The man on the paint horse rode up behind him. He had a blinking eye. The dark men stood back, silent as rocks.
'Just in time for what, sir?' Scull asked.
'To help us eat your horse,' Ahumado informed him. 'That's what we are cooking, over there in our pit.' 'Hector?' Scull said. 'Bible and sword, you must have a big pit.' 'Yes, we have a big pit,' Ahumado said.
'We have been cooking him for three days. I think he is about cooked. If you will hand this man your rifle we can go eat him.' The tall pistolero rode close.
Scull handed him the rifle. With the dark men walking behind him, Inish Scull followed Ahumado toward the rising smoke.
Scull stood on the edge of the crater, astonished first by the crater itself and then by what he saw in it. From rim to rim the crater must be a mile across, he judged. Below him, at the bottom of it, were the hundred or more people whose tracks he had seen--men and women, young and old.
They were all waiting. The smoke rose from a pit in the center of the crater, Hector, whose head was missing, had been cooked standing up, in his skin.
The old man, Ahumado, had scarcely looked at Scull since his surrender. His eyelids drooped so low that it was hard to see his eyes. Men had shovelled away the bed of coals that had covered the pit for three days. The coals were scattered in heaps around the pit--many of them still glowed red.
'We have never cooked a horse this big,' Ahumado remarked.
'He appears to be thoroughly charred,' Scull observed. 'You might as well let the feast begin.' He felt chagrined. The old man treated his arrival as casually as if he had received a letter announcing the date and arrival time. He had walked into Mexico, convinced that he was proceeding with extreme stealth, and yet Ahumado had read his approach so precisely that he had finished cooking Hector in time for Scull to say grace, if he wanted to.
Now the need he had always had to be as far as he could get from Boston--not just Boston the place but Boston as way of being--had landed him in a crater in Mexico, where a hundred dark people were waiting to eat his horse.
Ahumado made a gesture and the squatting, waiting people rose like a swarm and crowded into the pit around the smoking horse. Knives flashed, many knives. Strips of skin were ripped off, exposing the dark flesh, which soon dripped blood from a hundred cuts. Some who had no knives tore at the meat with their fingers.
'They are hungry but your horse will fill them up,' Ahumado said. 'We will go down now. I have saved the best part for you, Captain Scull.' 'This is a big crater,' Scull said, as they were walking down. 'I wonder what made it?' 'A great rock--Jaguar threw it from the sky,' Ahumado said. 'He threw it long ago, before there were people.' 'I expect we'd call it a meteor, up at Harvard College,' Scull said.
Then he saw four men shovelling coals out of another, smaller pit. This pit was modest, only a few scoops of coals in it. When the coals were scattered the men lifted something out of it on two long sticks, something that steamed and smoked, although wrapped in heavy sacking. They carried their burden over to a large flat rock and sat it down. Ahumado took out a knife, walked over, and began to cut the sacking away.
'Now this is a treat, Captain,' Tudwal said. 'You'd do best to eat hearty before we put you in the cage.' 'I will, sir, I've never lacked appetite,' Scull assured him. 'I ate my own pig, as a boy, and now I expect I'll eat my horse.' He did not inquire about the cage he was going to be put in.
Ahumado cut away the last of the sacking: Hector's steaming head stared at him from the flat rock. Smoke came from his eyes. The top of his skull had been neatly removed, so that his brains would cook.
'Now there's a noble head, if I ever saw one,' Scull said, as he approached.
'Hector and I harried many a foe. I had expected to ride him back north, when the great war comes, but it's not to be. You were his Achilles, Se@nor Ahumado.' Now the dark men carried machetes. Ahumado gestured for them to move back a few steps.
Scull glanced back at the larger pit.
Hector was rapidly being consumed. The dark people in the pit looked as if they had been in a rain of blood.
So it must have been when the cavemen ate the mastodons, Scull thought.
Then he turned back, pulled out his knife, and began to cut bites of meat from the cheeks of his great horse.
Once Inish Scull was securely shut in the cage of mesquite branches, Tudwal reached in and offered to cut the thongs that bound his hands and feet. Scull had been stripped naked too.
Both the binding and the stripping were indignities he didn't appreciate, though he maintained a cheerful demeanor throughout.
'Stick your feet over near the bars and I'll cut you loose,' Tudwal offered. 'Then I'll do your hands. You won't be able to catch no pigeons with your hands tied like that. You'd starve in ten days, which ain't what he has in mind. When he hangs a man in a cage he expects him to last awhile.' 'I have never cared much for squab,' Scull said. 'I suppose I can learn to like it, if there's nothing else.' 'A Mexican we hung off this cliff caught an eagle once,' Tudwal said. 'But the eagle got the best of him--pecked out one of his eyes.' 'I notice you blink, sir--what happened?' Scull said. 'A sparrow get you?' 'Nothing. I was just born ablinking,' Tudwal said.
The insult, as Scull had feared, didn't register.
'But you weren't born in Mexico,' Scull said. 'You sound to me like a man who was probably born in Cincinnati or thereabouts.' Tudwal was startled. How did the man know that?
He had, in fact, been born on the Kentucky River, not far from Cincinnati.
'You're right, Captain--but how'd you know that?' Tudwal asked.
'I suppose it's your mellow tone,' Scull said. He smiled at the man, hoping to lull him into a moment of inattention. The cliff they were about to lower him over seemed to fall away for a mile. Once they lowered him his fate would be sealed. He would hang there in space, with half of Mexico to look at, until he froze or starved. He
