Chapter FourteenChallenging Snake Thickets
No longer did it wait. No longer did it crouch in passive, latent malignance. Now the evil coma unsheathed its thorns, like a knife-thrower drawing his dirks for the first time. Now the adder-toothed retama struck from beneath the disguise of yellow flowers which had caused the Mexicans to call it flower of gold. Now the deadly Spanish dagger of the devil’s head thrust and parried and lunged like a savage fencer.
Ever since Crawford had returned to the Big O, the brasada had filled him with a strange, inexplicable sense of biding its time, crouched out there, surrounding them with its sinister, purring, waiting destruction. And now, as if this was what it had anticipated, it seemed to leap forth in all its deadly, ruthless malevolence, like a be
