It was on the days when Ahumado paid him no attention, never once raising his binoculars to the Yellow Cliffso, that Scull came closest to despair. As long as Ahumado watched, Scull could feel that he was in a fair contest of wills. When Ahumado watched, Scull immediately responded. Though he had given up scratching Greek hexameters, or anything else, on the rock wall, he grabbed his file and pretended to be scratching something. If that didn't hold the old man's interest then Scull tried singing. He roared out the 'Battle Hymn' at the top of his lungs--then, hoping to puzzle Ahumado, he warbled a few snatches of Italian opera, an aria or two that he knew imperfectly but that might fool the old dark man who sat on the blanket far below him. It was all a bluff, but it was his only chance. He had to keep Ahumado interested in order to stay interested himself; otherwise he was just a man hanging in a cage, eating raw birds and waiting to die. One book might have saved him; a tablet to write on might have saved him. He tried recalling his Shakespeare, his Pope, his Milton, his Virgil, his Burns--he even tried composing couplets in his head; he had always been partial to the well-rhymed couplet. But his memory, stretch as it might, would only get him through two or three hours of the day. His memory wasn't weak, he could snatch back much of the poetry that he had read, and not just poetry either. Lines came to him from Clarendon's History, from Gibbon, even from the Bible. His memory was vigorous and Scull enjoyed exercising it; but he wasn't at war with it and war was what he needed: someone or something to fight. For days he studied the cliff above and below him, thinking he might fight it. But the thought of the dark men, waiting with their machetes, made him hesitate about the climb.
Most of all, what he needed was Ahumado's attention. The Black Vaquero was a man worth fighting--Scull warbled and howled, sometimes yelling out curses, anything to let Ahumado know that he was still an opponent, a challenger, a captain.
Ahumado heard him, too--often he would train the binoculars on the cage. Sometimes he would study Scull for many minutes--but Ahumado was sly. Often he would do his studying while Scull was napping, or distracted by the effort to catch some bird that was nervous and would not quite settle on the cage. Ahumado wanted to watch but not be watched in turn; it was another way of being behind, in a position to surprise his opponent. He was subtle with his attention; perhaps he knew that Scull drew his energy from it.
What Scull wanted was some way to trigger Ahumado's anger, as he had triggered it when he suggested a ransom. Ahumado's hatred would give him something to challenge and resist: not just the endless swinging over an abyss. Confinement induced torpor, and from torpor he could easily slip to passivity, resignation, death. He needed a fight to keep his blood up. He had been three weeks in the cage, long enough to grow sick of the sight and taste of raw fowl--yet long enough, too, that news of his plight might have reached Texas--sch news would travel quickly, across even the most seemingly deserted country. A peon would mention something to a traveller and that single comment would radiate outward, like sunlight.
Soldiers in the northern forts would soon hear of things happening below the border--of course the information might be distorted, but that was to be expected. Even well-informed journalists, writing for respectable papers, were not free of the risk of distortion.
Even now, for all Scull knew, the Governor of Texas might have got wind of his peril; with luck a rescue party might already be on the way.
While rescue was still a possibility, it was all the more imperative that he keep his blood up, which he could do best by reminding the old man on the blanket that he, Inish Scull, was still alive and kicking, still a fighter to be reckoned with.
Hardest were the days when Ahumado failed to lift the binoculars, when he seemed indifferent to the white man hanging in the cage. On those days, the days when Ahumado did not look, the birds seemed to know that Scull was losing. The great vultures roosted in a line on the cliff above him, waiting. Pigeons and doves, the staple of Scull's diet, rested in numbers on the cage itself; he could, with a little stealth, have caught a week's supply, and yet he didn't.
On such days it was often only the evening light that brought Scull out of despair. The space before him would grow golden at sunset, leaving the distant mountains in haze until the glow faded and they became blue and then indigo. Staring into the distance, Scull would slowly relax and forget, for a time, the struggle he had to wage.
It was on such an evening that he began to file away the bindings on the side of the cage that faced outward, away from the cliff. If the vast echoing space was to be his balm and his ally, he didn't want bars interfering with his relation to it. The bars were ugly anyway, and stained with bird droppings.
He didn't want them between himself and the light of morning or evening.
Once, long before, as a youth, walking in Cambridge, he had seen a man of the East, a Buddhist monk who sat cross-legged in bright orange robes by the Charles River; the man was merely sitting, with his robe covering his legs and his hands folded in his lap, watching the morning sunlight scatter gold over the gray water.
The memory came back to Scull as he cut through the bindings at the front of his cage. The Buddhist had been an old man, with a shaven head and a long drooping wisp of beard; he had attentive eyes and he seemed to be thoughtfully studying the air as it brightened amid the buildings of Cambridge.
Scull, high on his cliff, thought he might emulate the old Buddhist man he had seen only that once, on a Cambridge morning, by the Charles River. When it came to air, he had, before him, a grander prospect for study than the old man had by the Charles. Before him, indeed, was a very lexicon of air, a dictionary or cyclopedia that would be hard to exhaust. He could study the gray air of morning, the white air of the bright noon, the golden air of evening. He wanted no bars to interfere with his contemplation, his study of the airy element--and to that end he sawed and sawed, with his little file, well into the deep Mexican night.
Ahumado had just walked out of the cave when Scull gave a great yell. At first Ahumado didn't look up. He knew well that the white man, Scull, craved his attention-- the stronger prisoners always craved his attention, or, at least, the attention of the people in the camp.
They didn't want to be forgotten by the people who were alive--they wanted to remind everyone that they were still of the living.
But then one of the vaqueros shouted and Ahumado looked up in time to see Scull heave the front of the cage as far as he could pitch it. The people sitting with coffee or tobacco jumped up when they saw what was happening--they got out of the way of the piece of cage that was falling. The only thing that didn't get out of the way was a red hen; the falling piece of cage hit the hen and caused her to flop around for a minute or two--then she died.
Ahumado picked up the binoculars and looked up at the man in the cage--fora moment he was annoyed because he supposed Scull had decided to commit suicide, as the sly Comanche had. With the front of the cage gone Scull could jump to his death at any time, which was a thing not to be tolerated.
Ahumado did not put prisoners in the cage in order to provide them with a choice in the matter of their own deaths.
