The kid stood studying this place and then he backtracked some hundred yards and stood looking down at his shallow footprints in the sand. He looked upon the drifted slope of the esker which they had descended and he knelt and held his hand against the ground and he listened to the faint silica hiss of the wind.
When he lifted his hand there was a thin ridge of sand that had drifted against it and he watched this ridge slowly vanish before him.
The expriest when he returned to him presented a grave appearance. The kid knelt and studied him where he sat.
We got to hide, he said.
Hide?
Yes.
Where do you aim to hide?
Here. We’ll hide here.
You cant hide, lad.
We can hide.
You think he cant follow your track?
The wind’s taking it. It’s gone from the slope yonder.
Gone?
Ever trace.
The expriest shook his head.
Come on. We got to get goin.
You cant hide.
Get up.
The expriest shook his head. Ah lad, he said.
Get up, said the kid.
Go on, go on. He waved his hand.
The kid spoke to him. He aint nothin. You told me so yourself. Men are made of the dust of the earth. You said it was no pair … pair …
Parable.
No parable. That it was a naked fact and the judge was a man like all men.
Face him down then, said the expriest. Face him down if he is so.
And him with a rifle and me with a pistol. Him with two rifles. Get up from there.
Tobin rose. He stood unsteadily, he leaned against the kid. They set out, veering off from the drifted track and down past the wagon.
They passed the first of the racks of bones and went on to where a pair of mules lay dead in the traces and here the kid knelt with a piece of board and began to scoop them a shelter, watching the skyline to the east as he worked. Then they lay prone in the lee of those sour bones like sated scavengers and awaited the arrival of the judge and the passing of the judge if he would so pass.
They’d not long to wait. He appeared upon the rise and paused momentarily before starting down, he and his drooling manciple. The ground before him was drifted and rolling and although it could be fairly reconnoitred from the rise the judge did not scan the country nor did he seem to miss the fugitives from his purview. He descended the ridge and started across the flats, the idiot before him on a leather lead. He carried the two rifles that had belonged to Brown and he wore a pair of canteens crossed upon his chest and he carried a powderhorn and flask and his portmanteau and a canvas rucksack that must have belonged to Brown also. More strangely he carried a parasol made from rotted scraps of hide stretched over a framework of rib bones bound with strips of tug. The handle had been the foreleg of some creature and the judge approaching was clothed in little more than confetti so rent was his costume to accommodate his figure. Bearing before him that morbid umbrella with the idiot in its rawhide collar pulling at the lead he seemed some degenerate entrepreneur fleeing from a medicine show and the outrage of the citizens who’d sacked it.
They advanced across the flats and the kid on his belly in the sand wallow watched them through the ribs of the dead mules. He could see his own tracks and Tobin’s coming across the sand, dim and rounded but tracks for that, and he watched the judge and he watched the tracks and he listened to the sand moving on the desert floor. The judge was perhaps a hundred yards out when he stopped and surveyed the ground. The idiot squatted on all fours and leaned into the lead like some naked species of lemur. It swung its head and sniffed at the air, as if it were being used for tracking. It had lost its hat, or perhaps the judge had replevined it, for he now wore a rough and curious pair of pampooties cut from a piece of hide and strapped to the soles of his feet with wrappings of hemp salvaged from some desert wreck. The imbecile lunged in its collar and croaked, its forearms dangling at its chest. When they passed the wagon and continued on the kid knew they were beyond the point where he and Tobin had turned off from the trace. He looked at the tracks. Faint shapes that backed across the sands and vanished. The expriest at his side seized his arm and hissed and gestured toward the passing judge and the wind rattled the scraps of hide at the carcass and the judge and the idiot passed on across the sands and disappeared from sight.
They lay without speaking. The expriest raised himself slightly and looked out and he looked at the kid. The kid lowered the hammer of the pistol.
Ye’ll get no such a chance as that again.
The kid put the pistol in his belt and rose onto his knees and looked out.
And what now?
The kid didnt answer.
He’ll be waiting at the next well.
Let him wait.
We could go back to the creek.
And do what.
Wait for a party to come through.
Through from where? There aint no ferry.
There’s game comes to the creek.
Tobin was looking out through the bones and hide. When the kid didnt answer he looked up. We could go there, he said.
I got four rounds, the kid said.
He rose and looked out across the scavenged ground and the expriest rose and looked with him. What they saw was the judge returning.
The kid swore and dropped to his belly. The expriest crouched. They pushed down into the wallow and with their chins in the sand like lizards they watched the judge traverse again the grounds before them.
With his leashed fool and his equipage and the parasol dipping in the wind like a great black flower he passed among the wreckage until he was again upon the slope of the sand esker. At the crest he turned and the imbecile squatted at his knees and the judge lowered the parasol before him and addressed the countryside about.
The priest has led you to this, boy. I know you would not hide. I know too that you’ve not the heart of a common assassin. I’ve passed before your gunsights twice this hour and will pass a third time. Why not show yourself?
No assassin, called the judge. And no partisan either. There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.
The imbecile stood and raised its hands to its face and yammered weirdly and sat again.
You think I’ve killed Brown and Toadvine? They are alive as you and me. They are alive and in possession of the fruits of their election. Do you understand? Ask the priest. The priest knows. The priest does not lie.
The judge raised the parasol and adjusted his parcels. Perhaps, he called, perhaps you have seen this place in a dream. That you would die here. Then he descended the esker and passed once more across the boneyard led by the tethered fool until the two were shimmering and insubstantial in the waves of heat and then they were gone altogether.
They would have died if the indians had not found them. All the early part of the night they’d kept Sirius at their left on the southwest horizon and Cetus out there fording the void and Orion and Betelgeuse turning overhead and they had slept curled and shivering in the darkness of the plains and woke to find the heavens all changed and the stars by which they’d traveled not to be found, as if their sleep had encompassed whole seasons. In the auburn dawn they saw the halfnaked savages crouched or standing all in a row along a rise to the north. They got up and went on, their shadows so long and so narrow raising with mock stealth each thin articulated leg. The mountains to the west were whited out against the daybreak. The aborigines moved along the sand ridge. After a while the expriest sat down and the kid stood over him with the pistol and the savages came down from the dunes and approached by starts and checks across the plain like painted sprites.