Final as the judgement of God.
The black looked once more across the flames at Glanton and then he moved away in the dark. The white man uncocked the revolver and placed it on the ground before him. Two of the others came back to the fire and stood uneasily. Jackson sat with his legs crossed. One hand lay in his lap and the other was outstretched on his knee holding a slender black cigarillo. The nearest man to him was Tobin and when the black stepped out of the darkness bearing the bowieknife in both hands like some instrument of ceremony Tobin started to rise. The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head.
Two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest's feet where it lay with eyes aghast. Tobin jerked his foot away and rose and stepped back. The fire steamed and blackened and a gray cloud of smoke rose and the columnar arches of blood slowly subsided until just the neck bubbled gently like a stew and then that too was stilled. He was sat as before save headless, drenched in blood, the cigarillo still between his fingers, leaning toward the dark and smoking grotto in the flames where his life had gone.
Glanton rose. The men moved away. No one spoke. When they set out in the dawn the headless man was sitting like a murdered anchorite discalced in ashes and sark. Someone had taken his gun but the boots stood where he'd put them. The company rode on. They had not gone forth one hour upon that plain before they were ridden upon by the Apaches.
IX
An ambuscade - The dead Apache - Hollow ground –
A gypsum lake - Trebillones - Snowblind horses - The Delawares
return - A probate - The ghost coach - The copper mines -
Squatters - A snakebit horse - The judge on geological evidence -
The dead boy - On parallax and false guidance in things past —
The ciboleros.
They were crossing the western edge of the playa when Glanton halted. He turned and placed one hand on the wooden cantle and looked toward the sun where it sat new risen above the bald and flyspecked mountains to the east. The floor of the playa lay smooth and unbroken by any track and the mountains in their blue islands stood footless in the void like floating temples.
Toadvine and the kid sat their horses and gazed upon that desolation with the others. Out on the playa a cold sea broke and water gone these thousand years lay riffled silver in the morning wind.
Sounds like a pack of hounds, said Toadvine.
It sounds like geese to me.
Suddenly Bathcat and one of the Delawares turned their horses and quirted them and called out and the company turned and milled and began to line out down the lake bed toward the thin line of scrub that marked the shore. Men were leaping from their horses and hobbling them instantly with loops of rope ready made. By the time the animals were secured and they had thrown themselves on the ground under the creosote bushes with their weapons readied the riders were beginning to appear far out on the lake bed, a thin frieze of mounted archers that trembled and veered in the rising heat. They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses' legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.
They'll swing to their right, called Glanton, and as he spoke they did so, favoring their bow arms. The arrows came lofting up in the blue with the sun on their fletchings and then suddenly gaining speed and passing with a waney whistle like the flight of wild ducks. The first rifle cracked.
The kid was lying on his belly holding the big Walker revolver in both hands and letting off the shots slowly and with care as if he'd done it all before in a dream. The warriors passed within a hundred feet, forty, fifty of them, and went on up the edge of the lake and began to crumble in the serried planes of heat and to break up silently and to vanish.
The company lay under the creosote recharging their pieces. One of the ponies was lying in the sand breathing steadily and others stood that bore arrows with a curious patience. Tate and Doc Irving pulled back to see about them. The others lay watching the playa.