I walked over. I could see her very faintly, just the blur of her face and the blonde head, but she couldn’t see me at all.

“Where are you?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. I stepped closer and reached out and put my hands on her. She gasped, and turned, her arms reaching out, groping for me. I kissed her roughly and her arms tightened about my neck with an urgent wild strength in them. She twisted her face a little to one side and her mouth whispered against my cheek, “Harry, I just had to see you.”

She was partly right, anyway. She just had to see somebody.

We were in the car with moonlight spilling into the other side of the ravine. “Do you love me, Harry?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Well, that’s a fine answer. You might at least say you did.”

“Why should I?”

“I just thought it might sound better that way. It don’t make any difference, though, does it?”

“No.”

“I suppose you think I’m in love with you, don’t you?”

“And why would I?”

“Because I’m here. Well, let me tell you—”

“You don’t have to tell me. I know why you’re here. But you don’t think we’re going to get by with much of this, do you?”

“Why not?”

“And you’re the one who asked me if I’d lived in a small town.”

“It’s all right. He’s at a lodge meeting.”

“It’s dangerous as hell. You know that.”

“I notice you’re telling me that now. You didn’t say anything about it a couple of hours ago.”

“You didn’t expect me to think then, did you?”

She laughed. “How’s about another kiss, and to hell with the sermon.” She was a witch, all right. She leaned back against me with her head in my arms and her feet on the window, bare legs a faint gleam in the darkness.

“Why’d you marry him?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe I was just getting scared. I’d been married twice before and it didn’t work out, and I was trying to make a living out of a crumby little beauty shop and not getting any younger. I’d known him a long time. He used to come and see me when he was in Houston. It was a kind of a—arrangement, I guess you’d call it. And then, after his wife died—” She paused for a moment, and then went on irritably. “Oh, hell, I don’t know. He just kept after me about it till I gave in. How’d I know it was such a dump?”

“Well, why do you stay?” I asked.

“What’re you kicking about? You seem to be doing all right.” She was rugged; there was no doubt of that.

“You think you’re going to get by with this forever?”

“Who the hell cares about forever? Forever’s when you’re dead.”

Yeah, I thought; forever’s when you’re dead all right, but you don’t have to rush it. She was as crazy as frozen dynamite. I wanted to ditch her, and I knew that as long as I was around this town I never could, unless she got mad enough to ditch me. I’d always come back.