away, only rattling a little, not coiling, but Scull leapt at it and crushed its head with his stick. He knew he had to be careful. His eyes were apt to water when he focused too long on one thing. He couldn't see well enough to spot the snakes. He edged around the perimeter of the pit and killed three more snakes before he was done. Then he began to dig at the walls. By noon, when he had to quit and hide his eyes, the dead Mexicans lay buried under sizable mounds of earth. Before burying the men Scull held his nose with one hand and forced himself to investigate their pockets. He was hoping Ahumado had overlooked a pocketknife, or another file, but in that he was disappointed. All he got off the corpses was their belts.
From time to time he dug, heaping more dirt on the corpses, but his time in the cage had weakened him; he could not dig long at a stretch, and no matter how careful he was, dirt got into his lidless eyes. The dust and dirt felt as painful as if it were gravel. Finally he took off his shirt, tied it over his eyes, and dug at the walls blindly.
By the afternoon, exhausted, he huddled in the shade.
One of his ankles was inflamed. He had seen several scorpions and wondered if he had been bitten by one during the night, when he was unconscious. He saw no sign of a bite, but the ankle was very sore, which chastened him. The pit seemed to be only fifteen feet deep, only some three times his size. Perhaps he could dig a few handholds and pull himself out. But his throbbing ankle, coupled with his exhaustion and the beginnings of a fever, brought home to him again the desperate character of the situation. No sound at all came from what had been, only the day before, a bustling camp.
There might be no one left to bring him water or food. The rangers might not have been able to get the cattle; no help might be coming. The pit he was in, though not really deep, was just deep enough to constitute the perfect trap for a man in his condition. Even if he could dig the handholds, he might not have the strength to climb out; his ankle would scarcely bear his weight. He could eat the snakes he had killed, but, after that, he would have nothing. Every day he would get a little weaker, and have less and less hope of effecting his own escape.
Barring a miracle, Ahumado had beaten him after all. The old man had even robbed him of time. As soon as Ahumado noticed that Scull was keeping a little calendar of twigs, he moved the cage and scattered the twigs. It was a thing to brood about. Ahumado had known that time meant something special to his prisoner. Now and then he would approach the cage and say, 'Do you know what day it is, Captain?' Scull refused to answer--but Ahumado knew that Scull's hold on time had been broken.
'I know what day it is,' he would say quietly, before returning to his blanket.
That night, as Scull's fever rose, he dreamed of a flood. He dreamed that water filled the pit to its brim, cool water that allowed him to float free. 'Forty days and forty nights,' he mumbled, but he awoke to dry sunlight and pain in his eyes. The dirt he had got in them the day before left them swollen.
'Noah,' Scull said, aloud. 'I need what Noah had. I need a flood to raise me up.' His own ^ws sounded crazy to him. As his mind swirled, touching the edges of madness, he suddenly thought of Dolly, his Dolly--Inez to the world but always Dolly to him. Even at that moment, as he lay starving in a scorpion pit in Mexico, she probably was in a bed or a closet, stoking her own fires with some stout illiterate lad.
'The black bitch!' he said.
Then, anger pulsing through him, he yelled the ^ws as loudly as he could: 'The black bitch!
The bitch!' The sound echoed off the cliffso, where a few buzzards still circled.
Then, dizzy from his own spurt of anger, Scull sat back against the wall of the pit, exhausted. In his mind he saw exactly how the handholds should be dug, in an ascending circle around the pit. He stood five foot two; he only needed to raise himself a bit over ten feet to escape--nothing to what Hannibal had faced with his elephants at the base of the Alps. Yet it was those ten feet that would defeat him. His eye saw the way clearly, but his body, for the first time in his life, would not respond.
Scull dozed; the heat of the day began to fill the pit. Soon it felt hot as a stovepipe to him. His fever rose; he felt chill even as he sweated. Once he thought he heard movement above him. He thought it might be a coyote or some other varmint, inspecting the camp, hoping to find a scrap to eat. He yelled a time or two, though, on the off chance that it might be a human visitor.
His yells produced no answer. Scull stood up, to test his ankle, but immediately sat back down. His ankle would bear no weight.
Then he began to get the feeling that he was not alone: someone was above him, waiting where he couldn't see them. But the person, if it was a person, waited quietly, making no sound. Through the afternoon he turned his sore eyes upward a few times, but saw no one.
Then, as dusk was approaching, he saw what he had sensed. A face, as old and brown as the earth, was visible above him. Then he remembered the old woman. He had seen her often during his days of captivity in the cage, but had paid her little mind. Most of the day the old woman sat under a small tree, silent. When she rose to do some chores she walked slowly, bent almost double, supporting herself with a heavy stick. He rarely saw anyone speak to her. No doubt the people of the camp had left her to die--crippled as she was, she would have been an impediment to travel.
'Agua!' he said, looking up at her. The sight of a human face made him realize how thirsty he was. 'Agua! Agua!' The old face disappeared. Scull felt a flutter of hope. At least one human knew where he was, and that he was alive. There was no reason for the old woman to help him--she was probably dying herself. But she was there, and people were unpredictable. She might help him.
Above him old Xitla crept about the camp.
She was glad the people had left--the camp was hers now. She had spent the day looking for things people had dropped as they were leaving. People were so careless. They left things that they considered had no use, but old Xitla knew that everything had a use, if one were wise enough to know the uses of things. In a few hours of looking she had already found a bullet, several nails, an old shirt, and a rawhide string.
These things were treasures to Xitla. With each find she hobbled eagerly back to her tree and put her treasure on her blanket.
In her years in Ahumado's camp Xitla had been careful never to tell him her name. She knew he would kill her immediately if he knew that her name was Xitla and that she was the daughter of Ti-lan, a great curandera who had known him in his youth in the south. Her mother had insisted that she take the name 'Xitla' because it would protect her from Ahumado. When he was a baby, her mother told her, the elders had put a poisoned leaf under Ahumado's tongue and sent him out in the world to do evil. Though Ahumado did not know it, he and Xitla had been born on the same minute of the same day, and their mothers were sisters-- thus their destinies were forever linked together. They would die on the same moment of the same day too--in killing Xitla, Ahumado would have killed himself.
