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By Root 1933 0

the first time they’d ever been allowed to touch without someone watching them. What kind of touch would it be? They sure wouldn’t simply shake hands. And it would probably be more than a hug. It would probably be more than even my imagination could guess, and I understood why Viridis did not invite me to go back with her to that glen. But there was another reason: she could ride Rosabone a lot easier and swifter without me behind. She had to elude those deputies who watched her every move from their lookout at Tilbert Jerram’s store. Both of those deputies had good horses, but they weren’t jumpers like Rosabone, and that mare would really give them chase. Viridis would point her west, or north, or south, or any direction except her northeastward destination, and then lead those poor deputies on a pursuit that would take them all over the Stay More countryside before they quit and realized they had long since lost her. Without me riding behind, Rosabone could jump pretty near anything that stood in her way: fallen trees and fences and creeks and brush piles that would impede or completely stop those men trying to follow her. Not once did those deputies come anywhere near discovering Viridis’ actual destination in the green glen of the waterfall.

Viridis would go on alone into the glen after shaking off her pursuers. It scared her a good bit, going alone through that dark forest to that place where possibly fiercer creatures than blue lizards dwelt. On the forest path once, Rosabone shied and reared up and nearly threw Viridis: there was a copperhead in the path, and those snakes are sure enough a lot less harmless than lizards: a copperhead’s bite can kill you.

When she got to the glen, Viridis would give herself and Rosabone a good long drink from the pool and then just hang around awhile, looking for signs that Nail or any other man had been there. Each time she went there she would take something and leave it, in the largest cavern beside the falls, like a bird building a nest: she would pack in a blanket one day, another blanket the next day, and eventually all of the things she had meant to leave under the sycamore tree behind the penitentiary: the hunting knife, the harmonica, the pocketknife with can opener attachment, and the few cans of corned beef and beans and such, as well as the compass, the pocket watch, soap, salt and pepper, and a few yards of mosquito netting (the mosquitoes were getting bad). On each trip she would check carefully to see if any of these items had been used or even touched. Disappointed, she would just sit for an hour or so listening to the trees, and waiting, before heading home.

Only one item that she had intended to leave for Nail and Ernest she did not place in the cavern but carried with her at all times: the Smith & Wesson revolver. Having the gun with her allayed the terror of encountering a panther, bear, or wolf. Against a pack of wolves the gun wouldn’t be much help, but it was better than nothing. She kept it in a small saddlebag attached to the back of Rosabone’s jumping-saddle, where she also sometimes carried a sandwich, in case she was gone past dinnertime.

Returning from the falls, she would be just as careful as she had been going to them, to make sure that she wasn’t watched or her route discovered. She would take a circuitous path that brought her out north of Nail’s sheep pastures, and then she would come back across those pastures to the Chism house and stop to say hello and perhaps make sure that he hadn’t shown up there.

On one of these visits to the Chism house she discovered that Seth Chism was in pretty bad shape. Nail’s father had been ailing for quite some time, and now it appeared that he might not survive. Doc Plowright had been to see him, but now the Chisms had sent for young Doc Swain, who was there when Viridis arrived and who later talked to her alone back in town.

“They call it heart dropsy,” Doc Swain said to her. “Leastways, that’s what…my colleague across the road yonder calls it.” He gestured toward Doc Plowright’s clinic. “I reckon that’s what