It came again before he could stop himself. "Mitty!"
He flung up his forearm, and that stifled it the third time.
A figure materialized from some doorway, approached, raising hand to headgear. This man wasn't like the police up north, snarling a challenge to noisemakers. He was deferent to the light-skinned outlander.
Jones veered and hurried to meet him, almost slobbering in his gratitude.
"A woman. An American woman. Have you seen her? Did she come this way?"
"Si, senor. A woman by herself. She passed by here a little while ago. I stood and looked after her a long time. It was the first time I ever saw anything like that. I knew she must be an americana, for our women do not walk alone at night like that."
"Help me try to find her. I don't know my way around here."
"Servicio, senor." He touched his cap again, and they started out together.
Sweat that wasn't just the sweat of hurrying or of heat was all over JorJes's face, like pearls of agony.
He knew that it wasn't the mere fear of something happening to her, some bodily harm befalling her, that was wrenching at his vitals so. It was the strangeness of her doing it that had him so short-breathedly terrified.
They wavered there for a moment, in uncertainty.
"Where does this go? How far does it go?"
"Nowhere, senor. It just keeps going, out toward the mountains."
"Mitty!" was jarred from him again, as though his chest had been dynamited.
They went on again.
The town began to crumble to pieces around them, the bare earth to show through. A dog barked, oflF across a small patch of cultivated ground, roused by their distant passage, then subsided again.
The policeman touched him on the arm; his darker eyes had pierced farther ahead. "There she is, senor. Sitting on that tumbled wall, resting. See, straight before us?"
Jones came to a dead halt. "Go back now. I'll go the rest of the way alone. Here." He took out his wallet.
"No, senor. I haven't done anything."
"Here, please."
He went on toward her. She was like a part of the wall, she was so still. She was sitting there sidesaddle, one leg higher than the other. Always, sitting, walking, resting, she seemed to be looking that way, toward that. Never any other way but that.
"Mitty," he said quietly from a few yards away.
She turned. Lack of recognition, as on the balcony.
"Mitty, don't you know me?"
"Oh. Larry, where did you come from?"
"From the hotel. From our bedroom."
She stayed there, draped on the wall. Then as his hand sought hers, "Why is your hand shaking so? Look, it dances in mine."
He swallowed, unable to answer.
"Why are you looking at me like that, Larry? Your face is so white."
He brought his face close to hers, pleadingly. "What is it, Mitty? Tell me, what is it?"
She just looked at him, like a wondering child.
"Mitty, this didn't begin tonight. It's been growing more noticeable all the time. I can't talk like a book. I only know there's a line dividing strangeness from what isn't strange. I only know you're on one side of that line now, and I'm on the other."
He leaned his head against hers, in a sort of desolation. But the simile still held, for she was looking one way now, he another.
"Help me to help you, Mitty. I don't care what it is, how strange, or how bad, or how anything it is. But put it into words. I won't look into your face, if that'll make it easier for you; I'll keep my eyes like this, the other way. Talk to me as your husband. No secrets, no reservations, no separate identities between us. Just one of us, here on this wall in the moonlight. Don't let me stay this way, Mitty. I'm scared now about things I didn't even know existed before."
Wonderment, still only wonderment on her face. The wonderment of a child who hears a grownup talking but doesn't know what he means.
"What brought you out? Where were you going?" "I don't know. I just felt drawn. Like when water carries you along."
"Didn't you know that every step was taking you farther away from our room, from where I was, from where you belonged? Didn't you know that shouldn't be?" "I—I didn't think behind me. I only thought forward" "But when were you coming back?" He saw her try desperately to give the answer, and saw that she couldn't. That supphed it to him without her aid, and it was like a knife through him. She wasn't. She wouldn't have. Not if he hadn't overtaken her.
A tortured cry broke from him. "Oh, why don't they send that ship to take us out! There's something around here that's bad!"
He lifted her bodily in his arms, and turned away from the wall with her.
"I'm heavy, Larry. I can walk."
"No, I want to make sure of getting you back with me." He started on the long return trip with her, walking slowly. The soft crunch of the powdered road dust under his feet was the only sound of their spellbound promenade. In the town ahead a church bell tolled the hour with infinite, age-old melancholy. As it must have tolled it two hundred years ago, on the same sort of night as this.
Down the rutted street he came, walking straight-legged with his burden, and he knew without looking at her that her head was turned, the whole way, to look back over his shoulder at the mountain.
As they passed the cantina its handful of inmates came out to the Hghted doorway and stood there watching him go by. They stood there in a curious silence, without laughter or jeering remarks. And somehow he could sense what they were thinking, in a sudden spontaneous flare of kinship that flickered back and forth between him and them, overleaping the barriers of language and of race. Every man has his own penance to perform; this particular one's was to carry his prowling wife home in his arms, save her from the evil mysteries of the night. He saw some make the sign of the cross, in pitying awe. They were not wrong, they were not wrong. And as he turned the last comer with her, he could feel, by the shift of her bodily balance, her neck elongate, to cling to the last lingering view of it, before the walls closed in behind them to shut it out.
Chapter Ten
The native doctor, a swarthy, oily-skinned man with close-cropped black hair, wore a crash linen suit and an apricot silk shirt, the latter darker in some places than in others from too close adherence to his body. In the background Jones strode feverishly back and forth while the stethoscope shifted here, there, the next place, like a little bug hopping about on her.
The chair scraped back, the doctor rose. He went over to Jones, satchel in hand. They turned and went out the door together and stood in the dim hall beyond.
The doctor put down his satchel first of all. He shrugged in complete frustration. "She has nothing, senor. Why did you send for me? What was it?"
Jones motioned. "She went out. Out into the street alone. About an hour ago, in the middle of the night."
The doctor swept his hand put. "Nothing. Absolutely nothing."
"But you don't understand—"
He broke off short, staring across the doctor's shoulder into the room they had just left. She'd quitted the bed, put on a thin wrapper, and gone out onto the balcony. It was growing lighter every minute. The sky was turning blue along the eastern horizon, where the mountain was, as though flickering gas flames had just been lit all along its contpurs.
He gripped the doctor's arm. "Look, that's it now. Always like that."
"The air is fresher out on the balcony."
"No. La montana. Always la montana. Every night, see what I mean?"
The doctor smiled. "The mountain attracts her?"
"It pulls her. She wants to go to it all the time. Cant you help me? Can't you tell me what it is?
"But this is nothing. This is no illness. Many young women are dreamy like this. They have the too strong imagination. It is no more than a form of poesy."
"She wants to go to it. She wants me to take her to it." He poked his finger repeatedly in that direction, to make him understand. "Before you came, she asked me
to. She got down on her knees and pleaded with me. I have never seen her like that before."
The doctor pondered, pursed his lips. "The climate down here on the seacoast is hard to bear. The change may do her good."
"But what's back there? I don't know anyone. I don't know where to go. It's no place to take a woman, is it?"
The doctor motioned into the distance. "All the way back, no. On the other side of it is a tierra desconocida, an unknown land. No one goes there, not women nor men either. The government, even, does not know what lies there. But on this side, just a little way out, to where begins the rise, is all right. Would be cooler."
He took out a card and began to write on the back of it.
"I have a friend has a coffee plantation out that way. One of your countrymen; American, like you. He comes down to coast sometimes on business. You go to him. He be glad to see you. He put you up."
He handed Jones the card. It had a name on it, Mallory, and underneath, "Finca La Escondida."
The doctor tapped his pocket. "You pay him a little something for your visit. He be glad to have you." He picked up his bag and turned to go.
Then he halted once more, a scant step away, to repeat, "Not all the way out. Not beyond there. Just that far and then back again." Cautioning with his finger, he pointed to the card. "You understand?"
Jones nodded. "Not past there. Only out to there and back." He looked down at the card, tapping it thoughtfully against his other hand. Then he raised his head and called after the doctor, "Why only that far? Why no farther?"
The doctor was gone. He had already turned the corner of the passage.
Jones stood there staring after him, down its empty length.
Not beyond there. Just out that far, but no farther. As though there were an invisible line drawn across the face of the earth as in some old tale of dark enchantment. He went in again and back to her on the balcony. She was seated now, but still looking toward the mountain. He let his hand trail to her shoulder. "You still want to go out that way?"
Her hand flew to his, atop her shoulder, as though to keep it from escaping.
"He knows some people out that way. I'll get in touch with them, see if I can make arrangements. We'll go, if you're that set on it, Mitty."
The worst thing about it, to him, was the avid way she tried to rear upright in her chair. He had to put both hands to her shoulders to hold her down.
His face was bitter as he stared out across the early-morning sky to where it reared, resplendent in new-minted hues. "You win, damn you," he said in a surly undertone. "Whatever you are."
Chapter Eleven
The little narrow-gauge toy train, which had been threatening to expire for hours past during its laborious upward climb, finally gave up the ghost entirely with a single exhausted puff of steam, and this was the end of the line. The halt seemed to occur almost impromptu, in what was little better than a clearing with an open shed standing in the middle of it. Under the tin roof were numbers of bales. A few Indian women stood in the background, children strapped to their backs, looking on curiously. The rest was just close encroaching jungle wall.
Jones stood up and stepped down to the ground without further ado, the car being open on one side and the seats placed lengthwise, as in some old-fashioned summer trolley cars up north. He helped her down after him and they stood there a moment looking around them vaguely.
A man was already coming toward them with the leisurely certainty of someone who has only one train to meet and only one possible pair of passengers on that train to accost.
His skin was the regional saddle tan, but as he came into closer focus his cast of feature became more synonymous with the American origin the doctor had ascribed to him. He had on corduroy trousers and a flannel shirt, and a pecuharly shapeless felt hat that looked as though it had been endlessly waterlogged.
"Mr. Jones? I'm Mallory. Glad to see you."
They pumped hands. There may not have been much to him, sartorially or otherwise, but Jones rather took to him at sight. He had a keenness and steadiness of eye, set deep within a perpetual and apparently ineradicable squint, that inspired confidence.
"This is my wife."
Mallory tipped his mobile hat brim to her without elevating the crown part from his head.
To her he was obviously of less interest than their inanimate surroundings. She smiled parenthetically and went on looking absorbedly around her.
He turned his attention back to Jones again. He didn't look like a man who felt particularly at ease with women, anyway. "Well, I guess we may as well get started. You both ride, don't you?"
"Oh, isn't this it here?"
Mallory smiled a little, good-naturedly. "Not anywhere near it. This is only a little better than halfway. This is still lowland country to us." He led them over to one side, where there was a gap through the canopy of foliage. "You can see it from here." The tilt of the ground was continually upward. "See where the line of vegetation stops, and that brown dryness starts in? That's us. Right along the edge there."
"Pretty far up," Jones commented.
"Last cultivated patch out. After us, nothing."
Jones was watching her covertly while Mallory talked to him. She was happy, he could see that. It was written all over her. Something about this whole thing pleased her. She was pleased with the scene around her, pleased with him (the way she twined herself about his arm showed that), pleased with everything. She was more like herself than she had been at any time since they'd left the boat. That was all that mattered.
He launched the thought on a sigh of doubt without noticing it himself.
Mallory whistled and a "boy" came forward bringing their horses. The designation was strictly occupational; he was probably older than either of the two men. Mallory introduced him one-sidely. "This is Pascual, from up at our place." A flash of white teeth split Pascual's face.
They mounted and set off single file, along a dirt track that was about the width of a single wheel rut. Pascual went first, to indicate the way, although this was hardly necessary so long as the closely knit foliage hemmed them in. Then came Mitty, then the two men considerably to the rear.
The two of them spoke in desultory snatches. "Have many people come out to visit you like this?" "Not often. There's nothing to bring them here. . . . Your wife's, a good horsewoman."
"Wish I could say the same for myself." "We'll be able to make better time once we get up a little farther; it's not so overgrown."
Finally he asked Jones, "You down here on business?" "My business is waiting for me up in Frisco. Was, I should say. We missed our ship down at Puerto, had to wait over for the next one."
Mallory gave him a rueful look. "What do you think of Puerto?"
Jones expressively sliced his finger across his own neck. Mallory nodded dourly, "I agree with you there. I can't stand the place myself. Haven't been down there in eighteen months now."
Funny life for a white man, Jones reflected, looking him over. He wondered how long he'd been down here, but didn't ask him.
And that was about the sum total of their conversational exchange during the entire three-hour ride.
They came into the enclosure or compound fronting the ranch house at a desultory trot, three abreast. It had grown dark some time before, but considerably later than it did down in Puerto Santo. An oxidized green glint still manifested itself along the lower reaches of the western sky, where the sun had last been, as though a powerful chemical agent had tarnished it over that way.
"We're up higher, the evening sun stays with us longer," Mallory mentioned.
Pascual dismounted and took charge of their horses as they followed his example.
Jones couldn't get a very good idea of the place in the blue dusk that cloaked it. Before them he could make out a whitewashed building glimmering wanly at them, a wooden veranda running along the front of it, the green-yellow of oil lampHght peering from its open doorway and slitted window bhnds. An Indian woman was making great
to-do on the veranda steps, floundering about, dipping her head, and jabbering unintelligibly—evidently Mallory's housekeeper welcoming them. Off to one side was a huddle of ramshackle structures, jacales or little lean-to huts of adobe, plaited bamboo, and even empty gasoline tins and packing cases, thatched with palm and banana fronds—evidently the workers' quarters. Over to the other side of the main dwelling, forming the third arm of the quadrangle, was a Ipng shedlike structure with a corrugated tin roof, part of which was used as a stable for the horses and the rest as a warehouse for storing the sacks of green coffee beans. Overhead the gorgeous.moun-tainside stars seemed to hang low enough to touch, filling the sky like bursting white raisins.
"Come on in and find out the worst at once," Mallory invited in that dry manner of his.
"My legs are dead up to the hips," Jones admitted, stamping them on the ground to get them to work before he raised them to the veranda steps.
Mitty had already gone in at a little quick step, as though she owned the place, the Indian housekeeper ingratiatingly at her heels.
There was a large central room, entered directly from the veranda, which bisected the rambling, one-story structure. One wing, leading off this, was evidently Mallory's own quarters.
"Your room is over on this side," he said, leading them into the other wing. "We're not very fancy up here. You understand how it is." He opened a door to reveal a rather shadowy interior, plank-floored and timber-roofed and almost barren but for a decrepit mahogany bed and a truncated chest, topped by a twinkling oil lamp, which cast alternate rays and shafts of shadow around it like the spokes of a wheel.
"Come out when you get hungry," Mallory said, and withdrew down the hall.
Jones looked around him, and then at her.
It was only slightly more primitive than the hotel, after all. She was taking deep breaths, as though she couldn't get enough of the air, as though it were something pertaining to her that she had done without for a long time. Unconsciously, her head was even tilted back a little, to be able to draw upon it more freely.
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