“Said I’d do it,” Old Nathan muttered, then wrinkled his face in embarrassment. This boy couldn’t know it, but success had never been more doubtful than in the moment it came . . . and the cunning man had no heart now for bluster, when his hands were red to the elbows with the blood of Spanish King.
Old Nathan did not stand up or even uncross his legs, but he paused in what he was doing to give Boardman his attention and a full answer. “What wuz here,” he said, “hit’s gone and won’t be back. Ye kin plow here er pasture, whatever you please.”
The cunning man resumed his work. He had already removed a hand’s breadth of hide from Spanish King’s nose to his croup. The horns were included by a strip of the poll.
“There’s a thing I wonder, though,” said Boardman, squatting down on his haunches with care not to let the tails of his frock coat brush the bloody soil. “The spring, ye see, it’s closed up. The rock’s cracked down all around it, and hain’t no water come out at all.”
He pointed toward the creek, as if Old Nathan would not already have noticed. The slime of finely divided clay particles gleamed between stones where it was still damp. Higher up on the rocks, the mud was cracking and lifting its edges toward the naked sun.
The cunning man ignored him, making the final cuts at the base of the dead bull’s tail.
“Well,” continued Boardman, disconcerted both by the older man’s activity and his lack of response to the implied question, “I reckon thet’s no affair of yourn. I’ll hire Bully Ransden en his team t’ grub out the landslip and get the spring t’ flowing agin.”
Old Nathan stood up slowly, lifting with his left hand the strop he had just cut and still holding in his right the knife which the coating of blood joined to his flesh. “He kin grub t’ Hell, I reckon,” the cunning man said, “and he’ll not strike water there. What lived through the flow uv that spring, it’s gone now and the water besides.”
Boardman overbalanced as he tried to stand up and had to brace his right fingertips on the ground. His face had a queasy expression as he straightened, and he neither looked at that hand nor allowed the splayed fingers to touch one another for some moments.
“I see,” he said in a voice that made it clear he understood nothing of what he had just been told. “Well, I reckon the Bully’ll grub till he fetches water somehow.”
The cunning man began to coil the bloody strap he held, starting from the back but letting the tail stick out to one side because it was too stiff to roll. The fresh hide made a fat bundle as well as a heavy one.
The younger man waited for Old Nathan to add something further, until it became evident that he had said all he cared to say. “Well,” began Boardman. He paused to clear his throat, starting to shield the cough with his right hand. Then he thrust the member with its charnel slime back down at his side, a safe distance from his pants leg.
“Rub it in clean earth,” said Old Nathan unexpectedly. His hands were occupied, but he twisted his neck so that his beard gestured up the slope where the ground was loose and dry. “Better’n water t’ clean thet, evens if there wuz water.”
“Well,” said Boardman. “Well, thank . . .” He trudged a few steps away, scuffing his boots to find suitable soil and clear it of ash and soot. “Oh,” he added as if by afterthought as he turned. “Reckon we might pay you yer price . . . though I don’t know we ought to”—his gaze glinted away from Old Nathan’s hard green eyes like lamp oil dripping from ice—”seeins as we don’t want it put about that we wuz sacrificin’ bulls ‘r any sich heathen thing.”
He did not realize that Old Nathan still held the open jackknife until the cunning man carefully set the roll of hide back on the ground. The horns, connected by a strip of skin but removed from their bony cores, flopped loose.