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 together 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 Lincoln. 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 hooting 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 Algodones 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 composure. 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 embroidered 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 barefooted 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 dónde 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.
When 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 unappalled by the nakedness and filth. They crooned to him and they consulted among themselves and a woman named Sarah Borginnis 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.