Chapter 25 There were twenty-nine dead and eight more in the street including the five the kid had shot. The dead were still in the streets four days later, and the wild dogs were feeding on them. When the riders passed back through this village the beasts stopped and watched them. The company rode past them like blurry numerations. When the last of them were gone they commenced to feed again. *** At the town of Alonso Nacori there had been a flag. There had been a shoot-out. There were the gates and there were the kin outside the gates that no one there would name. A man stood in the empty street before the gates. He saw the Americans riding until they stopped before the gates and he opened them. In this town there was a bar and here the squad dismounted. A man leading a funeral rounded the corner into the street, and a rocket sped into the plaza where it exploded overhead. The mourners were across the street behind the pall-bearers. People were on the street and they turned and held their hats to their chests. The funeral procession veered off the street and came toward the shops. The Americans were no more than seated in the bar when a muttered slur roused four of them. Before any could own it the funeral rockets exploded in the street. Hartford stepped out into the street. “It’s a funeral,” he said. The pall-bearers passed bearing on their shoulders the casket. And the watchers could see a young woman in her funeral dress among the flowers. Behind her came the coffin. At the rear advanced a company of mourners, the old women in their black veils weeping and looking shyly at the spectators in the street as they passed. In the bar the boy demanded which of the inebriates had spoken. A drunk at the table stood with a knife. His friends at the table yelled after him, but he waved at them. There were two mercenaries first into the streets. The pier was just passing. The Mexican reeled from the doorway and stabbed the boy named Charley Webster in the back. “I’m dead,” he said. He sat down in the street. The other boy had drawn his pistol and shot the drunk in the middle of the head. The dead man fell backward through the door of a shop, blood spouting from his head. There were more mercenaries in the street and one of them shot at the procession. The pall-bearer had been looking directly down the barrel of the gun when it fired and he was shot through the head and he dropped the casket and fell dead in the street. The coffin crashed on its corner to the ground. In the bar the Mexicans had knives drawn and were jabbing with them. From inside there came the sound of uninterrupted gunfire. Hartford turned in the street and stepped across several corpses sprawled there. Inside the pistols roared. Fresh splinters were blown out of the wood. Many Mexicans who had been in the room were strewn dead across the floor. Hartford stepped from the doorway into the bar. The mercenaries were looking at the dead and at each other in wonder. They looked at Jacobs. He stepped across the floor. He looked about. The men were reloading the empty chambers in their pistols. “Hair,” he said. “The thread ain’t run out on us yet.” They would not have shot people publicly in a town so large, but it had been so sudden. In the morning they went on. Desolate country. Rasp of a tail. There was nothing there. They thought that there could be. Then they decided to go. The night was like some sickness darkening away the world. *** Nine days out the squadron passed through the mountains, and they began to descend a trail hundreds of feet above the clouds. They rode west out of the mountains, and they passed through small villages, tipping their hats to folk whom they would murder before the month was out. *** They came to another village. In that place there were parts that stood wholly depopulated of male inhabitants, where the women and children crouched in terror in their hovels, listening until the last hoof-clop died in the distance.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 13:11:04 +0000
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