She wheeled and trotted off, without waiting. She and her horse cast a great blue shadow athwart the ground, against the preliminary rosy fuming of the still unrisen sun.
Mallory said, with an air of casual indifference that somehow didn’t quite go over altogether successfully, “Might be a good idea not to go too far off the finca. Plenty of room for you to work out your horses inside its limits.”
Jones stopped with his foot to the stirrup. “Why?” he asked. “Any particular reason?”
“Oh, no, no particular reason. Just that I figured you were riding on empty stomachs and wouldn’t want to be out too long. You know, distances can be deceptive in this clear mountain air.”
Jones had a feeling he hadn’t quite meant that, but saw no reason for lingering there to lock conversational horns with him, especially since Mitty was by now nearly out of sight.
He overtook her only with a good deal of difficulty, and as he finally came up alongside he inquired ruefully, “Hey, are we supposed to be riding together or separately?”
“Why, I was holding him in waiting for you,” she jeered.
“Oh, you were. Miss Valkyrie! Well, try to catch up with this.” He spurred to a slingshot velocity for a brief, dust-raising stretch. In no time she had shot past him.
“Try to catch up with what?” she inquired coolly when she had again allowed him to overtake her.
“Where’d you learn to ride like that?” he grunted.
“Fredericks taught me.”
He promptly let the subject drop, as he invariably did whenever that name came into it.
“Look,” she said presently, as they ambled on, “isn’t this worth coming out to see?”
A curious piebald shadow and lividness had developed across the landscape as the sun progressed in its ascent. There was something unreal about it, like a stage setting bathed in colored spotlights and viewed from the dimness behind the footlights. For they were so close in under the slope of the mountain, in fact midway up on it and of it itself, that the sun for them had not yet been able to top its crest, and where they were was still blue shade, save for a few flesh-toned fissures here and there. Yet miles below and behind them, sunlight already blazed in undiluted strength, and luminous zones of coral-pink, fuchsia, magenta, and orange-gold glowed up at them, like vivid tiles or the patches of a shimmering crazy quilt.
“We get it later than the lowlands do,” he murmured.
“It looks later down there to the eye, and yet we can already see it right now from where we are, before we’ve caught up to it ourselves. That’s what gives you that curiously unreal feeling,” she analyzed.
They went on again. There was no such thing as a bridle path, of course. They had to pick their own way, improvising as they went, but the terrain was fairly passable. They were already too high up here for any full-fledged jungle.
“There it comes now,” she said. “Watch. It’s breaking cover.”
It topped the crest, like a geyser, spraying the slopes with white and silver brightness, and suddenly all the remaining shadow had been swept off them at once and was gone, not to reappear again until night brought it back.
He squinted, turned his head aside, and said, “Whew! It’s sure strong.”
Almost immediately, as in a desert, heat became noticeable. Not the enervating, humid heat they had escaped from on the coast, but a dry, baking heat, absorbed by the boulders and rocky, arid mountainside soil and given back again, as by bricks in an oven, in refracted exhalations that caused the air to quiver.
She turned and pointed behind them down the mountainside. “Look. Look how far we’ve come. Look back, you can see nearly the whole finca down there below us. Look, see their little hats, where they’re picking the berries? Like pin points. And you can see the roof of the house — and those little things around it must be the shacks. It’s like looking at something through the wrong end of a telescope.”
They had already put a considerable distance between themselves and the outermost limits of the plantation’s cultivated area, discernible from here solely by the difference in coloring, the dark green of the bushes.
“We’d better turn back now, hadn’t we? He said not to—”
“Not to what?”
“Not to stay out too long if we want anything to eat.”
She curled her lip. “I’d rather keep on riding than eat, wouldn’t you? It’s early yet. Come on, just another quarter of an hour.”
He offered no objection, although his acquiescence was somewhat unwilling. The terrain around them was diamond-clear in the sunlight. It seemed ridiculous to think there could have been any guarded warning implicit in Mallory’s parting remark. Probably he’d only been afraid they’d lose their way, on their first unaccompanied ride around here.
She’d gone ahead again. He watched her from the rear. She rode with her head tilted back, scanning the mountaintops, imminent now and not remote, with a good deal of that same fixed intensity she had so often shown at their window and on their balcony down on the coast. It was less disturbing up here because, for one thing, it was more natural for her to look on ahead like that, and for another, the act of riding took some of the static melancholy out of it.
His horse’s bit began to lather. He reined in. “Mitty, this is far enough,” he called out to her. “Let’s go back. The horses need watering.”
She waved a casual, reassuring hand to him without turning her head. “There’s a little spring in a hollow just over the next rise. They can drink there. Come on, I’ll show you.”
He didn’t get it for fully a minute or two. Most likely the offhand manner in which she had said it had something to do with the blunting of his perceptions. She had gone down out of sight into one of the frequent recessions they had been encountering all along. By the time he had topped it in turn and joined her down at the bottom, she was already off her horse and watering it at a little struggling freshet that spilled from the rock formation, formed a little pool, meandered for a few laborious feet, and then disappeared again underground, whence it had come.
He was already in the act of dismounting before it finally hit him, as if by a sort of delayed timing. It rocked him. He left his saddle unsteadily and stood there looking at her half frightenedly, his hands against his horse’s neck, as if to help him support himself.
“How did you know file spring would be here?” he asked hoarsely.
She looked from him to the spring, uncertainly. “I don’t know. Well, it is here, isn’t it?”
“I know it’s here. But how did you know it was going to be? We only got here last night! We never came up this way before in our lives!”
“Larry, don’t get so frightened always!” she tried to remonstrate. “Your face is starting to sweat.”
“It’s the ride,” he said, brushing an inattentive forearm past it. He tried to pull himself together. “I guess Mallory told you, is that it?” But how could he tell her just where? He wondered, even as he said it.
She shook her head. “I didn’t speak to him before we left. You saw me go.”
He slumped down on a flat rock and let his shoulders go concave. He tried to light a cigarette, and he lost it between his fingers. The second one he caught just in time.
She came over and put a hand on his shoulders in a sort of mute consolation. He didn’t look up at her.
“Maybe you heard it before it came in sight,” he said gloomily, looking down at the glinting, mica-flecked ground.
“Yes, maybe. I... I guess that must have been it.”
She hadn’t, and she knew it. She was just saying that to try to make him feel better. The spring made hardly any sound. Even this close to it you could hear only the slightest occasional gurgle.