Has he always been like that? said the judge.
Yessir. He was born that way.
He turned to go. Glanton emptied his cup and set it before him and looked up. Were you? he said. But the owner pushed open the door and vanished in the blinding light without.
The lieutenant came again in the evening. He and the judge sat together and the judge went over points of law with him. The lieutenant nodded, his lips pursed. The judge translated for him latin terms of jurisprudence. He cited cases civil and martial. He quoted Coke and Blackstone, Anaximander, Thales.
In the morning there was new trouble. A young Mexican girl had been abducted. Parts of her clothes were found torn and bloodied under the north wall, over which she could only have been thrown. In the desert were drag marks. A shoe. The father of the child knelt clutching a bloodstained rag to his chest and none could persuade him to rise and none to leave. That night fires were lit in the streets and a beef killed and Glanton and his men were host to a motley collection of citizens and soldiers and reduced indians or tontos as their brothers outside the gates would name them. A keg of whiskey was broached and soon men were reeling aimlessly through the smoke. A merchant of that town brought forth a litter of dogs one of whom had six legs and another two and a third with four eyes in its head. He offered these for sale to Glanton and Glanton warned the man away and threatened to shoot them.
The beef was stripped to the bones and the bones themselves carried off and vigas were dragged from the ruined buildings and piled onto the blazed By now many of Glanton's men were naked and lurching about and the judge soon had them dancing while he fiddled on a crude instrument he'd commandeered and the filthy hides of which they'd divested themselves smoked and stank and blackened in the flames and the red sparks rose like the souls of the small life they'd harbored.
By midnight the citizens had cleared out and there were armed and naked men pounding on doors demanding drink and women. In the early morning hours when the fires had burned to heaps of coals and a few sparks scampered in the wind down the cold clay streets feral dogs trotted around the cookfire snatching out the blackened scraps of meat and men lay huddled naked in the doorways clutching their elbows and snoring in the cold.
By noon they were abroad again, wandering red-eyed in the streets, fitted out for the most part in new shirts and breeches. They collected the remaining horses from the farrier and he stood them to a drink. He was a small sturdy man named Pacheco and he had for anvil an enormous iron meteorite shaped like a great molar and the judge on a wager lifted the thing and on a further wager lifted it over his head. Several men pushed forward to feel the iron and to rock it where it stood, nor did the judge lose this opportunity to ventilate himself upon the ferric nature of heavenly bodies and their powers and claims. Two lines were drawn in the dirt ten feet apart and a third round of wagers was laid, coins from half a dozen countries in both gold and silver and even a few boletas or notes of discounted script from the mines near Tubac. The judge seized that great slag wandered for what millennia from what unreckonable corner of the universe and he raised it overhead and stood tottering and then lunged forward. It cleared the mark by a foot and he shared with no one the specie piled on the saddleblanket at the farrier's feet for not even Glanton had been willing to underwrite this third trial.
XVII
Leaving Tucson - A new cooperage - An exchange - Saguaro forests -
Clanton at the fire — Garcia's command — The paraselene — The godfire - The expriest on astronomy - The judge on the extraterrestrial,
on order, on teleology in the universe - A coin trick -
Glanton's dog — Dead animals — The sands — A crucifixion — The judge
on war - The priest does not say - Tierras quebradas, tierras
desamparadas - The Tinajas Atlas - Un hueso de piedra - The
Colorado — Argonauts — Yumas — The ferrymen — To the Yuma camp.
They rode out at dusk. The corporal in the gatehouse above the portal came out and called to them to halt but they did not. They rode twenty-one men and a dog and a little flatbed cart aboard which the idiot and his cage had been lashed as if for a sea journey. Lashed on behind the cage rode the whiskey keg they'd drained the night before. The keg had been dismantled and rebound by a man Glanton had appointed cooper pro-tern to the expedition and it now contained within it a flask made from a common sheep's stomach and holding perhaps three quarts of whiskey. This flask was fitted to the bung at the inside and the rest of the keg was filled with water. So provisioned they passed out through the gates and beyond the walls onto the prairie where it lay pulsing in the banded twilight. The little cart jostled and creaked and the idiot clutched at the bars of his cage and croaked hoarsely after the sun.