"Ben's the boss." Joe Button was relieved. "Fool thing, anyhow." He threw down his cigarette, half-smoked. "Jack and Mort ... yes, and Wes too. They got us into more trouble than we could get out of."
Trace Jordan reined his horse over. "See you," he said and put Big Red down the trail. Being a cautious man, he glanced back but Joe Sutton was riding on.
It was almost sundown when he found her. Maria Cristina had made camp in a little wooded draw off the Pass. She got up from the fire as he rode up, her face without expression. He swung his horse alongside the fire.
"What did you ride off for?" he demanded irritably.
"I do not run. I go home." She knelt beside the fire, knelt suddenly as if her knees had weakened. She began fussing over the food she was preparing. In the late afternoon light her face seemed unnaturally pale.
He swung down. "Damn it, you didn't have to run off! You could have said something!"
"Why? Who I say something to?... To you?"
"I don't want you going off like that," he protested. "This is no time for a woman to be traveling alone."
She did not look up, adding sticks to the fire. Then she added sullenly, "I am all right."
The words he had been thinking on the trail were gone. Somewhere he had lost them. He told her of Vicente and Wes Parker but she would not look at him. She put coffee in the water and got up.
He stepped around the fire and took her by the arms. "Maria Cristina, I don't want you going away. Not ever again. I want you with me."
She turned on him, looking up into his eyes, and there was no longer sullenness there, or anger. "You don't know what you say."
"I know all right --" She tried to draw away from him, her eyes suddenly wary, half-frightened. "No ... you take your hands off." She tried, ineffectually, to twist out of his grip.
"Don't do that!" he said sharply, angrily. He drew her swiftly into his arms, her body coming against his. She looked up at him, her eyes very black and suddenly burning, almost hungry.
Then desperately, fiercely, she fought him. She fought to twist free, to get away. He held her, then slowly and inexorably he brought her mouth around to his.
She twisted her face away, fighting like a panther to escape, then suddenly, fiercely, she turned her mouth to his and their lips met and clung.
He held her, saying nothing. "Just ain't halter-broke," he said gently, "but you'll do. You'll do all right." She stood quiet in his arms and the big red horse moved off a few steps and fell to cropping grass. He had his own degrees of patience and was becoming accustomed to the oddities of human behavior.
Later, when most of the coffee had boiled away, Jordan drank it, black and strong.
She looked at him, her eyes soft in the gathering dusk. "You know one time I say I don't think you ever make it?"
"I remember."
"Well... now I think maybe you make it."
She laughed then, a laugh teasing and tender, a soft laughter that lost itself with the campfire smoke in the brush along the canyon's wall.
the Burning Hills (1956) Page 12