Blood Meridian(69)

An hour later Carroll and another American named Sanford who'd been residing in the town caught them up. The citizens had torched the saloon. The priest had baptized the wounded Americans and then stood back while they were shot through the head.

Before dark they encountered laboring up the western slope of the mountain a conducta of one hundred and twenty-two mules bearing flasks of quicksilver for the mines. They could hear the whipcrack and cry of the arrieros on the switchbacks far below them and they could see the burdened animals plodding like goats along a faultline in the sheer rock wall. Bad luck. Twenty-six days from the sea and less than two hours out from the mines. The mules wheezed and scrabbled in the talus and the drivers in their ragged and colorful costumes harried them on. When the first of them saw the riders above them he stood in the stirrups and looked back. The column of mules wound down the trail for a half mile or more and as they bunched and halted there were sections of the train visible on the separate switchbacks far below, eight and ten mules, facing now this way, now that, the tails of the animals picked clean as bones by those behind and the mercury within the guttapercha flasks pulsing heavily as if they carried secret beasts, things in pairs that stirred and breathed uneasily within those bloated satchels. The muleteer turned and looked up the trail. Already Glanton was upon him. He greeted the American cordially. Glanton rode past without speaking, taking the upper side in that rocky strait and shouldering the drover's mule dangerously among the loose shales. The man's face clouded and he turned and called back down the trail. The other riders were now pushing past him, their eyes narrow and their faces black as stokers with gunsoot. He stood down off his mule and drew his escopeta from under the fender of the saddle. David Brown was opposite him at this point, his pistol already in his hand at the off side of his horse. He swung it over the pommel and shot the man squarely in the chest. The man sat down heavily and Brown shot him again and he pitched off down the rocks into the abyss below.

The others of the company hardly turned to advise themselves of what had occurred. Every man of them was firing point blank at the muleteers. They fell from their mounts and lay in the trail or slid from the escarpment and vanished. The drivers below got their animals turned and were attempting to flee back down the trail and the laden packmules were beginning to clamber white-eyed at the sheer wall of the bluff like enormous rats. The riders pushed between them and the rock and methodically rode them from the escarpment, the animals dropping silently as martyrs, turning sedately in the empty air and exploding on the rocks below in startling bursts of blood and silver as the flasks broke open and the mercury loomed wobbling in the air in great sheets and lobes and small trembling satellites and all its forms grouping below and racing in the stone arroyos like the imbreachment of some ultimate alchemic work decocted from out the secret dark of the earth's heart, the fleeing stag of the ancients fugitive on the mountainside and bright and quick in the dry path of the storm channels and shaping out the sockets in the rock and hurrying from ledge to ledge down the slope shimmering and deft as eels.

The muleteers benched out in a swag on the trail where the precipice was almost negotiable and they rode and fell crashing down through the scrub juniper and pine in a confusion of cries while the horsemen herded the lag mules off after them and rode wildly down the rock trail like men themselves at the mercy of something terrible. Carroll and Sanford had become detached from the company and when they reached the bench where the last of the arrieros had disappeared they reined their horses and looked back up the trail. It was empty save for a few dead men from the conducta. Half a hundred mules had been ridden off the escarpment and in the curve of the bluff they could see the broken shapes of the animals strewn down the rocks and they could see the bright shapes of the quicksilver pooled in the evening light. The horses stamped and arched their necks. The riders looked off down into that calamitous gulf and they looked at each other but they required no conference and they pulled the mouths of the horses about and roweled them on down the mountain.

They caught up with the company at dusk. They were dismounted at the far side of a river and the kid and one of the Delawares were hazing the lathered horses back from the edge of the water. They put their animals to the ford and crossed, the water up under the horses' bellies and the horses picking their way over the rocks and glancing wildly upstream where a cataract thundered out of the darkening forest into the flecked and seething pool below. When they rode up out of the ford the judge stepped forward and took Carroll's horse by the jaw.