Free Hondo (1953) by Louis L'amour Page A

was clear above, and rain only over the distant mountains. Yet now the rain was general, and the parched earth of her garden drank it eagerly.
    Some water would remain in the hollow behind the washed-out dam, too. It would last a few weeks, enough so she could irrigate several times, and so it might be the difference between a good crop and none at all.
    Johnny was unnaturally quiet, watching her, his face serious. "Will the man come back, Mommy?"
    "I don't know, Johnny. He's very busy."
    The same question was haunting her own thoughts. Would he return? And why should he? But if he did, what would she do? The thought disturbed her. Why should she think of doing anything? What was there to do?
    Worried by her own feelings, she sorted clothes for washing, then dusted and mopped, doing work she had not planned to do, merely to keep her thoughts occupied. Yet she kept wondering about him. Had he found shelter?
    Remembering the incidents of his visit, she tried to tell herself that he was hard, cruel. His attitude toward the dog, toward Johnny ... all of it. Yet in her heart she knew he was not cruel. Hard, yes. But how else could he be? And how deep did the hardness go?
    What lessons he had learned had come to him in a bitter school. It was the way he knew of learning, a hard way but a fast way that taught its lessons well. She remembered the way he had come off the pallet, gun in hand. What life had a man lived who could be so alert, even in sleep?
    It was nearly sundown when the rain ended at the basin, and she went outside. The air was miraculously cool and washed clean and clear. To breathe it was like drinking cold water. The sky was still a broken mass of cloud, and thunder rumbled off in the canyon of the faraway western hills. Lowering masses of cloud filled the hollows of the hills and nestled in the saddles where the ridge dipped low. Occasionally the bulging domes of cloud flared incandescent with distant lightning.
    Leaves dripped, water whispered against the banks of the wash, brown and swirling. She fed the horses and stood silent in the yard, looking around at the hills. He was gone. Even his tracks were gone. What kind of woman was she, a married woman and a mother, to be thinking like this of any man?
    A man who had gone as if he had never been. But that was not true. His footprints were gone from the yard, yet something remained, something intangible, yet present. A something that set her heart yearning toward the way his horse had gone, that made her remember the way he walked, the strange, somber, almost lonely expression of his eyes. The hunger in them when she had looked up suddenly and met his gaze ... She flushed, remembering it. And the way he had kissed her, and what he had said.
    "A woman walks with her head up ought to kiss a man before she dies."
    She repeated the words, feeling the heavy beat of her heart. What a strange thing to say to a woman! And the way he had kissed her ... not fierce, not possessive, not demanding, and yet so much much more.
    Slow drops from the eaves fell into the barrel placed to catch the runoff. In the late dusk the hills were unnaturally green and lovely after the rain. She would take the horses out to the hills in the morning and picket them on the grass where she could keep watch on them from the garden. She walked to the corral and put her hand on the wet top rail and looked again at the hills. The hills etched themselves against the sky darkening and gray. It would be lonely now, lonely as never before.
    She turned quickly from the thought gathering her skirt in a quick gesture and biting her lip against sudden tears. She brushed them away hastily and, squaring her shoulders, walked to the house. Yet in the door, as if reluctant to close it finally against the night where he had gone, she turned again to look toward the hills. And the silent hills lay still. Even in the moments of her walking their green had gone, and the dark wings of night shadowed the basin.
    She