Les Savage

“ Halfway through, the spread of mesquite became entwined with chaparro prieto and Spanish dagger that met his every movement with a vicious stab of its dirklike growth. He found himself fighting a frantic, useless battle to penetrate this thicket farther; it had brought him to a complete stop and, standing there, chest heaving, face dripping sweat, he could see that the impenetrable mogote was on the rim of a draw, and that it grew on down into the bottom of the draw, choking it full. Even if he could manage to fight his way through the thicket, he would be exposed, crossing that draw. ”

“ They pushed on southward with the false dawn dropping an eerie light through the brush. The boggy section fell behind, and the natural aridity of the brasada returned. They were still following the river, though it was nothing but a dry bed now, the trickle of water having ceased where it ran into Lost Swamp. A true dawn was bringing light to the sky in the east when they heard the first sound. It was a thin sibilation, reminiscent of the mesquite sighing in a light breeze. Crawford moved his pinto over beside Merida's copperbottom, halting both horses, to sit there, listening. ”

“ The throng about the large cedar-post corral was oddly subdued. Some of the vaqueros had dragged the blue bull over to the cooking fire for Jacinto to spit, but the gross cook had left the carcass lying on the ground. He stood with the middle bar of the fence making a deep indentation in the incredible protuberance of his stomach as the crowding vaqueros pressed in from behind.
"Madre de Dios, Crawford, why do you let him do this thing?" wailed the cook, running his fat hands nervously up and down the rail. "I don't want to see a man die." ”

“ I am the best goddam rider in the world. I am—"
"Don't be a boor," said Huerta, in faint disgust.
"A what?" Quartel wheeled the horse around in a growing rage, the sweat greasing his coarse face. "I'll show you." He started pounding his chest again. "I'll show you who's good. I'll make you a bet. I'll bet you a talega full of gold pesos that I can, blindfolded, with one end of the reata tied to my own neck and not to be touched by my hands, riding a bareback horse of your own choosing, forefoot each of any ten bulls we got in a pen, and break their necks." ”

“ The horse was as wild and frenzied as Crawford now. Two beasts filled the narrow confines of the corral with their crazed screams, forming shadowy, thundering, pounding, running shapes back and forth between the fences, the whole structure shuddering as one or the other smashed into the sides. Crawford did not try again to climb the fence. Hands bloody, clothes covered with dirt, shirt torn, all his wild concentration was on avoiding the mad, blind rushes of the killer horse. He found himself backed up against the door leading into the chute, facing the charging horse. ”

“ The oak branch knocked Quartel's sombrero off his head—he would have lost it but for the tie-thong—and tore at the cantle of the saddle so violently the whole rigging shrieked. There was a great mass of thorny junco just beyond the tree, growing as high as the pelicano's head, and a less skillful man would have been ripped to bloody shreds before he got back onto the saddle. Crawford could hear Quartel's violent grunt and thought sure the man was swinging up too soon and would be knocked back down by that branch. ”

“ Crawford did not see it till a flashing motion filled the lower corner of his vision. Again he heard the sharp thump of the snake striking that pechero, and saw the frustrated serpent drop away from the shield in a stunned way. The horse was in a veritable frenzy now, lather foaming its mouth, screaming and whinnying and fighting the hackamore madly without actually trying to change its direction. It was no longer only the hissing all about them. It was the movement. On every side the thickets seemed to have come alive. ”

“ Crawford's voice turned the aged Mexican, a rusty black frying pan still held in one gnarled fist. His face was seamed like an ancient satchel, and he squinted with the effort of focusing his rheumy eyes on Crawford. His soiled white cotton shirt hung slack from stooped, bony shoulders, and the inevitable chivarras were on his skinny legs, glistening with daubs of grease. They gazed at each other in an uncomfortable silence, and finally Delcazar made a vague movement with the frying pan. ”

“ Another serpent, as big around as his lower leg, had crawled from a mogote of huisache. Again it was the soft snap of decaying vegetation that lay thickly over the ground, and the cessation of this as the snake saw them and stopped, and that swift coiling movement, and that sibilant rattle.
"Crawford," said Merida, in a hoarse, strained whisper. "We can't move. They'll strike as soon as we move. They're all around us and we can't move—"
"No," he said gutturally. "Remember they don't often strike above the hip. You've got those batwings. Just keep your feet, that's all, just keep your feet." ”

“ A picture formed in Crawford's mind that filled him with a growing tension. A picture of Quartel blindfolded on that trigueño in the corral with one end of a rawhide dally tied about his neck and ten snorting, stamping, vicious ladinos tearing up the turf and the strange sighing sound rising from the crowd of sweating, stinking vaqueros every time he threw the bull. It didn't help a man. It didn't help a man while he unhitched the rawhide lashing on the saddle skirt from about the dally and shook out the loops and watched the braided hondo slide down the slick rope. ”

“ It will grow, Crawford, until you are that way completely, until these flashes of your former self cease to come. I told you about that miner in Monterrey—"
"You told me!" Crawford choked off the shout, staring sullenly at Huerta. He spoke finally, again, controlling it with hoarse effort. "Think I don't know."
"You do know," said Huerta. "However, it is not hopeless. For most diseases, there is a cure, even for those of the mind. Doctors are only human beings. They can only cure what they have the knowledge to cure. ”

“ Then he dropped the big coffeepot with a clang and began running his way, grunting as each foot struck the ground, his short, bandy legs looking as if they would collapse every time the prodigious weight of his torso descended on them in a step.
"Dios, Crawford," he shouted. "Válgame Dios. What happened? Que hace? Who is it? Are you all right? What happened?"
He was halfway to Crawford by the time Aforismo stumbled into view at the bunkhouse door, pulling bare brown legs into his stiff, greasy chivarras and blinking sleepily. ”

“ Jacinto was cringing behind Crawford, wringing his hands, sweat dribbling down his coarse face. "En el nombre de Dios, Aforismo, let him go, he never did anything to you, he never harmed one little hair of your head, I hate violence so, oh, I do hate violence so, my father he always tell me there are two sins in the world, work and fighting, and—oh, por Dios, Aforismo, Santa Maria, nombre de mi madre, let him go, let him go—"
"They say down in Durango a coyote always howls loudest in the trap," said Aforismo, nudging Crawford gently back with that needle point. ”

“ A malignant branch of chaparral reached out for Quartel's head, and he dodged that and then swayed back the other way in time to miss being blinded by a clump of mesquite berries. Then he reined his horse around a growth of prickly pear and swung down off the flank as the animal burst through a last dense growth of chaparral with branches so low the ladinos had found trouble going through, and then he was out of sight.
Keep your eyes open, keep your eyes open. It kept spinning through Crawford's head like that, the fundamental dictum of brush-popping. If a man closed his eyes once he was lost. ”

“ SHERIFF ED KENMARE, weary lawman of San Antonio, whose duties hang heavy upon him, has a bulbous nose prominent among heavy, weathered features.
FORD INNES, Cabezablanca's saddlemate, is a red-bearded redhead with shrewd little eyes and a short square body which holds all the lethal threat of a snub-nosed derringer.
AFRICANO, a big black devil of a horse, is a killer nobody has been able to break. Just the thought of him drives Crawford into a trembling frenzy of fear, but he knows he must conquer Africano or go crazy. ”

“ The bull turned a flip, its shoulder striking the rump of the running animal in front, and as the falling bull struck, Quartel shoved his reins hard against the trigueño's neck to wheel inward and give himself slack on the rope. He clutched for the slackening rawhide and sent a flirt down the rope that lifted the loop off the bull's forelegs, and when he turned away, he was pulling the line in.
"Viva Quartel, viva!" shouted the vaqueros, shoving Crawford up against the fence with their shifting press and deafening him with their cheers. ”

“ Huerta acted like he wanted to help me once too. It was only part of the game he was playing."
"Lástima de Dios," cried Jacinto, clapping fat hands to his brow. "Pity of God. Now I know you must be as loco about Merida as she is about you. Only a man in love could be that blind. Can't you see what she did? That day you and she rode into the brasada must have made Merida realize, finally, that the only way you could conquer your fear was to ride Africano again. And she wanted to see you conquer your fear, Crawford. More than anything else. ”

“ His body twitched with it.
"Crawford—"
He put his foot in the stirrup and stepped aboard.
Silver Persimmons, Turtle Sink, Rio Diablo. They were names on the chart. They were spots in the brasada. They were names in his head and their reality blended with black letters on faded parchment. He lost all sense of time. His only consciousness was of movement. No telling how long it took them from Haunted Ruins to Silver Persimmons. The weird brush floated past in a sea of mingled pain and trembling and sweating. The stark arms of chaparral supplicated the night on every side. ”

“ Then it was the shadowy figure moving out of the darkness down the trail, and Crawford yanked on the maguey and it slipped off the branch and the branch snapped up with a soft crackle and caused the figure to whirl that way, his gun crashing, his back toward the thicket in which Crawford lay.
"Maybe you're a dangerous man," screamed Crawford in a terrible release, leaping to his feet and throwing himself bodily at the man, who was still firing wildly into the opposite thicket, "but this is one bronc you'll wish to hell you never climbed on." ”

“ A hooty owl started to call, somewhere far out in the brush. Then, a coyote mourning in some distant draw. The singing of a mockingbird that had stayed awake to welcome the rising moon. The rustle of lizards through the decay. And that other sound. That desultory, intermittent sound of someone moving out there.
A thin scream rang out with terrifying abruptness, jerking Crawford's head up. He lay that way a moment, up on his hands, rigid, trembling with strain. Then he lowered himself again. Only an ocelot, somewhere, out there, a big cat down from the mountains across the Rio maybe. ”

“ Africano was larger than most brush horses, though not any taller, standing maybe fifteen hands, with a prodigiously muscled rump that indicated more than a little quarter blood, and a savage, vicious action to its every movement. The animal boiled over almost before it had left the chute. Quartel had not found his right stirrup as the beast erupted, but by the time Africano hit the top of its first buck, the man's foot was in the oxbow, and when the black stiff-legged down into the ground, Quartel was set for it. ”

“ You've lived in the brasada most of your life. Money to you represents no more than a barren, lonely ranch like this and a herd of cattle to support it. You have no conception of what riches can really mean. Not just the horses, the servants, the jewels. The grace, Crawford, the ease, the beauty, the way of life. ”

“ It was starting to blossom in Crawford now, a strange, dim exaltation. "Do you realize what it did to me? To come out on the porch that morning and see you standing there beside Whitehead's body, knowing what it meant?" Suddenly he knew how she must have felt. "It doesn't happen to a person often in her life." Suddenly he knew what she had been talking about. "That sort of feeling."
That sort of feeling. He looked around at Jacinto, his eyes wide.
"Sí," said Jacinto. "You understand now. It would take a lot of man to accept it, Crawford, even when he understood. It would take her kind of man. ”

“ That is unfortunate. I am a very dangerous man, Crawford."
"That's your horse." Quartel nodded at a ewe-necked old paint standing near the corral fence. It had rheumy eyes and rope scars all over its gaunt shoulders and a saddleback the shape of hickory bow and the weediest legs Crawford had ever laid eyes on. Yet, standing even this near the animal, Crawford could feel that nebulous excitation begin to rise in him. Or was it excitation? The sweat broke out on his palms. ”

“ He turned abruptly toward the corral.
"Where you going?" shouted Quartel.
"To get a decent horse," said Crawford, without turning back. "You want to try and stop me?"
He was sweating again. It was a little sorrel pony with a running walk so relaxed Crawford could hear the teeth pop at every step like a Tennessee walker, and a rocking-chair would have been harder on a man. Yet he was sweating again.
"They say the hombres who curse the brasada most love it the best," said Aforismo. "You must love it like a woman." ”