"No!"
Again, he did not know if it was in his head, or if he had shouted it. The very sound of the running horse seemed to fill his brain now. Each thundering hoofbeat was a separate note of agony. And more than the agony which filled him, that other something he could not define, or would not, so confused with the pain now he could not tell the two apart. Finally he could stand it no longer. Brutally, he reined in the horse. The animal brought himself to a series of stiff-legged halts that almost jolted him over its head. He swung off the lathered, heaving animal, and then, standing with his face toward its hairy wet hide, he was filled with that nausea again. He wheeled away from the horse, stumbling across the road to a pile of rubble that marked the remains of the aqueduct. With a hoarse exhalation, he lowered himself weakly to the adobe, dropping his head forward into his hands, so that the black hair fell through his grimy fingers in dank, sweaty tendrils.
"I can ride," he said aloud, in a desperate voice, "I can ride!"
[Chapter Two]
Santa Anna's Chests
It had a million faces. At dawn it was a dim, foggy mask. At noon it leered in brassy, burning malignance. At night it was a cunning visage, sometimes filled with bizarre mutations by the caprice of moonlight, sometimes cloaked in the unrelieved sin of utter blackness. This was the brasada.
Glenn Crawford did not know how many weeks of weary travel lay behind him since he had left that cow pony by the mission and had struck out on foot for this borderland which had provided sanctuary for so many fugitives. Now, crouched in a thicket of black chaparral, with the late afternoon sun falling through the branches to cast a weird shadow pattern across his back, Crawford was filled with an oppressive sense of its infinite mystery. It was a Spanish word, brasada, and there was no English equivalent. For it was not brushland in the ordinary sense. Not scattered clumps of mesquite dotting an arid prairie, or small thickets of sage in a sandy plain. It was a jungle. A dry jungle, as vast and unexplored as the Amazon jungles, stretching through southern Texas between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande for uncounted miles, in many places so thick as to be impossible of penetration.
Until he had reached its safety, Crawford's primary instinct had been the simple animal urge of escape. But once within its borders, a desire to get at the root of this thing, and to clear himself, began to grow in him. And though he knew the dangers involved, it had inevitably drawn him to the Big O, where the whole thing had started.
Otis Rockland's father had established the spread here in the brasada just before the Texas Revolution, shipping lumber for his house from New Orleans. It was a strange building, in a land where most structures were low adobe hovels. Its two stories rose gaunt and lonely against the dark horizon of brush, the flat gambrel roof supporting a pair of glassed-in cupolas over the front. Crawford had been here since noon, watching it, not yet knowing what he had meant to do when he reached the spread. The sun had burned bronze streaks through his shaggy mane of black hair, and a scrubby, matted beard grew up into the hungry hollows beneath his high cheek-bones, rendering his face gaunt and wolfish. His whole body jerked with the sudden crackle of brush behind him, and he started to whirl and rise from his hunkers and pull his gun around all in the same violent movement.