That painted horde dogged their steps the day long. They were twenty-four hours without water and the barren mural of sand and sky was beginning to shimmer and swim and the periodic arrows sprang aslant from the sands about them like the tufted stalks of mutant desert growths propagating angrily into the dry desert air. They did not stop. When they reached the wells at Alamo Mucho the sun was low before them and there was a figure seated at the rim of the basin. This figure rose and stood warped in the quaking lens of that world and held out one hand, in welcome or warning they had no way to know. They shielded their eyes and limped on and the figure at the well called out to them. It was the expriest Tobin.
He was alone and unarmed. How many are ye? he said.
What you see, said Toadvine.
All the rest gone under? Glanton? The judge?
They didnt answer. They slid down to the floor of the well where there stood a few inches of water and they knelt and drank.
The pit in which the well was sunk was perhaps a dozen feet in diameter and they posted themselves about the inner slope of this salient and watched while the indians fanned out over the plain, moving past in the distance at a slow lope. Assembled in small groups at cardinal points out there they began to launch their arrows upon the defenders and the Americans called out the arrival of the incoming shafts like artillery officers, lying there on the exposed bank and watching out across the pit toward the assailants in that quarter, their hands clawed at either side of them and their legs cocked, rigid as cats. The kid held his fire altogether and soon those savages on the western shore who were more favored by the light began to move in.
About the well were hillocks of sand from old diggings and the Yumas may have meant to try to reach them. The kid left his post and moved to the west rim of the excavation and began to fire on them where they stood or squatted on their haunches like wolves out there on the shimmering pan. The expriest knelt by the kid’s side and watched behind them and held his hat between the sun and the foresight of the kid’s pistol and the kid steadied the pistol in both hands on the edge of the works and let off the rounds. At the second fire one of the savages fell over and lay without moving. The next shot spun another one around and he sat down and then rose and took a few steps and sat down again. The expriest whispered encouragement at his elbow and the kid thumbed back the hammer and the expriest adjusted the hat to shade gunsight and sight eye with the one shadow and the kid fired again. He’d drawn his sight upon the wounded man sitting on the pan and his shot stretched him out dead. The expriest gave a low whistle.
Aye, you’re a cool one, he whispered. But it’s cunning work all the same and wouldnt it take the heart out of ye.
The Yumas seemed immobilized by these misfortunes and the kid cocked the pistol and shot down another of their number before they began to collect themselves and to move back, taking their dead with them, lofting a flurry of arrows and howling out bloodoaths in their stoneage tongue or invocations to whatever gods of war or fortune they’d the ear of and retreating upon the pan until they were very small indeed.
The kid shouldered up his flask and shotpouch and slid down the pitch to the floor of the well where he dug a second small basin with the old shovel there and in the water that seeped in he washed the bores of the cylinder and washed the barrel and ran pieces of his shirt through the bore with a stick until they came clean. Then he reassembled the pistol, tapping the barrel pin until the cylinder was snug and laying the piece in the warm sand to dry.
Toadvine had made his way around the excavation until he reached the expriest and they lay watching the retreat of the savages through the heat shimmering off the pan in the late sunlight.
He’s a deadeye aint he?
Tobin nodded. He looked down the pit to where the kid sat loading the pistol, turning the powderfilled chambers and measuring them with his eye, seating the balls with the sprues down.
How do you stand by way of ammunition?
Poorly. We got a few rounds, not many.
The expriest nodded. Evening was coming on and in the red land to the west the Yumas were gathering in silhouette before the sun.
All night their watchfires burned on the dark circlet of the world and the kid unpinned the barrel from the pistol and using it for a spyglass he went around the warm sand selvage of the well and studied the separate fires for movement. There is hardly in the world a waste so barren but some creature will not cry out at night, yet here one was and they listened to their breathing in the dark and the cold and they listened to the systole of the rubymeated hearts that hung within them. When day broke the fires had burned out and slender terminals of smoke stood from the plain at three separate points of the compass and the enemy had gone. Crossing the dry pan toward them from the east was a large figure attended by a smaller. Toadvine and the expriest watched.
What do you make it to be?
The expriest shook his head.
Toadvine cupped his hand and whistled sharply down at the kid. He sat up with the pistol. He clambered up the slope with his stiff leg. The three of them lay watching.
It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed. The three at the well watched mutely this transit out of the breaking day and even though there was no longer any question as to what it was that approached yet none would name it. They lumbered on, the judge a pale pink beneath his talc of dust like something newly born, the imbecile much the darker, lurching together across the pan at the very extremes of exile like some scurrilous king stripped of his vestiture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die.
Those who travel in desert places do indeed meet with creatures surpassing all description. The watchers at the well rose the better to witness these arrivals. The imbecile was fairly loping along to keep the pace. The judge on his head wore a wig of dried river mud from which protruded bits of straw and grass and tied upon the imbecile’s head was a rag of fur with the blackened blood side out. The judge carried in one hand a small canvas satchel and he was bedraped with meat like some medieval penitent. He hove up at the diggings and nodded them a good morning and he and the idiot slid down the bank and knelt and began to drink.
Even the idiot, who must be fed by hand. He knelt beside the judge and sucked noisily at the mineral water and raised his dark larval eyes to the three men crouched above him at the rim of the pit and then bent and drank again.
The judge threw off his bandoliers of sunblacked meat and his skin beneath was strangely mottled pink and white in the shapes of them. He set by the little mud cap and laved water over his burnt and peeling skull and over his face and he drank again and sat in the sand. He looked up at his old companions. His mouth was cracked and his tongue swollen.
Louis, he said. What will you take for that hat?
Toadvine spat. It aint for sale, he said.