“The water, please.”
“Right.” Gregg went to the oaken bucket, uncovered it and took out a dipper of cool water. When he turned he saw that the woman was surveying the room’s bare pine walls and rough furniture with an expression of mingled revulsion and despair. He felt sorry for her.
“This place isn’t much,” he said, “but I live here alone and I don’t need much.”
“You have no woman?”
Again Gregg was startled by the contrast between the woman’s obvious gentility and the bluntness of her questioning. He thought briefly about Ruth Jefferson, who worked in the general store in Copper Cross and who might have been living in his house had things worked out differently, then shook his head. The woman accepted the enamelled scoop from him and sipped some water.
“I want to stay here with you,” she said.
“You’re welcome to rest a while,” Gregg replied uneasily, somehow aware of what was coming.
“I want to stay for six days.” The woman gave him a direct, calm stare. “Until after my son is born.”
Gregg snorted his incredulity. “This is no hospital, and I’m no midwife.”
“I’ll pay you well.” She reached inside her dress-cum-cloak and produced a strip of yellow metal which shone with the buttery lustre of high-grade gold. It was about eight inches long by an inch wide, with rounded edges and corners. “One of these for each day. That will be six.”
“This doesn’t make any kind of sense,” Gregg floundered. “I mean, you don’t even know if six days will be enough.”
“My son will be born on the day after tomorrow.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“I can.”
“Ma’am, I …” Gregg picked up the heavy metal tablet. “This would be worth a lot of money … to a bank.”
“It isn’t stolen, if that’s what you mean.”
He cleared his throat and, not wishing to contradict or quiz his visitor, examined the gold strip for markings. It had no indentations of any kind and had an almost oily feel which suggested it might be 24-carat pure.
“I didn’t say it was stolen—but I don’t often get monied ladies coming here to have their babies.” He gave her a wry smile. “Fact is, you’re the first.”
“Delicately put,” she said, mustering a smile in return. “I know how strange this must seem to you, but I’m not free to explain it. All I can tell you is that I have broken no laws.”
“You just want to go into hiding for a spell.”
“Please understand that there are other societies whose ways are not those of Mexico.”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Gregg said, wondering, “this territory has been American since 1948.”
“Excuse me.” She was contrite. “I never excelled at geography—and I’m very far from home.”
Gregg suspected he was being manipulated and decided to resist. “How about the Prince?”
Sunlight reflecting from the water in the dipper she was holding split into concentric rings. “It was wrong of me to think of involving you,” she said. “I’ll go as soon as I have rested.”
“Go where?” Gregg, feeling himself become involved regardless of her wishes or his own, gave a scornful laugh. “Ma’am, you don’t seem to realize how far you are from anywhere. How did you get out here, anyway?”
“I’ll leave now.” She stood up with some difficulty, her small face paler than ever. “Thank you for helping me as much as you did. I hope you will accept that piece of gold …”
“Sit down,” Gregg said resignedly. “If you’re crazy enough to want to stay here and have your baby, I guess I’m crazy enough to go along with it.”
“Thank you.” She sat down heavily and he knew she had been close to fainting.
“There’s no need to keep thanking me.” Gregg spoke gruffly to disguise the fact that, in an obscure way, he was pleased that a young and beautiful woman was prepared to entrust herself to his care after such a brief acquaintanceship. I think you are a good man, were almost the first words she had said to him, and in that moment he had abruptly become aware of how wearisome his life had been in the last two years. Semi-crippled, dried out by fifty years of hard living, he should have been immune to romantic notions—especially as the woman could well be a foreign aristocrat who would not even have glanced at him under normal circumstances. The fact remained, however, that he had acted as her protector, and on her behalf had been reintroduced to all the heady addictions of danger. Now the woman was dependent on him and prepared to live in his house. She was also young and beautiful and mysterious—a combination he found as irresistible now as he would have done a quarter of a century earlier …
“We’d best start being practical,” he said, compensating for his private flight of fantasy. “You can have my bed for the week. It’s clean, but we’re going to need fresh linen. I’ll go into town and pick up some supplies.”
She looked alarmed. “Is that necessary?”
“Very necessary. Don’t worry—I won’t tell anybody you’re here.”
“Thank you,” she said. “But what about the two men I met?”
“What about them?”
“They probably know I came here with you. Won’t they talk about it?”
“Not where it matters. The Portfield men don’t mix with the townsfolk or anybody else around here.” Gregg took Caley’s pistol from his belt and was putting it away in a cupboard when the woman held out her hand and asked if she could examine the weapon. Mildly surprised, he handed it to her and noticed the way in which her arm sank as it took the weight.
“It isn’t a woman’s gun,” he commented.
“Obviously.” She looked up at him. “What is the muzzle velocity of this weapon?”
Gregg snorted again, showing amusement. “You’re not interested in things like that.”
“That is a curious remark for you to make,” she said, a hint of firmness returning to her voice, “when I have just expressed interest in it.”
“Sorry, it’s just that …” Gregg decided against referring to the terror she had shown earlier when he had fired the shotgun. “I don’t know the muzzle velocity, but it can’t be very high. That’s an old Tranter percussion five-shooter and you don’t see many of them about nowadays. It beats me why Caley took the trouble to lug it around.”
“I see.” She looked disappointed as she handed the pistol back. “It isn’t any good.”
Gregg hefted the weapon. “Don’t get me wrong, ma’am. This sort of gun is troublesome to load, but it throws a 54-bore slug that’ll bowl over any man alive.” He was looking at the woman as he spoke and it seemed to him that, on his final words, an odd expression passed over her face.
“Were you thinking of bigger game?” he said. “Bear, perhaps?”
She ignored his questions. “Have you a pistol of your own?”
“Yes, but I don’t carry it. That way I stay out of trouble.” Gregg recalled the events of the past hour. “Usually I stay out of trouble.”
“What is its muzzle velocity?”
“How would I know?” Gregg found it more and more difficult to reconcile the woman’s general demeanour with her strange interest in the technicalities of firearms. “We don’t think that way about guns around here. I’ve got a .44 Remington which always did what I wanted it to do, and that’s all I ever needed to know about it.”
Undeterred by the impatience in his voice, the woman looked around the room for a moment and pointed at the massive iron range on which he did his cooking. “What would happen if you fired it at that?”
“You’d get pieces of lead bouncing round the room.”
“The shot wouldn’t go through?”
Gregg chuckled. “There isn’t a gun made that could do that. Would you mind telling me why you’re so interested?”