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 goddamn 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. Goddamn, 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 exchanging 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.
Couts 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?
Couts 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 goddamned word of it, said Glanton.
Well by god 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 disclaimers. 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.