Border Town Girl by John D. MacDonald Page A

it was the thing to do. But if they had been picked up on the road, it might have appeared that they were doubling back, still in flight. Darkness would give them a good chance to reach the hotel without being stopped.
    He wondered if Diana could go free by giving evidence. He hoped so.
    She began to make small crying sounds in her sleep. Her shoulder twitched. He butted his cigarette against the trunk of the tree and kissed her on the lips. She awoke with a start and a frightened cry.
    “Oh, Lane!” she said. “I was frightened. I was running and running and the ground was going by under my feet, carrying me backward no matter how hard I ran. And Christy was standing and grinning and waiting for me.”
    “We’ve got to go, kitten.”
    She stood up and smoothed her dress down with the palms of her hands. “Gee, I’m messy,” she said.
    “Still think I’m wrong to take you back?”
    He stood beside her. She smiled up into his face. “You gave me a chance to make that decision. I watched you while you slept. There was the car and I knew the keys were in your pocket. There was even a rock. See it over there? As big as a baseball. If I hadn’t decided you were right, you’d have a terrible headache by now, Lane.”
    “A little too trusting of me to go to sleep, wasn’t it?”
    “Maybe that’s why I couldn’t hit you.”
    He looked through the night toward the west and sighed. “I guess we better go get this over with.”
    She stood close to him, wrapped her thin fingers around his wrist. Her fingers were cold. “I watched you while you were sleeping,” she said in a half-whisper. “It should have been you, Lane. Somebody like you. Right from the start. I kept pretending that was the way it was.”
    She seemed so forlorn and small and lost. He put his arm around her. She put her face against his shoulder, blonde hair touching the side of his jaw. She lifted her mouth and he kissed her.
    Without his knowing precisely how it happened, they were both down on the dark ground again. Her breath was like a quick furnace, her mouth like broken flowers, her body flexing, adjusting itself to him, eagerly awaiting and accepting him. Suddenly he remembered the daughter of many kings, and the silver-blots of moonlight on her. And remembered back further, back to the slender ease of Sandy, and the long Sunday mornings.
    He forced himself away from the girl. He stood up.
    “It’s no good,” she said in a clear, bitter voice. “No damn good. Too many others. That’s it, isn’t it?”
    “No. That isn’t it.”
    She began to weep helplessly. He helped her up. They got into the car. He started it, turned the lights on, headed west. The sound of weeping ceased after a time.
    Finally she said, in a clear, questioning tone, “You know something? I’m going back into trouble. But I feel good, Lane. I feel excited, as though I were going to my first dance. Why is that?”
    “Relief, maybe. You’ve been afraid and you’ve felt guilty. Now the decision is made and you aren’t afraid any more.”
    “Is it that simple?”
    “Why not?”
    “Maybe part of it is you, Lane.”
    He frowned at her in the dimness of the dash light. “How so?”
    She was looking straight at the road. “Maybe I love you.”
    “You don’t. You shouldn’t. It can’t work.”
    “Sandy?”
    “I guess so. One-woman man.”
    “I guessed that might be what it was that… stopped you. Back there. But, oh, Lane, let’s be gay for now. Let’s pretend we’re going to a dance or something.”
    “With a good band. And refreshments in a tent.”
    “No square dances, though.”
    “If they have any, we’ll sit them out.”
    She moved close and leaned her head on his shoulder. She sang all the rest of the way. The old, good songs. Her voice was small, husky and true. He had the feeling that she was singing not to him but to the past and that this was, for her, a sort of farewell. Then there were the lights of Baker ahead, the neon on the tourist