Maya was wearing a midcalf-length skirt of patched denim, with a dark blue blouse with long sleeves. Her feet were cased in a fine pair of handmade sandals with long thongs that tied just below her knees.
She carried no weapon, but Doc had noticed there was a small silver whistle on a red ribbon around her throat. Seeing him looking at it, she smiled.
“My way of passing messages along to my family,” she said. “They can hear me calling them a good couple of miles away on a still day.”
The kittens on her lap began to play-fight, cuffing each other with their tiny velvet paws.
Doc laughed with sheer delight, the fact of his pursuers almost totally gone from his wavery memory.
“Now, Romulus, stop trying to bully little Remus,” Maya said, like an indulgent mother. “Doc, you said about there being some of those crazies from the Children of the Rock coming this way after you.”
“By the Three Kennedys! I had nearly—”
“The cats will carry warning if there’s strangers around. Just tell me a little of what’s been going down, so I can decide on how to play the cards.” She carried on rocking. “Sounds like the quake’s passed on. Only thing is…” She hesitated a moment.
“What, ma’am?”
“Way the felines are still skittish, I have an uneasy feeling that we’ve just experienced something of a preshock. Could be a much bigger one lurking just around the next corner. Best be ready for that and all.”
Josiah Steele came by a few minutes later, to make sure they were all safe after the earthquake.
“Young Penny Boot broke a wrist when a cupboard came off the wall on top of her. Not serious.”
“We’re fine. Don’t know how Doc got along, out in the woods on his lonesome.”
The sec man shook his head. “I have to reckon that you could be hearing some bad news in the next two or three hours. Once that coldheart Owsley and his gang get back to the ville. They won’t likely be taking prisoners.”
“Is Wolfe planning to chill us all?” J.B. asked, sitting on one of the beds, holding Mildred’s hand.
For a long moment Steele didn’t reply to the question, then he cleared his throat, looking all around him. “Not for me to try and guess.”
“But if you were a gambling man,” the Armorer said, “then you wouldn’t give good odds on survival.”
Steele stared at him, stone-faced. “No odds I could offer you at all.”
Suddenly J.B.’s usual icy control snapped, and he jumped off the bed, coming right at the sec man. “You stinking bastard! I’ll rip your lungs out!”
Steele hastily drew his blaster and jammed it into the advancing man’s stomach. “Hey, just back off,” he shouted, his voice thin and high and frightened.
Ryan quickly came between them, brushing aside the Hawes Montana Marshal .45. “No need for this,” he said quietly. He placed a hand on his old friend’s shoulder, looking him in the eyes, unable to see the true expression behind the glittering lenses of the spectacles.
“All right. Dark night! But I hate…” He turned away, ignoring the threatening blaster.
Ryan also turned away, but his eye had been caught by something glittering brightly on the lapel of J.B.’s coat. The little rad counter was a clear and unarguable red. Not orange. Not reddish orange.
Full red.
THE WIND that had dropped, oddly, during the quake, was suddenly rising again, setting up with a real menace, shaking some of the largest branches on the huge pines all around Maya Tennant’s little cottage.
“Could be in for some darned unpleasant weather,” the woman said, one hand absently stroking the kittens.
“Hold up the pursuers, mayhap. Indeed, I have a scintilla of hope that the quake might have deterred them from chasing me any farther.”
“Not if it’s those Children of the Rock, Doc. All the years I’ve been here, they’ve been sniffing around and causing trouble. Kidnapping little ones from the Mescalero who arrived here a few years back. Nothing but anguish. They leave me alone, though that miserable one-armed son of a bitch, Joshua Wolfe, tried to have me burned as a witch about three winters ago. Failed. I went up to their poverty-hill ville and defended meself against their charges. Challenged them to burn or hang me.”