He was almost afraid to speak. "No," he said, with a strange, husky wonder in his voice. "No."
He had never seen her smile with such rich sincerity, and her voice trembled with a strange, joyful excitation. "Then we can, Crawford, we can!"
He stared at her, unable to answer. Then he averted his head, lips thin against his teeth. Could they? He was afraid to answer it. Yet the pain was gone. He could sit there with the movement of the horse beneath him and its sweaty fetor reaching his nostrils in vagrant waves and feel no pain. And with the cessation of his pain, the other things became more vivid in his consciousness.
He caught the faint honeyed odor of white brush from a draw to his right, and drank in its full sweetness for the first time in months. The woman saw that, and her lips lifted faintly. They reached Rio Diablo and turned northward on its banks. It was the best water between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, yet it was no more than a stream, its mucky course following a sandy bottom that wandered in lazy loops through the brasada.
"We're crossing Delcazar's old spread now," Crawford told her. "You can see how much better watering you'd get here than where Rio Diablo turns into Rockland's holdings. That's why Rockland wanted to get hold of this stretch. When Rockland's dad first got the Big O, they say the river was bank full from one end of his pastures to the other. Couple more years and it will be completely dry there."
They passed the borders of what had once belonged to Pio Delcazar and came across a grass-grown pile of stones on a clay bank while it was still dark, a broken, hand-hewn timber thrusting its jagged end skyward from the rubble. Crawford dismounted and moved about the area, bending now and then to squint at certain spots. Then he stared across the river to where another heap of stones stood on the far bank.
"Puenta Piedra," he mused, tugging idly at his scraggly black beard. "I wonder if those stories about a natural stone bridge could have started from one the Spaniards built on the route south from San Antonio."
"How does this line up with Tinaja de la Tortuga?"
He looked upward, turning his head till he found Lucero, and raised his hand to it. "There's the Shepherd's Star. And the one the Mexicans call La Guía. They're always fixed in relation to each other. That leaves us almost due south of Turtle Sink."
"That tallies with the map," she said, spreading the parchment out against her horse's neck. "Red Trails must be right in the middle of that thicket we skirted. And this is the Puenta Piedra they mean. We have to turn east a little now to strike Llano Sacaguista."