Slowly, for what must have been an hour, I bathed them. Listening into the night, I heard nothing. Peeling off my buckskin shirt, I got out my knife and cut the shape of my moccasins from it. One, then another. It was something I had done before. Sitting there in the darkness beside the Garlic water, I cut and made myself moccasins, and used the laces of the shirt’s neck and lower sleeves to bind them on.
Again I drank, and drank.
Moving away from the water, I found a place in the sand. Dared I sleep? I slept. And in the night the stars moved, and a night wind stirred the dried leaves on the scarce brush, and sand sifted, and in the night, something stirred, and my eyes opened.
A man … moving … coming nearer.
I sat up. There was a pale gray light in the eastern sky. I held the gun in my hand, and out of the desert a scarecrow of a man, staggering, with wild, staring eyes. He saw me and stopped.
“Water?” he pleaded. “Water?”
“Drop your gun belt. Your knife.”
“Gone … back … back there.”
“Drink, then, and be damned.”
He drank, drank too much. Taking him by the hair, I dragged him back from the water. “Wait, you fool. You’ll kill yourself.”
Yellow crept into the sky. He was an Anglo, a man burned red by the sun, a man whose boots were leather rags about his feet, an evil man with a knife-scarred face.
“Where are the others?”
“Gone … dead … back there.” He lifted a hand toward the desert. “Gone. All of them.”
“Was Federico among them?”
“He went back. For horses and to come again for you.” The man stared at me. “You are dead, too. He will have men waiting for you when you come from the desert. If you do not die here, they will be waiting at each water hole. He has a man who knows where you must come. They will be waiting.” Careful not to turn my back on him, I recovered the sleeves of my buckskin coat, and using rawhide threads cut from the remnants of the back after the moccasins were made, I doubled one sleeve over to make a bottom for the other sleeve and threaded it through holes in the sleeve.
He watched me, staring. “If that’s s’posed to be a water bag, it won’t work.
It’ll leak.”
“Maybe. Some of it.”
“You’re a fool. They’re goin’ to get you.”
My hand waved toward the desert “That’s what they thought.”
He started toward the water, and I let him drink. “You’re a fool,” he said.
“A live fool,” I said.
I dipped my water bag into the water and lifted it out, full. Water ran from it, dripped from it.
“See?”
Yet much water remained inside. I lowered it into the water hole again and left it there to soak.
“You …” I lifted my gun. “Get up.”
He stared at me. Slowly he got up.
“There’s another water hole right over there. It’s a part of this spring. You go over there and set. And you stay there. If you stand up again after you get there, I’ll kill you.”
He stumbled over to the other hole and sat down. “You try to walk out of here, and you’ll die,” he shouted at me.
It was only about thirty or forty feet away, but it gave me breathing room. After a while he stretched out on the sand to sleep. My back against a bank, I did likewise, dozing, sleeping, waking. He never stirred. All through the day, I rested, letting my feet heal, saturating myself with water. When the sun went down, I filled my water bag again, and holstering my gun, I turned into the desert.
The man got up and stared after me. “You’ll die!” he shouted. “You’ll die out there!”
There was no need to waste time looking back. I had far to go.
“You’ll die!” he screamed.
He ran a few steps after me. “You’ll die out there!” he screamed hoarsely.
“You’ll die!”
My crude water bag slung around my neck and hanging against my chest, I walked on.
“… die!” he screamed.
Far off there were mountains, and where there were mountains there might be hollows where water had been caught. The water in my bag would not last. Now it was saturated; soon the buckskin would dry and shrink. Would it help? At least there would be a few swallows before it was gone. A few swallows … Then?
I thought of Meghan, and I said aloud what I had never dared say before.
“Meghan, I love you.”
My feet were bleeding again. Each step was agony. I chose a distant star above distant mountains.
I walked on, into the night, into the desert.
Fifty
Miss Nesselrode made coffee in the large pot. Soon the stage would come to the Bella Union and the newspapers would be brought to her. Several of her regulars were sure to drop in. A dozen of the town’s most prominent men had made her reading room a place of meeting, away from the noise of the saloons. The news of the day was discussed here before it appeared in the columns of the Star. In the beginning she had been merely a young woman who kept a book shop, but more and more she had been accepted into their conversations, although when more than two men were involved she retreated behind her desk. English had long been her preferred language, although every young woman of her class in Russia spoke French in common conversation, yet she kept her books and her notes in Russian for the sake of privacy.
In Russia she would have been making tea in a samovar. How long ago it was! What if she had not been sent to Siberia? What if her brother had not been involved in that rather silly plot? By now she would have married, had children, and would be spending much of her life in France or Germany, perhaps Switzerland. She remembered her mother, that slender, beautiful woman with her kind gray eyes and her stately manner. Her father had been terribly proud of his wife, although he affected to disapprove of some of her too-liberal British ideas. They had met when he was on a diplomatic mission to England, and it had been immediate love. He had not even waited to be presented but had crossed the room and introduced himself. It had been shocking, but exciting, too. Her mother had often told her the story, a story that never grew old and which she had delighted in hearing. So far, far away, so long, long ago!
She remembered playing croquet on the lawn, and while waiting for Mikhail to make his play, she would look off down the avenue of firs toward the lake. She loved that view, and how often she had walked to the lake with her father on a Sunday afternoon!
By now she might have been a great lady, received by the czar and probably living at court. Although she had always preferred their country estates to living in St. Petersburg.
Nor had Siberia been the cold, dismal place they all expected. In the town to which they had been exiled the winters were less rigorous than in St. Petersburg and she had found the people more open and friendly, and the countryside beautiful in summer. Although exile was considered the worst of things, she had found it not at all bad, but then word had reached them of what was to happen, and they fled.
So lost in her thoughts was she that when she turned and saw a man standing inside the door she was completely surprised. It was a man she had not seen before but immediately recognized for who he was-Yacub Khan. Her first impression was one of power, not muscular power alone, although that was obvious from his massive shoulders and mighty arms, but from something emanating from the man itself.
He was no taller than she, but wide and thick. He stood facing her, his feet slightly apart, his loose shirt hanging outside his trousers. His face was broad, strongly boned, and his head was either bald or shaved. “You are friend to Meghan Laurel?”
“I am.”
“She goes to look for Johannes Verne.”
“What? Meghan? But she cannot! She must not!”
“She takes four men. One is Tomas Machado, a good man. Three packhorses.” If Meghan had gone into the wilderness looking for Johannes, she had not one chance in a thousand of finding him. He was pursuing horse thieves and would follow wherever the trail led. Meghan, having never been into the back country, could not appreciate the immensity of it, nor have the vaguest idea of what she was undertaking. She had ridden the trails in the Los Angeles Valley and into the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, but beyond the mountains it was something quite different.