Blood Meridian(58)

The peons in the fields saw them at about the same time. They flung their implements from them and began to run, some shrieking, some with their hands atop their heads. The young Don looked at the Americans and he looked at the approaching savages again. He called out something in Spanish. The Americans drove the horses up out of the spring and on through the grove of cottonwoods. The last they saw of him he had drawn a small pistol from his boot and had turned to face the indians.

That evening they led the Apaches through the town of Gallego, the street a mud gutter patrolled by swine and wretched hairless dogs. It appeared deserted. The young corn in the roadside fields had been washed by recent rains and stood white and luminous, bleached almost transparent by the sun. They rode most of the night and the next day the indians were still there.

They fought them again at Encinillas and they fought them in the dry passes going toward El Sauz and beyond in the low foothills from which they could already see the churchspires of the city to the south. On the twenty-first of July in the year eighteen forty-nine they rode into the city of Chihuahua to a hero's welcome, driving the harlequin horses before them through the dust of the streets in a pandemonium of teeth and whited eyes. Small boys ran among the hooves and the victors in their gory rags smiled through the filth and the dust and the caked blood as they bore on poles the desiccated heads of the enemy through that fantasy of music and flowers.





XIII



At the baths - Merchants - Trophies of war - The banquet –

Trias - The ball - North - Coyame - The border - The Hueco tanks -

Massacre of the Tiguas - Carrizal - A desert spring —

The Medanos - An inquest concerning teeth - Nacori - The cantina -

A desperate encounter - Into the mountains –

A village decimated - Mounted lancers - A skirmish -

Pursuing the survivors - The plains of Chihuahua –

Slaughter of the soldiers - A burial - Chihuahua - Westward.





Their progress was swelled by new riders, by boys on mule-_ back and old men in plaited hats and a deputation that took charge of the captured horses and mules and hazed them on through the narrow streets toward the bullring where they could be kept. The tattered campaigners surged on, some now holding aloft cups that had been pressed upon them, waving to the ladies clustered on the balconies their putrescent hats and elevating the bobbing heads with those strange halflidded looks of ennui into which the features had dried, all so hemmed about now by the citizenry that they seemed the vanguard of some ragged uprising and heralded before by a pair of drummers one witless and both barefoot and by a trumpeter who marched with one arm raised above his head in a martial gesture and playing the while. In this manner they passed through the standing portals of the governor's palace, over the worn stone sills and into the courtyard where the broomed hooves of the mercenaries' shoeless horses subsided upon the cobbles with a curious turtlelike clatter. Hundreds of onlookers pressed about as the dried scalps were counted out upon the stones. Soldiers with muskets kept back the crowds and young girls watched the Americans with huge black eyes and boys crept forth to touch the grisly trophies. There were one hundred and twenty-eight scalps and eight heads and the governor's lieutenant and his retinue came down into the courtyard to welcome them and admire their work. They were promised full payment in gold at the dinner to be held in their honor that evening at the Riddle and Stephens Hotel and with this the Americans sent up a cheer and mounted their horses again. Old women in black rebozos ran forth to kiss the hems of their reeking shirts and hold up their dark little hands in blessing and the riders wheeled their gaunted mounts and pushed through the clamoring multitude and into the street.

They moved on to the public baths where they descended one by one into the waters, each more pale than the one before and all tattooed, branded, sutured, the great puckered scars inaugurated God knows where by what barbarous surgeons across chests and abdomens like the tracks of gigantic millipedes, some deformed, fingers missing, eyes, their foreheads and arms stamped with letters and numbers as if they were articles requiring inventory. Citizens of both sexes withdrew along the walls and watched the water turn into a thin gruel of blood and filth and none could take their eyes from the judge who had disrobed last of all and now walked the perimeter of the baths with a cigar in his mouth and a regal air, testing the waters with one toe, surprisingly petite. He shone like the moon so pale he was and not a hair to be seen anywhere upon that vast corpus, not in any crevice nor in the great bores of his nose and not upon his chest nor in his ears nor any tuft at all above his eyes nor to the lids thereof. The immense and gleaming dome of his naked skull looked like a cap for bathing pulled down to the otherwise darkened skin of his face and neck. As that great bulk lowered itself into the bath the waters rose perceptibly and when he had submerged himself to the eyes he looked about with considerable pleasure, the eyes slightly crinkled, as if he were smiling under the water like some pale and bloated manatee surfacedin a bog while behind his small and close-set ear the wedged cigar smoked gently just above the waterline.