Flight From Snake Thickets

This time of night did strange things to the brush. The moon had not yet risen enough to light fully the trails winding their secretive way through the jealous chaparral, and what vague dim light did seep through the gloom held a reflected, synthetic quality. Most of the vaqueros were in a drunken stupor when Crawford and the woman left the house, getting one of Rockland's prized copperbottoms and a pinto mare from the corrals without being detected. They rode north from the spread, following one of the ancient game traces which the vaqueros used when working the cattle. In the eerie illumination, the berries ripening on the granjeno bushes formed yellow shadow patches against the velvet backdrop of darkness farther back, and the white filament of the horse-maimer was turned to a sick erubescence where it crouched on a stony ridge. Crawford caught the dim glow of the cactus's silky blossoms, and pulled his reins in a hard jerk against the pinto's neck. The animal shied to the right, away from the horse-maimer.

"Crawford!"

The woman said it softly from behind him, a controlled anger in her voice. She moved the copperbottom up beside him, peering at his face.

"It's all right," he said impatiently.

"Crawford," she said again, in that low, insistent tone.

He tried to relax his legs against the pinto. Just a walk, and they were like that. He felt his shirt sticking to his armpits and knew the sweat was showing on his face. That terrible frustration was biting at him.

"I told you it was all right," he said harshly.

A savagery entered her voice, struggling with that restraint. "Will you quit trying to hide it, Crawford. From me. From yourself. I know all about it now. I've seen it. There's no use being ashamed of it with me. It's there. We both recognize it. Admit it. That's the first thing you've got to do."

"All right. I'm afraid. Every time it moves. Every time it bats an eyelash. Every time it—"

He stopped, realizing how violent the release had been, and it seemed the mocking echoes of his voice were dying down the sombrous lanes of the brush. He turned away from her, feeling a new wave of shame.

"That's better than nothing," she said. The tone of Merida's voice made him turn back to her. She must have been waiting for that, because the movement brought his eyes around to hers. "When you wouldn't meet Quartel back at the bull-tailing," she said, "I condemned you for being a coward. I'll never do it again. You may be afraid, but I'll never condemn you for it. The only thing I'll condemn you for is refusing to face your fear."

He felt his legs relaxing slightly, and for a moment the beat of his heart diminished. He had never talked with anyone about it like this before. He had kept it locked within himself, refusing to look at it, refusing to admit it even to himself.

"Do your legs hurt now?" she said.

"A little." His voice was tight.

"Crawford—"

"All right. A lot. They hurt like hell. I hurt all over. Does that satisfy you?"

"This the river?" she said.

He pulled the pinto to a stop and stepped off stiffly. He stood there a moment with his face into the horse, trembling faintly. When he moved away from the animal, the nebulous pain subsided somewhat in his loins. Yet the animal's very proximity kept the irritation in his consciousness. When he pulled the map from his shirt, his hand twitched spasmodically, and he almost tore the paper. She took the paper from his uncertain hands, moving into the best of the bizarre light. They had ridden north in order to strike the Nueces River where the route on his portion of the derrotero started. The woman hunkered down on the ground, spreading the paper out. There was something wild about her figure, crouching there like that, her dark head brooding over the chart. She looked up abruptly. It caused him to make a small, involuntary movement, realizing how he had been watching her. He squatted down beside her, seeing the scarlet tip of her finger descend to the words printed in Spanish at one end of the chart.

"Montezuma Embrujada?"

"Yeah," he said. "You can see them right across the river. I don't know why they're called the Haunted Ruins. It's just an old Spanish fort they had here to guard the gold trains coming from the San Saba Mines."

Her finger moved down the line on the paper to the next spot. "Chapotes Platas."

"Silver Persimmons. A bunch of persimmon trees growing about five miles south of here that look silver in the moonlight. I been by there sometimes chousing cattle with Delcazar."

"Tinaja de la Tortuga." Her finger had passed on to the third spot marked on the upper portion of the map.

"Turtle Sink, we call it," he said. "There's the biggest old granddaddy turtle you ever saw living there, but I never saw any water."

"Veredas Coloradas—"

"You got me now," he said. "I told you nobody's seen all of the brasada. Delcazar knows more about it than anybody else I ever knew, but he can't tell me where Snake Thickets are, or what's in Lost Swamp."

"This is still on the portion of the map you had," she said.

He nodded. "It's new brush to me and thicker'n heel flies in spring. It takes a machete to get through."

Her finger was trailing on down the line, crossing the jagged tear in the paper, marking the spots noted on the second portion of the derrotero. "Llano Sacaguista, Puenta Piedra, Resaca Perdida—you don't know any of these?"

He shook his head. "I told you. I've never been down that way. I've heard of some. Puenta Piedra, for instance. There's supposed to be a natural stone bridge somewhere along the Rio Diablo. And most everybody in the brush has heard the tales about Lost Swamp."

"Puenta Piedra is beyond that thick brush," she said. "Why not skirt that section of the brasada until we strike Rio Diablo? If Puenta Piedra is somewhere along Rio Diablo, we should find it by following the river's course. Then maybe we can follow the chart from Puenta Piedra on down to the Snake Thickets."

"We won't get back before daylight," he said.

"I don't care." She rose with a toss of her head. "Let them know we've been hunting the chest. I told you there wasn't any time left to beat about the bush."

"And what have we got when we do reach Snake Thickets?" he said.

"Don't ask me!" She seemed to allow herself full release for the first time. Her face was flushed and she swung aboard the copperbottom viciously. "All I know is I can't sit around that house and wait for something to happen. The only way to find something is to go out and hunt for it—"

She stopped, as she saw him standing there staring at the pinto. It had a little roan in its black coloring which caused the dark spots to run over into the white patches, giving a sloppy, splotched effect. It stirred faintly, snorting. Merida saw what that did to him.

"Crawford—"

There was a plea in her voice. She sat quiescent, waiting. His lips flattened against his teeth. He moved slowly to the pinto, standing there, staring at the sweaty saddle. The smell of it grew in his nostrils. He was filled with the impulse to turn and run. His body twitched with it.

"Crawford—"

He put his foot in the stirrup and stepped aboard.

Silver Persimmons, Turtle Sink, Rio Diablo. They were names on the chart. They were spots in the brasada. They were names in his head and their reality blended with black letters on faded parchment. He lost all sense of time. His only consciousness was of movement. No telling how long it took them from Haunted Ruins to Silver Persimmons. The weird brush floated past in a sea of mingled pain and trembling and sweating. The stark arms of chaparral supplicated the night on every side. The cenizo's ashen hue had turned a sick lavender from recent rain, and it reeled biliously into vision and out again. Then Chapotes Platas were gleaming like newly minted coin beneath the risen moon. The woman talked sometimes, watching Crawford, in a low, insistent way.

"My mother was the curandera of the village. You have no idea how many plants those herb-women can make medicine from. On Saturday we would go to the river a mile away and gather herbs. I used to enjoy that. It was as far away from home as I got. The rest was mostly work. Nothing very nice to remember. Choking to death in the fumes of the herbs my mother had cooking constantly in the big brass kettle in our jacal. Rubbing my eyes all day in the smoke. She was stone blind from that. Grinding corn on the metate. I must have spent half my waking hours with that metate. Do you blame me for marrying CapitÁn Mendoza when he asked? I didn't love him. He was brutal and ugly. But he was stationed in Mexico City. I was fourteen at the time—"

Turtle Sink ceased to be inked words on yellowed paper and rose abruptly from the shadowed depths of the brush—a stony water hole with sand white as bleached bones covering its bottom and the scarred, mottled shell of a huge turtle barely visible in the black shadow beneath one end. They were beyond that when the sound of his breathing slid momentarily across the uppermost reaches of his consciousness. It was not as labored, or as harsh. Then it was her voice, floating in again.

"After Mendoza died, riding with Diaz, I got a job entertaining in a cafe near Collegio Militar. It was there I first met Huerta. He taught me to speak English, gave me my first taste of what money can do. Tarant had known Huerta before, and when Rockland sent him down to look into the Delcazar papers, Tarant contacted Huerta to help him. Huerta was there when Tarant came across the portion of the derrotero Delcazar's uncle had possessed. That's how Huerta knew Rockland would have it. When Huerta told me about it, I showed him the portion of the map I had—"

Now it was his legs. First it had been his breath, now it was his legs. He realized they were hanging free against the stirrup leathers. He was sitting a horse without tension for the first time since Africano had rolled him. He turned toward Merida. Maybe it was in his face.

"Your legs don't hurt now, do they?"

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."

He got onto the pinto without hesitation this time, and led down into the brown muck of the shallow water and up the other bank. Llano Sacaguista proved to be a vast open flat covered with greening sacaguista grass. He had never traversed these particular flats, and beyond this was a stretch of brush entirely foreign to him. They left Rio Diablo for a mile or so and then struck it again. A block in the river caused by some ancient upheaval rendered the land boggy here. The hollow boom of bullfrogs mingled with the other night sounds. A 'gator bellowed somewhere from the depths of the exotic brush.

"Looks more like East Texas," Crawford muttered. "I wonder if this could be Lost Swamp."

He could see the glow of excitement in the woman's eyes now. They pushed on southward with the false dawn dropping an eerie light through the brush. The boggy section fell behind, and the natural aridity of the brasada returned. They were still following the river, though it was nothing but a dry bed now, the trickle of water having ceased where it ran into Lost Swamp. A true dawn was bringing light to the sky in the east when they heard the first sound. It was a thin sibilation, reminiscent of the mesquite sighing in a light breeze. Crawford moved his pinto over beside Merida's copperbottom, halting both horses, to sit there, listening. Then he touched a heel to the pinto's flank, moving it carefully down into the very center of the river bed. The brush on either bank grew more dense as they moved on up the dry bed, and began to gather here in the bottoms now. The sound increased, too. The faint hissing was veritably ceaseless now, rising and falling in a sibilant tide. Finally the brush was so thick in the river bed they were having to force their way through. The pinto was beginning to fiddle nervously. It shied, finally, and Crawford jerked it to a stop, a vagrant wave of the old panic gripping him. He sat there a moment, trying to control his breathing.

"You wanted to know where Snake Thickets was," he said. "It looks like we're sitting right on the edge of it."

There was a vague awe in her voice. "It sounds as if all the snakes in Texas had gathered here. Crawford—"

"Don't be loco," he said, seeing it in her eyes. "We wouldn't last two minutes beyond this spot. If those Mexicans cached anything, it sure couldn't have been inside here."

"If?" Her tone was sharp; the excited glow fled her eyes, leaving them narrow and speculative as she looked at him. "You still don't believe there is any money."

"I told you I was skeptical to begin with," said Crawford.

"But the part of the derrotero you had—" she moved her hand in a vague, defensive way—"coming all this way, putting up with all that back there—Quartel, Huerta, Whitehead—surely—" She stopped as it must have struck her. A reserve crossed her face, tightening the planes of her cheek, and that speculation deepened in her eyes, accentuating, somehow, the oblique tilt of her brow. "Maybe I was right the first time," she said finally. She leaned toward him slightly. "I guess I should have seen it before this. You're hardly the type, are you? Money wouldn't mean enough to you to put up with that." She stopped again, studying him, and then a faint smile stirred her lips. "Which one of us do you think murdered Otis Rockland?"

He met her eyes for a moment, almost sullenly. Then a vague unrest seeped through him. His saddle creaked as he shifted on the pinto, and he turned his head upward, sniffing. She must have taken it for a discomfort arising from her scrutiny, for that smile on her lips spread perceptibly.

"I didn't think you were that righteous," she said.

He brought his eyes back to hers with an effort, staring a moment before he comprehended. "Look," he said, then, with a careful deliberateness. "I don't give a damn about Rockland being killed. It's me, see. It's purely a selfish motive. I told you. A man gets tired after a while. He gets tired jumping like a jack rabbit every time a tree toad chirps. He gets tired running the brush all day and all night to keep one jump ahead of those badge-packers. He gets tired living on raw meat because he's afraid to build a fire, and sleeping in a bunch of mesquite because he can't get near enough a house to get a blanket, and scratching his face off because he hasn't even got so much as a knife to shave with."

"Then why didn't you leave?"

He opened his mouth to say it. Then he closed it again, staring at her. Finally he shrugged sullenly. "It's my country, that's all."

"Is it?" she said. "Or maybe I'm wrong again. Maybe Quartel was closer to the truth than any of us. Where do you pin the badge? On your undershirt?"

"I didn't think you'd understand," he said.

"It would be the most logical reason for your staying, through all that," she said, studying him. "If you really are hoping to find Rockland's murderer, that would be the most logical reason."

"Let's close the poke," he said.

"And maybe that about your legs is wrong, too," her voice probed relentlessly. "That would be a pretty good blind. Who would suspect them of sending in a lawman who couldn't even sit a horse?"

She must have meant it to sting him. He saw some strange satisfaction in her face as he stiffened perceptibly.

"No—Merida—" He held out his hand, losing for a moment all sense of the heavy antipathy which had fallen between them. Then it was that restlessness, coming again, through the consciousness of her mocking eyes on him. The pinto began to fiddle around in the sand, and the woman's copperbottom raised its head, delicate nostrils fluttering. Merida looked at the animals, frowning.

"What is it?" she said.

A puff of wind ruffled Crawford's ducking jacket against his ribs. He turned in the saddle, staring northward. It was light enough with dawn now for him to discern the blackening clouds on the horizon, above the pattern of brush. The breeze whipped through the brasada anew, strong enough now to drown out the incessant hissing which emanated from Mogotes Serpientes. Mesquite rattled mournfully to the wind. A mule deer broke from chaparral with a clatter behind the horses, bounding across the river bed in frightened leaps. The pinto snorted and began fighting the bit, whirling in the sand.

The woman shivered with the sudden chill, calling again, a vague fear tinging her voice. "What is it?"

He could hardly answer. The plunging, rearing pinto had filled him again with that panic, and he was gripping frantically with his legs, blood thickening in his throat, choking him up, sweat breaking out on his face.

"Norther." He finally got it out. "Hits like this sometimes in the spring. Better get to shelter quick as we can. It looks like hell is going to pop its shutters. Delcazar used to have an old jacal on the Diablo. It's south of us somewhere along the bottoms. He and I used to hole up there when we were hunting—"

He was fighting the pinto all the time he shouted, and he could hold it no longer. Frothing at the mouth from battling the bit, the horse wheeled wildly, tossing its head, and bolted up the bank of the river. The wind had risen to a veritable gale already, and the ducking jacket whipped about his torso with a dull slapping sound as the pinto burst through the first growth of chaparral. A hackberry rose ahead. Crawford reined the horse aside desperately, sliding off on one flank to get beneath the branches. He was shaking with panic now, and the pain was in his tense, quivering legs.

"Crawford, Crawford—"

It was Merida's voice behind him. Her animal made a hellish clatter going through a mogote. Then that was drowned in the howl of the rising gale. Crawford was dimly aware of his own choked sobbing as he fought to stay on the frenzied pinto and turn it southward toward Delcazar's jacal. His consciousness of the norther was only secondary to the terrible animal panic in him. The black clouds had risen like a pyre of smoke over the northern horizon and were descending on the near brush like an awesome, clutching hand. Already rain was beginning to pelt the thickets. The howling wind tore a pendent bunch of mesquite berries off its bush as Crawford raced by, carrying it into his face. He shouted aloud at it, clawing wildly at the blinding mass. But mostly it was the horse beneath him. The writhing heat of its frenetic movement beating against his legs. The dank smell of its wet body sweeping him. The coarse black hair of its mane whipping into his face. The awful demoralizing consciousness of its uncontrollable run carrying him along.

He could hear his own choked, incoherent cries. The fear held him in a shaking, writhing vise now. Nopal clawed his face. A post-oak branch struck his head with stunning force. He clung to the horse, bawling insanely, no longer trying to rein it, torn off one side by raking chaparral, beaten at by the trunk of a hackberry, scratched and ripped by mesquite.

"Let go, Crawford." It was Merida, calling shrilly from behind him somewhere. "Jump, Crawford, please, let go, oh please—"

"No! no!"

Had he screamed it? Someone was screaming. His head rocked backward to a blow. Sensations spun in a kaleidoscope about him. The towering dominance of a cottonwood reeled around its orbit above him. Mesquite swept into his vision and out again. Sound and sight and feel became a confused pattern. Red-topped nopal swam past. The crash of chaparral dinned in his ears. The gnarled curve of a post oak reeled up and blotted out his vision with a stunning blow in the face. His own hoarse scream of agony. The drum of hoofs somewhere beneath him. The shrieking wind. White brush. Green toboso grass. Brown hackberries. Agony in his legs. The horse whinnying. White brush. Pain. Grass. Screaming. Trees. Shouting. Blood. Nopal—

"Crawford!"

He did not know he had left the horse till he found himself crouched there in a thicket of mesquite, his face against the wet, earthy smell of dampened grama grass, making small, incoherent sounds. He seemed in a void, only dimly aware of sound sweeping around him, his awesome fear the only real thing to him. It clutched his loins and knotted the muscles across his belly. His legs were still rigid and trembling with that pain. He was sobbing in a hoarse, choked way. He heard the creak behind him but didn't know what it was till the woman's voice came through the haze of primal panic.

"Crawford—"

"There. That's it. You've seen it now. All of it. Can we? Hell. How do you like it? Isn't it pretty?"

"You should have jumped." She had dropped to her knees before him and pulled his face up off the ground. The rain had soaked her clothes and when she drew his head into her arms he felt the soft, wet contour of her breast through the damp silk shirt. He was still shaken with that animal fright, and he had no control over his choked, guttural sobbing, or his words.

"I couldn't jump. It's always like that. I'm so scared I want to puke and the only thing I want to do is leave the horse and I can't." His voice sounded muffled against the supple heat of her body. He had never let it out like this before, and with the panic and pain and fear robbing him of all control, he heard all the agony and anguish and frustration of the last months flooding from him in a wild release. He was still crouched on the ground, bent into her lap, his face against her breast, his fingers clutching spasmodically at the grass on either side of her.

She soothed him like a child, stroking his head. Finally, the pain began to die in his legs. The knotted muscles across his belly began to twitch spasmodically, and then relaxed. It was no longer his hoarse, sobbing words against her body. It was only his labored breathing. The full realization of what had happened struck him, and he forced his head back in her arms till he was far enough away to see her face. The flush of a sudden shame swept darkly into his cheeks. She saw it, and her eyes widened with a tortured compassion.

"No, Crawford, no, please," she said, in a husky voice, and put her palms against his cheeks and pulled his head to one side. Her position gave weight to the leverage of her hands, and he found himself lying with his back on the ground, with his knees twisted beneath him and Merida bending over from her sitting position.

He had thought about it, before, enough times. A man did, with such a woman. But none of it had equaled this. All the shame was swept away. The sounds of the storm were blotted out. His whole consciousness was of the straining tension of her body against him and the moist resilience of her lips meeting his. Finally she lifted her head, and he could see that her eyes were closed. She sat that way a moment, without opening them, her blouse caught wetly across the curving rise and fall of her breast. He lay staring up at her, and it was not the fear or the pain or the shame any longer in him, or even the passion which had swept him in that brief, violent moment. Opening her eyes, she must have seen it in his twisted, wet face.

"Crawford," she said in a strained voice. "Crawford, what is it? What do you want?"