Yet, when Ahumado looked, he saw that Scull did not seem to be getting ready to jump. He was sitting comfortably in the cage, singing one of the songs he was always singing. This penchant for song was another annoying thing about the man. It made the villagers restive. Many of them considered Scull to be a powerful witch. There were a few, probably, who thought that Scull might prove to be more powerful than Ahumado. Why was he singing? Why wouldn't he just die? The most logical answer was that Scull was a witch.
Ahumado had carefully considered that possibility when Scull began scratching on the rock, and he was still a little uneasy about it. The notion that Scull might make the mountain fall had come to him in a dream, and dreams of that sort were not to be lightly disregarded. Although time passed and the mountain didn't fall, Ahumado did not forget his dream and continued to be suspicious of Scull.
Witches were often known to bide their time. An old witch from the south, who had a grudge against his father, had caused a tumour to grow in his father's stomach.
Though they caught the old witch and cut her throat, the tumour continued to grow in his father's stomach until it killed him. It was a thing Ahumado had never forgotten. He knew better than to underestimate the patience of a powerful witch.
Now Scull had cut open his cage--he could leap out if he wanted to. The old woman Hema, the one who had foamed at the mouth when she was listening to the mountain, came hobbling over, carrying the red hen that the fallen cage had killed.
'We should cut open this hen and look inside her,' Hema said. 'He might have put a message in her.' 'No,' Ahumado said, 'if we look inside her we will only find chicken guts.' In his view vision people who tried to see the future by looking at the entrails of animals were frauds. The future might be visible in the smoke that rose from a campfire, if only one knew how to look into the smoke, but he didn't believe that the spirits who made the future would bother leaving messages in the guts of goats or hens.
He gave old Hema the hen, to get rid of her, but before she left she came out with another prophecy, one that was a little more plausible.
'A great bird is going to come and get the white man soon,' old Hema said. 'The great bird lives on a rock at the top of the world. The reason the white man cut away the front of his cage is because the great bird will soon be coming to fly him back to Texas.' 'Go away and eat your hen,' Ahumado said.
She was a long-winded old woman and he did not want to waste his mornings listening to her. Still, his mind was not entirely easy where Scull was concerned. Once or twice, when he looked up and saw the white man sitting there in the open cage, he considered taking his Winchester and shooting the man right where he hung. That would end his worry about the mountain falling down. The mention of the great bird was worrisome too; there were many stories about a great bird that lived at the top of the world.
Perhaps the white man's strange singing was in the language of the birds. Perhaps he was telling the eagles that flew around the cage to go to the top of the world and bring the great bird. The language that Scull sang in was not the language of the Texans; perhaps it was the language of the birds.
To make matters even more uncertain, that very afternoon the largest vulture that anyone had ever seen came soaring over the cliff and flew down past the cage. The vulture was so large that for a moment Ahumado thought it might .be the great bird.
Though it proved to be only an exceptionally large vulture, its appearance annoyed him.
Big Horse Scull was proving to be the most troublesome prisoner he had ever captured; Scull did so many things that were witchlike that it might be better just to kill him.
That evening, by the campfire, he discussed the matter with old Goyeto, the skinner. Usually old Goyeto had only one response when asked about a prisoner; he wanted to skin the prisoner at once. This time, though, to Ahumado's surprise, Goyeto took a different tack.
'You could sell him to the Texans,' Goyeto said. 'They might give you many cattle--nobody around here has very many cattle.' Ahumado remembered that Scull had mentioned a ransom. He had never bargained with the Texans --he had only taken from them, in the way of a bandit. But the old simple-minded skinner, Goyeto, had made a good point. Perhaps the Texans would want Big Horse Scull so badly that they would bring them a lot of cattle.
Scull had said so himself--because he had said it, Ahumado had scorned the idea. He did not like suggestions from prisoners.
Besides, he had supposed that Scull would soon lose heart, like other men in the cage. But Scull was not like other men, and he had not lost heart. He had boldly cut away the front of his cage, he scratched on the face of the mountain, he sang loudly, and he ate raw birds as if he liked them. All this was annoying behaviour, so annoying that Ahumado was still tempted just to shoot the man--then if the great bird came to free him he would only find a corpse.
There had not been much to eat lately, in the camp. The thought of cattle made Goyeto's mouth water, but, of course, he still wanted to use his sharp skinning knives on Big Horse Scull. It would be vexing to send him home without skinning even a little part of him. Goyeto knew that would vex Ahumado too.
It was then that Goyeto remembered the small federale, Major Alonso, a strong fighter they had been lucky to catch alive.
Major Alonso had killed six of their pistoleros before one of the dark men caught him with a bola. When they tied Major Alonso to the skinning post, Goyeto had had one of his most brilliant ideas. Without even telling Ahumado what he had in mind he had delicately removed the Major's eyelids.
Tied to the skinning post, with no eyelids or any means of shielding his eyes, the Major had to bear the full light of the August sun for a whole day, and by the end of it he was insane. It was as if the sun had burned away his brain. Major Alonso gibbered and made the sounds of a madman.
Ahumado was so pleased by Goyeto's inventiveness with Major Alonso that he did not bother to torture the man more. Why torture a man whose brain had been burned up? They merely took away the Major's clothes and chased him out into the desert. He stumbled around with no eyelids until he died. A vaquero found his body only a few miles from camp.
'I could take his eyelids and we could leave him in the sun until the Texans come with the cattle,' Goyeto suggested, to Ahumado.
'I guess he would be crazy, like that federale.' 'Ah,' Ahumado said.
