Chapter TwoSanta Anna’s Chests
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, a
