Did you see him dead? he called. Glanton?
I did, called the expriest. For he had so.
He rode on, turned slightly in the saddle, the rifle on his knee. He kept watch behind him on those pilgrims and they on him. When he was well diminished on the pan they turned and went on.
By noon the day following they had begun to come again upon abandoned gear from the caravans, cast shoes and pieces of harness and bones and the dried carcasses of mules with the alparejas still buckled about. They trod the faint arc of an ancient lake shore where broken shells lay like bits of pottery frail and ribbed among the sands and in the early evening they descended among a series of dunes and spoilbanks to Carrizo Creek, a seep that welled out of the stones and ran off down the desert and vanished again. Thousands of sheep had perished here and the travelers made their way among the yellowed bones and carcasses with their rags of tattered wool and they knelt among bones to drink. When the kid raised his dripping head from the water a rifleball dished his reflection from the pool and the echoes of the shot clattered about the bonestrewn slopes and clanged away in the desert and died.
He spun on his belly and clambered sideways, scanning the skyline. He saw the horses first, standing nose to nose in a notch among the dunes to the south. He saw the judge clad in the gusseted clothing of his recent associates. He was holding the mouth of the upright rifle in his fist and pouring powder from a flask down the bore. The imbecile, naked save for a hat, squatted in the sands at his feet.
The kid scuttled to a low place in the ground and lay flat with the pistol in his fist and the creek trickling past his elbow. He turned to look for the expriest but he could not find him. He could see through the lattice of bones the judge and his charge on the hill in the sun and he raised the pistol and rested it in the saddle of a rancid pelvis and fired. He saw the sand jump on the slope behind the judge and the judge leveled the rifle and fired and the rifleball whacked through the bones and the shots rolled away over the dunelands.
The kid lay with his heart hammering in the sand. He thumbed back the hammer again and raised his head. The idiot sat as before and the judge was trudging sedately along the skyline looking over the windrowed bones below him for an advantage. The kid began to move again. He moved into the creek on his belly and lay drinking, holding up the pistol and the powderflask and sucking at the water. Then he moved out the far side and down a trampled corridor through the sands where wolves had gone to and fro. Off to his left he thought he heard the expriest hiss at him and he could hear the creek and he lay listening. He set the hammer at halfcock and rotated the cylinder and recharged the empty chamber and capped the piece and raised up to look. The shallow ridge along which the judge had advanced was empty and the two horses were coming toward him across the sand to the south. He cocked the pistol and lay watching. They approached freely over the barren pitch, nudging the air with their heads, their tails whisking. Then he saw the idiot shambling along behind them like some dim neolithic herdsman. To his right he saw the judge appear from the dunes and reconnoitre and drop from sight again. The horses continued on and there was a scrabbling behind him and when the kid turned the expriest was in the corridor hissing at him.
Shoot him, he called.
The kid spun about to look for the judge but the expriest called again in his hoarse whisper.
The fool. Shoot the fool.
He raised his pistol. The horses stepped one and the next through a break in the yellowed palings and the imbecile shambled after and disappeared. He looked back at Tobin but the expriest was gone. He moved along the corridor until he came to the creek again, already slightly roiled from the drinking horses above him. His leg had begun to bleed and he lay soaking it in the cold water and he drank and palmed water over the back of his neck. The marblings of blood that swung from his thigh were like thin red leeches in the current. He looked at the sun.
Hello called the judge, his voice off to the west. As if there were new riders to the creek and he addressed them.
The kid lay listening. There were no new riders. After a while the judge called out again. Come out, he called. There’s plenty of water for everybody.
The kid had swung the powderflask around to his back to keep it out of the creek and he held the pistol up and waited. Upstream the horses had stopped drinking. Then they started drinking again.
When he moved out on the far side of the creek he came upon the hand and foot tracks left by the expriest among the prints of cats and foxes and the little desert pigs. He entered a clearing in that senseless midden and sat listening. His leather clothes were heavy and stiff with water and his leg was throbbing. A horse’s head came up streaming water at the muzzle a hundred feet away over the bones and dropped from sight again. When the judge called out his voice was in a new place. He called out for them to be friends. The kid watched a small caravan of ants bearing off among the arches of sheepribs. In the watching his eyes met the eyes of a small viper coiled under a flap of hide. He wiped his mouth and began to move again. In a culdesac the tracks of the expriest terminated and came back. He lay listening. It was hours till dark. After a while he heard the idiot slobbering somewhere among the bones.
He heard the wind coming in off the desert and he heard his own breathing. When he raised his head to look out he saw the expriest stumbling among the bones and holding aloft a cross he’d fashioned out of the shins of a ram and he’d lashed them together with strips of hide and he was holding the thing before him like some mad dowser in the bleak of desert and calling out in a tongue both alien and extinct.
The kid stood up, the revolver in both hands. He wheeled. He saw the judge and the judge was in another quarter altogether and he had the rifle already at his shoulder. When he fired Tobin turned around facing the way he’d come and sat down still holding the cross. The judge put down the rifle and took up another. The kid tried to steady the barrel of the pistol and he let off the shot and then dropped to the sand. The heavy ball of the rifle passed overhead like an asteroid and chattered and chopped among the bones fanned over the rise of ground beyond. He raised to his knees and looked for the judge but the judge was not there. He reloaded the empty chamber and began to move again on his elbows toward the spot where he’d seen the expriest fall, taking his bearings by the sun and pausing from time to time to listen. The ground was trampled with the tracks of predators come in from the plains for the carrion and the wind carrying through the breaks bore with it a sour reek like the stink of a rancid dishclout and there was no sound except the wind anywhere at all.
He found Tobin kneeling in the creek bathing his wound with a piece of linen torn from his shirt. The ball had passed completely through his neck. It had narrowly missed the carotid artery yet he could not make the blood to stop. He looked at the kid crouched among the skulls and upturned ribtines.
You’ve got to kill the horses, he said. You’ve no other chance out of here. He’ll ride you down.
We could take the horses.
Dont be a fool lad. What other bait has he?
We can get out as soon as it comes dark.
Do you think there’ll be no day again?
The kid watched him. Will it not stop? he said.
It will not.
What do you think?
I’ve got to stop it.
The blood was running between his fingers.
Where is the judge? said the kid.
Where indeed.
If I kill him we can take the horses.
You’ll not kill him. Dont be a fool. Shoot the horses.