The water was shallow and he was moving weakly to regain his feet when the first of the Yumas leaped aboard the scow. Completely naked, his hair dyed orange, his face painted black with a crimson line dividing it from widow’s peak to chin. He stamped his feet twice on the boards and flared his arms like some wild thaumaturge out of an atavistic drama and reached and seized the black by his robes where he lay in the reddening waters and raised him up and stove in his head with his warclub.
They swarmed up the hill toward the fortifications where the Americans lay sleeping and some were mounted and some afoot and all of them armed with bows and clubs and their faces blacked or pale with fard and their hair bound up in clay. The first quarters they entered were Lincoln’s. When they emerged a few minutes later one of them carried the doctor’s dripping head by the hair and others were dragging behind them the doctor’s dog, bound at the muzzle, jerking and bucking across the dry clay of the concourse. They entered a wickiup of willowpoles and canvas and slew Gunn and Wilson and Henderson Smith each in turn as they reared up drunkenly and they moved on among the rude half walls in total silence glistening with paint and grease and blood among the bands of light where the risen sun now touched the higher ground.
When they entered Glanton’s chamber he lurched upright and glared wildly about him. The small clay room he occupied was entirely filled with a brass bed he’d appropriated from some migrating family and he sat in it like a debauched feudal baron while his weapons hung in a rich array from the finials. Caballo en Pelo mounted into the actual bed with him and stood there while one of the attending tribunal handed him at his right side a common axe the hickory helve of which was carved with pagan motifs and tasseled with the feathers of predatory birds. Glanton spat.
Hack away you mean red nigger, he said, and the old man raised the axe and split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple.
When they entered the judge’s quarters they found the idiot and a girl of perhaps twelve years cowering naked in the floor. Behind them also naked stood the judge. He was holding leveled at them the bronze barrel of the howitzer. The wooden truck stood in the floor, the straps pried up and twisted off the pillow-blocks. The judge had the cannon under one arm and he was holding a lighted cigar over the touch-hole. The Yumas fell over one another backward and the judge put the cigar in his mouth and took up his portmanteau and stepped out the door and backed past them and down the embankment. The idiot, who reached just to his waist, stuck close to his side, and together they entered the wood at the base of the hill and disappeared from sight.
The savages built a bonfire on the hill and fueled it with the furnishings from the white men’s quarters and they raised up Glanton’s body and bore it aloft in the manner of a slain champion and hurled it onto the flames. They’d tied his dog to his corpse and it was snatched after in howling suttee to disappear crackling in the rolling greenwood smoke. The doctor’s torso was dragged up by the heels and raised and flung onto the pyre and the doctor’s mastiff also was committed to the flames. It slid struggling down the far side and the thongs with which it was tied must have burnt in two for it began to crawl charred and blind and smoking from the fire and was flung back with a shovel. The other bodies eight in number were heaped onto the fire where they sizzled and stank and the thick smoke rolled out over the river. The doctor’s head had been mounted upon a paling and carried about but at the last it too was thrown onto the blaze. The guns and clothing were divided upon the clay and divided too were the gold and silver out of the hacked and splintered chest that they’d dragged forth. All else was heaped on the flames and while the sun rose and glistened on their gaudy faces they sat upon the ground each with his new goods before him and they watched the fire and smoked their pipes as might some painted troupe of mimefolk recruiting themselves in such a wayplace far from the towns and the rabble hooting at them across the smoking footlamps, contemplating towns to come and the poor fanfare of trumpet and drum and the rude boards upon which their destinies were inscribed for these people were no less bound and indentured and they watched like the prefiguration of their own ends the carbonized skulls of their enemies incandescing before them bright as blood among the coals.
XX
The escape – Into the desert – Pursued by the Yumas – A stand – Alamo Mucho – Another refugee – A siege – At long taw – Nightfires – The judge lives – At barter in the desert – How the expriest comes to advocate murder – Setting forth – Another encounter – Carrizo Creek – An attack – Among the bones – Playing for keeps – An exorcism – Tobin wounded – A counseling – The slaughter of the horses – The judge on torts – Another escape, another desert.
Toadvine and the kid fought a running engagement upriver through the shore bracken with arrows clattering through the cane all about them. They came out of the willow brakes and climbed the dunes and descended the far side and reappeared again, two dark figures anguishing upon the sands, now trotting, now stooping, the report of the pistol flat and dead in the open country. The Yumas who crested out on the dunes were four in number and they did not follow but rather fixed them upon the terrain to which they had committed themselves and then turned back.
The kid carried an arrow in his leg and it was butted against the bone. He stopped and sat and broke off the shaft a few inches from the wound and then he got up again and they went on. At the crest of the rise they stopped and looked back. The Yumas had already left the dunes and they could see the smoke rising darkly along the river bluff. To the west the country was all rolling sandhills where a man might lie in hiding but there was no place the sun would not find him and only the wind could hide his tracks.
Can you walk? said Toadvine.
I aint got no choice.
How much water you got?
Not much.
What do you want to do?
I dont know.
We could ease back to the river and lay up, said Toadvine.
Till what?
He looked toward the fort again and he looked at the broken shaft in the kid’s leg and the welling blood. You want to try and pull that?
No.
What do you want to do?
Go on.
They mended their course and picked up the trail the wagon parties followed and they went on through the long forenoon and the day and the evening of the day. By dark their water was gone and they labored on beneath the slow wheel of stars and slept shivering among the dunes and rose in the dawn and went on again. The kid’s leg had stiffened and he hobbled after with a section of wagontongue for a crutch and twice he told Toadvine to go on but he would not. Before noon the aborigines appeared.
They watched them assemble upon the trembling drop of the eastern horizon like baleful marionettes. They were without horses and they seemed to be moving at a trot and within the hour they were lofting arrows upon the refugees.
They went on, the kid with his pistol drawn, stepping and ducking the shafts where they fell out of the sun, the lengths of them glistening against the pale sky and foreshortening in a reedy flutter and then suddenly quivering dead in the ground. They snapped off the shafts against their being used again and they labored on sideways over the sand like crabs until the arrows coming so thick and close they made a stand. The kid dropped onto his elbows and cocked and leveled the revolver. The Yumas were over a hundred yards out and they set up a cry and Toadvine dropped to one knee alongside the kid. The pistol bucked and the gray smoke hung motionless in the air and one of the savages went down like a player through a trap. The kid had cocked the pistol again but Toadvine put his hand over the barrel and the kid looked up at him and lowered the hammer and then sat and reloaded the empty chamber and pushed himself up and recovered his crutch and they went on. Behind them on the plain they could hear the thin clamor of the aborigines as they clustered about the one he’d shot.