By now merchants had spread their wares all along the clay tiles behind them, suits of European cloth and cut and shirts of colored silks and closenapped beaver hats and fine Spanish leather boots, silverheaded canes and riding crops and silvermounted saddles and carven pipes and hideout guns and a group of Toledo swords with ivory hilts and nicely chased blades and barbers were setting up chairs to receive them, crying out the names of celebrated patrons upon whom they had attended, and all of these entrepreneurs assuring the company of credit on the most generous terms.
When they crossed the square attired in their new haberdashery, some with coatsleeves barely past their elbows, the scalps were being strung about the iron fretwork of the gazebo like decorations for some barbaric celebration. The severed heads had been raised on poles above the lampstandards where they now contemplated with their caved and pagan eyes the dry hides of their kinsmen and forebears strung across the stone facade of the cathedral and clacking lightly in the wind. Later when the lamps were lit the heads in the soft glare of the up-light assumed the look of tragic masks and within a few days they would become mottled white and altogether leprous with the droppings of the birds that roosted upon them.
This Angel Trias who was governor had been sent abroad as a young man for his education and was widely read in the classics and was a student of languages. He was also a man among men and the rough warriors he'd hired for the protection of the state seemed to warm something in him. When the lieutenant invited Glanton and his officers to dine Glanton replied that he and his men did not keep separate mess. The lieutenant yielded the point with a smile and Trias had done the same. They arrived in good order, shaved and shorn and turned out in their new boots and finery, the Delawares strangely austere and menacing in their morningcoats, all to gather about the table set for them. Cigars were presented and glasses of sherry poured and the governor standing at the head of the table made them welcome and issued orders to his chamberlain that every need be seen to. Soldiers attended them, fetching extra glasses, pouring the wine, lighting cigars from a wick in a silver holder designed for just that purpose. The judge arrived last of all, dressed in a well-cut suit of unbleached linen that had been made for him that very afternoon. Whole bolts of cloth exhausted and squads of tailors as well in that fabrication. His feet were encased in nicely polished gray kid boots and in his hand he held a panama hat that had been spliced together from two such lesser hats by such painstaking work that the joinery did scarcely show at all.
Trias had already taken his seat when the judge made his appearance but no sooner had the governor seen him than he rose again and they shook hands cordially and the governor had him seated at his right and they at once fell into conversation in a tongue none other in that room spoke at all saving for random vile epithets drifted down from the north. The expriest was sat opposite the kid and he raised his brows and motioned toward the head of the table with a swing of his eyes. The kid, in the first starched collar he'd ever owned and the first cravat, sat mute as a tailor's dummy at that board.
By now the table was fully commenced and there was a tandem run of dishes, fish and fowl and beef and wild meats of the countryside and a roast shoat on a platter and casseroles of savories and trifles and glaces and bottles of wine and brandy from the vineyards at El Paso. Patriotic toasts were drunk, the governor's aides raising their glasses to Washington and Franklin and the Americans responding with yet more of their own country's heroes, ignorant alike of diplomacy and any name at all from the pantheon of their sister republic. They fell to and they continued to eat until they had exhausted first the banquet and then the larder of the hotel altogether. Couriers were sent abroad through the city to fetch more only to have this also vanish and more sent for until Riddle's cook barricaded the door with his body and the soldiers in attendance took to simply dumping great trays of pastries, fried meatskins, rounds of cheese—whatever they could find—out upon the table.
The governor had tapped his glass and risen to speak in his well-phrased english, but the bloated and belching mercenaries were leering about and were calling for more drink and some had not ceased to scream out toasts, now degenerated into obscene pledges to the whores of various southern cities. The bursar was introduced to cheers, catcalls, hoisted bumpers. Glanton took charge of the long canvas bag stamped with the state cartouche and cutting the governor short he rose and dumped the gold out onto the table among the bones and rinds and pools of spilled drink and in a brisk drumhead disbursement divided out the pile of gold with the blade of his knife so that each man was paid his spoken share and no further ceremony to it. A sort of skiffle band had struck up a lugubrious air in one corner of the hall and first up was the judge who ushered the players and their instruments into the adjoining ballroom where a number of ladies who had been sent for sat already about the walls on benches and fanned themselves without apparent alarm.