It had a million faces. At dawn it was a dim, foggy mask. At noon it
leered in brassy, burning malignance. At night it was a cunning visage,
sometimes filled with bizarre mutations by the caprice of moonlight,
sometimes cloaked in the unrelieved sin of utter blackness. This was
the _brasada_.
Glenn Crawford did not know how many weeks of weary travel lay behind
him since he had left that cow pony by the mission and had struck out
on foot for this borderland which had provided sanctuary for so many
fugitives. Now, crouched in a thicket of black chaparral, with the
late afternoon sun falling through the branches to cast a weird shadow
pattern across his back, Crawford was filled with an oppressive sense
of its infinite mystery. It was a Spanish word, _brasada_, and there
was no English equivalent. For it was not brushland in the ordinary
sense. Not scattered clumps of mesquite dotting an arid prairie,
or small thickets of sage in a sandy plain. It was a jungle. A dry
jungle, as vast and unexplored as the Amazon jungles, stretching
through southern Texas between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande
for uncounted miles, in many places so thick as to be impossible of
penetration.
Until he had reached its safety, Crawford's primary instinct had been
the simple animal urge of escape. But once within its borders, a desire
to get at the root of this thing, and to clear himself, began to grow
in him. And though he knew the dangers involved, it had inevitably
drawn him to the Big O, where the whole thing had started.
Otis Rockland's father had established the spread here in the _brasada_
just before the Texas Revolution, shipping lumber for his house from
New Orleans. It was a strange building, in a land where most structures
were low adobe hovels. Its two stories rose gaunt and lonely against
the dark horizon of brush, the flat gambrel roof supporting a pair of
glassed-in cupolas over the front. Crawford had been here since noon,
watching it, not yet knowing what he had meant to do when he reached
the spread. The sun had burned bronze streaks through his shaggy mane
of black hair, and a scrubby, matted beard grew up into the hungry
hollows beneath his high cheek-bones, rendering his face gaunt and
wolfish. His whole body jerked with the sudden crackle of brush behind
him, and he started to whirl and rise from his hunkers and pull his gun
around all in the same violent movement.
"Never mind, Glenn, you'd never do it in time," said the man standing
there. He waited a moment, grinning, and then spoke again with a
deliberate, slow irony. "If you'll drop that Henry, we'll be able to
talk comfortably."
Crawford let the rifle slip reluctantly from stiff fingers, and then
straightened his legs out until he was standing, faced toward the man
they called Cabezablanca for his head of pure white hair. His face
was as smooth and unlined as a coffee bean, and he wore a pair of
tight buckskin leggings they called _chivarras_ this near the border,
and a blue cotton shirt, and Crawford had never seen him without the
Winchester he carried now.
"It's been a long time since you busted broncs for the Big O, Glenn,"
said Cabezablanca. "Ain't you going to say something? _Buenos días_,
for an old _amigo_, or how are things?" He waited a moment, the smile
slipping from his thin, beardless lips. "You better be civil to me,
Glenn. I'm a very dangerous man." He halted again, and when he realized
Crawford would not answer, a sullen anger tightened his lips. "Very
well, let us go and see what they want to do with you."
Crawford turned around, moving from the screen of brush in stiff, catty
steps, the tense forward thrust of his shoulders giving them that
narrow appearance. He was aware that Cabezablanca stooped to pick up
the Henry as he followed. Crawford had been watching the crew working a
bunch of horses in the corrals, and now, as he drew near, he saw that
they had pulled a new animal into the tight chute between the smaller
pen where the animals were held and the larger one where they were
worked. It was a big black animal the Mexicans called a _puro negro_,
throwing itself crazily against the bars of the chute, the whole
structure shuddering with its violent struggles. Crawford was not aware
that he had stopped till Cabezablanca came up beside him.
"Yeah, Crawford," said the white-headed man, watching him narrowly.
"Africano. Sort of brings back things, doesn't it? That black devil's
still rolling them, and nobody's broke it yet."
A man threw a dally rope over the top of the chute, noosing the black
animal's neck and pulling it tight against the bars. The beast fought
wildly a moment, banging its skull against the cedar poles. The corrals
shook again, and yellow dust rose about that section, obscuring the
horse. When the dust settled, the _puro negro_ had quit battling, and
stood with its forelegs stiff, breathing heavily through its nose. A
tall, slat-limbed Mexican climbed to the top of the chute, and the
men below handed him up a double-rigged Porter. He dropped the heavy
saddle on the horse, and a man below reached through the bars to get
the front girth, pulling the latigo through the cinch rings and yanking
the girth tight. Africano squealed shrilly, trying to jerk away again.
Then another Mexican climbed up the bars of the chute and stood at
the top, pulling his belt up. He was so broad he appeared short,
his close-cropped hair beginning to gray at the temples. His great
shoulders bunched like sides of beef beneath the strained wool of a
faded _charro_ jacket with a few tattered remnants of what might have
been gold embroidery on its lapels. He wore a pair of tight rawhide
leggings, and the rolling muscles of his thighs had burst the seams in
several places between hip and knee.