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. Crawford had seen more than one hand knocked from his horse because a branch appearing suddenly out of nowhere had caused him to shut his eyes and dodge blindly.
The sorrel was going at a frenzied, headlong pace now, caught up in the wild excitement of the chase, with the drumming pound of Bueno Bailey's dun off to the flank and the deafening crash of mesquite and chaparral echoing about them. All he could do was dodge and duck. He found himself gripping the horn with one white-knuckled hand. Cursing bitterly, he tore it off, jerking violently aside just in time to miss being raked by a thick mat of mesquite. And all the time it was going through him, keep your eyes open, and he couldn't.
A branch of chaparro prieto loomed before his face and he jerked aside and blackness blotted out sight. He heard someone yelling and did not know it was himself till he had opened his eyes again. It could not have been from pain because he had missed the chaparro. But the instant he opened his eyes, leaning off to one side that way, junco and retama were clawing at his face. With his eyes open he would have been able to see them in time to dodge. As it was, the myriad claws of the allthorn raked his flesh like the stroke of a jaguar's paw. Again his eyes clamped shut, and he tore himself out of the tangle. If it had been a post oak it would have knocked him off.
He did not know whether the screams were inside his head now or whether he actually voiced them. He felt his hands jerking desperately on the reins, but the sorrel was running wild, and he had lost control of the horse as well as himself. He was swept with violent, spasmodic waves of virulent anger at himself and pain that grew more knifing each time it struck from his loins and fear that turned his mind to a kaleidoscope of uncontrolled sensations. He was clinging with both hands to the horn now, his eyes closed, sobbing and screaming. The sorrel sideswiped a post oak. A low branch knocked Crawford backward with the blow. He reeled back to an upright position, swimming in a stunned agony. Somewhere, dimly, in what was left of his consciousness he realized there was only one thing to do. If he tried to keep on the horse any longer this way he would be battered into pulp. Yet, knowing it, there was no will left in him to act. Even that swift thought of it caused a new spasm of awful fear.
Reeling, swaying, his eyes clamped shut, his ducking jacket ripped and torn, he rode on madly through the thicket. He crashed through a mesquite thicket, and the brush clawed his cheeks to shreds. Chaparral beat him aside time and time again. His screams were hoarse and incoherent now, hardly human. The lathered, frothing wild-eyed horse was in a frenzy, its hoofs drumming the ground in a dim tattoo beneath the deafening, incessant crash of brush. Then that last blow caught him, square across the belly. It must have been a low branch. His desperate grip was torn from the saddle horn, and he was swept over the cantle and off the sorrel's rump, doubled over. He had one lucid thought before his head struck the ground, blotting out all thought.
Huerta was right!
[Chapter Four]
Unreasoning Fear
Dusk held its own singular aspect. There was something hushed about the brush at this time. Not the dead oppressive silence of noon. There were many small sounds, but the bizarre, velvety clutch of twilight seemed to subdue them. A hooty owl called tentatively from a hackberry down in some yonder draw. An invisible jack rabbit made a dim, staccato thump hopping through a distant clearing, then halted. Nearer by a lizard rustled sibilantly through the foot-deep layer of decaying brush, which for eons had been dropping from the bushes to pile up on the ground.