She rocked slowly and gently in the midday heat so as not to use up too much precious strength – there was still dinner to cook, if you could call boiled potatoes and pork belly a dinner, and dishes to wash… and Jamie's one decent work-shirt to be hand scrubbed and hung on the line stretched across the porch to dry in less than a half hour in the desert's hot waterless breeze. Sometimes she felt that the desert's furnace-hot wind was drying her out much the same way, draining her whole young body of its very youthfulness just as it sucked the moisture from a dripping-wet shirt in twenty minutes or so.

Scanning the black on white type of the newspaper old Mr. Parker brought her from his supply run into the city, Sarah brushed her blonde hair from her eyes and wiped her forehead instinctively. "Instinctively" because out here in the desert there was really no need for that; perspiration evaporated as fast as it beaded up on your skin in this zero humidity heat. All morning long she had carefully gone down the long, finely-printed columns, x-ing them off one by one, narrowing her hopes for any escape from this perpetual furnace she was trapped in as surely as a sinner is trapped in purgatory. One by one, each tiny inked-in "X" snuffing a little more of the flicker of hope that ached in her breast, Sarah Marie Olsen had eliminated her methods of escape and her chances for another life outside this hell hole that only a money-maddened wildcatter with a cooked brain could call a town.

And now there was just one chance left. There could be no turning back if she managed to make it this once, Jamie was no man to be trifled with! She knew only too well that he would beat her until she wouldn't be able to run away again if he caught her or if she had to turn back. Mr. Parker was taking his life in his hands in agreeing to drive her into town, but maybe he figured at his age there wasn't really much to live for anyway.