The moment Jeebee did come full awake or respond, Wolf either greeted him or—more often—simply seemed to lose all interest, turned about, trotted off, and disappeared.
If it had not been for the wolf books, Jeebee would not have recognized what the other was doing. But with the help of the books, he now understood. Wolf was simply making sure that he was still alive. At first, his sudden switches to total indifference had been shocking to Jeebee. Yet this was the same animal who had brought him food the only way he could—in his own stomach.
Wolves dealt with things as they were, and, Jeebee told himself, he now had come to do pretty much the same thing.
He waited. Merry cried for some time. Eventually the emotion went out of her, her body relaxed, and the tears gave way to dry sobs, the sobs to silence. She lay still for what seemed a long while, simply holding to him. Then, almost abruptly, she took her arms away and sat up, wiping her eyes.
“Let’s get up and build up the fire,” she said.
She got out of the bed without waiting for his answer, wrapped a blanket around her, and went over to hunch down before the fire and feed its still-glowing coals. Jeebee rose, pulled on his pants and jacket, and went to join her.
The fire blazed up and they sat down together on the two chairs he had brought back from the ranch, just before the fireplace. Merry took the coffeepot off its hook and weighed it in her hand. Evidently satisfied that there was still tea water in it, she put it back on the hook and swung the rod about so that it was over the flames.
She continued to say nothing, so Jeebee did not speak, either. They sat together. After a while, when the water was hot, she filled his cup, then hers, and sat back in her chair, not sipping from the cup, but holding it in both hands as if to warm herself. The fire was now throwing enough heat so that extra warmth should not be necessary, but still she cradled the cup in her grasp.
“I haven’t cried,” she said to the fire. “I wasn’t able to, until now.”
“Do you want to tell me?” Jeebee asked.
“Yes,” she said, “I wanted to from the first moment I found you. But I couldn’t.” She paused.
“You remember the horses?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Jeebee, understanding which particular horses to which she referred.
“You know the ones I mean?” she persisted.
“The ones always saddled and ready, tied to the end of the wagon as you went,” Jeebee answered.
As he said the words the memory of them came back to him. The three horses—four, after he had joined the wagon’s crew—all saddled, the full pack behind the saddle, a loaded rifle scabbarded at each saddle and the ends of their reins tied to holding bars at the back of the wagon. He remembered that whatever horse Merry would be riding also always had a rifle at its saddle. Just as she at all times had a handgun in the holster of the gun-belt around her waist and a filled pack behind her saddle. These packs, he had learned, on his third day with the wagon, carried the essentials for survival, insofar as Paul could supply them. They carried some of Paul’s hidden store of antibiotics, ammunition and extra handguns, which were always valuable trade goods, bedrolls, clothing, and other needs. The horses that bore these things were for escape.
Merry had looked at him for a second as she asked the last question, but now her eyes were back on the fire.
“They were waiting for us,” she said in a steady voice. “We were on a pretty good highway—not a two-lane freeway, but a good local highway, with the ground clear back fifty to a hundred feet on each side and trees beyond—”
She laughed, unhappily.
“If it hadn’t been like that, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “They would have got me, too—”
Her voice died. He waited. Finally he spoke.
“The people in the area didn’t warn you that there was danger?” he asked.
What she wanted to tell him was not even now coming easily. It was up to him, plainly, to draw her out gently, to make it possible with questions for her to tell him.
“Nobody local had told us anything,” Merry answered dully. “I don’t think they knew themselves there were raiders around.”
“Someone local must have known, if they were waiting and ready for you.”
“Yes,” she answered, “they were waiting. I don’t know how they knew. Maybe they’d been camped nearby, in a patch of woods somewhere, or perhaps in some place that’d already been raided. Just—there was no warning. No warning at all. Just all of a sudden they were there, coming out of the trees on both sides of the road.”
“Then it was planned,” Jeebee said.
“Yes,” Merry said indifferently. Her words were still addressed to the fire. It was as if all that mattered could be seen there, among the alternately fading and bright-glowing embers, where the greatest heat of the fire was, under the flames.
“It was an ambush.” She shook her head, very slightly. “There were way too many of them for us, but they wanted it easy.”
She went silent, again. Jeebee waited. But this time it was as if she had run out of words to go on with. He prodded her with another question as Wolf had nosed up one of his arms when he was bedridden and unmoving.
“How did they think it’d go?”
“I don’t know,” Merry said in the same dead voice to the flames. “Easy, I suppose. There had to have been more than a hundred of them. They let the wagon get right into the middle of where they were waiting, before they came out of the trees. It was just luck I was back, further than usual, heading in Missy”—she glanced for only a second at Jeebee—“you don’t know her. We traded for her after you left us. She wasn’t full-trained to staying with the wagon and so she’d stray—”
Merry paused.
“If I hadn’t gone back after her… but I did, and when they swarmed the wagon, they were all up ahead of me. I heard the alarm siren when Dad pulled it; and I looked back, to see them riding in on it from both sides. Then the siren quit; and I knew Dad must already be inside with Nick. Almost at the same time, I heard our machine guns, both of them…”
She ran down. Jeebee waited. “You know what he always said,” she went on dully. “‘Ride, fast as you can. Don’t look back.’”
She stopped speaking. The firelight glanced off her hair. She was sitting with her elbows on her knees, apparently all her attention concentrated on the fire. The moments stretched out.
“I rode,” she said at last, in a monotone. “I think some of them even chased me a little ways—I’m not sure of that. But I rode; and after a while I was too far away to hear the firing…”
She broke off. Again, a silence. Only the fire crackled and snapped.
“They couldn’t have known how well Dad and Nick were prepared to fight them off,” she went on finally. “They must have been surprised… ”
She lifted her head slowly and looked steadily at Jeebee.
“You know what else he said.” She waited.
Jeebee nodded and she went on.
“‘Don’t try to come back’—that’s what he always told us. ‘Never come back.’”
Her eyes were still on Jeebee. He wanted to reach out and touch her, comfortingly, but he was afraid that even that might be wrong at this moment.
“You went back,” Jeebee said. She dropped her eyes and nodded. He waited.
“I went deep into some woods and waited there—oh, a couple of hours perhaps,” she said to the embers. “Finally, I went back… slowly. I had the binoculars. I found a good spot I could see, from maybe a hundred yards or more away. I could have been even closer. They weren’t paying attention to anything but the wagon. They’d tried to burn it. The front seat was gone, the wooden facings over the front and back ends were gone, the canvas with our sign on it was burned away and so were the tires. All that was left was the steel underneath. They were up by the steel box of the wagon itself, and they must’ve realized by that time that it wasn’t the ordinary sort of thing they went after. The machine guns would have let them know that. It wasn’t going to be that easy for them to get at Dad and Nick.”