Through it all, the bugler continued to play, although the snatches of sound came from farther away.
“I think that bugler’s lost,” Gus said. “He’ll be lucky if them dogs don’t get him.”
The wind rose higher?lanterns only a few feet from the wagons were hard to see. Now and then, a horse neighed. So much sand had blown into the oxcart that the men were sitting in it. Sand had sifted down the men’s loose clothes?it coated their hair.
Then, abruptly, the wind stopped?the cart had turned a corner near a high wall. The sand still swirled above the wall, but for a moment the men were protected. When they lifted their heads, sand from their hair and their collars fell inside their shirts.
Through the dusty air they saw a nimbus of light approaching? it was Major Laroche, with a soldier beside him carrying a large lantern. The Major was wrapped in a great grey cloak, with a hood that came over his head. His mustache was still neatly curled?he seemed not at all affected by the storm.
“Welcome to the Pass of the North, Messieurs,” he said. “I have brought you to the Convent of San Lazaro. In the morning the alcalde of El Paso will be here, with his staff, to watch the little ceremony we have planned. We have a warm room waiting for you, and you will be well fed.”
“When do we get to know what this ceremony is all about?” Bigfoot asked. “It might be one of those things I’d rather sleep through.”
“You will not sleep through this one, Monsieur Wallace,” the Major said. “This is what you have walked across Texas and New Mexico for. I assure you?you would not want to miss it.”
Then the Major was gone, and the light with him. A gate creaked open?several figures stood beside it in the darkness, but the sand swirled through as the cart passed inside the walls. Call couldn’t see well enough to tell whether the figures were men or women.
The cart they had been traveling in was so cramped that several of the Texans had to stretch their legs slowly before they could walk. When they were all mobile they were marched across a dusty, windy courtyard by the shadowy figures who had opened the gate.A few of the cavalrymen, with their lanterns, came into the courtyard with the Texans, but they stayed close to the men and avoided the dim figures who led them. All the people inside the walls were wrapped in heavy cloaks; they led the Texans across the courtyard silently. All of the figures had the cloaks wrapped closely around their faces.
Bigfoot Wallace had so much sand in his boots that he found it difficult to walk. Big as his feet were, he considered them to be appendages to be cared for correctly; they had taken him across Texas and New Mexico successfully, and now they yet might have to take him farther, to Mexico City, it was rumoured. Sand often contained sand-burrs; he had once got a badly infected toe because he had neglected the prick of a sand-burr. The others marched into the room they were shown to, but Bigfoot calmly sat down and emptied his boots, one by one. He wanted to do it outside, rather than risk emptying burrs into the quarters they were being shown into. Some of the boys were nearly barefoot, as it was?he didn’t want to bring burrs inside, where one of them could get stepped on and infect someone else.
As he sat, one of the dim figures, with a very small light, a candle whose flame flicked in the wind, came and stood beside him. Bigfoot was grateful for the light, small though it was. Sand-burrs were small, and not easy to see. He didn’t want to miss any. He wiped off the soles of his feet carefully and prepared to pull his boots back on when he happened to glance toward the small, flickering light of the candle. Whoever was holding the candle cupped a hand around it, to shield the flame from the puffs of wind. That, too, was considerate, but what caught Bigfoot’s eye was the hand itself?the hand was the hand of a skeleton, just bone, with a few pieces of loose, blackened flesh hanging from one of the fingers.
In all his years on the frontier, Bigfoot Wallace had never had such a shock. He had seen many startling sights, but never a skeleton holding a candle. He was so shocked that he dropped the boot he had been about to put on. His hands, steady through many fierce battles, began to shake and tremble?he could not even locate the boot he had just dropped.
The presence holding the candle?Bigfoot was not sure he could call it a person?bent, in an effort to be helpful, and held the candle closer to the ground, so that Bigfoot could pick up his boot. When he fumbled, the presence bent even closer with the candle; Bigfoot looked up, hoping to see a human face, and received an even greater shock, for the person holding the candle had no nose?just a dark hole. Where he had expected to see eyes, he could see nothing. A hand that was mostly bone held the candle, and the form the hand belonged to had no nose. Then the wind rose higher, and the candle flickered.
Bigfoot was so shaken that he forgot the sand-burrs?he even forgot his boots. He stood up and walked barefoot straight through the doorway, into the room where his companions were. He almost ran through the door, running into Matilda Roberts and knocking her into Gus. There was no light at all in the room. The wind whooshed past the door, and the sand blew in?then someone outside closed the door, and a key grated in the lock.
When Matty knocked Gus down, Gus fell into Long Bill?no one knew what was happening, in the pitch-dark room.
“Woodrow, where are you?” Gus cried?“Someone knocked Matty down.”
“It was nobody but me,” Bigfoot said.
He realized at that moment that he had forgotten his boots and he turned to go back for them, only to find the door locked. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or frightened that he was inside. It was so dark he could see no one?he had only known he shoved Matilda Roberts because none of the Rangers were that large.
“Oh Lord, Matty,” he said. “Oh Lord. I seen something bad.”
“What?” Matty asked. “I didn’t see nothing but folks wrapped in serapes.”
“It was so bad I don’t want to tell it,” Bigfoot said.
“Well, tell it,” Matilda insisted.
“I seen a skeleton holding a candle,” Bigfoot said. “I guess they’ve put us in here with the dead.”
ALL NIGHT THE RANGERS huddled in pitch darkness, not knowing what to expect. Bigfoot, when questioned, would only say that he had seen a skeleton holding a candle, and that when he looked up he had seen a face with no nose.
“But how would you breathe, with no nose?” Long Bill said.
“You wouldn’t need to breathe,” Gus said. “If it was just a big hole there, the air would go right into your head.”
“You don’t need it in your head, Gus?you need it in your lungs.”
“What about eyes?” Long Bill asked.
“That’s right, didn’t it have eyes?” Don Shane asked. The mere sound of Don Shane’s deep voice startled everyone almost as much as Bigfoot’s troubling report. Don Shane, a thin man with a black beard, was the most silent man in the Ranger troop. He had walked all the way across Texas and Mexico, enduring hunger and cold, without saying more than six words. But the thought of a person with no nose brought him out of his silence. He felt he would like to know about the eyes. After all, Comanches sometimes cut the noses off their women. A barber in Shreveport had once slashed Don’s own nose badly. The barber had been drunk. But a person without eyes would be harder to tolerate, at least in Don Shane’s view.
“I didn’t see eyes,” Bigfoot said. “But it had a sheet wrapped over its head. There could have been eyes, under that sheet.”
“If there weren’t no eyes, that’s bad,” Long Bill said.
“It’s bad anyway,” Gus said. “Why would a skeleton be wanting to hold a candle?”
No one had an answer to that question. Call was in a corner?he took no part in the discussion. He thought Bigfoot was probably just imagining things. Gus’s question was a good one. A skeleton would have no reason to light their way to their prison cell. Perhaps Bigfoot had gone to sleep in the oxcart, and had a dream he hadn’t quite waked out of?skeletons were more likely in dreams than in Mexican prisons. It was true that the Mexican soldiers had seemed a little nervous when they brought them into the prison, but that could well have been because the wild dogs had attacked them. Wild dogs ran in packs; they were known to be worse killers than wolves. They sometimes killed cattle, and even horses. The fact was they were locked in until morning and wouldn’t find out the truth about the skeleton until the sun came up.
There was no window in the room they had been put in. When the sun did come up, they only knew it because of a thin line of light under the door.
When the door opened Major Laroche stood there, in a fancier uniform than he had worn during the journey from Las Palomas. His mustache was curled at the ends, and he wore a different sabre, one with a gold handle, in a
