Lengyll started forward, saw Susan riding with her hands tied, and actually drew back a step, as if he wanted to find a comer to hide in. There were no comers out here, however, so he stood fast. He did not look happy about it, however.
Susan nudged her horse forward with her knees, and when Reynolds tried to grab her shoulder, she dipped it to the side, temporarily eluding him.
“Why, Francis Lengyll! Imagine meeting you here!”
“Susan, I’m sorry to see ye so,” Lengyll said. His flush crept closer and closer to his brow, like a tide approaching a seawall. “It’s bad company ye’ve fallen in with, girl . . . and in the end, bad company always leaves ye to face the music
alone.”
Susan actually laughed. “Bad company!” she said. “Aye, ye’d know about that, wouldn’t ye, Fran?”
He turned, awkward and stiff in his embarrassment. She raised one booted foot and, before anyone could stop her, kicked him squarely between the shoulderblades. He went down on his stomach, his whole face widening in shocked surprise.
“No ye don’t, ye bold cunt!” Renfrew shouted, and fetched her a wallop to the side of the head—it was on the left, and at least evened things up a bit, she would think later when her mind cleared and she was capable of thinking. She swayed in the saddle, but kept her seat. And she never looked at Renfrew, only at Lengyll, who had now managed to get to his hands and knees. He wore a deeply dazed expression.
” You killed my father!” she screamed at him. “You killed my father, you cowardly, sneaking excuse for a man!” She looked at the party of ranchers and vaqs, all of them staring at her now. “There he is, Fran Lengyll, head of the Horsemen’s Association, as low a sneak as ever walked! Low as coyote shit! Low as— ”
“That’s enough,” Jonas said, watching with some interest as Lengyll scuttled back to his men—and yes, Susan was bitterly delighted to see, it was a full-fledged scuttle—with his shoulders hunched. Rhea was cackling, rocking from side to side and making a sound like fingernails on a piece of slate. The sound shocked Susan, but she wasn’t a bit surprised by Rhea’s presence in this company.
“It could never be enough,” she said, looking from Jonas to Lengyll with an expression of contempt so deep it seemed bottomless. “For him it could never be enough.”
“Well, perhaps, but you did quite well in the time you had, lady-sai. Few could have done better. And listen to the witch cackle! Like salt in his wounds, I wot . . .
but we’ll shut her up soon enough.” Then, turning his head: “Clay!”
Reynolds rode up.
“Think you can get Sunbeam back to Seafront all right?”
“I think so.” Reynolds tried not to show the relief he felt at being sent back east instead of west. He had begun to have a bad feeling about Hanging Rock, Latigo, the tankers . . . about the whole show, really. God knew why. “Now?”
“Give it another minute,” Jonas said. “Mayhap there’s going to be a spot of killing
right here. Who knows? But it’s the unanswered questions that makes it worthwhile getting up in the morning, even when a man’s leg aches like a tooth with a hole in it. Wouldn’t you say so?”
“I don’t know, Eldred.”
“Sai Renfrew, watch our pretty Sunbeam a minute. I have a piece of property to take back.”
His voice carried well—he had meant that it should—and Rhea’s cackles cut off suddenly, as if severed out of her throat with a hooking-knife. Smiling, Jonas walked his horse toward the black cart with its jostling show of gold symbols.
Reynolds rode on his left, and Jonas sensed rather than saw Depape fall in on his right. Roy was a good enough boy, really; his head was a little soft, but his heart was in the right place, and you didn’t have to tell him everything.
For every step forward Jonas’s horse took, Rhea shrank back a little in the cart.
Her eyes shifted from side to side in their deep sockets, looking for a way out that wasn’t there.
“Keep away from me, ye charry man!” she cried, raising a hand toward him. With the other she clutched the sack with the ball in it ever more tightly. “Keep away, or I’ll bring the lightning and strike ye dead where ye sit yer horse! Yer harrier friends, too!”
Jonas thought Roy hesitated briefly at that, but Clay never did, nor did Jonas himself. He guessed there was a great lot she could do … or that there had been, at one time. But that was before the hungry glass had entered her life.
“Give it up to me,” he said. He reached the side of her wagon and held his hand out for the bag. “It’s not yours and never was. One day you’ll doubtless have the Good Man’s thanks for keeping it so well as you have, but now you must give it up.”
She screamed—a sound of such piercing intensity that several of the vaqueros dropped their tin coffee-cups and clapped their hands over their ears. At the same time she knotted her hand through the drawstring and raised the bag over her head.
The curved shape of the ball swung back and forth at the bottom of it like a pendulum.
“I’ll not!” she howled. ” I’ ll smash it on the ground before I give it up to the likes o’
you!”
Jonas doubted if the ball would break, not hurled by her weak arms onto the
trampled, springy mat of the Bad Grass, but he didn’t think he would have occasion to find out, one way or the other.
“Clay,” he said. “Draw your gun.”
He didn’t need to look at Clay to see that he’d done it; he saw the frantic way her eyes shifted to the left, where Clay sat his horse.
“I’m going to have a count,” Jonas said. “Just a short one; if I get to three and she hasn’t passed that bag over, blow her ugly head off.”
“Aye.”
“One,” Jonas said, watching the ball pendulum back and forth at the bottom of the upheld bag. It was glowing; he could see dull pink even through the cloth. “Two.
Enjoy hell, Rhea, goodbye. Thr—”
“Here!” she screamed, thrusting it out toward him and shielding her face with the crooked hook of her free hand. “Here, take it! And may it damn you the way it’s damned me!”
“Thankee-sai.”
He grabbed the bag just below the draw top and yanked. Rhea screamed again as the string skinned her knuckles and tore off one of her nails. Jonas hardly heard.
His mind was a white explosion of exultation. For the first time in his long professional life he forgot his job, his surroundings, and the six thousand things that could get him killed on any day. He had it; he had it; by all the graves of all the gods, he had the fucking thing!
Mine! he thought, and that was all. He somehow restrained the urge to open the bag and stick his head inside it, like a horse sticking its head into a bag of oats, and looped the drawstring over the pommel of his saddle twice instead. He took in a breath as deep as his lungs would allow, then expelled it. Better. A little.
“Roy.”
“Aye, Jonas.”
It would be good to get out of this place, Jonas thought, and not for the first time.
To get away from these hicks. He was sick of aye and ye and so it is, sick to his bones.
“Roy, we’ll give the bitch a ten-count this time. If she isn’t out of my sight by then, you have my permission to blow her ass off. Now, let’s see if you can do the counting. I’ll be listening close, so mind you don’t skip any!”
“One,” Depape said eagerly. “Two. Three. Four.”
Spitting curses, Rhea snatched up the reins of the cart and spanked the pony’s back with them. The pony laid its ears back and jerked the cart forward so vigorously that Rhea went tumbling backward off the cant-board, her feet up, her white and bony shins showing above her ankle-high black shoes and mismatched wool stockings. The vaqueros laughed. Jonas laughed himself. It was pretty funny, all right, seeing her on her back with her pins in the air.
“Fuh-fuh- five,” Depape said, laughing so hard he was hiccupping. “Sih-sih- six!”
Rhea climbed back up, flopped onto the cantboard again with all the grace of a dying fish, and peered around at them, wall-eyed and sneering.
” I curse ye all!” she screamed. It cut through them, stilling their laughter even as the cart bounced toward the edge of the trampled clearing. “Every last one of ye!
Ye… and ye… and ye!” Her crooked finger pointed last at Jonas. “Thief! Miserable thief!”