They rode that way, one behind the other, back along the curving gully, and out, and down the outside slope, in silence. He hadn’t said a word about her riding off without waiting for him, or about her going on beyond the water hole in spite of his forbidding her the time before. Both things were in his mind, nevertheless.
They were halfway down to the well when she stopped short suddenly. She was looking back, her horse held as rigidly motionless as her body was. Her eyes gazed past him, into the upper distance. He turned around on his saddle to look with her.
It was rising again, the same sort of slender wavering line against the spotless sky as when they had been up there. A finger of smoke, attenuated upward into nothingness.
But it was not the same one they had just left back there. That one had not kindled again.
This time it was coming from behind — from the other side of the cleft — miles and miles off in the distance.
As he looked, a clean break, a cessation, ran up through it. It had ended, as cleanly as if snipped off short by a pair of giant shears.
The sky stretched stainless before them.
Then suddenly it began again. It climbed upward and hung there, incredibly gossamer.
Then once more it ended.
After that it was no more.
They didn’t move, either of them. They waited, but it did not come again, it was done with.
When at last he turned forward once more, there was something trembling on the grip of his saddle, and when he looked down, it was his own hand.
He didn’t speak of it to Mallory. He wondered why he shouldn’t, but he didn’t. Something held him back. He supposed, of course, that it was because he’d only imagined it, it had been merely some trick of perspective, some mirage against the clear mountain air, and it would sound silly to repeat such a thing. The other man would begin to lose his respect for him.
But then he knew that wasn’t true. He hadn’t imagined it. He’d seen it with his own eyes.
And still he didn’t tell Mallory about it.
Chapter Fifteen
It began that night.
It had a beginning. It was strange to think later that it did have, that on such and such a precise moment, at such and such an exact instant, it had begun, and before then it hadn’t been.
It was an hour after sundown. They’d finished their evening meal and were sitting there playing bridge. Chris was his partner, and Mallory was Mitty’s. It was just another evening on the plantation, and they’d had many like this. There was no strangeness to it.
Mitty was holding a cigarette in her hand, leisurely scanning her cards. (She was modern, she was everyday, she was common place.) “You should have come back to me in spades that time, partner,” she said.
“Told you I wasn’t very good at this,” Mallory mumbled, crestfallen.
Chris looked across the table at Jones and smiled a little. Not because of anything in particular, just for the sake of smiling at him. She smiled at him nearly every time he looked at her, he was beginning to notice. And when she didn’t she had a sort of soulful, mooning look on her face that he liked even less. He was married, and — well, she was just a kid.
Mitty paid out her card and the rubber ended. Mallory slumped back in his chair, swept his hand in front of his face, and said, “I’ll never learn.”
Jones drew the cards toward him and began to shuffle them.
Chris parted her lips slightly, sighed, and murmured, “I love to—”
“I know,” he finished for her dryly, “you love to watch me mix the cards.” She’d said it last night and the night before. The night before that, too. Mitty was beginning to snicker about it when they were alone together in their room.
He was dealing the cards, and at the fall of the third card, to Mitty’s place, it began. Then. He stopped dead in the middle of the deal, listening.
They all probably heard it with him, they were all listening. No one moved or said anything. He held the pack poised in his hand.
It was faint, far-off, but yet deep-throated. You could detect a downbeat in it each time, one to each double concussion. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.
He was the first to speak. “What’s that? A storm coming up?”
It was too even for a storm, too rhythmic; he didn’t have to be told that.
Mallory said it for him a minute later. “That’s no storm. That’s too continuous.” And then he added, “This is the dry season, anyway. We don’t have them this time of year.”
They sat raptly listening for a moment more. Then Jones looked down at his hands and saw that he’d interrupted his card-dealing. He resumed a little jerkily, as if under mechanical compulsion.
No one picked up the cards or looked at them as they fell. They were waiting for it to stop as unaccountably as it had begun, and it didn’t. Their faces kept rotating before him, from left to right, as he turned his own in accompaniment to his card-dealing. Mallory’s was turned slightly sideward, as if listening down past his own shoulder; as if that were where the sound came from. Chris was looking straight over at Jones. She wasn’t smiling now. Her eyes were rounder now than they had ever been. There was a questioning sort of look in them, as if to say, “Is this bad? I’ll do whatever I see you do. If you show fright, then I’ll be frightened too. If you don’t, then I’ll know it’s all right.” Mitty was looking straight downward at the table. There was to her expression more of a thoughtful, introspective cast. It was more than just physical listening, it was a form of mulling-over as well. Her hand moved, absently, and a puff of smoke came from before her face.
It reminded him for a second of the way she had looked veiled by the smoke haze of that fire she had built within the stones, when he came upon her in the gully this morning.
He remembered that, then forgot again. There was no time for the past in the present.
Nobody made a move to play. A chair leg scraped shatteringly in the stillness, and Mallory got up and went outside. The screen door ebbed back in place behind him, and his figure stood revealed through it for a moment, orange from the lamplight behind him; then it receded into the gloom outside, darkening into invisibility rather than diminishing with distance.
The downbeat hurt a little, Jones noticed. Not the eardrums, for it was not loud, but the chest cavity, for it was deep. You felt it there each time.
Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump...
It was like an endless train going by. Each time a car passes you think it is going to be the last, but the next one comes, and the next.
Presently Jones got up and went after Mallory.
He could feel Chris’s eyes following him, but somehow he knew equally well, without looking back, that Mitty was not even aware of his going; was not aware of any of them around her; was lost on some other plane.
Mallory was standing by one of the uprights at the veranda rail in the dark. He didn’t turn to look at him, though he heard him join him.
“That’s it,” he said quietly.
“That’s what?”
“Ghost drums. What I told you about that they claim to have heard. Tambores de los muertos. I never heard it before myself.”
“Don’t say it in Spanish. It sounds even worse.” Jones heeled his hand to the veranda rail. Not once, but twice, three times, repeatedly. He saw that he was keeping time with it, and quit it abruptly.
It kept plucking at your chest, as though there were a hollow spot there, a sound box that it echoed in.
“What do you suppose it is, some echo or freak acoustic in the mountains?”