And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.
The judge looked about him. He was sat before the fire naked save for his breeches and his hands rested palm down upon his knees. His eyes were empty slots. None among the company harbored any notion as to what this attitude implied, yet so like an icon was he in his sitting that they grew cautious and spoke with circumspection among themselves as if they would not waken something that had better been left sleeping.
The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was. Glanton sat his horse and studied the adamantine deep beneath him. A raven had set forth from the cliffs far below to wheel and croak. In the acute light the sheer stone wall wore strange contours and the horsemen on that promontory seemed very small even to themselves. Glanton looked upward, briefly, as if there were anything to ascertain in that perfect china sky, and then he chucked up his horse and they rode on.
Crossing the high mesas in the days to follow they began to come upon burnedout pits in the ground where the indians had cooked mescal and they rode through strange forests of maguey—the aloe or century plant—with immense flowering stalks that rose forty feet into the desert air. Each dawn as they saddled their horses they watched the pale mountains to the north and to the west for any trace of smoke. There was none. The scouts would be already gone, riding out in the dark before the sun rose, and they would not return until night, reckoning out the camp in that incoordinate waste by palest starlight or in blackness absolute where the company sat among the rocks without fire or bread or camaraderie any more than banded apes. They crouched in silence eating raw meat the Delawares had killed on the plain with arrows and they slept among the bones. A lobeshaped moon rose over the black shapes of the mountains dimming out the eastern stars and along the nearby ridge the white blooms of flowering yuccas moved in the wind and in the night bats came from some nether part of the world to stand on leather wings like dark satanic hummingbirds and feed at the mouths of those flowers. Farther along the ridge and slightly elevated on a ledge of sandstone squatted the judge, pale and naked. He raised his hand and the bats flared in confusion and then he lowered it and sat as before and soon they were feeding again.
Glanton would not turn back. His calculations concerning the enemy included every duplicity. He spoke of ambushes. Even he in all his pride could not have believed that a company of nineteen men had evacuated an area of ten thousand square miles of every living human. Two days later when the scouts returned in the middle of the afternoon and reported finding the Apache villages abandoned he would not ride in. They camped on the mesa and made false fires and lay all night with their rifles on that stony heath. In the morning they caught up the horses and descended into a wild valley strewn with grass huts and the remains of old cookfires. They dismounted and moved among the shelters, frail structures of saplings and weeds stuck into the ground and bent to at the top to form a rounded hovel over which a few rags of hide or old blankets remained. The grounds were strewn with bones and knappings of flint or quartzite and they found pieces of jars and old baskets and broken stone mortars and rifts of dried beanpods from the mesquite and a child’s straw doll and a primitive onestringed fiddle that had been crushed and a part of a necklace of dried melonseeds.
The hovel doors were waist high and faced the east and few of the shelters were tall enough to be stood in. The last one that Glanton and David Brown entered was defended by a large and vicious dog. Brown drew his belt pistol but Glanton stopped him. He dropped to one knee and spoke to the animal. It crouched against the rear wall of the hogan and bared its teeth and swung its head from side to side, the ears flattened alongside its skull.
He’ll bite you, said Brown.
Get me a piece of jerky.
He crouched, talking to the dog. The dog watched him.
You wont man that son of a bitch, said Brown.
I can man anything that eats. Get me a piece of jerky.
When Brown came back with the dried meat the dog was looking about uneasily. When they rode west out of the canyon it was trotting with a slight limp at the heels of Glanton’s horse.
They followed an old stone trail up out of the valley and through a high pass, the mules clambering along the ledges like goats. Glanton led his horse and called after the others, and yet darkness overtook them and they were benighted in that place, strung out along a fault in the wall of the gorge. He led them cursing upward through the profoundest dark but the way grew so narrow and the footing so treacherous they were obliged to halt. The Delawares came back afoot, having left their horses at the top of the pass, and Glanton threatened to shoot them all were they attacked in that place.
They passed the night each man at the feet of his horse where it stood in the trail between a sheer rise and a sheer fall. Glanton sat at the head of the column with his guns laid out before him. He watched the dog. In the morning they rose and went on, picking up the other scouts and their horses at the top of the pass and sending them on again. They rode through the mountains all that day and if Glanton slept none saw him do so.
The Delawares had reckoned the village empty ten days and the Gilenos had decamped in small bands by every egress. There was no trail to follow. The company rode on through the mountains singlefile. The scouts were gone for two days. On the third day they rode into camp with their horses all but ruined. That morning they’d seen fires atop a thin blue mesa fifty miles to the south.
XII
Crossing the border – Storms – Ice and lightning – The slain argonauts – The azimuth – Rendezvous – Councils of war – Slaughter of the Gilenos – Death of Juan Miguel – The dead in the lake – The chief – An Apache child – On the desert – Night fires – El virote – A surgery – The judge takes a scalp – Un hacendado – Gallego – Ciudad de Chihuahua.
For the next two weeks they would ride by night, they would make no fire. They had struck the shoes from their horses and filled the nailholes in with clay and those who still had tobacco used their pouches to spit in and they slept in caves and on bare stone. They rode their horses through the tracks of their dismounting and they buried their stool like cats and they barely spoke at all. Crossing those barren gravel reefs in the night they seemed remote and without substance. Like a patrol condemned to ride out some ancient curse. A thing surmised from the blackness by the creak of leather and the chink of metal.
They cut the throats of the packanimals and jerked and divided the meat and they traveled under the cape of the wild mountains upon a broad soda plain with dry thunder to the south and rumors of light. Under a gibbous moon horse and rider spanceled to their shadows on the snowblue ground and in each flare of lightning as the storm advanced those selfsame forms rearing with a terrible redundancy behind them like some third aspect of their presence hammered out black and wild upon the naked grounds. They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.
They crossed the del Norte and rode south into a land more hostile yet. All day they crouched like owls under the niggard acacia shade and peered out upon that cooking world. Dust-devils stood on the horizon like the smoke of distant fires but of living thing there was none. They eyed the sun in its circus and at dusk they rode out upon the
