game. Their cries to one another or perhaps the visible frailty of them seemed to incite something in Glanton. Brown watched him. He nudged forth his horse and drew his pistol and this somnolent pueblo was forthwith dragooned into a weltering shambles. Many of the people had been running toward the church where they knelt clutching the altar and from this refuge they were dragged howling one by one and one by one they were slain and scalped in the chancel floor. When the riders passed through this same village four days later the dead were still in the streets and buzzards and pigs were feeding on them. The scavengers watched in silence while the company picked their way past like supernumeraries in a dream. When the last of them was gone they commenced to feed again.