Then it was the shadowy figure moving out of the darkness down the trail, and Crawford yanked on the maguey and it slipped off the branch and the branch snapped up with a soft crackle and caused the figure to whirl that way, his gun crashing, his back toward the thicket in which Crawford lay.
"Maybe you're a dangerous man," screamed Crawford in a terrible release, leaping to his feet and throwing himself bodily at the man, who was still firing wildly into the opposite thicket, "but this is one bronc you'll wish to hell you never climbed on."
[Chapter Five]
Huerta Makes a Proposition
At dawn, it was the birds, mostly, during the spring months, like this. They filled the dim undulations of brush with a constant, shrill twittering. Bobwhites shrieked from a draw full of white brush, and blue quail cooed beneath the cejas of green brazil, and turkeys gobbled down in a dry creek bed where they were fattening on elm mast.
Through all this treble cacophony, Glenn Crawford walked heavily up the road leading the shaggy black cow pony. It was Jacinto who saw him first. Though the sun had not yet risen, smoke curled from the kitchen, and the gross Mexican was just outside the door filling the coffeepot from the water butt. It cost him some effort to straighten up when he caught sight of Crawford. He stared blankly. Then he dropped the big coffeepot with a clang and began running his way, grunting as each foot struck the ground, his short, bandy legs looking as if they would collapse every time the prodigious weight of his torso descended on them in a step.
"Dios, Crawford," he shouted. "Válgame Dios. What happened? Que hace? Who is it? Are you all right? What happened?"
He was halfway to Crawford by the time Aforismo stumbled into view at the bunkhouse door, pulling bare brown legs into his stiff, greasy chivarras and blinking sleepily. Someone must have asked him what it was, for he grunted something over his shoulder and came on out. Jacinto had reached Crawford by the time he got to the front of the house, and it was there Crawford halted the horse. The tremendous Mexican stood with his great belly heaving from the run, staring blankly at Whitehead. He started to reach out and touch the man, then dropped his hand.
"Is—is he—"