Dust Devil by Parris Afton Bonds Page A

support herself as a tutor or governess.
    But what about Jamie? She knew she could not give him up... and she knew Stephen would never let her leave with the baby. But did she really want to leave? She had come to love the land. The wildness of it. Cambria! Its exotic beauty. Its dangerous nature. She sensed Ireland would be boring after life in the New Mexico Territory.
    And yet she could never let Stephen touch her again. The very sight of those freckled hands would repulse her now. To even be in the same room with him would be revolting to her. But to look forward to a life that stretched on in emptiness . . . she could find no answer.
    The air, shimmering with the turbid pink light of the storm, was a moving tapestry of sand. The longer she walked, the greater blew the sand and wind. She lifted her face to its blast, as if the sand would cleanse away the shame and horror of the day before.
    Eventually the storm’s intensity grew so great that it was impossible for her to see where she walked. The thought that any moment she might wander from the trail and plunge into some gashed canyon snapped her out of her cataleptic state. She halted and, like a bat without the aid of sight, tried to sense something solid near her to protect her from the wind’s blast — a boulder, a gully, a ridge.
    The sand stung her face and clogged the air so that breathing was now a real effort. Panic pricked her. She whirled about, uncertain now of which direction she had come. It was nigh impossible to stand erect. When the wind whipped the blanket from her, she crouched and shielded her nearly nude body from the sand’s blinding onslaught.
    Suddenly she was engulfed in blackness and lifted, to be thrown roughly across something hard that knocked the breath from her. Stunned, some seconds passed before she realized she was wrapped once more in a scratchy blanket and slung across the saddle of a mule or horse. She struggled, and a hand swatted her behind. " Dulce !”
    She recognized Lario’s soft, low voice and stiffened indignantly.
    At last the animal came to a halt, and she felt herself lifted again and deposited on the hard ground. She fought her way out of the blanket to see the rocky ledge that protruded above her and on both sides, forming a shallow cave. Not two yards away Lario tied his chestnut stallion to a growth of juniper that hedged the sheer walls.
    He turned to her. Impatience crowded in upon his normally uninflected voice.  "You are a fool!” he said, and Rosemary knew he was not only talking about her folly in leaving the hogan. She had willfully closed her eyes to the truth about the kind of man Stephen was. But pride kept her from acknowledging to Lario that greed for the house, the land — for Cambria — had brought her to this. "How did you find me?” she asked, averting her eyes from his angry, penetrating glare.
    In the small rock-walled enclosure he sat next to her but not touching, his ankles crossed. "Adala told me what direction you had taken. My horse kept me on the path.”
    For a while the two of them, isolated as if they were in a ship’s cabin on the ocean with the great waves crashing about it, listened to the wind’s shriek. But his dispassionate silence began to unnerve her.  Her emotions already had been strained to raveled threads.  She hugged her knees, silently telling herself she was skittish merely because she did not like the man with her. It was only natural she should feel that way about him after losing her family to Indian revolutionists. What mattered the continent . . . an Indian was an Indian. True, Lario was cleaner than most Indians she had come in contact with and perhaps better educated; but nevertheless, he thought like an Indian — and that was enough to make her abhor his presence.
    T he silence became so intense that it seemed louder than the wind that raged outside, and at last she snapped.  “You judge me a fool.  But what are you, turning a blind eye to my husband . .