The little muscles jumped out all along Crawford's jaw suddenly. Huerta looked up, smiled faintly. "Yes—the most acute agony. I could find nothing organically wrong with him, absolutely nothing. In my office, he did not feel the pain. I took him back to the mine. As he approached the mouth of the shaft in which he had worked, the agony returned. All the symptoms of genuine pain. Sweating, trembling, tears in the eyes. I could not account for it. There was utterly no reason for him to feel the pain. I administered drugs, enough to deaden the greatest agony. It had no effect. Then I took him away from the mine. As soon as it was out of sight, the pain receded, disappeared."
Merida's face had lifted as he spoke, a tight furrow appearing between her brows. "You mean—his mind—"
"Sí," said Huerta. He was adjusting a fresh cigarette carefully in its holder. "I came to that conclusion finally. The mind plays funny tricks on us sometimes. That cave-in had been such a ghastly experience that he actually felt pain when he returned to the scene. And worse than the pain. Fear. He could never work at his trade again; he could never get near a mine without feeling that pain. And that fear. He tried to fight it. He had been a brave man once. He tried to force himself back into the mines. But in the shaft he became a sniveling, gibbering coward, crying and puking like a baby, unable to speak coherently even. Yes, the mind does play funny tricks on us—" Huerta held his cigarette holder out abruptly. "Crawford, you've spilled your coffee!"
[Chapter Three]
Huerta Was Right!
The bunkhouse and cookshack stood a few hundred yards south of the house, two adobe structures connected by a covered dog-run. Rockland's father had put them up to live in while his large dwelling was being built, constructing their walls not with mud bricks but by the older Indian method of making forms out of willow shoots and cotton sheeting, pouring the mud into these forms, and peeling off the cotton after the adobe had dried. Unless these walls were replastered every six months or so, they began to crack, and the inside of the cookshack was already beginning to show a network of minute fissures across its whitewashed surface. It was here Crawford had spent the night, an oppressive sense of the hostility which surrounded him keeping him from much sleep. After breakfast, all the crew had left the bunkhouse but Bueno Bailey.
He was gaunt as an alley cat, and he parted his long yellow hair in the middle and slicked it down with bacon grease, and he sat in the stilling morning heat of the shack, idly spinning the cylinder of his six-shooter.
"Will you stop that, Bueno?" snapped Crawford.
Bailey looked up at Crawford, who had been standing against the doorpost, staring outside. "I've seen cattle look out between the bars of a pen that same way, Glenn," he said, putting his long forefinger against the cylinder of his gun to give it another, deliberate whirl. "You don't need to get ideas. Why do you think they left me here?"