sensed movement somewhere close by.
“Matt.”
The voice was a whisper. He propped himself up on an elbow and looked around.
Elizabeth was on her knees beside his pile of buffalo robes. The fire had burned down, but it still gave off a faint glow that he could make out behind her, silhouetting her hair and her slender form, which was now clothed in a long nightgown. Juan Pablo’s wife was asleep on the other side of the fire.
“Matt,” she said again, “I ... I know I shouldn’t be here. It’s very improper.”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “It is.”
“And I know that you’re ... well ... injured and need your rest, but I ... I’ve been lonely here. I know I’m doing good work with these people and all, but still ... one gets lonely for the company of one’s own kind after a while. I thought perhaps ... if I could simply lie here with you for a while ...”
Matt took a deep breath. He couldn’t believe he was about to do this, but he said, “I don’t reckon that would be a good idea, Miss Fleming.”
“I think you can call me Elizabeth. And I wasn’t proposing anything, well, indecent, Mr. Bodine, just some companionship.”
She might believe what she was saying, and it might actually start out that way, Matt thought, but it wouldn’t stay that way and he didn’t figure that was a good idea.
For one thing, he really was injured, and he wasn’t sure he was up to any romping. For another, that stolid- faced Navajo woman was snoring on the other side of the hogan, and he didn’t know how sound a sleeper she was.
And for another, he just flat didn’t need the complication of a romance with this Vermont schoolteacher, no matter how pretty she was. He had to concentrate on getting better, so he could catch up with Sam and help him settle the hash of those bushwhackers.
“I’m sorry—” he began.
“No, that’s perfectly all right,” Elizabeth said, and now her voice was stiff and formal again. “There’s absolutely no need to apologize. Of course it would be a bad idea. I’ll go back to my own hogan now and leave you alone.”
As she stood up, he lifted a hand toward her and said, “Elizabeth ...”
“You should go back to sleep now,” she said firmly. “I’m sorry I disturbed your rest, Mr. Bodine.”
Before he could say anything else, she turned and left the hogan. As Matt looked through the open doorway, he saw the white shape of her nightgown for a moment, floating through the dark night like a ghost.
Then she was gone.
Matt sighed and stretched out on the blankets again. Under different circumstances, he would have been pleased to have Elizabeth pay him a nighttime visit like that, but not here and not now.
He didn’t know what things would be like between them when the sun came up in the morning. If she was so mad at him that she didn’t come to visit him anymore, he didn’t know how he was going to get through the long, empty hours while he regained his strength.
What it amounted to was that Sam didn’t need to waste any time getting back here, so they could go after those blasted bushwhackers together.
Chapter 10
By the middle of the day, Sam and Juan Pablo had reached the place where the Navajo warriors had found the blood brothers. They stopped there to eat some of the dried, jerked venison they had brought with them.
“I suppose you’ll be going back to your home now,” Sam said when they finished with the meal, such as it was.
Juan Pablo said, “No, I will come with you to the place where you and your friend fought those men. I can help you find their trail.”
“I appreciate the offer, but that’s not necessary.”
“The sooner you find them and deal with them, the sooner you can return to the canyon, get the one called Matt, and leave my people alone.”
“Well, if that’s the way you want to look at it ...” Sam shrugged. “I reckon you’re welcome to come along.”
Juan Pablo just grunted and turned away to tend to his pony.
They rode on, backtracking the trail Matt and Sam had left after their encounter with the bushwhackers several days earlier. The terrain had flattened out to the point that there weren’t many landmarks, so it didn’t really look all that familiar to Sam.
After they had gone several miles, though, he spotted a bluff that he recognized in the distance.
“That’s where they were when they started shooting at us,” he told Juan Pablo as he pointed to the bluff that jutted up from the flats. Sam swept his hand back to the south. “The arroyo where they caught up to us is over that way.”
“These men outnumbered you,” Juan Pablo said. “If they wanted you dead, why did they not keep fighting until they had killed you?”
“We’d already ventilated several of them, maybe fatally. I don’t think they had the stomach to keep fighting. They decided to cut their losses and leave us alone instead. Anyway, they knew Matt was wounded, and they may have thought I was, too. Maybe they hoped we’d just crawl off somewhere and die.”
“No man worthy of the name
