“Yes,” said Rawley, his thoughts forced back again to things he would like to forget. “It’s easy to stop it. Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “A man standing so close to me our shoulders rubbed was stopped in the middle of a sentence. We were talking. I asked him something about the mine. He was telling me. A cable broke, and the end of it snapped our way and caught him in the head. Life stopped right there, so far as he was concerned. He wasn’t given time to finish what he was saying.”
Nevada was staring at him, her lips parted, the easy flow of her thoughts halted by the horror of the picture he had drawn with a few quiet words. So few words—spoken so quietly, she thought fleetingly.
“I—didn’t know—right beside you! It might have—Weren’t you hurt?”
Rawley lifted a hand to his cheek, where a fine, white line was drawn.
“The tip of one strand flicked me there,” he said. “Made a nasty gash.”
The pallor in Nevada’s face deepened. She shivered as if a sudden chill had struck her skin.
“Well,” said Rawley, after a further five minutes of staring at the river. “I’ll be getting back. Tell Peter I’ll be down again. Or if he can take the time, have him come up, will you?”
“Why don’t you call him father?” Nevada asked him. “You aren’t ashamed of him, are you?”
Rawley looked at her, the truth on the tip of his tongue. But he closed his lips a bit more firmly, smiled down at her and shook his head.
“Peter and I understand each other,” he told her enigmatically and went away.