She paused.
“I shouldn’t have trusted them.”
Jeebee tensed. This time she did look at him.
“Oh, they didn’t do anything to me personally.” She looked back at the fire. “But when I got up in the morning and moved out into the kitchen, I found one of them holding a rifle on me. The other took away my revolver. They told me they’d talked it over last night after I’d gone to bed. I was to stay with them—and work for them. They needed a woman around the house. As long as I didn’t give any trouble to them, they wouldn’t give any trouble to me. But I was going to stay, and that was that.”
She hesitated.
“In some ways,” she said, “I don’t think they were really so bad. It was just that they really wanted to keep me, and they knew I’d never stay of my own free will. So they took my guns and my horses—everything I owned— and made sure I wasn’t carrying anything else, even a knife I might use against them. And kept me locked up nights. Daytimes, there was always one of them with me and he had a gun.”
She stopped, and stayed stopped so long that Jeebee finally prompted her.
“What happened then?”
She looked at him.
“Well,” she said, “I thought it best to seem to go along with them and maybe they’d relax and I’d have a chance to slip away.
And that’s pretty much what happened after several weeks. But I had to run at night, with nothing more than that packsack on my back, with a couple of blankets and a little bit of food that I stole from their kitchen. I headed north blind. I didn’t even get to keep my binoculars. With those I could have waited my time to come up and watch a ranch house from a distance until I was sure there was a woman there, or else there was some sign that it’d be safe to go up to them. As it happened, I’d only passed a couple of places—and that at night—before this snow caught me. I sneaked into a barn at one of the ranch houses, but left that morning before anybody was up, so I don’t know what they were like. I headed on north, but finally, I knew it was no good. I was out of food and desperate. Even if they made a slave of me, the next place I came to, I had to go in and throw myself on their mercy. If I didn’t find a place, I was going into the hills, the way you have, and see if I couldn’t set snares for rabbits and small animals and find someplace to hole up.” She looked at him.
“Well, you know the rest,” she said. “It was then you found me.
“You were really ready to drop,” said Jeebee. “I don’t know how you went that long before turning in somewhere.”
“I kept hoping to catch up with you,” she said, looking at him. “It’s funny. I didn’t really find you until after I’d finally given up hope I’d find you.”
“You were out on your feet,” Jeebee said gruffly. “You’d have died that night if I hadn’t found you.”
“Maybe,” she said, looking back at the fire. “Maybe… but maybe not. I had a lot of reason to want to live.”
She sat without saying anything more for some seconds. Jeebee waited her out, listening to the crackle and snap of the burning wood in the fireplace. Finally she shook her head, as if she was putting the whole memory she had talked about out of her mind. She looked over at him and smiled.
“Have you looked for an outdoor thermometer down at that ranch?” she said. “That’s not the sort of thing people raiding a ranch like that would particularly think of taking. They must have had a thermometer to see what the outside temperature was like. Did you see one?”
“No,” Jeebee said slowly. The fact of the matter was it had never crossed his mind to look, either. Or if he had seen one, he had paid no attention to it. He was long past the point where he thought of the weather in degrees. It was cold, it was hot, it was bearable, it was unbearable. These were the things he concerned himself with, as exclusively as Wolf might.
“You’re probably right,” he said. “There’s got to be one. I can look for it. But what do we need a thermometer for, particularly?”
“You shouldn’t have to ask me that,” said Merry. “You know I’ve been digging that pit in the cold room up front for the meat storage. We’re almost to the point where it’s going to be cold enough to keep meat frozen down there. But we want to be sure. If you can get a thermometer from the ranch, we can check the temperature at the bottom and know.”
Jeebee felt stupid.
“Of course,” he said. “I’ll swing by there tomorrow, long enough to see if I can find one without a lot of searching. I’d still like to get more in before the weather breaks.”
“I’d like to get down there, too,” said Merry. “Why don’t you let me go down with you, and leave me at the ranch while you go out hunting, then come back and pick me up along with whatever I’ve found to take back.”
Jeebee was tempted to point out that taking her there and then going back to pick her up would limit the amount of ground he could cover out on the open range looking for cattle. While he hesitated, she spoke again.
“As you say, this good weather isn’t going to last, perhaps not more than another day or so—if that. In fact, it could snow tonight and we’d be into winter,” she said. “I want to get down and comb through that place before everything gets covered.”
“All right,” said Jeebee.
But, almost miraculously, the weather continued to hold. Not only was it warmer than it had been—and warmer than it should be for this time of year—but the sky remained clear of clouds and they had relatively long hours of daylight in which to get things done.
Jeebee was making progress in using the solar-cell blanket to charge all the batteries. Evidently the converter that was built into the blanket would work for car batteries, although it was, as he had expected, no better than a trickle charger. It was very slow to get a battery up to working level.
Nonetheless, he kept the blanket spread out where the sun could reach it all day long, and continuously connected to a battery, so that one of them was being charged all the daylight hours. Eventually they had four fully charged batteries in reserve, which could be turned on for extra or emergency lighting during the night or early morning, if the fire was out or for other reason they needed extra illumination. Using the cars’ interior lights had allowed the batteries to charge faster than Jeebee depleted them by use. Also, the light from the fireplace had helped.
Accordingly, both Merry and Jeebee went with the horses and the trailer down to the ranch the next morning. Merry finally let herself be persuaded to ride in the trailer, though this was anything but a comfortable way to travel.
The springs on the trailer were very stiff, designed for heavy loads, like machinery or equipment that needed to be hauled about the ranch. So they were very little use in cushioning the bumps and jolts along the way. Also the trailer was continually tilted either upslope or downslope or sometimes toward one side or another. The result was that Merry had to ride holding on to the top pipe of the fencing that enclosed the body of the trailer, to keep from being thrown off her feet.
In fact, part of the way down there, she got so thoroughly sick of the jolting that she insisted on stopping, getting out, and walking. However, she recognized shortly that she was still not up to an extended tramp of any kind on foot. They compromised by stopping for short rests and Jeebee promised that he would build a sort of padded chair-harness that could be put in the trailer for anyone who wanted to ride in it. It had not occurred to him before, but either one of them could be hurt away from the cave, and need to be transported back to it in the trailer. He began to think about some way of anchoring down and cushioning a bed that could be fastened to the floor of the trailer as well as the harness.
He dropped Merry off at the ranch. He had taken the place so much for granted, he was a little startled to see Merry reacting to it as if it was some sort of potential Christmas tree full of presents. He left her there, worrying a little that she would be disappointed with what a small amount of things there were to find, and went about his hunting.
It turned out to be one of his unsuccessful days. Most of the time he could find cattle fairly easily. But occasionally, from some instinct of self-preservation, they either all seemed to have gone into hiding, or else he was somehow perversely threading a path through all the places where they weren’t.
He had given up and headed back toward the ranch when he found himself startling jackrabbits with the
