“Beginning to, anyway. Might be they’re kind of sifting back, by ones and fews.”
Rachel hitched herself nearer the big gun; her movements were jerky, and her hands were shaking as she stretched them to the weapon. “I’ll sight her down—fix that overshoot—” Andy would be the one to fire, when the time came, because of this gun’s heavy kick. “He’s bound to fill the sights again, soon or late.”
“Wait.” Andy had gone back to thinking, methodically, carefully, wary of hurrying into some panicky mistake. These spells of stillness were new to him, and Rachel was not quite sure what they meant. He didn’t look as though he were thinking. More as if he might be going to sleep. “I question,” he said finally, “if it’s a real good idea. Maybe they’ll bide their time, a spell, if we don’t seem to know they’re there. And time’s what we need. Cash is the one we have to make know.”
They suspected, in spite of his taciturnity, that Cash meant to fetch home his crew, and maybe even his wagon—by what miracle of hard riding they could only imagine. But eleven men would melt to nothing in a hurry, if they came high-looping into an ambush. Rachel wanted to try making a smoke. In this still air, even a thread of smoke would rise tall and straight into the sky; it would be seen from far away. They could smudge it with wet rags and grease drippings, and soak a blanket for sending the smoke up in puffs, lest it be mistaken for a cooking fire gone out of hand. What they had no way to figure, Andy objected, was how their brother would take it. “Cash sets no store by any size-up us young’ns are liable to make.” He said it without bitterness. He judged Cash would as lief charge in headlong as lay back; he had been that way all his life. Anyway, by the time they got through fooling with a smudge and a blanket, the place would be smoked in fit to blunt an ax, and hotter than hell’s back oven besides. Which hardly seemed right, with Mama in the shape she was in.
They finally decided that the only signal Cash could not very well misread would be a sound of fighting. They would have to fire in bursts, to make it sound real, or it would have the failing of any other kind of signal. Two shots, nearly together, then one, at the space of a reload; then wait a while to save ammunition, and run it off backwards. They had not started their clock again, lest its loud tick interfere with listening. But they had a little minute glass they had made, for boiling an egg when they had an egg; its sand was measured to run through in three minutes. Guessing at how far downstream their guns could be heard, they thought they could make do with one burst to every three turns of the glass.
For their first burst they used a Sharp’s Fifty, and a cap-and-ball Walker. Then Rachel watched the sand dribble through the minute glass while Andy made the round of the lookouts, to see if the besiegers had reacted. The Kiowas should be able to see that the shots from the house were going wild, as if nobody knew anything, but you could never be sure.
They went on with this for fourteen turns of the minute glass. The sun would set in an hour more. Out on the cottonwood root by the creek the up-rooted greasebush still lay, its leaves curled now by the heat; but the telescope sight had picked up no other sign that any ememy was near. Rachel was worring about the wasted ammunition.
“It’s terrible, how fast the powder burns away. We’re doing an awful thing, here, if it turns out we’re wrong.”
“Well, we’re not wrong.” Andy answered her. “How can we be wrong?”
“We haven’t a thing to go on, but just that one, lone, single sign.”
“If you find one, lone, single bear track,” Andy said stubbornly, “there has by God been a bear.”
“Yes, but what if—”
Rachel tried to listen, then went to the bedroom door, and closed it softly. Matthilda’s breathing was quieter, but now they were trying to hear something that perhaps could not be heard. After a moment Rachel knew what it was. From eastward came a faint whispering that had to be far-off riflery. Were war cries sounding with the guns? Rachel thought they were. Perhaps she had not really heard them, but only knew they must be sounding, in as big a fight as was going on, somewhere far away. The distant whisper died away, rose briefly in a distinct rattle, then ceased altogether. They did not hear it again.
“That’s Cash!” Andy whispered. “He’s run into a fight, way off there!”
“No, he hasn’t! It’s something else.” She was voicing no more than a wish. If he did not get back, they need not mourn for Cassius alone, but for them all. Of course, if the firing had come from a brush between Indians and a couple of companies of cavalry happening along—
“Oh, for God’s sake,” was Andy’s only answer when Rachel suggested that. No cavalry had ever been seen on the Dancing Bird yet.
“Seems like you’re cussing a good bit,” Rachel commented.
“I may stop that. Sudden-like, and all at once. Sometime tonight.”
Rachel could think of only one thing she could be sure the day had accomplished for them. She did not mention it to Andy, for no dust anywhere gave hope that it was going to do any good. Yet it meant something to her: Ben surely must be one day nearer home tonight than he had been when this sun came up.
Instead she said, “Cash is all right. He’ll come home. He
Chapter Thirty-eight
Cassius lay in the bottom of a dry coulee, resting, and trying to save what strength remained to him. His left leg was broken below the knee, so badly that a spike of bone was sticking out of it. He had bound it as tightly as he could with strips of his shirt, splinting it awkwardly with bits of drift, yet it was all he could do to drag it as he crawled, and he had crawled a long way. The leg had been smashed by his horse as it crumpled in front and over- ended, destroyed by a bullet-broken shoulder.
Before his horse had been shot under him, he had got an arrow in the back, which was an unfairness, for it had been shot from in front of him as he charged, trying to close with his enemies. He had been lying low on the neck, and the arrow’s trajectory had carried it deep along the length of a back muscle. He had got rid of the shaft, finally, by an effort that almost knocked him out. But the sheet-iron head, a slender three-inch cone of metal, had come off the shaft, and stayed. It was still lodged in his back, somewhere down near his belt.
He believed he had killed four savages. One he had got in the first brush, when they had discovered him and circled in on him. A dandy shot, when he finally got it, but he had spent six cartridges before he made it. The second he had got from behind his fallen horse, with the last shot in his carbine. After that he had taken to the coulee, trying to outwit the warriors by an interminable crippled crawling. The wound in his back was bleeding fast, and he could find no way to stanch it. He left a blood trail every yard of the way; and he had been able to make use of it.
When the Kiowas had come into the coulee after him he managed to be some distance from where they expected him, so that they followed his blood trail along the bottom of the gully. And now he used a trick that wounded bears used. Beyond a twist in the coulee he climbed out onto the bank, and back-trailed a little. Until now he had kept the empty carbine, sometimes using it as a crutch; but it wasn’t much good to him, so he dropped it in the bottom of the gully for bait. Waiting on the lip of the coulee, just over the carbine, he had killed the first savage who bent to pick it up, shooting him through the head with the Dragoon revolver. Four or five others who were trailing them got the hell out of there, and he wounded one as they got away. But he didn’t count the ones that were only wounded.
The last one he got with almost the same trick, but with an extra hitch to it. The Kiowas circled, to come safely at the place where he had lain in ambush; but he wasn’t there when they got to it. As soon as the coulee was clear he had rolled off the edge, half killing himself in the fall, and once more started crawling. At a turn of the gully he climbed out of it again, but this time he did not watch his back-trail. The Kiowas halted, well clear of the place his blood trail disappeared around the corner. They spotted the bit of buckbrush in which he was hiding on the lip and knew he was waiting there. They left the coulee and circled to a safe distance ahead; then back-trailed themselves, to close from behind him.
