That night they made camp in the middle of the rotten roadway deep in the forest. The trees closed over them, blotting out the sky, and their small fire seemed feeble and pale in the immensity of the darkness that pressed in from all sides and above. Molly lay rigidly still, listening for something, anything, for a sound that said they were not alone in the world, that she wasn't alone in the world. But there was no sound.

The next afternoon Molly sketched the brothers. She was sitting alone, enjoying the sun and the water, which had become smooth and deep. She thought of the brothers, how different they were one from another, and her fingers began to draw them in a way she never had drawn before, never had seen before.

She liked the way Thomas looked. His muscles were long and smooth, his cheekbones high and prominent, neatly dividing his face. She drew his face, using only straight lines that suggested the planes of his cheeks, the narrow sharp nose, the pointed chin. He looked young, younger than the Miriam sisters, although they were nineteen and he was twenty-one.

She closed her eyes and visualized Lewis. Very big, over six feet. Very broad. She drew a rocklike form, a long head and a face that seemed to flow, rounded, fleshy with no bony framework, except for his large nose. The nose didn't satisfy her. She closed her eyes and after a moment rubbed out the nose she had drawn and put one back that was slightly off center, a bit crooked. Everything was too exaggerated, she knew, but somehow, in overdoing it, she had caught him.

Harvey was tall and rather thin. And great long feet, she thought, smiling at the figure emerging on her pad. Big hands, round eyes, like rings. You just knew, she thought, he would be awkward, stumble over things, knock things down.

Jed was easy. Rotund, every line a curve. Small, almost delicate hands, small bones. Small features centered in his face, all too close together.

Ben was the hardest. Well proportioned, except for his head, which was larger than the others', he was not so beautifully muscled as Thomas. And his face was merely a face, nothing outstanding about it. She drew his eyebrows heavier than they should have been, and made him squint, the way he did when he listened closely. She narrowed her eyes studying it. It wasn't right. Too hard. Too firm, too much character, she thought. In ten years he might look more like the sketch than he did now.

"Rocks! Twelve o'clock, thirty yards!" Lewis called. Guiltily Molly flipped the sketch pad to a clean page and began to draw the river and its hazards.

Chapter 12