Her flesh chilling, she was backing cautiously toward the table. He must not guess what she was seeking.
She found it difficult to enunciate. Her tongue was thick. “You understand camp? Indian Camp?” He shook his head. She was still backing, retreating toward her revolver. “Camp,” she insisted. “Indians have bread, mucho. Go there. Get bread, mucho, there.”
“Bread,” he pleaded. “Bread, señora. Hambreando!”
Starving! She knew what that meant. Then he was dangerous. To save herself, she would give him bread, but she was afraid to open the door. Every Indian tragedy she had ever read shook her then with terror. She was groping blindly, her hand behind her, over the crowded surface of the table. She struck against the cold steel butt of the gun. Her fingers curled around it.
“Go away,” she repeated. “Man come pretty soon.” He would know what that meant. She lifted her revolver, and the face left the door.
She dared not now have a light. Her heart was bursting. If it would not pound so! She must quiet it, so she could breathe, so she could shoot. How could she be calm? She was thinking of the things the Indians do to people, to people who have not harmed them; of scalping, of tortures. Sam said these Indians were gentle; but he had said her tent would not blow down. He would not deceive her. He did not know. This man had killed two innocent people. Perhaps they had refused to give him bread.
How badly Sam would feel that he had left her; things always happened when he was away. But she had urged him; she could not stand the pain another night. The night! It stretched before her, a long torture of fear.
She caught a sound at the rear of the tent. That light screen door, held only by a thin hook! Any child could break that down. Why had she let Sam go? He was scarcely on his way. Two hours to get there, if he was lucky and his horse not too tired. An hour to rouse the drug clerk, and get the drugs—two hours back. God! she would go mad!
She strained her ears to listen, the silence of the desert falling like lead on her ear-drum. There was that stealthy step again, moving around the tent! She would have to do something. She must give him bread if he was starving. Hunger makes men desperate. He had been in hiding for two days, she had heard the rurales tell Sam. Perhaps he had eaten nothing since that time—she shivered at the picture she conjured of the dead man and woman. She wondered why he had killed them? Just because he was starving, because they refused to give him bread? She wondered if he had tortured them, scalped them? When he came into her vision again, well in front of the tent, she would hurl a loaf out the back door, and hook it before he could get back there. Perhaps he would go away, if she gave him something to eat.
The voice came whining through her door again.