Savage Bride

Chapter Thirteen

He came out, closing the door of their room quietly after him. He was restless, he couldn’t sleep. She had retired some time before. Whether she was asleep or not he couldn’t tell. Most likely not; he’d detected two studs of glistening brightness set into the dim outline of her face, where it lay motionless on the pillow, as if her eyes were open in the gloom.

He had a strange feeling that he couldn’t remember ever having had before where she was concerned. He hadn’t wanted to stay in the room with her. He wanted to be away from her, for a little, by himself, or more preferably still, with just another man. Someone to talk with for a while, uncomplicated, simple, as he was. One of his own kind. Someone he could feel relaxed with, without having to be on guard every moment, watchful of every sound or sign he made. That sort of feeling.

He drew a deep breath, without being aware of it himself, and went out on the veranda.

A figure motionless against one of the uprights turned its head, and the half-swallowed grunt of greeting told him it was Mallory. That was what he wanted, someone like that to talk to.

He went over to him, and they went through the small, friendly traffic of preparing to have a smoke together.

Mallory’s eyes met his questioningly over their mutual match flare in the darkness, as though sensing that Jones wanted to ask him something.

He took a minute or two, and finally began, “I suppose you know the ground pretty well... er, over there on the upslope?”

Mallory took another moment or two to answer. “As well as anyone, I guess.”

“Did you know there was a well, a sort of pool, up there at one place?”

“No, there’s no water up that way. It’s dry as a bone. It’s the first time I’ve heard of it, if there is one.” He waited a while; then, since nothing more was forthcoming, he said, “Why, did you happen to find one up around there?”

“Yes, we found one up there this morning,” Jones said. He thought about it for a while. “I suppose some of your workmen around here would know of it, though.”

But if she couldn’t talk Spanish and they couldn’t talk English, how could they have told her about it anyway?

“They might,” Mallory admitted. “Though I still claim to know as much or more about my own place than anyone else on it.”

Jones watched the paleness of his smoke trail off into the darkness past the veranda rail. “What’s on the other side of that rise, anyway?” he asked presently.

Mallory took a long time about answering, as though weighing his words. “Tierra de los Muertos,” he murmured at last. “The Land of the Dead. That’s the hands’ name for it, anyway. It’s supposed to be peopled by ghosts, evil spirits.”

Jones chuckled a little. Mallory, he noticed, didn’t join him in it.

“It’s got a bad reputation,” Mallory went on quietly. “Every once in a while someone disappears around here. Then they blame it on the other side of the mountains. Some of them even claim to have seen the spirits of phantom warriors slinking along the skyline at night, and to have heard ghost drums pounding the still air. I don’t take any stock in native superstitions myself, but it’s undoubtedly true that from time to time somebody does vanish.”

“Lose their way and die of exposure, I suppose,” Jones supplied. “Or a wild animal gets them. But then when they come across them — or their remains — again, doesn’t that prove to them it had nothing to do with the mountains?”

The finca manager didn’t answer immediately. Then he shook his head a little. “They never do come across them again,” he murmured. “They never have yet.”

They’d reached the well again.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back now. This is our usual turning-around place.”

She made no move to follow. “No, I want to go on to that cleft.”

He reached over and caught her horse by the bridle, abruptly. He held it fast that way, drawn in protectively close to his own. “It’s a good additional half hour’s ride, at least, as close as it looks from here. You won’t see anything different from there than you already do from here.”

“But why don’t you want to go?”

“Because I say so. Don’t ask me why.”

Suddenly, for no reason that he could account for, a clash of wills was in the making. It had nothing to do with domination. He could feel some uncertain element stiffening his determination against her, uneasiness or even a slight tincture of fear. He tugged commandingly at the gripped bridle and her horse came around obediently in company with his own.

“Mitty, look at me. Listen to what I’m saying. I’m getting sick of this spooky nonsense. I forbid you to go any farther up that way. Today or any other time.”

He was surprised at his own starkness of voice.

He had strayed down by the native workers’ shacks. There was nothing there, but he was at loose ends with himself. A chicken paused in its pecking about to quirk its head at him quizzically, one claw furled off the ground. An elderly woman, on her knees kneading moist meal with a stone roller down an inclined stone, looked up and grinned at him, showing blackened tooth crevices.

He grinned back and stood watching her. She sprinkled a little water on the meal and rolled it thin. A youngster came to the doorless opening of the jacal behind her, his stomach thrust forward under a faded yellow shirt, and stood gaping at him. Another joined him, in a faded green shirt. Then a third, without any shift at all. A woman’s voice called out something inside the hut, and the three of them disappeared.

He found nothing to interest him and went on from there after a moment or two of loitering about. Down a way farther in the pleasant heat of the sunlight, strong but not wilting up here as it was down on the coast, he passed the well where they got their water. It had a little parapet of cemented pumice stones built around it, and a little shed structure over it to keep the sun off. Then a little farther on there were a number of scrubby trees gathered together in one place, struggling, rather than growing, out of the sloped ground. They were too few to be called a grove, but they cast a light stenciling of shade about in this one place. He sat down under one of them and leaped his back against it, and let his eyes stray down the descending lines of coffee bushes, with small figures moving along them here and there.

He didn’t hear her step behind him until she was already standing there at his back.

“Hello,” she said shyly.

There was a shade of formality lingering there that she had long ago discarded with Mitty.

She came around in front of him and sat down beside him.

He looked at her with a sort of approving disapproval. The approval was for her appearance in general, the disapproval for a new detail he had not noticed before. “Where’d you get that?” he challenged her, almost as though he were her father.

There was a crumbling and inexpert tracing of red overlapping her mouth, in particular her upper lip. It had slipped its moorings several times.

“Mitty — Mrs. Jones — gave me one of hers.”

He shook his head a little. He felt like saying, “Why don’t you leave yourself alone? Don’t you know there isn’t an older woman in the world who wouldn’t give anything to be just as you are at this moment? Don’t you know you’re going to lose that soon enough, and never get it back?” But he didn’t. It was none of his business.

“I think she’s wonderful,” she said. “I wish I could be like her.”

“Why not be just the way you are? No two people can be alike.”

“You married her suddenly, didn’t you?”

“How’d you know that?”

“She told me.” She sighed wistfully. “I think that’s awfully romantic.”

“I did, too.” He realized he’d used the past tense. “I mean, I — guess it is.”

Presently he became aware of something. Or thought he did. He waited a moment to confirm it. “Why do you keep looking at me like that?”

“Because I like to look at you.” She didn’t smile.

He tried to change the subject. “Is that good for you, to keep eating so many of those green coffee beans?”

“I just chew them and spit them out. You haven’t been watching. What did you think I was doing when I kept turning my head away like that?”

The conversation lapsed for a few moments. He thought idly, What do you talk about with kids that age?

Suddenly she had reared to her knees, inching closer. “A caterpillar just got on you. Wait, don’t move. I’ll get it off. I can see it and you can’t. It’s on your collar, around at the back.” She picked up a twig. “Keep your head over that way.”

He could feel the twig lightly brushing him once or twice. Finally he said, “It’s taking you a long time. My neck is getting stiff.”

“He won’t get on it. He keeps wanting to go on straight down your collar.”

He turned back. “There isn’t anything there.”

She laughed, a little shakily. “I just said there was. I don’t know why.”

He looked in another direction and swallowed.

Presently she said, “I like to watch you smoke a cigarette. I like to watch everything you do. I like to watch my father, too, but — I don’t know — I like to watch you in a different way than I like to watch him.”

I suppose they all have to go through this stage, he thought remorsefully. I should be some kid her own age, but she’s been so cut off out here—

He reached out and chucked her under the chin, mechanically, without any meaning.

Instantly her smile died, and she looked at him with a sort of wistful gravity. Her face moved forward slightly, toward his own, then drew back again.

He looked full at her for a minute, with a sort of inflexibility in the expression of his eyes. Then he got up.

“Come on, we’re going back now,” he said quietly.

He took her by the hand and led her firmly along with him, out at a little distance, as you do with a child who has been misbehaving.