The Crossing (The Border Trilogy, #2)

by Cormac McCarthy

When he told them where he came from he was surprised to find that they knew that country also but of it they would not speak. No one tried to trade horses with him. No one asked him why he had come. They cautioned him only to lay clear of the Yaqui country to the west because the Yaqui would kill him. Then the women packed for him a dinner of some dried and leathern meat or machaca and parched corn and sootstained tortillas and an old man came forward and addressed him in a Spanish he could scarcely understand, speaking with great earnestness into the boy’s eyes and holding his saddle fore and aft so that the boy sat almost in his arms. He was dressed in odd and garish fashion and his clothes were embroidered with signs that had about them the geometric look of instructions, perhaps a game. He wore jewelry of jade and silver and his hair was long and blacker than his age would seem to warrant. He told the boy that although he was huérfano still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself. He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them. ...