The animal moved toward the fringe of brush surrounding the clearing. Crawford walked close in by its side, tugging incessantly forward on the reins, talking in that soft low tone. The animal's hoofs crackled in the brush underfoot. It snorted once, pulling peevishly at his tight grip on the shanks of the bit. He twisted them upward slightly and the horse responded to the bit against its roof, quieting. They had almost reached the edge of the mogote when the shot crashed.
The horse was jerked over against Crawford by the force of the bullet going through its body. Then it reared into the air, screaming. Desperately Crawford tried to retain his hold on the reins, yanking the horse on ahead, throwing the whole weight of his body into it. He managed to fight the plunging, rearing animal a couple more steps toward the brush. Then the beast's violent spasms tore his grip loose of the reins. With the animal still forming a shield in that last instant, he threw himself in a headlong dive for the thicket. Another shot roared behind him, and the horse screamed again, and then Crawford was rolling into the crackling, tearing mesquite thicket. He came to his feet, pawing a cluster of berries out of his face, and plunged blindly on into the mogote.
For a long, blind run, the only sound was that incessant deafening crash of brush all about him. He burst through that first thicket and crossed a game trail and clattered into another mogote. Black chaparral this time, and stabbing junco and maddening prickly pear. Then an open patch. And another ramadero. White brush and golden huisache that filled the air with a vague, viscid odor of honey. Then that was gone and the spines of the agarita tore at his face. He broke through the agarita into a game trail that wound its secretive way through the mogotes, and he stumbled down that till it petered out into more mesquite. 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. The realization came to him in a dim, spasmodic way, with no true reasoning behind it, for he was still filled with that animal panic.
He whirled back and fought his way out of the mesquite. And then, crossing the comparatively open space of the game trail, it came to him. He stopped there. Tears squeezed from his eyes with the effort it caused him to control his breath so he could hear more clearly. It came again, small, distant, yet distinct enough. The faint rattle of mesquite berries, brushed by a passing body. The soft snap of decaying vegetation beneath a careless foot. Again it was no reasoning process. Just a wave of instinctive, animal realization of how he was trapped. Face twisting with frustrated rage, Crawford backed slowly, almost involuntarily, across the game trail into the mesquite thicket again. He moved as far back as he could, upright, and then he got down on his belly and crawled in until the roots and trunks and foliage became too thick even for that, and then he stopped.
His shirt was drenched with sweat and the perspiration dripped into his eyes, blinding and stinging. Gnats began to float in, attracted by the sweat and the blood of his scratches. At first he fought them. He rubbed his palms viciously against his face, mashing the maddening insects. He slapped wildly, gasping virulent curses. It only seemed to draw more. With a myriad of the gnats mashed wetly against the cut, bleeding, stinging, itching flesh of his face, and with a veritable cloud of them buzzing about his upper body, he put his head at last into his arms, and a bitter, hoarse sobbing arose mutedly from him.
At last he stopped even that. He lay there in utter, hopeless defeat. His crashing passage through the brush had frightened all the small animals into silence, but now the sounds of them began again. 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. And now, lying there, with the first awful sense of defeat losing its edge, the other began to come. They thought they had him? Damn them. Whoever it was, damn them. The anger grew in him till it struggled with the defeat. It thickened the blood in his throat till he almost choked. Had him trapped? The hell. Kill him like that? Without a gun, without anything. Think he'd just wait? Try it. Come on, try it. I'm here. Try it.
It was going through his head while he squirmed about beneath the low overhanging branches of chaparral, scratching his face and hands anew on barbed nopal and the harsh mesquite. Finally he found a maguey plant, close to the trail. He had no knife, and he had to tear at it with his fingers. They were ripped and bleeding by the time he had torn the first strip of the leathery plant.
The Mexicans cured the strips in brine and in the sun to supple it for their ropes. Crawford could do nothing but braid the stiff lengths together. And all the time, out there, approaching with the deliberateness of a man knowing the confidence of complete advantage, those sounds, rising with deadly intermittence over the other sounds. The soft crunch of a boot heel driving through the layer of rotting vegetation that covered the ground. The sibilant harshness of mesquite scraping leather. Crawford worked with swift desperation till he had a line long enough; then he knotted a hondo into one end and formed a loop. It took him half a dozen throws across the game trail to snag one of the low chaparral branches in a mogote over there. Then he hooked the line beneath a root on the opposite side of the trail so that it crossed the trail itself on the ground. He moved back into his own thicket as far as the line would permit. Then it was the waiting. Working with the rope that way, there had been no time to think. But now it had begun to come.
En la cárcel y en la cama se conocen los amigos.