Page 79 of The Promise of Jenny Jones
“Just go,” he muttered, his voice starting to slur.
“Ty?” she whispered, drinking in the last sight of him. “Thank you for… for everything. I love you.”
His head dropped and she didn’t know if he’d heard. Every instinct screamed at her to stay with him. He needed her. He needed nursing, needed that bullet out of his body. He was a good man; he deserved better than to die alone on the Mexican desert.
“I’ll find a village. I’ll send someone back. I promise!”
I promise.Never had she detested two words more. Blinded by tears, she threw Graciela up on the black, pulled her skirts to her thighs, and swung up behind her. Because she couldn’t bear to look at him again, she cantered away without a backward glance.
Fighting to hold his eyelids open, Ty watched until all he could see of them was a small plume of dust floating against the horizon. By then he had dulled the pain in his side by drinking most of the mescal. Silence settled like a shroud.
His chances weren’t good. He knew that. With a full canteen, and if he didn’t move much, he figured he might have four days. As weak as he was, as much blood as he’d lost, he probably had less. But he was a determined bastard, and tough. He wouldn’t go easy.
Shifting his back against the saddle, he opened his eyes and spotted three buzzards circling a spot about two miles in the distance. His hand tightened on the grip of the pistol.
He had enough bullets to stave off predators, at least for a while. The night chill would be a problem and the heat of the day, but no worse than the lack of food.
Closing his eyes, he let his head drop toward his chest.
Damn it. He should have told her that he loved her. He should have told them both.
Because when he’d watched them ride away, he’d recognized the truth. The same thing had happened with his father. The old man had to die before Ty realized that he’d loved him. Now it took his own dying to make him recognize what he’d been fighting for weeks.
Damn it. He should have told them. He should have said the words.
The gun slipped from his hand, and he slowly rolled onto his side.
Jenny rode through the sunset and into the night, Graciela limp and sleeping against her chest. Sometimes exhaustion won, and she dozed, waking with a panicked jerk and wondering how long she had slept. Finally, near dawn, she smelled a village and veered east toward the ripe scents of habitation.
There were only a dozen huts arranged around a weed-clogged plaza and a cracked fountain, which had long ago ceased to function. That was enough. Reining before the first shack she came to, she stumbled toward a rawhide door, reeling with fatigue.
“I need help,por favor,” she whispered to a man who peered through the stitching at the edges of the rawhide. “I havedinero, Señor.I can pay, but please… help me.”
He studied her reddened, exhausted eyes, scanned her rumpled, bloodstained jacket and skirt. Then he glanced toward Graciela slumped on the horse in front of his house.
He opened the door. “Mi casa es su casa, Señora.”
“Gracias, Señor, gracias.My child,” she said, collapsing against the doorjamb, her gaze grateful. The man called to someone behind him, and a woman stepped past Jenny, sliding her a look of curiosity before she rushed to help Graciela off the horse and into the house.
First, Jenny saw to it that Graciela washed and ate. Before she touched the food Senora Gonzales offered her, she drew Senor Gonzales into the yard and the early glow of sunshine.
She told him about Ty, her voice urgent and shaking. “He’s out about a day and half’s ride. He’ll need a healing woman and a carrying litter.” Senor Gonzales rubbed the money she had pressed into his palm. Then he nodded and turned away from her, heading toward the plaza, which looked more desolate in full daylight than it had in the faint hints of sunrise.
For a long moment Jenny considered waiting for Senor Gonzales to return with Ty. That’s what she wanted to do. Then her head cleared and she realized that imposing on the hospitality of these people for three days would strain the resources of the village.
Regardless, if she had truly believed the village men would bring Ty in alive, nothing on earth could have induced her to leave.
But she couldn’t bear to be here if what they brought back was his body. She wanted to remember him as he had been, vividly alive, larger than life, a man whose eyes danced with pale fire, a man whose hot touch could send her crashing to her knees. A hard, dangerous man capable of surprising tenderness, a thief who had stolen a love she hadn’t know she possessed.
“Damn it!” He would have laughed at the moisture in her eyes, would have ridiculed her weakness. Raising her hands, she ground the heels of her palms against her eyelids. She had to be strong for Graciela. Graciela had loved him, too.
After she ate food she felt too numb to taste, she and Graciela climbed into the same hammock and held each other until Graciela cried herself to sleep. Eventually Jenny slept, not waking until the heat of the day had passed.
She bought fresh clothing from Senora Gonzales, and a wagon from an old man who looked dazed by the number of pesos she dropped in his hand. She hitched the black to the wagon, loaded jugs of water and a basket of food, and she and the kid drove away from the village that would become the grave for her heart.
Two days later, hollow-eyed and trembling with fatigue, Jenny and Graciela crossed the Rio Grande and entered El Paso, Texas.
The next afternoon, wearing hastily purchased traveling ensembles, they boarded the westbound Southern Pacific, holding tickets for San Francisco.
