> ...on the inside of his lower arm was there tattooed a number which Toadvine would see in a Chihuahua bathhouse and again when he would cut down the man's torso where it hung skewered by its heels from a treelimb in the wastes of Pimeria Alta in the fall of that year.
Here McCarthy employs again to great effect his device of a narrator that knows and will tell of all physical events past and future. The narrator however does not know, though will speculate upon, thoughts of the characters:
... with them now rode a boy named Sloat who had been left sick to die in this place by one of the gold trains bound for the coast weeks earlier. ... He rode near the head of the column and he must have counted himself well out of that place but if he gave thanks to any god at all it was ill-timed for the country was not done with him.
Now that's how you introduce a character!