When they had gone he built up the fire and caught the horse and took the hobbles off and tied it and saddled it and then he moved off apart and spread his blanket and lay down in the dark.
When he woke there was still no light in the east. The boy was standing by the ashes of the fire with the rifle in his hand. The horse had snuffed and now it snuffed again.
I knowed you’d be hid out, the boy called.
He pushed back the blanket and rolled onto his stomach and cocked the pistol and leveled it at the sky where the clustered stars were burning for eternity. He centered the foresight in the milled groove of the framestrap and holding the piece so he swung it through the dark of the trees with both hands to the darker shape of the visitor.
I’m right here, he said.
The boy swung with the rifle and fired.
You wouldnt of lived anyway, the man said.
It was gray dawn when the others came up. They had no horses. They led the halfgrown boy to where the dead youth was lying on his back with his hands composed upon his chest.
We dont want no trouble mister. We just want to take him with us.
Take him.
I knowed we’d bury him on this prairie.
They come out here from Kentucky mister. This tyke and his brother. His momma and daddy both dead. His grandaddy was killed by a lunatic and buried in the woods like a dog. He’s never knowed good fortune in his life and now he aint got a soul in this world.
Randall you take a good look at the man that has made you a orphan.
The orphan in his large clothes holding the old musket with the mended stock stared at him woodenly. He was maybe twelve years old and he looked not so much dullwitted as insane. Two of the others were going through the dead boy’s pockets.
Where’s his rifle at mister?
The man stood with his hand on his belt. He nodded to where the rifle stood against a tree.
They brought it over and presented it to the brother. It was a Sharp’s fifty calibre and holding it and the musket he stood inanely armed, his eyes skittering.
One of the older boys handed him the dead boy’s hat and then he turned to the man. He give forty dollars for that rifle in Little Rock. You can buy em in Griffin for ten. They aint worth nothin. Randall, are you ready to go?
He did not assist as a bearer for he was too small. When they set out across the prairie with his brother’s body carried up on their shoulders he followed behind carrying the musket and the dead boy’s rifle and the dead boy’s hat. The man watched them go. Out there was nothing. They were simply bearing the body off over the bonestrewn waste toward a naked horizon. The orphan turned once to look back at him and then he hurried to catch up.
In the afternoon he rode through the McKenzie crossing of the Clear Fork of the Brazos River and he and the horse walked side by side down the twilight toward the town where in the long red dusk and in the darkness the random aggregate of the lamps formed slowly a false shore of hospice cradled on the low plain before them. They passed enormous ricks of bones, colossal dikes composed of horned skulls and the crescent ribs like old ivory bows heaped in the aftermath of some legendary battle, great levees of them curving away over the plain into the night.
They entered the town in a light rain falling. The horse nickered and snuffed shyly at the hocks of the other animals standing at stall before the lamplit bagnios they passed. Fiddle-music issued into the solitary mud street and lean dogs crossed before them from shadow to shadow. At the end of the town he led the horse to a rail and tied it among others and stepped up the low wooden stairs into the dim light that fell from the doorway there. He looked back a last time at the street and at the random windowlights let into the darkness and at the last pale light in the west and the low dark hills around. Then he pushed open the door and entered.
A dimly seething rabble had coagulated within. As if the raw board structure erected for their containment occupied some ultimate sink into which they had gravitated from off the surrounding flatlands. An old man in a tyrolean costume was shuffling among the rough tables with his hat outheld while a little girl in a smock cranked a barrel organ and a bear in a crinoline twirled strangely upon a board stage defined by a row of tallow candles that dripped and sputtered in their pools of grease.
He made his way through the crowd to the bar where several men in gaitered shirts were drawing beer or pouring whiskey. Young boys worked behind them fetching crates of bottles and racks of glasses steaming from the scullery to the rear. The bar was covered with zinc and he placed his elbows upon it and spun a silver coin before him and slapped it flat.
Speak or forever, said the barman.
A whiskey.
Whiskey it is. He set up a glass and uncorked a bottle and poured perhaps half a gill and took the coin.
He stood looking at the whiskey. Then he took his hat off and placed it on the bar and took up the glass and drank it very deliberately and set the empty glass down again. He wiped his mouth and turned around and placed his elbows on the bar behind him.
Watching him across the layered smoke in the yellow light was the judge.
He was sitting at one of the tables. He wore a round hat with a narrow brim and he was among every kind of man, herder and bullwhacker and drover and freighter and miner and hunter and soldier and pedlar and gambler and drifter and drunkard and thief and he was among the dregs of the earth in beggary a thousand years and he was among the scapegrace scions of eastern dynasties and in all that motley assemblage he sat by them and yet alone as if he were some other sort of man entire and he seemed little changed or none in all these years.
He turned away from those eyes and stood looking down at the empty tumbler between his fists. When he looked up the barman was watching him. He raised his forefinger and the barman brought the whiskey.
He paid, he lifted the glass and drank. There was a mirror along the backbar but it held only smoke and phantoms. The barrel organ was groaning and creaking and the bear with tongue aloll was revolving heavily on the boards.
When he turned the judge had risen and was speaking with other men. The showman made his way through the throng shaking the coins in his hat. Garishly clad whores were going out through a door at the rear of the premises and he watched them and he watched the bear and when he looked back across the room the judge was not there. The showman seemed to be in altercation with the men standing at the table. Another man rose. The showman gestured with his hat. One of them pointed toward the bar. He shook his head. Their voices were incoherent in the din. On the boards the bear was dancing for all that his heart was worth and the girl cranked the organ handle and the shadow of the act which the candlelight constructed upon the wall might have gone begging for referents in any daylight world. When he looked back the showman had donned the hat and he stood with his hands on his hips. One of the men had drawn a longbarreled cavalry pistol from his belt. He turned and leveled the pistol toward the stage.
Some dove for the floor, some reached for their own arms. The owner of the bear stood like a pitchman at a shooting galery. The shot was thunderous and in the afterclap all sound in that room ceased. The bear had been shot through the midsection. He let out a low moan and he began to dance faster, dancing in silence save for the slap of his great footpads on the planks. Blood was running down his groin. The little girl strapped into the barrel organ stood frozen, the crank at rest on the upswing. The man with the pistol fired again and the pistol bucked and roared and the black smoke rolled and the bear groaned and began to reel drunkenly. He was holding his chest and a thin foam of blood swung from his jaw and he began to totter and to cry like a child and he took a few last steps, dancing, and crashed to the boards.