Suddenly Agustín squared his shoulders. Not paying any attention to the spectators, he raised the deerhide hanging over the doorway of the hut and stalked outside. In single file the elders, and Nacho, followed. In the winter sun waited the others; warriors, a few women and children. Golden light of late afternoon streamed through the dwarfed trees, dappled the rocks, lit the patches of snow. Smoke from cooking fires drifted through the branches of the pines and junipers. From a brush corral a stolen horse whinnied. The people, his Tinneh, watched Agustín. But he did not look at them.
With the easy lope of the trailwise Apache he passed the waiting faces, taking a path through the trees, toward the sun, toward the east. For a moment Jack Drumm, winded and perspiring, glimpsed him among the trees. Then he was gone.
Jack turned to Nacho. The youth was staring at the ground, scratching a cabalistic pattern in the dust with a stick. Jack looked at the camp people. They were still watching the trees where Agustín had disappeared. One woman drew a blanket over her head. A child whimpered, and the mother put a gentle hand over its mouth. Nothing broke the silence except the call of a jay, the mourning of the chill wind.
"We go now," Nacho murmured.
Jack blinked in the fading sunlight. His arm bled where Agustín had cut him, and he dabbed at the wound with a dirty handkerchief.
Nacho pointed toward the huts. "We go this way."
Limping behind Nacho, Jack was aware he had twisted his ankle during the fight. In the aftermath of the struggle he began to tremble. Now that immediate danger was gone, he shook like one of the quaking aspens indigenous to the mountains. With clumsy fingers he wrapped the handkerchief around the wound in his arm and pulled it tight.
"Aqui," Nacho said. "Here. This is the place."
They stood before a low brush shelter, so cradled among giant rocks it appeared almost a natural part of the landscape.
"You go in," Nacho gestured.
Was this some kind of trick? But there appeared to be no deceit in Nacho's eyes.
"Go in," Nacho repeated, and walked away. He joined the rest under the trees; they sat on the rocks, and did not talk to one another, yet seemed united in common feeling.
Puzzled, he pulled aside the deerhide and stepped within. For a moment he stared blindly, eyes unaccustomed to the darkness.
"Jack?"
He blinked.
"Jack?"
Suddenly she was in his arms, clasping him tightly, head pressed hard against his chest, crying and laughing at the same time.
"I knew you'd come!"
It was Phoebe Larkin.
Chapter Thirteen
Holding her in his arms, body warm and soft against his, he paused for a moment, listening.
"What is it?"
"I don't know," he muttered. "I don't know." He shook his head. "Something queer is going on tonight in the camp."
"What do you mean?"
He told her about the big brush hut, about the fight, about the way Agustín walked, silent and erect, toward the east, and how the people seemed to mourn.
"Listen," he said, "even now—"
Together they peered through the chinks in the hut where the mud plastering had fallen away. The sun had fallen quickly behind the screen of trees, and it was twilight. A huge fire blazed in the clearing. Around it Agustín's people—the Tinneh—were ranged. Someone harangued them in the sibilant Apache tongue. A meeting was taking place.
"What are they doing?" Phoebe whispered.
"I don't know."
"What will they do with us, Jack?"
"I don't know that either," he admitted.
She shuddered, pushing a strand of hair back from her face. He saw her face dimly, very pale, in the gloom of the hut.
"They came so quick, that night along the river! I was cleaning some wild celery. All of a sudden there they were, swarming all over the place like—like bees! I shot one—I always carried the derringer in my—bosom. But one of them grabbed me and tied me up and threw me over a horse. Mr. Sloat came running, then, and tried to help me, but—" Her voice trailed away in a half sob.
"No need to talk of it now," Jack comforted, patting her shoulder.
He went to the doorway, pulled aside the deerskin flap. After a moment he slipped outside. When he returned his face was puzzled.
"There's no one out there. I mean—no guard!"
"What does that signify?"
"Our situation appears to have changed in some way."
He could see the spark of hope in her eyes.
"Maybe—maybe they're going to let us go!"
"Hardly likely! And there's no one so unpredictable as an Apache. If we tried to get out of here, they'd cut our throats, quickly."
"What must we do then?"
In distress she clung to him. The red hair, loose and flowing, lay silkily against his cheek, the ripe swell of her thigh pressed against the hard muscles of his own. Voice trembling, but not from fear, he muttered, "Wait, I guess."
"I suppose I should be scared. I was, till you came. Now I'm not anymore. Maybe they'll kill us, Jack, but—but somehow I'm happy! Happy you came, happy we're together, even in a scary situation like this!"
His arm girdled her slender waist in the poet's narrow compass. All that's good and all that's fair. At the meeting in the clearing someone pounded a drum; the pulse in his ears thudded in time to the savage beat.
"Phoebe," he said thickly. "Phoebe, I—" He touched her hair, feeling pleasure as the coppery strands sifted through his calloused fingers.
"What is it, Jack?"
He carried her to the pile of skins in a corner of the hut and they sank down clasped together in ecstasy that was strange and wondrous to John Peter Christian Drumm. He hoped it was wonderful to Phoebe Larkin also, and finally believed on good evidence that it was.
Afterward they lay for a long time in each other's arms. Moonlight, light from a winter moon, shone fitfully through cracks in the brush hut. The air grew cold but they were warm in their nearness. The meeting of the Tinneh was still going on. The voices, the drum, came to them only faintly.
"Do you love me, Jack?"
Unbidden in his mind came a quick image of Cornelia Newton-Barrett. He ought, of course, to feel very guilty, but somehow he did not; that troubled him. To cover his confusion, he equivocated.
"Do you love me?"
As always, she was quick and forthright in her answer.
"It seems like I always have, and I know I always will! How could it be any other way? When the Prescott stage came into your place along the river, arrows sticking out all over it, and I saw you standing there, something—something inside of me trembled. Oh, I couldn't give it much thought right then—Mr. Meech was hot on our trail—but a shiver went through me, and I said to myself, 'This is it, Phoebe Larkin! This is it—the real thing—and now you're on the run and won't probably ever see him again.'"
Reminded, he told her, "You need not worry any longer about Mr. Meech; he has given up the pursuit. It seems old Buckner fell down the stairs and broke his neck. His relatives have balked at spending any more money to catch you—you and Beulah Glore."
"He didn't!"
"He did, indeed."
She rose on an elbow to face him. "I can hardly believe it! I mean, to have been chased so long—" She sighed. "Still, I feel sorry for poor Mr. Buckner. He was lonely, I suppose, but he didn't know how to love anyone." For a long moment she was silent. Then she said, "It's—what do you call it? Ironic—yes, that's the word! It's ironic that I don't have to worry about Mr. Meech anymore, but now I've got to worry about—about—" She wept, burying her face against his shoulder. "About—about us! I don't mind dying so much, but I don't want to lose you!"