to his unending job of accumulating and chopping firewood for the fireplace.
They could not have too much of this and he was piling it ready against the outside wall of the cave, where it would act as an extra windbreak, if not extra insulation against the cold, later on. Merry came home eventually, with a good load of meat, as well as some light things from the ranch, to top out a fairly good-sized packload on Sally.
“I was lucky,” she told Jeebee as they were unloading and unsaddling the horses together. “I found a calf by itself, almost the minute I hit the flat down there. So I spent the rest of the time at the ranch. How’s the forge coming?”
“It’s done,” said Jeebee. “There’s no time tonight to rig lights in there, so if you can wait awhile in the morning before you go out, I’ll show you how it works.”
That afternoon and evening after she got home Merry did not talk about her journey to find Jeebee. She talked about everything else, about her hunting, about the ranch, about several dozen things. Her tone was excited and cheerful. She bustled about the interior of the cave. Finally, almost regretfully, she agreed that they should probably turn in for the night, since they were always up by dawn.
Jeebee fell asleep almost immediately, as had become a habit with him. He was roused to find Merry holding herself tightly against him and crying into his chest.
“What is it?” he said, putting his arms around her.
“Just hold me,” Merry choked.
He tightened his arms around her. She was crying very hard indeed. It was the kind of weeping that tears apart the one who weeps.
Once, Jeebee thought, his mind would have been flooded with a number of questions and guesses as to what was troubling her. But the past months had changed him in this, too. Her explanation would come eventually. There was no need to try to hurry it. She was being attacked by something, something her mind remembered; and all he could do was be a fortress about her and wait. So, he would wait.
He laid his cheek down tenderly upon the top of her soft hair and tried to encompass her as much as he could with his presence. For no reason at all, he thought of how Wolf had come to him in the river bottoms, and also when he had turned his ankle. Often Wolf had come when he was asleep, or when he was so caught between wakefulness and sleep that he was hardly conscious of the other appearing. Invariably, Wolf sniffed him all over and then nose-prodded at his arm or body. “Nose-lift,” he told himself, would be a better term, since essentially what Wolf did was slide the top of his nose under an arm or a leg and push upward, to see if Jeebee made any reaction.
The moment Jeebee did come full awake or respond, Wolf either greeted him or—more often—simply seemed to lose all interest, turned about, trotted off, and disappeared.
If it had not been for the wolf books, Jeebee would not have recognized what the other was doing. But with the help of the books, he now understood. Wolf was simply making sure that he was still alive. At first, his sudden switches to total indifference had been shocking to Jeebee. Yet this was the same animal who had brought him food the only way he could—in his own stomach.
Wolves dealt with things as they were, and, Jeebee told himself, he now had come to do pretty much the same thing.
He waited. Merry cried for some time. Eventually the emotion went out of her, her body relaxed, and the tears gave way to dry sobs, the sobs to silence. She lay still for what seemed a long while, simply holding to him. Then, almost abruptly, she took her arms away and sat up, wiping her eyes.
“Let’s get up and build up the fire,” she said.
She got out of the bed without waiting for his answer, wrapped a blanket around her, and went over to hunch down before the fire and feed its still-glowing coals. Jeebee rose, pulled on his pants and jacket, and went to join her.
The fire blazed up and they sat down together on the two chairs he had brought back from the ranch, just before the fireplace. Merry took the coffeepot off its hook and weighed it in her hand. Evidently satisfied that there was still tea water in it, she put it back on the hook and swung the rod about so that it was over the flames.
She continued to say nothing, so Jeebee did not speak, either. They sat together. After a while, when the water was hot, she filled his cup, then hers, and sat back in her chair, not sipping from the cup, but holding it in both hands as if to warm herself. The fire was now throwing enough heat so that extra warmth should not be necessary, but still she cradled the cup in her grasp.
“I haven’t cried,” she said to the fire. “I wasn’t able to, until now.”
“Do you want to tell me?” Jeebee asked.
“Yes,” she said, “I wanted to from the first moment I found you. But I couldn’t.” She paused.
“You remember the horses?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Jeebee, understanding which particular horses to which she referred.
“You know the ones I mean?” she persisted.
“The ones always saddled and ready, tied to the end of the wagon as you went,” Jeebee answered.
As he said the words the memory of them came back to him. The three horses—four, after he had joined the wagon’s crew—all saddled, the full pack behind the saddle, a loaded rifle scabbarded at each saddle and the ends of their reins tied to holding bars at the back of the wagon. He remembered that whatever horse Merry would be riding also always had a rifle at its saddle. Just as she at all times had a handgun in the holster of the gun-belt around her waist and a filled pack behind her saddle. These packs, he had learned, on his third day with the wagon, carried the essentials for survival, insofar as Paul could supply them. They carried some of Paul’s hidden store of antibiotics, ammunition and extra handguns, which were always valuable trade goods, bedrolls, clothing, and other needs. The horses that bore these things were for escape.
Merry had looked at him for a second as she asked the last question, but now her eyes were back on the fire.
“They were waiting for us,” she said in a steady voice. “We were on a pretty good highway—not a two-lane freeway, but a good local highway, with the ground clear back fifty to a hundred feet on each side and trees beyond—”
She laughed, unhappily.
“If it hadn’t been like that, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “They would have got me, too—”
Her voice died. He waited. Finally he spoke.
“The people in the area didn’t warn you that there was danger?” he asked.
What she wanted to tell him was not even now coming easily. It was up to him, plainly, to draw her out gently, to make it possible with questions for her to tell him.
“Nobody local had told us anything,” Merry answered dully. “I don’t think they knew themselves there were raiders around.”
“Someone local must have known, if they were waiting and ready for you.”
“Yes,” she answered, “they were waiting. I don’t know how they knew. Maybe they’d been camped nearby, in a patch of woods somewhere, or perhaps in some place that’d already been raided. Just—there was no warning. No warning at all. Just all of a sudden they were there, coming out of the trees on both sides of the road.”
“Then it was planned,” Jeebee said.
“Yes,” Merry said indifferently. Her words were still addressed to the fire. It was as if all that mattered could be seen there, among the alternately fading and bright-glowing embers, where the greatest heat of the fire was, under the flames.
“It was an ambush.” She shook her head, very slightly. “There were way too many of them for us, but they wanted it easy.”
She went silent, again. Jeebee waited. But this time it was as if she had run out of words to go on with. He prodded her with another question as Wolf had nosed up one of his arms when he was bedridden and unmoving.
“How did they think it’d go?”
“I don’t know,” Merry said in the same dead voice to the flames. “Easy, I suppose. There had to have been more than a hundred of them. They let the wagon get right into the middle of where they were waiting, before they came out of the trees. It was just luck I was back, further than usual, heading in Missy”—she glanced for only
