"I take it," Gault said acidly, "that you and the sheriff, and some others, don't want me in Standard County any longer. Might be I'd leave, and save you the trouble of killin' me, if I knowed why it was that you didn't want me here."
Finley smiled. It was a chilling expression on a humorless face. "Miss Esther ain't had much schoolin', but she's a tolerable good doc. She'll have you up and around inside of two, three days. Your buckskin's in the horse pen on the other side of the shed. My advice is get saddled soon as you're able to ride, and strike for some direction away from Standard County."
The deputy nodded and strode out of the shed. Gault lay for a long while, his mind milling in aimless circles. He saw Shorty Pike and Colly Fay pass in front of the open doorway, heading for the Garnett cornfield with long-handled hoes on their shoulders.
Gunhands hoeing corn. It made a bizarre picture. And it raised bizarre and disturbing thoughts in his mind.
He drifted into a troubled sleep, and when he awoke Esther Garnett was standing over him with a large crock bowl in her hands. "Deputy Finley said you was in a hurry to get well so's you could start back to your homeplace. You won't be doin' much ridin' for three, four days. And not then, if you don't start eatin'." She pulled up the milking stool and sat down and handed him the bowl.
"Sorry to put you out," he said with lingering bitterness. "I didn't aim to go and get myself shot on your property."
She ignored his heavy sarcasm. "Wasn't your fault," she told him. "All a misunderstandin'. Deputy Finley and Shorty and Colly thought you was drivin' off my cows."
There didn't seem to be any point in arguing about it. Gault gazed down at the soup, a rich brown broth swimming with grease and chunks of marrow. The thought of eating any of it caused his stomach to curl. What he wanted was a large glass of whiskey and some rest. More than anything else, a night of dreamless sleep. A night of oblivion in which Martha's terrified eyes did not haunt him.
"Eat," Esther Garnett said briskly, those clear eyes watching him from beneath the hood of her sunbonnet.
Gault dipped a spoon through the layer of grease and took some of the broth in his mouth. It was as bad as he had feared. After a few spoonfuls he put the bowl aside.
"Come breakfast time," she told him, "you'll feel more like eatin'." Gault lay back on the hay. For some time those clear eyes continued to look at him from beneath the hood of the sunbonnet. Then, in a gesture of mild irritation, she shoved the sunbonnet back with her forearm and let it hang down her back.
The change was startling. At first Gault was struck by what appeared to be her extreme youth. Her oval face was as smooth and as delicately tinted as Dutch china. She's only a child! Gault thought in amazement. He saw almost immediately that this was a mistake—there was something childlike in the blue clearness of her eyes, and in the delicacy of her complexion—but she was no child. Gault wondered about her age and guessed it at eighteen. Almost immediately he revised it upward to twenty, and finally settled on twenty-four or -five.
It took him several minutes to find the right word to describe her, and it came as something of a surprise when he realized that the word was "beautiful." It had not occurred to him before that beauty was such a rare thing on the frontier. Martha had not been beautiful—she had been pleasing to look at, and he had loved her—but she had not been beautiful.
He realized that he was staring. But apparently Esther Garnett was used to being stared at. She smiled and picked up the bowl. "Deputy Finley said your name is Gault."
Gault nodded. The thing about her that fascinated him was the rosy tint of her skin. In the Southwest a woman's face tended to become dark and leathery. At the age of thirty she was an old woman. Mostly because of the heat and the wind. At forty they began losing their teeth, and often their hair. It had something to do with not getting enough of the right things to eat, Gault had heard. He wasn't sure about that, but he did know that Southwest summers were hell on women. Or on anything at all, for that matter, that was delicate and lovely to look at. Wild flowers that sometimes dotted the prairie lasted only a few days. And Gault was sure that Esther Garnett too would soon begin to fade. But for the moment she was beautiful.
That night a sudden thunderstorm rolled in from the west, and for an hour the night shuddered with thunder and lightning, and rain slashed into the shed through the poorly chinked walls. Gault was grateful for the storm, and while it lasted he remembered his trail-driving days, before he had had a brand of his own. Then his biggest worries had been being struck by lightning or having his horse stumble in front of a stampede. His worst nightmares had been simple ones, like riding off a cut bank on a stormy night. Not like the ones now.
The storm, like most prairie storms, did not last long. Gault propped himself up on the mound of hay. The freshly washed night smelled cold and clean. He could hear water running in some distant gully or arroyo. Somewhere a nervous horse—perhaps the buckskin—huffed and stamped.
The storm passed, but Gault was afraid to sleep. Afraid to dream. He built a cigarette and lit it and smoked it slowly. Maybe, he thought to himself, I'll go away from here. As soon as I feel like ridin'. Maybe I'll head back to the Big Pasture country and lease some grass from the Comanches and Kiowas and start running cattle again.
No, he corrected himself, almost immediately, not the Pasture. That would remind him of his time with Martha. Maybe some state land, over in the Panhandle. There was still some open range left, in spite of the encroaching sodbusters and squatters.
He knew only too well that this was wishful thinking. There was a wild man locked up inside him. And rivers of bile. They would not let him rest or work or do any of the quietly productive things that ordinary men did.
He sat for a long while in the darkness of the shed. The last remnants of the storm had passed on to the east. An April moon and a few glittering stars looked coldly down on North Texas. Through the side cracks in the split pole walls, Gault looked bleakly out at the Garnett farmhouse and sheds. This, Gault thought, is where Wolf Garnett once lived. The outlaw had, no doubt, been in this very shed many times.
The taste of steel was in Gault's mouth. He tried to turn his thoughts in other directions. And for a little while he almost succeeded. He was about to get himself settled again and try to sleep when, suddenly, the flare of a sulphur match lighted up a small corner of the outside darkness. The deputy, Gault thought to himself. Or Pike, or Fay. They're still here.
Whoever it was, the light had come from a blacksmith lean-to next to the main barn, on the far side of the house. Gault waited for several minutes, scowling, but there were no more lights.
Gault was settling again on his hay bed when he first heard the sound of hoofs in the distance. Gingerly, he raised himself and peered through the crack. Apparently, he wasn't the only one to hear horses—a slender figure appeared out of the dark bulk of the barn and stood for a moment in the soft moonlight. He cocked his head to one side, listening. The man was too tall for Pike, and not big enough for Fay. It was Deputy Dub Finley, and, for some reason, he had been waiting there in the barn for just the sound that he was now hearing.
Gault's curiosity was whetted. He watched the deputy move a little farther out from the barn, his head still cocked, listening. Suddenly he began walking toward the approaching horsebackers, and after a few steps he broke into a jog. Soon the deputy had disappeared behind what was probably a small harness shed.
Gault started to pull himself to his feet in order to get a better look, but a pain went through him like a knife and he fell back gasping. He mopped the beads of cold sweat from his forehead and listened for the horsebackers.