Savage Bride

Chapter Fourteen

Their room was still deeper in the throes of drawn than on other mornings when he awakened, yet she had already risen and gone out before him, he saw when he opened his eyes. He thought she might be waiting for him on the veranda, but when he dressed and went out there, there was no sign of her. He called to Pascual, and the latter came shuffling across the violet-tinted compound bringing a single horse with him.

“The señora go already?”

“Si, señor.”

“Why did you let her go alone?”

“She said you would follow. She said not to trouble, that she knew the way.”

He might have known she’d do something like this, he told himself. He mounted and set off fast, along the familiar up trail they took together every day.

Incredible dawn colors began to streak the slopes as he went along, but his face was sullen against their vivid glow. There were gashes of flesh pink, coral, and mauve, and overhead a sky that glistened like light-blue cellophane. More of that will-o’-the-wisp stuff, like down at Puerto Santo, he kept thinking.

By the time he’d come to the spring, the sun had cleared the crest, the rainbow tints were gone, and the entire terrain around him had taken on a bisque monotone. He stopped there briefly and let his horse drink. Well, she’d got that cleft out of her system, at least. Maybe after this there wouldn’t be any more attraction to it.

He went on up from there, breaking new trail now for the first time. There was still no sign of her anywhere ahead. The cleft, as he finally neared it, proved to be somewhat in the nature of an optical illusion. That is to say, from below, from where they’d been before, it might have seemed to be a sharp notch, an indentation in the billowing horizon line above. Now it became simply a curved, semicircular aisle or lane, running between two moundlike elevations of ground, one partially telescoped behind the other. It was the superimposition of their tops that made a little dip in the skyline, but they were actually not abreast; one was forward of the other. In between them wound a little curving gully, of no great depth, scarcely deep enough to hide a rider’s head from view when he was mounted. A great many little scrub bushes dotted the ground up here, and, uneven as it was, it was on the horizontal plane now, no longer sharply tilted. Somewhere beyond, the mountain must begin to descend again, into that mystic valley that had them all so terrified.

His shadow and his horse’s rippled along the side of the mound beside him as he rode along the little depressed track, undulating fluidly over scrub bushes, boulders, and lumps of sun-baked earth.

And then as he slowly circled and the domelike impediment sidled rearward on its axis, she suddenly came into view.

She had dismounted and her horse was nudging at one of the bushes off to one side of her. She was kneeling beside what at first sight seemed to be a cone-shaped pile of stones. Her outlines were thinned, colorless, almost transparent, unlike the horse, which stood out boldly black, although it was only a yard or two away from her. It was as though she were veiled with dust, and he couldn’t tell what was causing it, for it blended so with the color of the barranca around her that it was invisible save where her own figure gave its filmy texture background.

Then when he looked upward, over her, he saw that it wasn’t dust, for it didn’t hang listlessly inert against the sky but rose in agile activity straight upward. It was faint smoke from a fire.

As he came on toward her he saw her open a furled horse blanket that she had brought along with her, and fling it down with both hands so that the orifice of the stones was covered. Her figure cleared into its full color strength, and the upper smoke against the blue of the sky was erased as if by a gigantic puff of breath. Then she drew the blanket off again, and haze once more fumed from the stones. She turned to greet him as he dismounted, holding the blanket doubled and stretched out between her hands. There was something vainglorious in her attitude.

He nudged his toe against the odd-looking cone of stones, the hollow in its middle as deep and as perfectly rounded as though it had been cemented by hand. Scattered about lay twigs and branches of numerous small bushes that she must have uprooted with her bare hands.

He looked at her curiously. “What did you light that for? Are you cold?”

“No, I... I just came across this sort of kiln here and I thought I’d like to try it out. Those bushes bum wonderfully.”

“But how’d you know what it was for? You can hardly tell what it is now, even with the fire in it.”

“I don’t know; it just seemed to be for that and nothing else.” She gathered up a few more twigs and dropped them in.

She watched for a moment. “Now it’s gaining strength,” she said. She tilted her head back admiringly. “Look. Look how straight up it goes. So thin and clear. Like a ribbon. Now watch when I do this.”

She took the blanket and flung it down, stifling the orifice.

The slender column stopped short. It continued to rise, but the break in it rose with it, ending it as it went. Then as she raised the blanket it shot upward again.

He laughed a little. “What are you trying to do, send signals by Morse code?”

“I don’t know the Morse code,” she said gravely. She recapped it again, waited, and withdrew it once more.

“Then what are you doing, making up a code of your own as you go along?”

“I don’t know any code of my own.”

“Then how do you know when to bring the damper down and when to take it off again?”

“I don’t. My arms just seem to do it of their own accord.” She stared bemusedly upward, fascinated by her own handiwork.

“Come on,” he said, “that’s enough.” He sounded irritated about it even to himself. He kicked his foot down into the stones, scattering burning brands and smoldering twigs. A dozen separate little skeins of smoke now rose, but not strong enough to reach past the skyline, as the one main one previously had. They died with the faltering little sparks that caused them.

He remounted, waited until she had done so too, and stood aside until she had gone ahead, then turned and rode after her, as if ushering her away.

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.