It is a quarter past eight. We’ll operate at one. Get some rest. If you require anything please let us know.
The assistant led him across the courtyard to a whitewashed adobe building in the rear. A bay that held four iron beds all empty. He bathed in a large riveted copper boiler that looked to have been salvaged from a ship and he lay on the rough mattress and listened to children playing somewhere beyond the wall. He did not sleep. When they came for him he was still drunk. He was led out and laid on a trestle in an empty room adjoining the bay and the assistant pressed an icy cloth to his nose and told him to breathe deeply.
In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. In the white and empty room he stood in his bespoken suit with his hat in his hand and he peered down with his small and lashless pig’s eyes wherein this child just sixteen years on earth could read whole bodies of decisions not accountable to the courts of men and he saw his own name which nowhere else could he have ciphered out at all logged into the records as a thing already accomplished, a traveler known in jurisdictions existing only in the claims of certain pensioners or on old dated maps.
In his delirium he ransacked the linens of his pallet for arms but there were none. The judge smiled. The fool was no longer there but another man and this other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men’s fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end.
The light in the room altered, a door closed. He opened his eyes. His leg was swathed in sheeting and it was propped up with small rolls of reed matting. He was desperate with thirst and his head was booming and his leg was like an evil visitant in the bed with him such was the pain. By and by the assistant came with water for him. He did not sleep again. The water that he drank ran out through his skin and drenched the bedding and he lay without moving as if to outwit the pain and his face was gray and drawn and his long hair damp and matted.
A week more and he was hobbling through the town on crutches provided him by the surgeon. He inquired at every door for news of the expriest but no one knew him.
In June of that year he was in Los Angeles quartered in a hostel that was no more than a common dosshouse, he and forty other men of every nationality. On the morning of the eleventh all rose up still in darkness and turned out to witness a public hanging at the cárcel. When he arrived it was paling light and already such a horde of spectators at the gate that he could not well see the proceedings. He stood at the edge of the crowd while day broke and speeches were said. Then abruptly two bound figures rose vertically from among their fellows to the top of the gatehouse and there they hung and there they died. Bottles were handed about and the witnesses who had stood in silence began to talk again.
In the evening when he returned to that place there was no one there at all. A guard leaned in the gatehouse portal chewing tobacco and the hanged men at their rope-ends looked like effigies for to frighten birds. As he drew near he saw that it was Toadvine and Brown.
He’d little money and then he’d none but he was in every dramhouse and gamingroom, every cockpit and doggery. A quiet youth in a suit too large and the same broken boots he’d come off the desert in. Standing just within the door of a foul saloon with his eyes shifting under the brim of the hat he wore and the light from a wallsconce on the side of his face he was taken for a male whore and set up to drinks and then shown to the rear of the premises. He left his patron senseless in a mudroom there where there was no light. Other men found him on their own sordid missions and other men took his purse and watch. Later still someone took his shoes.
He heard no news of the priest and he’d quit asking. Returning to his lodging one morning at daybreak in a gray rain he saw a face slobbering in an upper window and he climbed the stairwell and rapped at the door. A woman in a silk kimono opened the door and looked out at him. Behind her in the room a candle burned at a table and in the pale light at the window a halfwit sat in a pen with a cat. It turned to look at him, not the judge’s fool but just some other fool. When the woman asked him what he wanted he turned without speaking and descended the stairwell into the rain and the mud in the street.
With his last two dollars he bought from a soldier the scapular of heathen ears that Brown had worn to the scaffold. He was wearing them the next morning when he hired out to an independent conductor from the state of Missouri and he was wearing them when they set out for Fremont on the Sacramento River with a train of wagons and packanimals. If the conductor had any curiosity about the necklace he kept it to himself.
He was at this employment for some months and he left it without notice. He traveled about from place to place. He did not avoid the company of other men. He was treated with a certain deference as one who had got onto terms with life beyond what his years could account for. By now he’d come by a horse and a revolver, the rudiments of an outfit. He worked at different trades. He had a bible that he’d found at the mining camps and he carried this book with him no word of which could he read. In his dark and frugal clothes some took him for a sort of preacher but he was no witness to them, neither of things at hand nor things to come, he least of any man. They were remote places for news that he traveled in and in those uncertain times men toasted the ascension of rulers already deposed and hailed the coronation of kings murdered and in their graves. Of such corporal histories even as these he bore no tidings and although it was the custom in that wilderness to stop with any traveler and exchange the news he seemed to travel with no news at all, as if the doings of the world were too slanderous for him to truck with, or perhaps too trivial.
He saw men killed with guns and with knives and with ropes and he saw women fought over to the death whose value they themselves set at two dollars. He saw ships from the land of China chained in the small harbors and bales of tea and silks and spices broken open with swords by small yellow men with speech like cats. On that lonely coast where the steep rocks cradled a dark and muttersome sea he saw vultures at their soaring whose wingspan so dwarfed all lesser birds that the eagles shrieking underneath were more like terns or plovers. He saw piles of gold a hat would scarcely have covered wagered on the turn of a card and lost and he saw bears and lions turned loose in pits to fight wild bulls to the death and he was twice in the city of San Francisco and twice saw it burn and never wept back, riding out on horseback along the road to the south where all night the shape of the city burned against the sky and burned again in the black waters of the sea where dolphins rolled through the flames, fire in the lake, through the fall of burning timbers and the cries of the lost. He never saw the expriest again. Of the judge he heard rumor everywhere.