"Quite well," she said, smiling. "Please don't apologize." She felt a sudden wild impulse to stand on tiptoe and kiss his mouth and say, Give that to Will and tell him to never mind what I said! Tell him there are a thousand more where that came from! Tell him to come and get every one!
Instead, she fixed on a comic image: this Richard Stockworth smacking Will full on the mouth and saying it was from Susan Delgado. She began to giggle. She put her hands to her mouth, but it did no good. Sai Stockworth smiled back at her . . . tentatively, cautiously. He probably thinks I'm mad . . . and I am! I am!
"Good day, Mr. Stockworth," she said, and passed on before she could embarrass herself further.
"Good day, Susan Delgado," he called in return.
She looked back once, when she was fifty yards or so farther up the street, but he was already gone. Not into Hockey's, though; of that she was quite sure. She wondered what Mr. Stockworth had been doing at that end of town to begin with.
Half an hour later, as she took the new iron from her da's shoebag, she found out. There was a folded scrap of paper tucked between two of the shoes, and even before she unfolded it, she understood that her collision with Mr. Stockworth hadn't been an accident.
She recognized Will's handwriting at once from the note in the bouquet.
Susan,
Can you meet me at Citgo this evening or tomorrow evening? Very important. Has to do with what we discussed before. Please.
W.
P.S. Best you bum this note.
She burned it at once, and as she watched the flames first flash up and then die down, she murmured over and over the one word in it which had struck her the hardest: Please.
3
She and Aunt Cord ate a simple, silent evening meal - bread and soup - and when it was done, Susan rode Felicia out to the Drop and watched the sun go down. She would not be meeting him this evening, no. She already owed too much sorrow to impulsive, unthinking behavior. But tomorrow?
Why Citgo?
Has to do with what we discussed before.
Yes, probably. She did not doubt his honor, although she had much come to wonder if he and his friends were who they said they were. He probably did want to see her for some reason which bore on his mission (although how the oilpatch could have anything to do with too many horses on the Drop she did not know), but there was something between them now, something sweet and dangerous. They might start off talking but would likely end up kissing ... and kissing would just be the start. Knowing didn't change feeling, though; she wanted to see him. Needed to see him.
So she sat astride her new horse - another of Hart Thorin's payments-in-advance on her virginity - and watched the sun swell and turn red in the west. She listened to the faint grumble of the thinny, and for the first time in her sixteen years was truly torn by indecision. All she wanted stood against all she believed of honor, and her mind roared with conflict. Around all, like a rising wind around an unstable house, she felt the idea of ka growing. Yet to give over one's honor for that reason was so easy, wasn't it? To excuse the fall of virtue by invoking all-powerful ka. It was soft thinking.
Susan felt as blind as she'd been when leaving the darkness of Brian Hockey's bam for the brightness of the street. At one point she cried silently in frustration without even being aware of it, and pervading her every effort to think clearly and rationally was her desire to kiss him again, and to feel his hand cupping her breast.
She had never been a religious girl, had little faith in the dim gods of Mid-World, so at the last of it, with the sun gone and the sky above its point of exit going from red to purple, she tried to pray to her father. And an answer came, although whether from him or from her own heart she didn't know.
Let ka mind itself, the voice in her mind said. It will, anyway; it always does. If ka. should overrule your honor, so it will be; in the meantime, Susan, there's no one to mind it but yourself. Let ka go and mind the virtue of your promise, hard as that may be.
"All right," she said. In her current state she discovered that any decision - even one that would cost her another chance to see Will - was a relief. "I'll honor my promise. Ka can take care of itself."
In the gathering shadows, she clucked sidemouth to Felicia and turned for home.
4
The next day was Sanday, the traditional cowboys' day of rest. Roland's little band took this day off as well. "It's fair enough that we should," Cuthbert said, "since we don't know what the hell we're doing in the first place."