But Rachel was beginning to remember, not the man, but a happening that was the same. Long ago—six or seven years?—when they lived on the San Saba…. She began setting the table in shaky silence.
This time the boys came soon. Rachel saw Andy, first, jogging homeward around the upper bend of the Dancing Bird; and in a few moments more Cassius appeared, looking so sure of himself, so easy in the saddle, that Rachel was comforted in the uncertainty of this dusk. Still, neither of them, nor the two together, could quite take the place of Ben, who could make everything seem all right just by coming into sight.
She held her tongue when they came in, waiting to see what her mother would tell them; for she had a wicked little plan. A name that had been playing tag with her, teasing her by dancing just out of her reach, had now come clear into her mind. She judged it would serve to get Cash’s attention this time. Certainly there had been enough fuss and to-do—yes, and mystery made of it, too—that time on the San Saba, long ago.
“Any word of Ben yet? Any sign at all?” Matthilda always asked that first, nowadays; although, unless she was thinking of smoke signals, it was hard to see how she expected any kind of word to outtravel Ben himself.
“Nope.” Cassius scooped a handful of homemade soft soap and began to wash. “You all have a good day around here?” He always asked that, too.
“Well…” Matthilda wavered, and would not meet Rachel’s eyes. “Just a middling ordinary day, I reckon.”
Quiet again, under the sound of wind, while Cassius bent low to souzle his face and hair. Rachel waited a moment more, watching her mother. Then—“Abe Kelsey was here,” she said.
The effect was explosive. Cassius straightened so sharply his heels lifted off the floor. Rachel was dumbfounded; she had almost scared him through the roof. Well, not scared him, maybe—startled him, more like. His eyes went to his mother, not to Rachel, and held with a hard questioning.
She had been stretching it, of course; she had no memory of what anybody named Kelsey looked like, way back yonder. She had meant to admit, in a minute, that she hadn’t really recognized the stranger. She guessed she had better snatch that mysteriously powerful name back, and in a hurry. Confession was on the tip of her tongue. Then suddenly it was too late for that.
“I was going to tell you,” Matthilda said to Cassius, and her voice was coaxing him not to be mad.
Rachel’s heart contracted. Her mother had recognized the stranger and had not let on. When you live so close to people, and they hold things back from you, it makes halfseen things stir in shadows that come all around you. Part of the cabin fever…. Cash still stood there, water from his face running down his limp old buckskin shirt, and puddling on the floor from his dropped hands.
“She doesn’t mean he came in,” Matthilda said. She was faltering now, and near to tears. “He—just sat out there and—looked—”
“How long ago?”
“Well—I guess—it might have been—”
“Twenty minutes,” Rachel said clearly.
Cash shifted as if he would rush outside, but changed his mind without moving a step. “But the light was failing. You couldn’t have told if—Wait. How far out was he?”
“About seven feet,” Rachel said. “He leaned down close, to look in.”
“Seven—” He stared at her blankly a moment and his next question fairly crackled. “How come
Matthilda shook her head, and her eyes were ominously shiny. “Why, the child can’t have seen Abe since— why, she can’t have been more than ten years old. And not even then, unless—and anyway, he’s so changed, Cash, just dreadfully. It’s uncanny she remembers him now.”
“Papa had falling-outs with a lot of people.” Cash reached for a towel, wishing he were shed of the whole thing.
“But Kelsey kept nosing around.”
“The child’s right, Cassius,” Matthilda murmured.
“There was something more to it,” Rachel said. “Something queer, that I was never let to know.”
“All you need to know is I don’t want him around! Let him smell gunpowder—you all hear me?”
It was as if Ben himself had come into the room. No, more as if Papa had come into the room; Ben was quieter. Andy was sitting there gaping, with no more idea of what was happening than Rachel had. Mama went to the table, so that she was behind Andy and Rachel; but Rachel knew at once that Mama put a finger to her lips. “Don’t talk so much in front of the children,” Rachel put it into words for them.
They made no answer to that. “Bring your carbine,” Cassius told his brother, making his tone ordinary. “We’ll put the gate poles up.”
As they let themselves out, the wind whisked at everything in the house, and set the pans to swinging, but perhaps it was less violent than before. The women moved immediately, both at once, to get supper on. The wheels of daily living began to turn again, as they must always turn, no matter what.
“He’s going back where he came from, now,” Matthilda said, and Rachel knew she meant Abe Kelsey. “Hear how the wind’s dying? Going down more and more, as he gets farther and farther away.”
It was the kind of sign some of the Indians believed. The Zacharys took no stock in such heathenisms, but out here you could sometimes get mixed up, and confuse the things you really believed with things that just sort of came with the country. But it was true that the wind was abating. This should have made the night a better one for sleep, but it did not. Their bedding was turning clammy again for want of sun, so that they were chilled and sweated, seemingly both at once. Rachel knew she should have baked their blankets before the fire, but had put it off, hoping for a chance to get the outdoor smell of sunshine into them.
Perhaps it was the very quiet that woke her in the first hour after midnight, so lightly she slept that night. Once she was full awake, she heard her mother crying, two yards away, in the other bed. Matthilda wept so softly, her face pressed so hard into her pillow, Rachel never would have heard her at all if the wind had held.
Chapter Three
Cassius and Andy had to wait for daylight to pick up Abe Kelsey’s trail. They followed it easily enough, until they had gone about four miles. Then it disappeared.
They cast some long circles, and found it again around noon. This time the trail led off in a new and unlikely direction; it took them nearer the house than they had been all morning, before they lost it completely. Cassius blew up, and sat cussing so long he turned red in the face.
The trouble with Cash was that he knew exactly who he was after, and why. He thought of Abe Kelsey as a varmint that had to be killed before a worse thing happened, and he was in a sweat to get it over with. But he didn’t know how much Andy knew. Nothing, he hoped.
Actually, Abe Kelsey was a most unfortunate man; about as unfortunate as a man can get, perhaps. He was even famous for it, in his own part of the world, which was limited to the prairies south of the Arkansas. Andy and Rachel may have been the only natives of the Texas frontier over ten years old who did not know who he was.
For his story had a riddle in it, and this kept it alive. He had once had a wife and a young son. But he located at Burnt Tree, a tiny settlement of three or four families thirty miles out of Round Rock; and the Kiowas destroyed it in 1863. Kelsey must have married late, for he had been middle-aged even then, and his little boy was only seven when Abe lost him, along with his mother, in the Burnt Tree Massacre.
Supposedly. Two years later somebody brought Abe a rumor that his son was alive, a captive in the lodge of a Kiowa named Pacing Wolf. Abe went up there—and swore forever that he found his son. The boy had even answered to his name. And now a queerness came up. That the Kiowas claimed the boy to be neither white nor a captive, but of mixed blood and their own, was surprising to nobody. But men who had known the Kelsey boy came forward to declare that they had seen the boy dead and had helped to bury him. Thus was born an enigma never completely answered.
