It was the first time Kady had heard his voice, and it sent chills up her spine, made the hairs on her arms stand on end. “How?” she asked, leaning toward him, and her single word told it all. She was not hesitating about whether she would go to him or not, but asking only how she could find him.
Raising his arm, he pointed with one long finger toward Kady, then raised his arm higher to point above her head. Quickly, she turned her head and once again looked toward the trees, but she saw nothing.
When she looked back, he was still there, her empty apartment behind him, as though he were standing in front of a large photograph. It was in that moment that she knew he meant for her to go down that skinny little path and turn her back on all that her apartment represented. In that moment Gregory flashed before her eyes, and she thought of the way he smiled at her, of how she felt when he held her. She thought of Onions and her customers and Gregory’s mother. And she thought of her wedding and Debbie and Jane.
“No,” she said without hesitation. “No thanks,” then took a step toward her apartment.
In that split instant, everything disappeared, the apartment, the Arabian man on the horse, all of it. Instead, there was just a rough-surfaced rock, and Kady was jammed against it as though she’d tried to walk straight through the stone.
“No, no, no, no!” she said as she turned her face away and leaned against the rock. This dream was too real, and if it was real, it was something that she did not want. “I want to go home,” she said, her mouth set in a firm line of stubbornness. “I’m not leaving here!” Crossing her arms over her corseted chest, she decided she wasn’t going to move, no matter what.
But even as she said the words, something inside her made her want to go down that path. Once again, dizziness nearly overpowered her until she feared she’d lose consciousness. Bracing against a rock to steady herself, she waited for the compulsion to pass, but it merely lightened, refusing to leave her.
Her head came up when the wind carried what seemed to be the sound of male voices. Kady tried to fight the feeling, but there seemed to be a force outside of her telling her that she had to go down that path, that she could not stay where she was. And she had to go now.
Still dizzy and seeming to grow dizzier by the second, Kady took a step toward the path, then halted as her foot encountered something. On the ground was the satin envelope, neatly retied, a lump showing that it contained the watch. When Kady bent to pick it up, she almost fainted and it took several moments before she could stand upright.
Another shot came, and this time it was as though her feet had a will of their own as she started to stumble down the path. Twice the path branched, and even though her mind was disoriented and hazy, her feet seemed to know which way to go. Clutching the envelope tightly, her train thrown over her arm, she hurried forward. Twice she seemed to black out, and each time she opened her eyes again, she found herself still half running down the mountainside. Once she left the path altogether and stumbled across rocks and fallen timber before she found another path that led down the mountainside.
Abruptly, she stumbled out of the shady woods and into brilliant sunlight. Swaying, she leaned against a boulder and tried to clear her vision. Several feet below her was a scene out of a movie. On a horse, his hands tied behind his back, his head listing to one side as though he were unconscious, was a man with a rope about his neck, and the rope was tied above to a large branch of a tree. The man was about ten seconds away from being hanged.
Near him were three men on horses, guns strapped to their hips and smirks of delight on their faces. Kady didn’t know who was in the right, who were the good guys and who the bad, but she didn’t like the look on those men’s faces. Frantically, she looked about for some way to stop this awful event before the poor man on the horse was left dangling.
A thousand thoughts ran through her head, but none of them seemed to be worth acting upon. Somehow, she doubted that she could walk up to the men and ask them to please stop. Nor did she think promises of cakes and chocolate pudding would make them cut the unconscious man down.
She hesitated for a few seconds, then nearly jumped out of her corset when she heard a hateful little laugh below her to the left. Turning, she saw that a man was standing there, a rifle across his folded arms, and he was grinning in anticipation of the gory sight he was about to see.
Maybe it was the thousands of television shows Kady had seen or all the violent movies, but she didn’t seem to think at all. It was pure instinct that made her creep up behind the man, pick up a big rock, and bring it down on his head.
Silently, the man crumpled to the ground, and Kady grabbed his rifle. Now what? she thought, looking at the thing. How do I fire it? What should I—?
She didn’t have any more thoughts because the rifle seemed to go off by itself and the kick of it sent Kady slamming back into a deep crevice between two rocks, the man she’d hit on the head at her feet.
Still holding the rifle, her eyes wide in astonishment, she peered through the shrubs at the men on the horses several feet away. There was a tree between her and them, and because of the angle, she realized, the men couldn’t see her, but by the noise and confusion, she knew she had distracted them. Holding the rifle against her corseted belly, Kady pulled the trigger again, only to find that nothing happened. Cock it, came a voice into her head, and she remembered seeing TV shows where men pulled down a lever on the bottom of the rifle, then fired. After a bit of fumbling, she managed to do this, then fired again. This time there was a yell of pain, and she knew, to her horror, that she had hit someone.
The sound of horses’ hooves, plus three shots directed toward her location, made her leap behind the rocks and crawl into a tiny cave formed by fallen trees and little bushes. With her breath held in fear, Kady listened as the horses came thundering her way.
“What about him?” one of the men yelled when they were so near Kady she could feel the warmth of their horses. She could tell that “him” was the poor man they’d been about to hang.
“Shoot the horse out from under him, and let’s get the hell out of here.”
It was all Kady could do to keep from yelling “No!” but self-preservation made her stay where she was, trying to make herself as small as possible, holding the train of the wedding dress close to her body so they wouldn’t see her. There was another shot; then, to her horror, she saw the satin envelope on the path and prayed the men wouldn’t see it.
But they were gone as fast as they could pull the man she’d bashed onto a horse; then all was quiet. Part of her wanted to run from her hiding place, but another part of her wanted to stay there until someone came to rescue her.
But her concern for the man about to be hanged won over her own fear. After disentangling herself from the underbrush, she slung the train of her dress over her arm, grabbed the envelope, then took off running in his direction.
As soon as she was in the sunlight, she saw that the man was still on his horse, still had the noose about his neck. The shot had obviously scared the animal as it had moved forward until the poor man in the saddle was stretched as far as his body could be.
When Kady reached him, she knew that she could lose no time. Gently, she spoke to the horse, caressing its nose as she coaxed it to move backward a few steps and relieve some pressure on the man’s neck. Once the animal was back, she put her hand on the man’s leg and looked up at him. “Sir?” she said, but saw that he was unconscious, oblivious to everything.
So how did she get him down? she wondered. The man was big, at least six feet tall and a couple of hundred pounds. His hands were tied, and he was dead to the world, and if that thick rope lashing his neck to a tree wasn’t removed, he’d be even more dead very soon.
“Mister,” she called up, shaking him with her hand on his calf. There was no response from the man, but the horse turned its head and rolled its eyes at her, then moved one foot forward. If the horse became impatient and decided to walk away, he’d leave his passenger hanging, so Kady knew she had to act immediately.
As quickly as she could, she divested herself of the heavy, trained skirt, all the half-slips, the lovely veil and the lace gloves, until she was wearing the long drawers, hose, and the nifty little boots, which easily slipped into the stirrup beside the man’s booted foot.
With a great push, she propelled herself onto the back of the saddle behind the unconscious man.