“Just talking,” said the Saint. “How are you doing?”
“Fine.” She was fretting her pony with hands and heels, making it step nervously, showing off. “Esther isn’t so happy, though. Her horse is a bit frisky for her.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Esther said, coming up. “I’m doing all right. I’m awful hot, though.”
“Fancy that,” said Ginny.
“Never mind,” said the Saint tactfully. “We’ll call a halt soon and have lunch.”
They were walking down towards a grove of great palms that rose like columns in the nave of a natural cathedral, their rich tufted heads arching over to meet above a cloister of deep whispering shade. They were the same palms that Simon had paused under once before, years ago; only now there were picnic tables at their feet, and at some of them a few hardy families who had driven out there in their automobiles were already grouped in strident fecundity, enjoying the unspoiled beauties of Nature from the midst of an enthusiastic litter of baskets, boxes, tin cans, and paper bags.
“Is this where you meant we could have lunch?” Freddie asked rather limply.
“No. I thought we’d ride on over to Murray Canyon — if they haven’t built a road in there since I saw it last, there’s a place there that I think we still might have to ourselves.”
He led them down through the trees, and out on a narrow trail that clung for a while to the edge of a steep shoulder or hill. Then they were out on an open rise at the edge of the desert, and the Saint set his horse to an easy canter, threading his way unerringly along a trail that was nothing but a faint crinkling in the hard earth where other horses had followed it before.
It seemed strange to be out riding like that, so casually and inconsequentially, when only a few hours before there had been very tangible evidence that a threat of death to one of them had not been made idly. Yet perhaps they were safer out there than they would have been anywhere else. The Saint’s eyes had never stopped wandering over the changing panoramas, behind as well as ahead, and although he knew how deceptive the apparently open desert could be, and how even a man on horseback, standing well above the tallest clump of scrub, could vanish altogether in a hundred yards, he was sure that no prospective sniper had come within sharp-shooting range of them. Yet...