San Antone. V. J. Banis

she asked, “Is that what my husband is doing, here in Texas? Following a mirage?”

      “Hard to say.” He pointed down; at their feet, a brief stretch of wagon tracks could just be made out in the tall brown grass. “At least he’s not the first.”

      “It’s hard to imagine anyone else has ever been here,” she said, marveling.

      “The land heals itself. That’s part of what I like about Texas. People keep coming, more and more of them, and there’s so much Texas, it just soaks them up, the way the desert soaks up the spring rains, till there’s scarcely a trace of them, and the land is still just as big and open and wild as it ever was.”

      “Will it always be, I wonder?”

      “There’s something in me likes to think a part of it always will be. If God had anything in mind when he made Texas, it must have been to let a man know what freedom feels like.”

      Freedom. Yes, she’d been thinking something like that earlier; that was what she’d sensed here, since they’d left Galveston. Those pushed-back horizons, faded far off into the distance; why, even the boundaries of her marriage seemed to have moved back from her, to give her room she’d never had before.

      She tried to look at this moment in time over her shoulder as it were, as it would look when she had gone on into the future.

      Wouldn’t it be funny if this, here, turned out to be happiness, the happiness she’d been waiting for all her life, that had seemed always to elude her. This immense dome of sky, faded to a washed-out blue-gray. The endless, wrinkled prairie unfolding itself before them, and the tall grass burning brown in the hot sun. The sky-searching of a hawk, her hair loose from its pins, whipping in her face, and the steady thrumedy-thrumedy-thrum of horses’ hooves on the iron-hard ground.

      She laughed aloud. Webb Price gave her a surprised look, and then he laughed with her. Suddenly, he spurred up his horse and with a loud yell, Yippee-i-o, he raced forward. She kicked the pony’s flanks and ran after him, the two of them thundering over the plains. The rest of her pins came loose and her hair made a golden red cloud trailing after her, a web to catch the shining rays of the midday sun.

      “There,” he said, pointing to where a greener patch of grass and a low outcropping of brush marked the location of the water hole they were seeking.

      They slowed to a more sedate pace. “It got to you, didn’t it?” he asked, grinning. “Texas? It does that, it gets to you all of a sudden. I may as well warn you, once it’s in your blood like that, you like to never get it out.”

      She laughed, and shook her hair about her face. “I like it,” she said. “I like it here.” And she did, as simply as that; she felt suddenly as if she’d come home, home to some place where her heart had been all along, without her even knowing it.

      “It can be a rough country, too. Hard to tame,” he warned.

      “I don’t know that I’d want to tame it, exactly,” she said, looking around with a newfound sense of recognition.

      “Like a horse, you mean, just tame enough to stay on, and still wild in the heart.” The way a man wants a woman, he was thinking, but didn’t dare say. The way I want you.

      “Like this pony,” she said, and he was immediately sorry for his analogy.

      They had reached the water hole. He dismounted and came to help her down.

      Their touch, when he took her hand, was like a flash of lightning crackling about them. The tension that had long been mounting between them broke. Whether by accident or by design, she half fell into his arms, against his chest, and somehow, never knowing quite how it had come about, he was kissing her—her lips, her throat, her hair, even the closed lids of her eyes. She crowded into his senses, merged with the scent of hot prairie and tall grass and mirrored surface of the pool. Something pierced his chest like a knife, but sweetly for all its pain.

      “Joanna,” he murmured, and in her name alone was his declaration of love.

      Suddenly she was struggling against him. For a few seconds he held her tight, body crushed against body, softness yielding to rocklike hardness.

      “Don’t, please,” she cried.

      He let her go then. She took a step backward, half staggering drunkenly. He could still feel the heat of her breasts where they had been crushed against him.

      “I’m married,” she said, breathing heavily.

      “Your husband....”

      “...Is my husband, for better or for worse,” she finished for him.

      “Most would say for the worst.”

      “And so you would make of me a poor wife? A cheap woman?”

      “You could never be that.”

      “I would be to a husband I betrayed. And what man would ever be sure afterward that he could trust me either? Is that what you want, Lieutenant Price? Because I can tell you truthfully, you are very dangerously close to having it. To something we can’t do without feeling ashamed afterward.”

      For a long moment they regarded one another steadily. Then, with an angry set to his mouth, he turned away from her. “No” was all he said.

      Their horses, mindless of the passion hovering in air, had gone to drink at the muddy pool. They waited silently for the animals to finish, then mounted again and turned back toward the wagon train. He let her ride ahead of him, but when they had ridden a short distance, he spoke her name, in a formal, businesslike voice.

      “Mrs. Harte?”

      She looked back at him, trying not to show the pain that distant tone caused her. “Yes?”

      “I think you’ll be happier here if you learn to manage a western saddle.”