They skinned out the hindquarters without gutting the animal and the men cut steaks from it and roasted them over the fire and cut the rest of the meat in strips and hung it to smoke. The scouts did not come in and they posted videttes and turned in to sleep each man with his weapons at his breast.
Midmorning of the day following they crossed an alkali pan whereon were convoked an assembly of men's heads. The company halted and Glanton and the judge rode forward. The heads were eight in number and each wore a hat and they formed a ring all facing outward. Glanton and the judge circled them and the judge halted and stepped down and pushed over one of the heads with his boot. As if to satisfy himself that no man stood buried in the sand beneath it. The other heads glared blindly out of their wrinkled eyes like fellows of some righteous initiate given up to vows of silence and of death.
The riders looked off to the north. They rode on. Beyond a shallow rise in cold ash lay the blackened wreckage of a pair of wagons and the nude torsos of the party. The wind had shifted the ashes and the iron axletrees marked the shapes of the wagons as keelsons do the bones of ships on the sea's floors. The bodies had been partly eaten and rooks flew up as the riders approached and a pair of buzzards began to trot off across the sand with their wings outheld like soiled chorines, their boiled-looking heads jerking obscenely.
They went on. They crossed a dry estuary of the desert flat and in the afternoon they rode up through a series of narrow defiles into a rolling hill country. They could smell the smoke of pinonwood fires and before dark they rode into the town of Santa Cruz.
This town like all the presidios along the border was much reduced from its former estate and many of the buildings were uninhabited and ruinous. The coming of the riders had been cried before them and the way stood lined with inhabitants watching dumbly as they passed, the old women in black rebozos and the men armed with old muskets and miquelets or guns fabricated out of parts rudely let into stocks of cottonwood that had been shaped with axes like clubhouse guns for boys. There were even guns among them with no locks at all that were fired by jamming a cigarillo against the vent in the barrel, sending the gunstones from the riverbed with which they were loaded whissing through the air on flights of their own eccentric selection like the paths of meteorites. The Americans pushed their horses forward. It had begun to snow again and a cold wind blew down the narrow street before them. Even in their wretched state they glared from their saddles at this falstaffian militia with undisguised contempt.
They stood among their horses in the squalid little alameda while the wind ransacked the trees and the birds nesting in the gray twilight cried out and clutched the limbs and the snow swirled and blew across the little square and shrouded the shapes of the mud buildings beyond and made mute the cries of the vendors who'd followed them. Glanton and the Mexican he'd set out with returned and the company mounted up and filed out down the street until they came to an old wooden gate that led into a courtyard. The courtyard was dusted with snow and within were contained barnyard fowl and animals— goats, a burro—that clawed and scrabbled blindly at the walls as the riders entered. In one corner stood a tripod of blackened sticks and there was a large bloodstain that had been partly snowed over and showed a faint pale rose in the last light. A man came out of the house and he and Glanton spoke and the man talked with the Mexican and then he motioned them in out of the weather.
They sat in the floor of a long room with a high ceiling and smokestained vigas while a woman and a girl brought bowls of guisado made from goat and a clay plate heaped with blue tortillas and they were served bowls of beans and of coffee and a cornmeal porridge in which sat little chunks of raw brown peloncillo sugar. Outside it was dark and the snow swirled down. There was no fire in the room and the food steamed ponderously. When they had eaten they sat smoking and the women gathered up the bowls and after a while a boy came with a lantern and led them out.
They crossed the yard among the snuffling horses and the boy opened a rough wooden door in an adobe shed and stood by holding the lamp aloft. They brought their saddles and their blankets. In the yard the horses stamped in the cold.
The shed held a mare with a suckling colt and the boy would have put her out but they called to him to leave her. They carried straw from a stall and pitched it down and he held the lamp for them while they spread their bedding. The barn smelled of clay and straw and manure and in the soiled yellow light of the lamp their breath rolled smoking through the cold. When they had arranged their blankets the boy lowered the lamp and stepped into the yard and pulled the door shut behind, leaving them in profound and absolute darkness.