Susan had gone silently, biting back a thousand retorts, mounting the stairs as she had so often, throbbing with a mixture of shame and resentment.
And now here she was, in her bed and still awake as the stars paled away and the first brighter shades began to color the sky. The events of the night just past slipped through her mind in a kind of fantastical blur, like shuffled playing cards - and the one which turned up with the most persistence was the face of Will Dearborn. She thought of how that face could be hard at one moment and soften so unexpectedly at the next. And was it a handsome face? Aye, she thought so. For herself, she knew so.
I've never asked a girl to ride out with me, or if she would accept a visit of me. I would ask you, Susan, daughter of Patrick.
Why now? Why should I meet him now, when no good can come of it?
If it's ka, it 'll come like a wind. Like a cyclone.
She tossed from one side of the bed to the other, then at last rolled onto her back again. There would be no sleep for her in what remained of this night, she thought. She might as well walk out on the Drop and watch the sun come up.
Yet she continued to lie in bed, feeling somehow sick and well at the same time, looking into the shadows and listening to the first cries of the morning birds, thinking of how his mouth had felt against hers, the tender grain of it and the feeling of his teeth below his lips; the smell of his skin, the rough texture of his shirt under her palms.
She now put those palms against the top of her shift and cupped her br**sts with her fingers. The ni**les were hard, like little pebbles. And when she touched them, the heat between her legs flared suddenly and urgently.
She could sleep, she thought. She could, if she took care of that heat. If she knew how.
And she did. The old woman had shown her. Even a girl who's intact don't need to lack for a shiver now 'n then... Like a little bud o' silk, so it is.
Susan shifted in bed and slipped a hand deep beneath the sheet. She forced the old woman's bright eyes and hollow cheeks out of her mind - it wasn't hard to do at all once you set your mind to it, she discovered - and replaced it with the face of the boy with the big gelding and the silly flat-crowned hat. For a moment the vision of her mind became so clear and so sweet that it was real, and all the rest of her life only a drab dream. In this vision he kissed her over and over, their mouths widening, their tongues touching; what he breathed out, she breathed in.
She burned. She burned in her bed like a torch. And when the sun finally came over the horizon some short time later, she lay deeply asleep, with a faint smile on her lips and her unbraided hair lying across the side of her face and her pillow like loose gold.
3
In the last hour before dawn, the public room of the Travellers' Rest was as quiet as it ever became. The gaslights which turned the chandelier into a brilliant jewel until two of the clock or so on most nights were now turned down to guttering blue points, and the long, high room was shadowy and spectral.
In one corner lay a jumble of kindling - the remains of a couple of chairs smashed in a fight over a Watch Me game (the combatants were currently residing in the High Sheriff's drunk-cell). In another comer was a fairly large puddle of congealing puke. On the raised platform at the east end of the room stood a battered piano; propped against its bench was the ironwood club which belonged to Barkie, the saloon's bouncer and all-around tough man. Barkie himself, the naked mound of his scarred stomach rising above the waistband of his corduroy pants like a clot of bread dough, lay under the bench, snoring. In one hand he held a playing card: the deuce of diamonds.
At the west end of the room were the card tables. Two drunks lay with their heads on one of these, snoring and drooling on the green felt, their outstretched hands touching. Above them, on the wall, was a picture of Arthur, the Great King of Eld astride his white stallion, and a sign which read (in a curious mixture of High and Low Speech): ARGYOU NOT ABOUT THE HAND YOU ARE DELT IN CARDS OR LIFE.