"I'm sure ye don't, but I'd as soon not answer. My position is a delicate one just now, as I told ye. Besides, it's late. Here's where we part, Will. But stay . . . one more moment . . ."
She rummaged in the pocket of her apron and brought out half a cake wrapped in a piece of green leaf. The other half she had eaten on her way up to the Coos ... in what now felt like the other half of her life. She held what was left of her little evening meal out to Rusher, who sniffed it, then ate it and nuzzled her hand. She smiled, liking the velvet tickle in the cup of her palm. "Aye, thee's a good horse, so ye are."
She looked at Will Dearborn, who stood in the road, shuffling his dusty boots and gazing at her unhappily. The hard look was gone from his face, now; he looked her age again, or younger. "We were well met, weren't we?" he asked.
She stepped forward, and before she could let herself think about what she was doing, she put her hands on his shoulders, stood on her toes, and kissed him on the mouth. The kiss was brief but not sisterly.
"Aye, very well met. Will." But when he moved toward her (as thoughtlessly as a flower turning its face to follow the sun), wishing to repeat the experience, she pushed him back a step, gently but firmly.
"Nay, that was only a thank-you, and one thank-you should be enough for a gentleman. Go yer course in peace, Will."
He took up the reins like a man in a dream, looked at them for a moment as if he didn't know what in the world they were, and then looked hack at her. She could see him working to clear his mind and emotions of the impact her kiss had made. She liked him for it. And she was very glad she had done it.
"And you yours," he said, swinging into the saddle. "I look forward to meeting you for the first time."
He smiled at her, and she saw both longing and wishes in that smile. Then he gigged the horse, turned him, and started back the way they'd come - to have another look at the oil patch, mayhap. She stood where she was, by Mrs. Beech's mailbox, willing him to turn around and wave so she could see his face once more. She felt sure he would . . . but he didn't. Then, just as she was about to turn away and start down the hill to town, he did turn, and his hand lifted, fluttering for a moment in the dark like a moth.
Susan lifted her own in return and then went her way, feeling happy and unhappy at the same time. Yet - and this was perhaps the most important thing - she no longer felt soiled. When she had touched the boy's lips, Rhea's touch seemed to have left her skin. A small magic, perhaps, but she welcomed it.
She walked on, smiling a little and looking up at the stars more frequently than was her habit when out after dark.
CHAPTER IV LONG AFTER MOONSET
1
He rode restlessly for nearly two hours back and forth along what she called the Drop, never pushing Rusher above a trot, although what he wanted to do was gallop the big gelding under the stars until his own blood began to cool a little.
It'll cool plenty if you draw attention to yourself, he thought, and likely you won't even have to cool it yourself. Fools are the only folk on the earth who can absolutely count on getting what they deserve. That old saying made him think of the scarred and bowlegged man who had been his life's greatest teacher, and he smiled.
At last he turned his horse down the slope to the trickle of brook which ran there, and followed it a mile and a half upstream (past several gathers of horse; they looked at Rusher with a kind of sleepy, wall-eyed surprise) to a grove of willows. From the hollow within, a horse whickered softly. Rusher whickered in return, stamping one hoof and nodding his head up and down.
His rider ducked his own head as he passed through the willow fronds, and suddenly there was a narrow and inhuman white face hanging before him, its upper half all but swallowed by black, pupilless eyes.
He dipped for his guns - the third time tonight he'd done that, and for the third time there was nothing there. Not that it mattered; already he recognized what was hanging before him on a string: that idiotic rook's skull.
The young man who was currently calling himself Arthur Heath had taken it off his saddle (it amused him to call the skull so perched their lookout, "ugly as an old gammer, but perfect cheap to feed") and hung it here as a prank greeting. Him and his jokes! Rusher's master batted it aside hard enough to break the string and send the skull flying into the dark.