This time of night did strange things to the brush. The moon had not yet risen enough to light the trails their secretive way through the jealous chaparral, and what vague dim light did through the gloom held a reflected, quality. Most of the vaqueros were in a drunken when Crawford and the woman left the house, getting one of Rockland's prized copperbottoms and a pinto 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 illumination, the berries on the granjeno bushes formed yellow shadow patches against the backdrop of darkness farther back, and the white of the horse-maimer was turned to a sick erubescence where it on a . Crawford caught the dim glow of the cactus's silky blossoms, and pulled his 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, 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 was biting at him.
 
"I told you it was all right," he said harshly.
 
A 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 you for being a coward. I'll never do it again. You may be afraid, but I'll never 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 somewhat in his loins. Yet the animal's very kept the in his consciousness. When he pulled the map from his shirt, his hand 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, there like that, her dark head brooding over the chart. She looked up . It caused him to make a small, involuntary movement, realizing how he had been watching her. He down beside her, seeing the tip of her finger 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 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 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 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 , splotched effect. It stirred faintly, snorting. Merida saw what that did to him.
 
"Crawford—"
 
There was a plea in her voice. She sat , waiting. His lips against his teeth. He moved slowly to the pinto, standing there, staring at the sweaty saddle. The smell of it grew in his . 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 brush floated past in a sea of pain and trembling and sweating. The arms of chaparral the night on every side. The cenizo's had turned a sick lavender from recent rain, and it reeled 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 of the herbs my mother had cooking constantly in the big 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 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 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 , 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 . 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 , and her voice trembled with a strange, excitation. "Then we can, Crawford, we can!"
 
He stared at her, unable to answer. Then he 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 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 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 . Crawford dismounted and moved about the area, bending now and then to at certain spots. Then he stared across the river to where another heap of stones stood on the far bank.
 
"Puenta Piedra," he , 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 in relation to each other. That leaves us almost due south of Turtle Sink."
 
"That with the map," she said, spreading the parchment out against her horse's neck. "Red Trails must be right in the middle of that 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 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 traverse............