She smiled bleakly. “I used to be pretty—very pretty. I used to be the belle of the ball. He liked to show me off, but that was all, show me off.”
Longarm said, “I see.” He didn’t say any more.
They had now come to a place where he decided to turn toward the northeast and head off into the rough country. The going wasn’t so bad for the first mile as they wove in and out of mesquite thickets and greasewood bushes, but before long the terrain started to descend and they were going across cuts and washouts and hummocks. He was keeping the horses going at as fast a walk as he thought they could manage. Because the rope kept getting tangled in the bushes, he had brought Sarah’s horse right up alongside his so that her horse’s head was slightly ahead of his knee on his right side. He was beginning to wonder about the wisdom of cutting across country as he was. They probably would have made better time if they had stayed on the path, but he didn’t know if the path would lead to the main road.
From time to time, he would glance around at Sarah. She was having a rough time of it. Her face was red and she was sweating and he could see the whiteness of her knuckles as she tried to choke the saddle horn to death. So far, she’d made no complaint, but after about an hour of the rough going, she said, “Please, can’t we stop and rest?”
Longarm shook his head and didn’t bother to look back at her. He said, “We can’t, Sarah. We’ve got to hurry.”
“But no one will be chasing us from the ranch,” she said.
Longarm said grimly, “That’s not why I’m hurrying. I’m hurrying because I want to catch your husband before he gets away with a very rich crime.”
She said, “But I can’t go on. I’m sore. I’m hurting.”
“Honey, you’re going to be a lot sorer before we get to town.” It was not Sarah that Longarm was the most worried about, it was the horses. Over the bad ground, it would be no trick at all for one of the horses to step wrong and break a leg or go lame, and they were in the wrong place and in the wrong part of the country to have anything go wrong with their transportation. He had no choice, however, but to press along as fast as he could. Harding already had too big a start. Longarm had to get word to Billy Vail and somehow stop the man. He didn’t know how he was going to go about it, not yet anyway, but he figured he had several more hours to think about it.
They dragged on as night began to fall. Dusk came like a kind of mist. There were dark clouds in the sky, and far off toward the east, Longarm could see dark thunderclouds and little flickers of lightning. That, he thought, was all they needed—a hell of a thunderstorm to make the hard clay ground slick and slippery. That would finish off the horses for sure and they had been none too good to start with.
From behind him, Sarah asked timidly, “Is it going to rain?”
He glanced back at her. She looked bedraggled and tired and as if she wished desperately she was someplace else, but she had been good so far. She hadn’t spoken for almost an hour. All he had heard out of her had been soft suppressed moans every now and then. He could imagine that she was good and sore. If you weren’t used to riding astride a horse, just an easy walk along a smooth path could be a chore, much less riding on a stiff-legged misgaited pony over rough, harsh ground where you’re cutting back and forth almost constantly and you’re not used to the motion of the saddle.
Longarm eyed the clouds and said, “I sure hope it doesn’t. Not until we get to some level ground. If we get caught on one of these slopes in a downpour, we got trouble.”
She said, “I’m so thirsty, I almost don’t care.”
“Why didn’t you mention you needed water?”
“I didn’t know we had any,” she said.
There was a big gallon canteen hanging off his saddle horn. He hadn’t tested the water in it, but he supposed somebody had. He got it up and unscrewed the top and took a drink. It was warm and brackish but it was wet. He handed it back to her, watching while she tilted the canteen up to her mouth and then made a face as she drank. When she lowered the canteen, she said, “Oh, that tastes awful.”
Longarm said, “Well, sometimes, when you’re thirsty enough, even mud will do the chore.”
She handed him back the canteen and he took another drink and screwed the top back on and looped the strap of the canteen back over his saddle horn. What he wished he hadn’t forgotten was the full bottle of whiskey that had been standing on the bedside table when he had rushed back into the room to get his hat and his gun belt. But in the rush, he simply had overlooked it and he hadn’t thought of either food or drink. He had assumed that time was more important and that they would make Laredo soon enough to get food and drink before they expired. As it was, he wasn’t so sure. It was becoming increasingly difficult to pick his way through the thick brush and the rough ground, encumbered as he was by having the other horse right up next to his. He had to look for openings in the terrain that would accommodate two horses side by side.
He was also beginning to worry about the condition of the two ranch ponies. They were holding up fairly well so far, but he could hear them both heave for breath if they had to scramble up a washout or if they were struggling to keep from sliding down a sharp incline. He feared neither one of them would ever see ten years old again and had never had the best of care. People in Mexico, Longarm always thought, seemed to consider a horse a disposable animal. Feed him just enough to keep him alive, use him as hard as you could, and then when he died, step off and remove your saddle and get another one.
It had come fair dark now. Fortunately, the moon was coming now and it was a good three-quarter moon, enough to cast some helpful light. But it was coming up in the corner of the sky where the dark clouds still hovered. As it rose it would be obscured by the clouds. He could only hope the storm was working its way toward the east and not heading toward them.
Sarah said, “How are you going to catch Richard?”
Longarm looked back at her. He said, “You didn’t call him your husband, you never do. You always call him Richard.”
She shrugged. She said, “I’m supposed to be dead, remember? I don’t think of him as my husband anymore. As a matter of fact, I haven’t thought of him as my husband for a long, long time, even before he sent me to exile at his stolen cattle ranch.”
Longarm gave her a hard look. “Is that what he has that place for?”
