CHAPTER XVIII
VOICES IN THE VOID
The directions had been plain. With the North Star and the moon as our guides we scarcely could fail to strike the stage road where it bore off from the mountains northward into the desert.
For the first half mile we rode without a word from either of us to violate the truce that swathed us like the night. What her thoughts were I might not know, but they sat heavy upon her, closing her throat with the torture of vain self-reproach. That much I sensed. But I could not reassure her; could not volunteer to her that I welcomed her company, that she was blameless, that I had only defended my honor, that affairs would have reduced to pistol work without impulse from her—that, in short, the responsibility had been wholly Daniel’s. My own thoughts were so grievous as to crush me with aching woe that forebade civil utterance.
This, then, was I: somebody who had just killed a man, had broken from the open trail and was riding, he knew not where, through darkness worse than night, himself an outlaw with an outlawed woman—at the best a chance woman, an adventuring woman, 262 and as everybody could know, a claimed woman, product of dance hall and gaming resort, wife of a half-breed gambler, and now spoil of fist and revolver.
But that which burned me almost to madness, like hot lava underneath the deadening crust, was the thought that I had done a deed and a defensible deed, and was fleeing from it the same as a criminal. Such a contingency never had occurred to me or I might have taken a different course, still with decency; although what course I could not figure.
We rode, our mules picking their way, occasionally stumbling on rocks and shrubs. At last she spoke in low, even tones.
“What do you expect to do with me, please?”