Then in case that I did kill him—if kill him I must (and that eventuality hung over me like the sword of Damocles) I should be not ashamed to tell even my mother. In this I took what small comfort I might.
I had not spoken at length with Mrs. Montoyo for several days. We had exchanged merely civil greetings. To-day I did not see her during the march; did not attempt to see her—did not so much as curiously glance her way, being content to let well enough alone, although aware that my care might be misinterpreted as a token of fear. But as to proving the case against me, Daniel was at liberty to experiment with the status in quo.
Toward evening we climbed a second wide, flat divide. We were leaving the Red Basin, they said, and about to cross into the Bitter Creek Plains, which, according to the talk, were “a damned sight wuss!” Somewhere in the Bitter Creek Plains our course met the course of the Overland Stage road, trending up from the south for the passage of the Green River at the farther edge of the Plains.
I had only faint hope that Mrs. Montoyo would be delivered over to the stage there. It scarcely would be her wish. We were destined to travel on to Salt Lake City together—she, Daniel and I.
If the Red Basin had been bad and if the Bitter Creek Plains were to be worse, assuredly this plateau was limbo: a gray, bleak, wind-swept elevation fairly level and extending, in elevation perceptible mainly by 242 the vista, as far as eye might see, northward and southward, separating basin from basin—one Hell, as Jenks declared, from the other.
Nevertheless there was a wild grandeur in the site, flooded all with crimson as the sun sank in the clear western sky beyond the Plains themselves, so that our plateau was still bathed in ruddy color when the Red Basin upon the one hand had deepened to purple and the white blotches of soda and alkali down in the Plains upon the other hand gleamed evilly in a tenuous gloaming.
We had corralled adjacent to another tainted pond, of which the animals refused to drink but which furnished a little rank forage for them and an oasis for a half dozen ducks. A pretty picture these made, too, as they lightly sat the open water, burnished to brass by the sunset so that the surface shimmered iridescent, its ripples from the floating bodies flowing molten in all directions.
After supper I took the notion to go over there, in the twilight, on idle exploration. Water of any kind had an appeal; a solitary pond always has; the ducks brought thoughts of home. Many a teal and widgeon and canvasback had fallen to my double-barreled Manton, back on the Atlantic coast—very long ago, before I had got entangled in this confounded web of misadventure and homicidal tendencies.
To the pond I went, mood subdued. It set slightly in a cup; and when I had emerged from a little swale 243 or depression that I had followed, attracted by the laughter of children playing at the marge, whom should I see, approaching on line diagonal, but Mrs. Montoyo—her very hair and form—coming in likewise, perhaps with errand similar to mine: simple inclination.
And that (again perhaps) was a mutual surprise, indeed awkward to me, for we both were in plain sight from the camp. Certainly I could not turn off, nor turn back. Not now. It was make or break. Hesitate I did, with involuntary action of muscles; I thought that she momentarily hesitated; then I drove on, defiant, and so did she. The fates were resolved that there should be no dilly-dallying by the principals chosen for this drama that they had staged.