5

The Big Bend of the Rio Grande lay deserted and quiet beneath the searing heat of the mid-afternoon Texas sun. From the wide sweep of the river a series of sun-baked ridges and dry watercourses rose gradually northward to the base of rugged towering peaks. A cruel, merciless land, studded with mesquite and catclaw and cactus, sheltering lean jack rabbits and skulking coyotes; a forbidding, desolate region with no water and scant vegetation, dotted with the bones of animals and of men who had striven to wrest life from its barren reaches.

In all those hundreds of square miles leading back from the river there was only one sign of movement or of life; a lone, faltering human being who moved with pitiful slowness toward the mountains. A slender, bowed figure beneath the blazing sun, painfully surmounting each ridge and pausing momentarily before plunging down the other side to the bottom … only to begin another struggle up the next long slope.

High overhead, faintly glimpsed against the glittering blue of a cloudless sky, ominous black dots circled warily above the struggling youth. Gaunt buzzards, scavengers of the Border region, waiting patiently for death to come to the doomed figure far below … as they had seen death come so often in the Big Bend. Soaring high upon outspread pinions, they waited for heat and exhaustion to strike the victim down so they might descend for the feast.

Ramon Navarro knew they kept their vigil for him. They had been overhead since early morning when he turned north from the rimrock and set his cruelly beaten body to the impossible task of making his way on foot across those endless miles to the mountains where his aged father awaited his return.

With bowed head, shoulders streaked with dried blood where Lem Colter’s quirt had cut deeply into the flesh, the Mexican youth moved on in the unendurable heat.

Since early morning he had moved steadily northward. It was a trek beyond the strength of a strong man, yet the frail youth had not hesitated to undertake it. Death awaited him at the cave of the outlaws if they should chance to return. Not only death, but possible disgrace and death for his father, also, if he weakened and told the outlaws what they wanted to know.

It was this subconscious fear of his own inability to withstand further torture that had sent Ramon unhesitatingly upon the path that he knew spelled certain death. Better to die quietly out yonder in the hills where no men could wrest the secret of the Padres from him than to remain and go through the agony of betrayal.

Yet, something inside the lad would not let him lie down and die on the trail even after he had gone past the limits of his strength as he stumbled on with lips swollen and parched, eyeballs glazed by the unceasing glare of sunlight on the chalk-white hills.

Since noon, he had passed the conscious limits of his strength. Death dogged every footstep and the carrion crows of the Border swooped lower each time he stumbled forward to his knees.

He didn’t know why he struggled back to his feet each time. He had ceased wanting to live. Death loomed as merciful oblivion to his thirst-tortured throat and the unendurable agony of his slender body. Each time he fell in the scant shadow of a stunted mesquite, the relief he felt enticed him to lie still and die, but an unquenchable spirit urged him onward and upward.

His thoughts had long since lost any coherency. He no longer glanced ahead to calculate the distance remaining between him and the friendly mountains beyond the foothills where his father’s camp was pitched in the shade of cottonwoods beside a bubbling spring.

From the top of each ridge he looked only to the next barrier, the top of the next ridge. Beyond that he had ceased to look or hope.

Ramon Navarro’s was a spirit handed down to him from Conquistador ancestors, tempered and hardened by the iron will of Indian ancestry which has made the Mexican people a nation which is today rising proudly from the oppression of centuries to make its challenge for power.

Topping a last long rise, he pitched forward on his face twice before reaching the top, wavered upward each time and stumbled on.

At the bottom of the long ridge stunted willows lined a boulder-strewn wash which was still damp in the shade from last night’s cloudburst. Swaying and falling, the lad reached the bottom and pushed through the willows to fall prone in the shade, pressing his face gratefully into the moist coolness, fingers outflung instinctively to dig into the sand in a last desperate effort to find water.

Sunbaked silence lay heavy upon the wash. The lad’s fingers stopped digging and were still. He lay without moving, hidden from view by the protecting willows.

Overhead, buzzards circled cautiously, beady eyes fixed upon the point where Ramon Navarro had disappeared. Lower and lower they circled, patiently waiting to see if he would drag himself up the other bank, their business a matter of timeless patience which they possess to a greater degree than any other creature of the wild.

Miles away, another figure moved in that vast silent land. The figure of a gaunt old man with unkempt silvery locks flowing from beneath a peaked sombrero, mounted bareback on a mouse-colored burro, his moccasined feet barely missing the ground.

There was something of the look of an eagle in the old man’s black eyes. He had ridden out that morning to search for his son when the lad’s burro had returned without his rider. Old eyes beneath bushy white brows were keen and searching, parchment-like skin was drawn tightly over fleshless features. Thin knotted fingers clutched the burro’s mane as he spoke often to the sure-footed little animal.

No one realized better than Juliano Navarro the uselessness of his single-handed search for Ramon through the trackless Border wasteland, but the same spirit which had brought the lad so far on the homeward trail had sent the old man forth that morning.

So close, within a few miles, the exhausted lad lay motionless, face pressed against the damp sand, hidden between two ridges by stunted willows. His father rode on an oblique course which would carry him past Ramon’s resting place with at least a mile separating the two.

Nature, in all her cruelty and disregard for human life, has a curious way of performing wonders. The circling birds of prey were her omens of death, yet, like signal rockets sent up in the night from a stranded ship, they pointed the way to the rescuer, thus defeating their own ends by circling lazily above the lad’s body and attracting the keen gaze of the old Mexican as nothing else could possibly have done.

Juliano Navarro straightened on the back of the shambling burro with his eyes lifted to the sky, exclaiming aloud:

“Por Dios, Chato! The buzzards wait for death to come to some poor creature.”

Chato flopped scarred ears negligently at the sound of his rider’s voice. He changed his course at the pull of a bit, his sad eyes wholly disinterested in the procedure.

“We will frighten them away,” the old man explained to the little burro. “In this cruel land of the gringo, the least we can do is give burial to the dead.”

The great black carrion crows were swooping lower, riding the still air on outspread wings which they began to flap lazily to lift their awkward bodies higher as man and burro moved directly toward the willow-lined wash.

Man and beast were descending the last slope when Chato’s long ears went forward suddenly and he brayed loudly, then roused himself from a lethargic walk to an eager trot which carried the father quickly to Ramon, the burro’s master, whom he had scented.

Chato was the only witness to the reunion between father and son, pointing his muzzle upward to bray loudly as the buzzards wheeled higher and higher in the cloudless sky.