For every step forward Jonas's horse took, Rhea shrank back a little in the cart. Her eyes shifted from side to side in their deep sockets, looking for a way out that wasn't there.
"Keep away from me, ye charry man!" she cried, raising a hand toward him. With the other she clutched the sack with the ball in it ever more tightly. "Keep away, or I'll bring the lightning and strike ye dead where ye sit yer horse! Yer harrier friends, too!"
Jonas thought Roy hesitated briefly at that, but Clay never did, nor did Jonas himself. He guessed there was a great lot she could do ... or that there had been, at one time. But that was before the hungry glass had entered her life.
"Give it up to me," he said. He reached the side of her wagon and held his hand out for the bag. "It's not yours and never was. One day you'll doubtless have the Good Man's thanks for keeping it so well as you have, but now you must give it up."
She screamed - a sound of such piercing intensity that several of the vaqueros dropped their tin coffee-cups and clapped their hands over their ears. At the same time she knotted her hand through the drawstring and raised the bag over her head. The curved shape of the ball swung back and forth at the bottom of it like a pendulum.
"I'll not!" she howled. "I 'llsmash it on the ground before I give it up to the likes o' you!"
Jonas doubted if the ball would break, not hurled by her weak arms onto the trampled, springy mat of the Bad Grass, but he didn't think he would have occasion to find out, one way or the other.
"Clay," he said. "Draw your gun."
He didn't need to look at Clay to see that he'd done it; he saw the frantic way her eyes shifted to the left, where Clay sat his horse.
"I'm going to have a count," Jonas said. "Just a short one; if I get to three and she hasn't passed that bag over, blow her ugly head off."
"Aye."
"One," Jonas said, watching the ball pendulum back and forth at the bottom of the upheld bag. It was glowing; he could see dull pink even through the cloth. "Two. Enjoy hell, Rhea, goodbye. Thr - "
"Here!" she screamed, thrusting it out toward him and shielding her face with the crooked hook of her free hand. "Here, take it! And may it damn you the way it's damned me!"
"Thankee-sai."
He grabbed the bag just below the draw top and yanked. Rhea screamed again as the string skinned her knuckles and tore off one of her nails. Jonas hardly heard. His mind was a white explosion of exultation. For the first time in his long professional life he forgot his job, his surroundings, and the six thousand things that could get him killed on any day. He had it; he had it; by all the graves of all the gods, he had the f**king thing!
Mine! he thought, and that was all. He somehow restrained the urge to open the bag and stick his head inside it, like a horse sticking its head into a bag of oats, and looped the drawstring over the pommel of his saddle twice instead. He took in a breath as deep as his lungs would allow, then expelled it. Better. A little.
"Roy."
"Aye, Jonas."
It would be good to get out of this place, Jonas thought, and not for the first time. To get away from these hicks. He was sick of aye and ye and so it is, sick to his bones.
"Roy, we'll give the bitch a ten-count this time. If she isn't out of my sight by then, you have my permission to blow her ass off. Now, let's see if you can do the counting. I'll be listening close, so mind you don't skip any!"
"One," Depape said eagerly. "Two. Three. Four."
Spitting curses, Rhea snatched up the reins of the cart and spanked the pony's back with them. The pony laid its ears back and jerked the cart forward so vigorously that Rhea went tumbling backward off the cant-board, her feet up, her white and bony shins showing above her ankle-high black shoes and mismatched wool stockings. The vaqueros laughed. Jonas laughed himself. It was pretty funny, all right, seeing her on her back with her pins in the air.
"Fuh-fuh-five ," Depape said, laughing so hard he was hiccupping. "Sih-sih-six !"
Rhea climbed back up, flopped onto the cantboard again with all the grace of a dying fish, and peered around at them, wall-eyed and sneering.
"Icurse ye all!" she screamed. It cut through them, stilling their laughter even as the cart bounced toward the edge of the trampled clearing. "Every last one of ye! Ye... and ye... and ye!" Her crooked finger pointed last at Jonas. "Thief! Miserable thief!"
As though it was yours, Jonas marveled (although "Mine!" was the first word to occur to him, once he had taken possession of it). As though such a wonder could ever belong to a back-country reader of rooster-guts such as you.
The cart bounced its way into the Bad Grass, the pony pulling hard with its ears laid back; the old woman's screams served to drive it better than any whip could have done. The black slipped into the green. They saw the cart flicker like a conjurer's trick, and then it was gone. For a long time yet, however, they heard her shrieking her curses, calling death down upon them beneath the Demon Moon.