The boy known only as the kid was born in Tennessee in 1833, to a schoolmaster father who drank too much and a mother who died giving birth to him. At fourteen, restless and violent, he ran away from home with nothing but the clothes he wore and a few coins. He drifted southward through the towns and backwaters of the American frontier, living by scraps and odd jobs, sleeping in ditches and sheds, fighting with whomever crossed him. Violence trailed him like a shadow. He carried a pistol almost as soon as he could lift one and used it freely, his life defined more by blood and chance than purpose.
He wandered through Tennessee and into Texas, finding himself in the borderlands where law was thin and men made their own codes. He spent time with outlaws, gamblers, drifters, and killers. In Nacogdoches, he fought, stabbed, and was shot, but survived. Everywhere he went, men carried knives, pistols, and grudges, and the kid learned to meet brutality with brutality. He joined a ragged band of filibusters under the captaincy of a brash adventurer named Captain White, who dreamed of stirring revolution in Mexico. But the dream was foolish. White’s band crossed into Mexican territory only to be ambushed by lancers. Men were slaughtered, bodies strewn across the desert, and the kid barely escaped alive, wandering half-dead before being taken prisoner.
In Chihuahua, he languished in a Mexican jail, surviving on scraps. There he met another ragged American, a mysterious man with knowledge of languages and sciences named Judge Holden, though few ever called him by his full name. The judge was immense in size, hairless, with pale skin, small hands, and a vast intellect that carried an unsettling coldness. He could speak many tongues, draw with precision, and discourse on geology, history, or law, yet his presence was uncanny, his morality alien. He seemed both a scholar and a creature beyond men. Soon, the kid was freed through the efforts of a soldier of fortune named Glanton, who was assembling a company of scalp hunters contracted by the Mexican governor to rid the northern frontier of Apaches. The kid joined them.
The Glanton gang was a grim company of Americans, Irish, ex-soldiers, drifters, and killers. They rode out armed with rifles, pistols, and long knives, hardened for slaughter. Their contract promised bounty payments for every Apache scalp. What began as an enterprise of extermination quickly grew into something monstrous. They scoured the deserts of Sonora and Chihuahua, crossing rivers and mountains, enduring hunger and thirst, but when they found their quarry they killed with savage efficiency. The kid rode among them, a witness and participant in the carnage. They hunted Apache bands, cutting down men, women, and children, scalping corpses, and presenting the bloody trophies for gold. The work hardened them further, stripping them of anything resembling mercy.
The judge rode at their side, naked of hair, colossal in stature, and always talking. He spoke of war as the truest form of human destiny, of conflict as the only order, of the dance of violence that bound all men. He wrote in notebooks, sketched landscapes and plants, drew the very men he rode with, yet burned the sketches as if to claim dominion over what he observed. His philosophy unsettled the kid, but others admired or feared him. He was both a leader and something beyond a man. Wherever the gang went, he seemed to predict the land and the people. His knowledge and presence grew more terrible with each passing mile.
The Glanton gang’s campaign grew bloodier. They massacred entire villages, slaughtering not only Apaches but peaceful settlements, claiming the scalps of Mexicans and presenting them falsely for reward. Their greed consumed them. They ambushed Sonoran peasants, murdered indiscriminately, and left towns in flames. Their violence knew no border. Yet they were celebrated by corrupt officials who cared little for the truth so long as the promised blood-price was delivered. The gold filled their saddlebags, and whiskey and gambling consumed their nights. The kid watched as companions sank further into depravity, yet he too partook, his conscience blurred but not altogether lost.
They pressed deeper into the deserts, fighting tribes who resisted them. In the mountains, they fought the Comanche and Apache, whose ferocity often matched their own. Battles erupted in arroyos, gunfire echoing against cliffs, arrows blackening the sky, knives flashing in the dust. The kid saw men split by lances, burned alive, torn apart. He learned to move through death as through air. The gang left a trail of ruin across the borderlands, growing infamous.
At times, strange encounters marked their passage. They saw burning trees in the wilderness, the bodies of dead soldiers hanging like effigies, and creatures wandering the deserts. The kid felt at moments as if the land itself conspired in their violence. Yet always the judge was there, his calm voice shaping the meaning of these visions, saying all things were part of war’s dominion.
Their fate shifted when they crossed into Yuma territory. The gang, swollen with bloodlust and profit, turned from mercenary work to outright outlawry. They terrorized settlements along the Gila River, extorting, murdering, and stealing. Their greatest crime came when they seized a ferry at the Colorado River, killing its Yuma operators and establishing their own extortion scheme. But the Yuma struck back. In a sudden dawn assault, warriors attacked with overwhelming numbers, and chaos engulfed the camp. Arrows, stones, and war clubs fell upon them. Men screamed, horses stampeded, and blood soaked the riverbanks. Many of the gang were slaughtered, and Glanton himself was killed, his head crushed.
The survivors scattered into the desert. The kid fled with a few others, hunted by Yumas and soldiers alike. Days blurred into thirst, starvation, and exhaustion. Companions fell one by one until the kid alone pressed on. He found refuge in settlements, took work when he could, and drifted again through the borderlands, older now but still carrying the violence within him. Always, in the distance, the judge lingered. Somehow, impossibly, Holden survived the massacre, and the kid would see him again.
Years passed. The kid, no longer young, wandered westward into Texas and California. He lived on the edges of towns, sometimes jailed, sometimes drifting. He spoke little, carried his pistol, and bore the weight of what he had seen. He had no family, no lasting bonds, only the memory of the blood-soaked deserts and the presence of the judge, who appeared again and again like a phantom of fate. The kid had resisted the judge’s allure, refusing to embrace wholly the philosophy of total war, and this set him apart.
At last, in the 1870s, the kid—now grown into a man called the ex-kid—came to a town in Texas. He wandered through saloons, spoke little, and carried the air of one who had lived long among violence. There, on a night filled with drunken revelry, he encountered the judge once more. Holden was unchanged by time, vast and hairless, his body immense, his presence overpowering. He drank with the men, danced naked on the tables, and proclaimed that he would never die.
The kid went into the jakes behind a tavern and there, in the dim and stinking dark, the judge awaited him. What passed inside was never spoken, but when others came later they recoiled in horror. The judge emerged afterward, towering and jubilant, declaring that he would never die, that he would dance forever. He returned to the saloon, where he danced and drank and played the fiddle with unholy vigor, a figure of endless war, endless dominion, endless violence, his laughter ringing above the music and the crowd.
The kid was gone. The judge endured.