Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West

Can you walk? said Toadvine.

I aint got no choice.

How much water you got?

Not much.

What do you want to do?

I dont know.

We could ease back to the river and lay up, said Toadvine.

Till what?

He looked toward the fort again and he looked at the broken shaft in the kid's leg and the welling blood. You want to try and pull that?

No.

What do you want to do?

Goon.

They mended their course and picked up the trail the wagon parties followed and they went on through the long forenoon and the day and the evening of the day. By dark their water was gone and they labored on beneath the slow wheel of stars and slept shivering among the dunes and rose in the dawn and went on again. The kid's leg had stiffened and he hobbled after with a section of wagontongue for a crutch and twice he told Toadvine to go on but he would not. Before noon the aborigines appeared.

They watched them assemble upon the trembling drop of the eastern horizon like baleful marionettes. They were without horses and they seemed to be moving at a trot and within the hour they were lofting arrows upon the refugees.

They went on, the kid with his pistol drawn, stepping and ducking the shafts where they fell out of the sun, the lengths of them glistening against the pale sky and foreshortening in a reedy flutter and then suddenly quivering dead in the ground. They snapped off the shafts against their being used again and they labored on sideways over the sand like crabs until the arrows coming so thick and close they made a stand. The kid dropped onto his elbows and cocked and leveled the revolver. The Yumas were over a hundred yards out and they set up a cry and Toad-vine dropped to one knee alongside the kid. The pistol bucked and the gray smoke hung motionless in the air and one of the savages went down like a player through a trap. The kid had cocked the pistol again but Toadvine put his hand over the barrel and the kid looked up at him and lowered the hammer and then sat and reloaded the empty chamber and pushed him­self up and recovered his crutch and they went on. Behind them on the plain they could hear the thin clamor of the aborigines as they clustered about the one he'd shot.

That painted horde dogged their steps the day long. They were twenty-four hours without water and the barren mural of sand and sky was begi

He was alone and unarmed. How many are ye? he said.

What you see, said Toadvine.

All the rest gone under? Glanton? The judge?

They didnt answer. They slid down to the floor of the well where there stood a few inches of water and they knelt and drank.

The pit in which the well was sunk was perhaps a dozen feet in diameter and they posted themselves about the i

About the well were hillocks of sand from old diggings and the Yumas may have meant to try to reach them. The kid left his post and moved to the west rim of the excavation and began to fire on them where they stood or squatted on their haunches like wolves out there on the shimmering pan. The expriest knelt by the kid's side and watched behind them and held his hat between the sun and the foresight of the kid's pistol and the kid steadied the pistol in both hands on the edge of the works and let off the rounds. At the second fire one of the savages fell over and lay without moving. The next shot spun another one around and he sat down and then rose and took a few steps and sat down again. The expriest whispered encouragement at his elbow and the kid thumbed back the hammer and the expriest adjusted the hat to shade gunsight and sight eye with the one shadow and the kid fired again. He'd drawn his sight upon the wounded man sitting on the pan and his shot stretched him out dead. The expriest gave a low whistle.

Aye, you're a cool one, he whispered. But it's cu

The Yumas seemed immobilized by these misfortunes and the kid cocked the pistol and shot down another of their number before they began to collect themselves and to move back, tak­ing their dead with them, lofting a flurry of arrows and howling out bloodoaths in their stoneage tongue or invocations to what­ever gods of war or fortune they'd the ear of and retreating upon the pan until they were very small indeed.

The kid shouldered up his flask and shotpouch and slid down the pitch to the floor of the well where he dug a second small basin with the old shovel there and in the water that seeped in he washed the bores of the cylinder and washed the barrel and ran pieces of his shirt through the bore with a stick until they came clean. Then he reassembled the pistol, tapping the barrel pin until the cylinder was snug and laying the piece in the warm sand to dry.

Toadvine had made his way around the excavation until he reached the expriest and they lay watching the retreat of the savages through the heat shimmering off the pan in the late sun­light.

He's a deadeye aint he?

Tobin nodded. He looked down the pit to where the kid sat loading the pistol, turning the powderfilled chambers and meas­uring them with his eye, seating the balls with the sprues down.

How do you stand by way of ammunition?

Poorly. We got a few rounds, not many.

The expriest nodded. Evening was coming on and in the red land to the west the Yumas were gathering in silhouette before the sun.

All night their watchfires burned on the dark circlet of the world and the kid unpi

What do you make it to be?

The expriest shook his head.

Toadvine cupped his hand and whistled sharply down at the kid. He sat up with the pistol. He clambered up the slope with his stiff leg. The three of them lay watching.

It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strange­ness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed. The three at the well watched mutely this transit out of the breaking day and even though there was no longer any question as to what it was that approached yet none would name it. They lumbered on, the judge a pale pink beneath his talc of dust like something newly born, the imbecile much the darker, lurching together across the pan at the very extremes of exile like some scurrilous king stripped of his vesti-ture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die.