"Merida?" he called. He could not see enough in the semidarkness, and he ran to the windows, yanking the heavy overdrapes of dark blue velure away from the window. Noon sunlight flooded the room, turned the damask covering on the wing chair to a gleaming china blue, caught brazenly on the brass fixtures of the Franklin stove in the small fireplace. Then, blinking his eyes, Crawford saw it, and realized what the maid had meant. "In your room. Merida put it there."
On the chintz coverlet of the bed lay his rifle.
[Chapter Fourteen]
Challenging Snake Thickets
No longer did it wait. No longer did it crouch in passive, latent malignance. Now the evil coma unsheathed its thorns, like a knife-thrower drawing his dirks for the first time. Now the adder-toothed retama struck from beneath the disguise of yellow flowers which had caused the Mexicans to call it flower of gold. Now the deadly Spanish dagger of the devil's head thrust and parried and lunged like a savage fencer.
Ever since Crawford had returned to the Big O, the brasada had filled him with a strange, inexplicable sense of biding its time, crouched out there, surrounding them with its sinister, purring, waiting destruction. And now, as if this was what it had anticipated, it seemed to leap forth in all its deadly, ruthless malevolence, like a beast unleashed. Never before had it fought him so, blocking his way impenetrably, cutting and stabbing and striking every foot of the way. And Crawford met its challenge, taking a wild, savage delight in pitting all his skill and strength and experience against the brasada's violent, cunning, malicious virulence.
And he had a horse! Knowing it would take something more than an ordinary brush horse to catch Huerta, he had chosen Africano. It had not been broken to the spade bit yet, but would work with a hackamore, and the fact that they had first captured it in the brasada indicated a life of running the thickets, which would make it a good brush horse even without training. Just how good, Crawford realized the first thicket they traversed. The puro negro met the brush with a fearless, consummate skill, something uncanny about the way it could sense whether the mogotes were actually impenetrable or whether they held a weak spot which could be run through. It found holes in thickets Crawford would never have guessed were there, running headlong through the most dense ramaderos without a moment's hesitation. The kind of a horse a brush-popper dreamed about. It was a constant battle, and Crawford fought it with the wild abandon peculiar to the brasadero when he was riding the brush like this, shouting at the horse and himself and anything else that wanted to listen, and cursing in two languages at every stabbing, clawing thicket which tried to drag him off.
And the names passed by, as they had before. Silver Persimmons. Turtle Sink. Rio Diablo. Chapotes Platas. He had tried to follow Huerta's trail for a while, but when he had seen the undeviating direction it was taking he had quit tracking and had let the black out. Finally he came crashing through the fringe of chaparral into the clearing above Rio Diablo and swung down off the lathered, heaving horse, and ran toward the jacal. A man was trying to crawl across the threshold of the doorway.
"Crawford," he groaned. "I knew it was you. I heard you coming ten miles off. There never was anybody could match you cussing the brush. I guess that's 'cause there never was anybody loved it the way you do." He tried to rise abruptly, his eyes opening in a glazed way as he stared past Crawford. "Dios, Africano!"