So the hours go, but he hardly marks their flight. The sun is getting lower in the west, and the white heat of day gives way to the yellowish-purple haze that in Apache land is always the forerunner of night. How when he was first hit he had longed for night; how little he cared for it now. He could feel himself growing weaker. His Winchester was heavier than any he had ever before lifted. Even “it,” that terrible thing that chained him there, pained him less, but the thirst grew horrible. Anyhow night would give him a chance to reach the canteen. At times he felt almost drowsy, but fought off the feeling. He was merely waiting for the end. He thought it strange that he could face it so complacently. He hardly cared now how soon it came. Would he shoot all his cartridges away before it reached him? He would not waste them though. If he could only reach Tom’s gun and revolver and destroy them it would make those that killed him angry. It was for these things, worth perhaps $50, that he and Tom had been murdered. He was beginning to think of himself as already dead. At least how easy to ruin Tom’s rifle. It was only two or three paces away. He took his revolver and fired at it, aiming to hit it just in front and below the hammer, its most vulnerable part. Instead, the bullet hits the ground and ricocheting enters the breast of the dead man. He shudders as the body stirs from the force of the shot, although he knows that life has been gone for hours. Everything is plain to him now why his other shots had not taken effect. He was unnerved. How could a man with a hole through his body hope to hit anything. He had heard of men shot through the heart killing their assailants, and had often wondered if he could do it. Could Tom have done it? How far off and yet how short seemed the years that he and Tom had been together. How little there had been in them that seemed worth now recalling. Crack! a single shot off to the right, and he fires where he sees the smoke curling upward. Fires again. Nothing. He counts his cartridges and is astonished that he has fired so many. He must have lost some. No, there are the empty shells.
Another shot off to the right. One to the front. He fires at both. He feels that he is growing nervous, and brings all his remaining powers into play to secure better control of himself. He will put away the idea of death, of his wound, of everything but revenge. Only one and he will be satisfied, and for the first time in years he prays, prays without words though, that he may kill but one.
The sun is sinking lower, it has almost reached the far off western mountain tops. It would soon be night, and then what would “they” do? Steal up under cover of the darkness and shoot him from behind some boulder before he would be aware of it. He would keep a close lookout, and perhaps he might after all “get” one of them.
Crack! crack! to the right and left, and he glances in both directions, firing at each; and then right over him takes place a terrible explosion, and he feels as if something heavy and blunt had struck him in the back. He half raises himself, just enough to turn his face upward. Another explosion, another heavy, blunt blow, and through the smoke from a revolver he sees a dark young face, with black, glittering eyes, white teeth, across which the lips are tightly drawn. The face and the form of one almost a boy, and then he falls back while a dark hand and arm snatches his gun from his half-clinging clasp. He hears wild shouting and through his glazing eyes sees dark forms scrambling for his arms, for Tom’s. They are even quarreling in their eagerness to tear the pack from the dead burro, and then instinctively he sees one raise something in the air ... and when it falls there is no longer anything human in the face or the head of the man who has spent the afternoon in fight. Nothing but a bloody pulp of skull, hair, brains, broken teeth, crushed into a misshapen mass by the boulder cast upon it by an Apache.
* * * * *
Another afternoon, years after, a tall sergeant and his detail of cavalry escorting through the canyon a party locating a road, looks down on the whitened bones of two men and a burro scattered by coyotes and bleached by the winds and rains, and as he, with the toe of his boot, pushes to one side the ribs of one of the skeletons, his eyes mark the many empty cartridge shells. He looks up and sees that his comrades have already noted them, while some one remarks:
“By——, he stayed with them while he lasted.”
FOLLOWING THE SEA
(Ambrose Bierce: Collected Sketches.)