She looked very wan and schoolgirlish in her prim gray dress and with her hair in a braid tied with a bright red ribbon, and her tearstained cheeks.
One of the men who had strolled off a little way with the appearance of utmost casualness returned to the group in time to hear this. “He’ll be back any minute now,” he announced. “He didn’t get no deer.”
“But how do you know?”
The soft-spoken young man shot a malignant look at the other, the older man looked suddenly abashed. Sabra’s question went unanswered. “Won’t you sit and rest yourself, ma’am?” suggested the spokesman. The words were hospitable enough, yet there was that in the boy’s tone which conveyed to Sabra the suggestion that she and Cim had better be gone. She took Cim’s hand. Now that her fright was past she thought she must have looked very silly running down the draw with her tears and her pigtail and her screaming. She thanked them, using a little Southern charm and Southern drawl, which she often legitimately borrowed from the ancestral Venables for special occasions such as this.
“I’m ve’y grateful to you-all,” she now said. “You’ve been mighty kind. If you would just drop around to our camp I’m sure my husband would be delighted to meet you.”
The young man smiled more sweetly than ever, and the others looked at him, an inexplicable glint of humor in their weather-beaten faces.
“I sure thank you, ma’am. We’re movin’ on, my friends here and me. Pronto. Floyd, how about you getting a piece of deer meat for the lady, seeing she’s been cheated of her supper. Now, if you and the little fella don’t mind sittin’ up behind and before, why, I’ll take you back a ways. You probably run fu’ther than you expected, ma’am, scared as you was.” She had, as a matter of fact, in her terror, run almost half a mile from camp.
He mounted first. His method of accomplishing this was something of a miracle. At one moment the horse was standing ready and he was at its side. The next there was a flash, and he was on its back. It was like an optical illusion in which he seemed to have been drawn to the saddle as a needle flies to the magnet. Cim he drew up to the pommel, holding him with one hand; Sabra, perched on the horse’s rump, clung with both arms round the lad’s slim waist. Something of a horsewoman, she noticed his fine Mexican saddle, studded with silver. From the sides of the saddle hung hair-covered pockets whose bulge was the outline of a gun. A slicker such as is carried by those who ride the trails made a compact shipshape roll behind the saddle. The horse had a velvet gait, even with this triple load. Sabra found herself wishing that this exhilarating ride might go on for miles. Suddenly she noticed that the young rider wore gloves. The sight of them made her vaguely uneasy, as though some memory had been stirred. She had never seen a plainsman wearing gloves. It was absurd, somehow.
A hundred feet or so from the camp he reined in his horse abruptly, half turned in his saddle, and with his free hand swung Sabra gently to the ground, leaning far from his saddle and keeping a firm hold on Cim and reins as he did so. He placed the child in her upraised arms, wheeled, and was gone before she could open her lips to frame a word of thanks. The piece of deer meat, neatly wrapped, lay on the ground at her feet. She stood staring after the galloping figure, dumbly. She took Cim’s hand. Together they ran toward the camp. Isaiah had a fire going, a pot of coffee bubbling. His greeting to Cim was sternly admonitory. Ten minutes later Yancey galloped in, empty handed.
“What a chase he led me! Twice I thought I had him. I’d have run him into Texas if I hadn’t thought you’d be—”
Sabra, for the first time since her marriage, felt superior to him; was impatient of his tale of prowess. She had her own story to tell, spiced with indignation. She was not interested in his mythical deer. She had an actual piece of fresh deer meat to cook for their supper.
“… and just when I was ready to die with fright, there he was, talking to those four men, and sitting on the knee of one of them as though he’d known him all his life eating nuts. … Anything might have happened to him and to me while you were off after your old deer.”
Yancey seemed less interested in the part that she and Cim had played in the adventure than in the appearance and behavior of the four men in the draw, and especially the charming young man who had so gallantly brought them back.
“Thin faced, was he? And a youngster? About nineteen or twenty? What else?”
“Oh, a low voice, and kind of sweet, as though he sang tenor. And his teeth—”
Yancey interrupted. “Long, weren’t they? The two at the side, I mean. Like a wolf’s?”
“Yes. How did you—Do you know him?”
“Sort of,” Yancey answered, thoughtfully.
Sabra was piqued. “It was lucky for us it was someone who knows you, probably. Because you don’t seem to care much about what happened to us—what might have happened.”
“You said you wanted to go a-pioneering.”
“Well?”
“This is it. Stir that fire, Isaiah. Sabra, get that deer meat a-frizzling that your friend gave you. Because we’re moving on.”
“Now? Tonight? But it’s late. I thought we were camping here for the night.”
“We’ll eat and get going. Moonlight tonight. I don’t just like it here. There’s been a lot of time lost this afternoon. We’ll push on. In another day or so, with luck, we’ll
