He smiled slightly. That was a question few westerners dared to ask a man.
On the other hand, he had just asked her precisely that question.
«Turnabout is fair play, is that it?» Whip asked.
«Unless you mind?»
«Not as long as you’re the one doing the asking. I came to Echo Basin because I’d never been here before.»
Shannon frowned slightly. «You sound like there aren’t many places you haven’t been.»
«There aren’t. I’m a yondering man. I’ve been all over the world.»
«Truly?»
Whip smiled. «Truly.»
«Have you seen the pyramids of Egypt?»
«I saw them,» Whip said.
«What are they like?»
«Big. They rise out of the desert all pitted and racked by time. There’s a city nearby, a place where women go veiled from head to heels so that only their eyes show.»
Shannon made a surprised sound. «Just their eyes?»
Whip nodded. «You would be a sultan’s prize, honey girl. Eyes as blue as heaven itself.»
And a walk that’s hotter than hell, he added to himself.
But Whip wasn’t about to say it aloud. If Shannon knew just how much he wanted her, Whip doubted that she would be sitting so at ease across the small table from him.
«Paris,» Shannon said. «Have you seen it?»
«Paris, London, Madrid, Rome, Shanghai…I’ve seen them, and more besides. Do you like cities?»
«I don’t know. I haven’t been in one for years and years.»
Shannon looked past Whip to the strips of light coming between the ill-fitting shutters.
«But I think,» she said slowly, «having that many people pressing close would wear on me.»
«Are you eager to find out?»
«No. I only asked about cities because the history books are always going on about Paris and London and Rome. They’re the only places I could think of. And China, of course.»
Whip’s eyes took on a faraway look.
«China is a special place,» he said quietly. «It had empires and art and philosophy long before Christ was born. The Chinese have a real different way of looking at life, from music to food to fighting.»
«Did you like it?»
«Like, love, hate…» He shrugged. «Those words have no real meaning when it comes to China.»
«I don’t understand.»
Whip lifted his cup of coffee, sipped, and tried to find words to explain to Shannon what he had never explained to himself.
«Once,» he said slowly, «I stood on the banks of a river at midnight and watched men fish with lanterns and black birds instead of hooks and nets.»
Shannon made a startled sound.
«Did it work?» she asked.
«Oh, yes. It had been working like that for thousands of years, golden lantern light swirling with each dive the birds made, the fluting whistles of the fishermen as they called to their birds, midnight and the ebony river flowing by…. It was like breathing time itself to be there. China is old, older than I had ever imagined anything could be.»
A shiver coursed through Shannon as she watched Whip’s eyes. They were hazed with memory and distance and a black river flowing.
It was like breathing time itself.
«Are there other places like this?» Shannon asked when she no longer could bear Whip’s silence and distance.
«Echo Basin?» he asked.
«The Colorado Territory.»
Frowning, Whip ran his hand through his hair.
«I haven’t seen one to beat it,» he admitted finally.
«In all the world?»
«Oh, Ireland is green enough, but it lacks towering mountains like these. Burma and Switzerland have huge mountain ranges, but they’re stone and ice with little place in them for man.»
Shannon leaned forward, her eyes brilliant, fascinated.
«South America has a long, muscular chain of mountains with green lands in between clusters of high peaks,» Whip said, «but the high plains are so high that it makes a man weary just to walk a mile. Australia has green mountains with some snowy peaks. They’re pretty enough, but they aren’t real high. And the smell of the gum forest never appealed to me as much as the evergreen scent of the Rockies does.»
«Then it sounds like the best place on earth for you is right here,» Shannon said.
Whip laughed and shook his head, but when he looked at Shannon, his expression became very serious. He sensed the question buried within her words: Are you going to stay in the mountains that are like nowhere else on earth?
«The Rockies have held me longer than any other place,» Whip said softly, «but someday a distant sunrise will call to me, promising me everything I’ve ever wanted and have never been able to name. Then I’ll set out again, because there’s nothing as grand as the sunrise I haven’t seen. Nothing.»
Shannon fought against a sorrow so sharp it made her breath break. There was no reason for her to feel such grief. Whip was barely more than a stranger to her. She shouldn’t care if he stayed forever or left in the next hour.
But she cared so much it was a knife turning deep inside her. She closed her eyes and fought the unexpected pain.
«Like I said, honey girl,» Whip said gently, «I’m a yondering man.»
Shannon’s eyes opened. She looked at the man she knew only as Whip. Then she looked at his savagely clear eyes, eyes that had seen so much and yet moved on to another view, a different place, one more distant sunrise, for there was always more to see.
Always.
I hear your warning, yondering man. Don’t try to hold you. Don’t dream on you.
Don’t love you.
Yet Shannon had the uneasy feeling Whip’s warning had come too late. Somewhere deep inside her, something she had never felt before had awakened.
She prayed that it was only desire.
6
A week later Shannon awoke just after dawn to the sound of an ax taking big bites from a tree. Relief washed through her.
Nothing changed while I slept. He’s still here.
If the Culpeppers came skulking around, they would find Shannon with a shotgun in her hands, a snarling dog at her heels…and a man called Whip by her side.
«See?» Shannon whispered to herself. «I told you he would still be here in the morning.»
This time.
When Shannon hadn’t heard Whip’s panpipes last night, she wondered if he had saddled up and left Echo Basin, never to return again. But he hadn’t. He was still here, still doing all the chores that had been difficult for Shannon to do alone.
Whip had repaired the lean-to where the old mule spent the worst of the winter, then he had trimmed and shod the beast’s hooves with horse-shoes Silent John never had gotten around to using. Whip had rehung the cabin door so that it closed evenly without being shoved or leaned on or kicked. Then Whip had rammed caulking so tightly between the cabin’s logs that the wind couldn’t get past to steal the fire’s warmth. He had chopped down eight trees and was working on a ninth.
Not only would Shannon have firewood curing for winter, with those trees gone there would be enough sun on the south side of the cabin for her to have a small kitchen garden. It was something she had always wanted, but she had given up on the idea four years ago. It had taken six days for her to gnaw through a tree with an ax, and then the tree had knocked her silly by falling the wrong way.
Silent John had laughed when she told him the story about the tree falling on her. But when she told Whip about it a few days ago, he hadn’t laughed at all. He had said something under his breath and then told her in very plain English that if he ever caught her trying to chop down a tree, they would both regret it — but she would regret it more.
Then, yesterday morning, the trees on the south side of the cabin had started to come down one by one, felled by a man who attacked each tree as though it was an enemy.
Humming quietly to herself, Shannon got out of bed and started the breakfast fire. As she worked, anticipation swirled through her like heat through flame. Soon Whip would call out and she would bring a pan of warm water to the bench at the side of the cabin. Then she would watch while he washed and shaved.