SALVAGE The brother of Tomaso came back.

Mary V, cannily watching the wide waste behind her as she rode homeward, saw him and made sure of him through her glasses.

The brother of Tomaso seemed to be in a hurry, and he seemed to have been waiting in some convenient covert until she had left.

His horse was trotting too nimbly through the sage to have come far at that pace.
Mary V could tell a tired horse as far as she could tell that it was a horse.
She did not turn back, for the simple reason that she knew very well her mother would have all the boys out hunting her if she failed to reach home by sundown.

That would have meant deep humiliation for Mary V and a curtailment of future freedom.