The alcalde was a man in his sixties and he turned to go to his wife’s aid and was struck down with a pistolbarrel. He stood up again holding his head. Glanton pushed him on to the rear room. He had in his hand a rope already fashioned into a noose and he turned the alcalde around and put the noose over his head and pulled it taut. The wife was sitting up in bed and at this she commenced to scream again. One of her eyes was swollen and closing rapidly and now one of the recruits hit her flush in the mouth and she fell over in the tousled bedding and put her hands over her head. Glanton held the candle aloft and directed one of the recruits to boost the other on his shoulders and the boy reached along the top of one of the vigas until he found a space and he fitted the end of the rope through and let it down and they hauled on it and raised the mute and struggling alcalde into the air. They’d not tied his hands and he groped wildly overhead for the rope and pulled himself up to save strangling and he kicked his feet and revolved slowly in the candlelight.
Válgame Dios, he gasped. Qué quiere?
I want my money, said Glanton. I want my money and I want my packmules and I want David Brown.
Cómo? wheezed the old man.
Someone had lit a lamp. The old woman raised up and saw first the shadow and then the form of her husband dangling from the rope and she began to crawl across the bed toward him.
Dígame, gasped the alcalde.
Someone reached to seize the wife but Glanton motioned him away and she staggered out of the bed and took hold of her husband about the knees to hold him up. She was sobbing and praying for mercy to Glanton and to God impartially.
Glanton walked around to where he could see the man’s face. I want my money, he said. My money and my mules and the man I sent out here. El hombre que tiene usted. Mi compañero.
No no, gasped the hanged man. Búscale. No man is here.
Where is he?
He is no here.
Yes he’s here. In the juzgado.
No no. Madre de Jesús. No here. He is gone. Siete, ocho días.
Where is the juzgado?
Cómo?
El juzgado. Dónde está?
The old woman turned loose with one arm long enough to point, her face pressed to the man’s leg. Allá, she said. Allá.
Two men went out, one holding the stub of the candle and shielding the flame with his cupped hand before him. When they came back they reported the little dungeon in the building out back empty.
Glanton studied the alcalde. The old woman was visibly tottering. They’d halfhitched the rope about the tailpost of the bed and he loosed the rope and the alcalde and the wife collapsed into the floor.
They left them bound and gagged and rode out to visit the grocer. Three days later the alcalde and the grocer and the alcalde’s wife were found tied and lying in their own excrement in an abandoned hut at the edge of the ocean eight miles south of the settlement. They’d been left a pan of water from which they drank like dogs and they had howled at the booming surf in that wayplace until they were mute as stones.
Glanton and his men were two days and nights in the streets crazed with liquor. The sergeant in charge of the small garrison of American troops confronted them in a drinking exchange on the evening of the second day and he and the three men with him were beaten senseless and stripped of their arms. At dawn when the soldiers kicked in the hostel door there was no one in the room.
Glanton returned to Yuma alone, his men gone to the gold fields. On that bonestrewn waste he encountered wretched parcels of foot-travelers who called out to him and men dead where they’d fallen and men who would die and groups of folks clustered about a last wagon or cart shouting hoarsely at the mules or oxen and goading them on as if they bore in those frail caissons the covenant itself and these animals would die and the people with them and they called out to that lone horseman to warn him of the danger at the crossing and the horseman rode on all contrary to the tide of refugees like some storied hero toward what beast of war or plague or famine with what set to his relentless jaw.
When he reached Yuma he was drunk. Behind him on a string were two small jacks laden with whiskey and biscuit. He sat his horse and looked down at the river who was keeper of the crossroads of all that world and his dog came to him and nuzzled his foot in the strirrup.
A young Mexican girl was crouched naked under the shade of the wall. She watched him ride past, covering her breasts with her hands. She wore a rawhide collar about her neck and she was chained to a post and there was a clay bowl of blackened meatscraps beside her. Glanton tied the jacks to the post and rode inside on the horse.
There was no one about. He rode down to the landing. While he was watching the river the doctor came scrambling down the bank and seized Glanton by the foot and began to plead with him in a senseless jabber. He’d not seen to his person in weeks and he was filthy and disheveled and he tugged at Glanton’s trouserleg and pointed toward the fortifications on the hill. That man, he said. That man.
Glanton slid his boot from the stirrup and pushed the doctor away with his foot and turned the horse and rode back up the hill. The judge was standing on the rise in silhouette against the evening sun like some great balden archimandrite. He was wrapped in a mantle of freeflowing cloth beneath which he was naked. The black man Jackson came out of one of the stone bunkers dressed in a similar garb and stood beside him. Glanton rode back up along the crest of the hill to his quarters.
All night gunfire drifted intermittently across the water and laughter and drunken oaths. When day broke no one appeared. The ferry lay at its moorings and across the river a man came down to the landing and blew a horn and waited and then went back.
The ferry stood idle all that day. By evening the drunkenness and revelry had begun afresh and the shrieks of young girls carried across the water to the pilgrims huddled in their camp. Someone had given the idiot whiskey mixed with sarsaparilla and this thing which could little more than walk had commenced to dance before the fire with loping simian steps, moving with great gravity and smacking its loose wet lips.
At dawn the black walked out to the landing and stood urinating in the river. The scows lay downstream against the bank with a few inches of sandy water standing in the floorboards. He pulled his robes about him and stepped aboard the thwart and balanced there. The water ran over the boards toward him. He stood looking out. The sun was not up and there was a low skein of mist on the water. Downstream some ducks moved out from the willows. They circled in the eddy water and then flapped out across the open river and rose and circled and bent their way upstream. In the floor of the scow was a small coin. Perhaps once lodged under the tongue of some passenger. He bent to fetch it. He stood up and wiped the grit from the piece and held it up and as he did so a long cane arrow passed through his upper abdomen and flew on and fell far out in the river and sank and backed to the surface again and began to turn and to drift downstream.
He faced around, his robes sustained about him. He was holding his wound and with his other hand he ravaged among his clothes for the weapons that were not there and were not there. A second arrow passed him on the left and two more struck and lodged fast in his chest and in his groin. They were a full four feet in length and they lofted slightly with his movements like ceremonial wands and he seized his thigh where the dark arterial blood was spurting along the shaft and took a step toward the shore and fell sideways into the river.