The doctor stood on the low parapet of the works in silence and watched the bodies dragged down the landing and booted and shoved into the river. He turned and looked at Brown and Webster. They’d hauled the howitzer back to its position and Brown sat easily on the warm barrel smoking his cigar and watching the activity below. The doctor turned and walked back to his quarters.
Nor did he appear the following day. Glanton took charge of the operation of the ferry. People who had been waiting three days to cross at a dollar a head were now told that the fare was four dollars. And even this tariff was in effect for no more than a few days. Soon they were operating a sort of procrustean ferry where the fares were tailored to accommodate the purses of the travelers. Ultimately all pretense was dropped and the immigrants were robbed outright. Travelers were beaten and their arms and goods appropriated and they were sent destitute and beggared into the desert. The doctor came down to remonstrate with them and was paid his share of the revenues and sent back. Horses were taken and women violated and bodies began to drift past the Yuma camp downriver. As these outrages multiplied the doctor barricaded himself in his quarters and was seen no more.
In the following month a company from Kentucky under General Patterson arrived and disdaining to bargain with Glanton constructed a ferry downriver and crossed and moved on. This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan’s headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black, silent rider to the sea.
Easter in that year fell on the last day of March and at dawn on that day the kid together with Toadvine and a boy named Billy Carr crossed the river to cut willow poles at a place where they grew upstream from the encampment of immigrants. Passing through this place before it was yet good light they encountered a party of Sonorans up and about and they saw hanging from a scaffold a poor Judas fashioned from straw and old rags who wore on his canvas face a painted scowl that reflected in the hand that had executed it no more than a child’s conception of the man and his crime. The Sonorans had been up since midnight drinking and they had lit a bonfire on the bench of loam where the gibbet stood and as the Americans passed along the edge of their camp they called out to them in Spanish. Someone had brought a long cane from the fire tipped with lighted tow and the Judas was being set afire. Its raggedy clothes were packed with squibs and rockets and as the fire took hold it began to blow apart piece by piece in a shower of burning rags and straw. Until at last a bomb in its breeches went off and blew the thing to pieces in a stink of soot and sulphur and the men cheered and small boys threw a few last stones at the blackened remnants dangling from the noose. The kid was the last to pass through the clearing and the Sonorans called out to him and offered him wine from a goatskin but he shrugged up his rag of a coat about his shoulders and hurried on.
By now Glanton had enslaved a number of Sonorans and he kept crews of them working at the fortification of the hill. There were also detained in their camp a dozen or more indian and Mexican girls, some little more than children. Glanton supervised with some interest the raising of the walls about him but otherwise left his men to pursue the business at the crossing with a terrible latitude. He seemed to take little account of the wealth they were amassing although daily he’d open the brass lock with which the wood and leather trunk in his quarters was secured and raise the lid and empty whole sacks of valuables into it, the trunk already holding thousands of dollars in gold and silver coins as well as jewelry, watches, pistols, raw gold in little leather stives, silver in bars, knives, silverware, plate, teeth.
On the second of April David Brown with Long Webster and Toadvine set out for the town of San Diego on the old Mexican coast for the purpose of obtaining supplies. They took with them a string of packanimals and they left at sunset, riding up out of the trees and looking back at the river and then walking the horses sideways down the dunes into the cool blue dusk.
They crossed the desert in five days without incident and rode up through the coastal range and led the mules through the snow in the gap and descended the western slope and entered the town in a slow drizzle of rain. Their hide clothing was heavy with water and the animals were stained with the silt that had leached out of them and their trappings. Mounted U S cavalry passed them in the mud of the street and in the distance beyond they could hear the sea boom shuddering on the gray and stony coast.
Brown took from the horn of his saddle a fibre morral filled with coins and the three of them dismounted and entered a whiskey grocer’s and unannounced they upended the sack on the grocer’s board.
There were doubloons minted in Spain and in Guadalajara and half doubloons and gold dollars and tiny gold half dollars and French coins of ten franc value and gold eagles and half eagles and ring dollars and dollars minted in North Carolina and Georgia that were twenty-two carats pure. The grocer weighed them out by stacks in a common scale, sorted by their mintings, and he drew corks and poured measures round in small tin cups whereon the gills were stamped. They drank and set down the cups again and he pushed the bottle across the raw sashmilled boards of the counter.
They had drafted a list of supplies to be contracted for and when they’d agreed on the price of flour and coffee and a few other staples they turned into the street each with a bottle in his fist. They went down the plankboard walkway and crossed through the mud and they went past rows of rawlooking shacks and crossed a small plaza beyond which they could see the low sea rolling and a small encampment of tents and a street where the squatting houses were made of hides ranged like curious dorys along the selvage of sea oats above the beach and quite black and shining in the rain.
It was in one of these that Brown woke the next morning. He had little recollection of the prior night and there was no one in the hut with him. The remainder of their money was in a bag around his neck. He pushed open the framed hide door and stepped out into the darkness and the mist. They’d neither put up nor fed their animals and he made his way back to the grocer’s where they were tied and sat on the walkway and watched the dawn come down from the hills behind the town.
Noon he was red-eyed and reeking before the alcalde’s door demanding the release of his companions. The alcalde vacated out the back of the premises and shortly there arrived an American corporal and two soldiers who warned him away. An hour later he was at the farriery. Standing warily in the doorway peering into the gloom until he could make out the shape of things within.
The farrier was at his bench and Brown entered and laid before him a polished mahogany case with a brass nameplate bradded to the lid. He unsnapped the catches and opened the case and raised from their recess within a pair of shotgun barrels and he took up the stock with the other hand. He hooked the barrels into the patent breech and stood the shotgun on the bench and pushed the fitted pin home to secure the forearm. He cocked the hammers with his thumbs and let them fall again. The shotgun was English made and had damascus barrels and engraved locks and the stock was burl mahogany. He looked up. The farrier was watching him.
You work on guns? said Brown.
I do some.
I need these barrels cut down.
The man took the gun and held it in his hands. There was a raised center rib between the barrels and inlaid in gold the maker’s name, London. There were two platinum bands in the patent breech and the locks and the hammers were chased with scrollwork cut deeply in the steel and there were partridges engraved at either end of the maker’s name there. The purple barrels were welded up from triple skelps and the hammered iron and steel bore a watered figure like the markings of some alien and antique serpent, rare and beautiful and lethal, and the wood was figured with a deep red feather grain at the butt and held a small springloaded silver capbox in the toe.