Free Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy

there and shot up about a box of shells apiece and then they left
     out.
    Was anybody hit?
    Not that I ever heard of. We hit the car a time or two. Knocked the windshield out.
    Did you get the horses across?
    We did.
    How many head was it?
    It was a few. About seventy head.
    That's a lot of horses.
    It was a lot of horses. We was paid good money, too. But it wasnt worth gettin shot over.
    No sir. I guess not.
    It does funny things to a man's head.
    What's that, sir?
    Bein shot at. Havin dirt thowed on you. Leaves cut. It changes a man's perspective. Maybe
     some might have a appetite for it. I never did.
    You didnt fight in the revolution?
    No.
    You were down there though.
    Yes. Tryin to get the hell out. I'd been down there too long. I was just as glad when it
     did start. You'd wake up in some little town on a Sunday mornin and they'd be out in the
     street shootin at one another. You couldnt make any sense out of it. We like to never got
     out of there. I saw terrible things in that country. I dreamt about em for years.
    He leaned and put his elbows on the table and took his makings from his shirtpocket and
     rolled another smoke and lit it. He sat looking at the table. He talked for a long time.
     He named the towns and villages. The mud pueblos. The executions against the mud walls
     sprayed with new blood over the dried black of the old and the fine powdered clay sifting
     down from the bulletholes in the wall after the men had fallen and the slow drift of
     riflesmoke and the corpses stacked in the streets or piled into the woodenwheeled carretas
     trundling over the cobbles or over the dirt roads to the nameless graves. There were
     thousands who went to war in the only suit they owned. Suits in which they'd been married
     and in which they would be buried. Standing in the streets in their coats and ties and
     hats behind the upturned carts and bales and firing their rifles like irate accountants.
     And the small artillery pieces on wheels that scooted backwards in the street at every
     round and had to be retrieved and the endless riding of horses to their deaths bearing
     flags or banners or the tentlike tapestries painted with portraits of the Virgin carried
     on poles into battle as if the mother of God herself were authoress of all that calamity
     and mayhem and madness.
    The tallcase clock in the hallway chimed ten.
    I reckon I'd better get on to bed, the old man said.
    Yessir.
    He rose. I dont much like to, he said. But there aint no help for it.
    Goodnight sir.
    Goodnight.
    THE CABDRIVER would see him through the wroughtiron gate in the high brick wall and up the
     walk to the doorway. As if the surrounding dark that formed the outskirts of the city were
     a danger. Or the desert plains beyond. He pulled a velvet bellpull in an alcove in the
     archway and stood back humming. He looked at John Grady.
    You like for me to wait I can wait.
    No. It's all right.
    The door opened. A hostess in evening attire smiled at them and stood back and held the
     door. John Grady entered and took off his hat and the woman spoke with the driver and then
     shut the door and turned. She held out her hand and John Grady reached for his hip pocket.
     She smiled.
    Your hat, she said.
    He handed her his hat and she gestured toward the room and he turned and went in, brushing
     down his hair with the flat of his hand.
    There was a bar to the right up the two stairs and he stepped up and passed along behind
     the stools where men were drinking and talking. The bar was mahogany and softly lit and
     the barmen wore little burgundy jackets and bowties. Out in the salon the whores lounged
     on sofas of red damask and gold brocade. They wore negligees and floorlength formal gowns
     and sheath dresses of white satin or purple velvet that were split up the thigh and they
     wore shoes of glass or gold and sat in studied poses with their red mouths pouting in the
     gloom. A cutglass chandelier hung overhead and on