But if Cholo Ramirez was indeed intended to embark on the Ghost Trail of his Indian ancestors, its entrance was not marked by cottonwood trees along a riverbank on a windswept green plain. The Ghost Trail for Cholo lay inside the incessant scream of a shorted-out car horn and the heated smell of car metal and exhaust fumes and asphalt only a block from the Alamo. That's where the paramedics pried his hands off the steering wheel of his '49 Merc and tried to abate the convulsions in his body and the hemorrhage that was taking place in his brain. While they strapped him down to a gurney, a frustrated policeman popped the Merc's hood and tore the wiring from the horn like a severed snake.