wall. It balanced a moment, then rattled on the planks as she turned away. She stumbled to the bedroom door, and got it open. She almost reached the bed, but struck its edge as she fell; and lay face downward on the floor.
He picked her up, and started to put her on her bed; but he saw the sheeted corpse in the other bed, so carried her away. At the other end of the soddy he found his own bunk smoothly made, untouched in all that chaos. He stripped off the ruins of Rachel’s dress, and put her poor dirty little body between the clean sheets, before he went to Andy.
Chapter Forty-five
Nine of the range crew came in soon after daylight. They had lost the cook, whom the Kiowas had caught in his overturned wagon. And they thought they had had a pretty bad time, until they saw what had happened here. The two men who had gone missing when they went to hunt for Rachel had not been seen again. And nobody knew where Cash was.
They moved both Andy and Rachel to improvised beds in the saddle shed, and strapped Andy down to dress the wreckage of his arm. Ben himself bathed Rachel, and made her as comfortable as he could. Sometimes, for a few moments, she came half awake; she knew Ben then, but said very little. She knew that Matthilda was dead, and that they had forted up, and Andy had been hurt. For the present she didn’t seem to remember much more, and Ben was glad for that. He poured soup into her when he could, and she slept.
Between stages of delirium, Andy was able to tell Ben what had happened here, but only up to a point. He remembered Rachel’s firing through the root cellar slide, but he didn’t know what had overturned the walnut secretary, or what had happened in the fireplace—or maybe the chimney; or what had busted the water barrel. He thought that after he was wounded he had fired at something, from where he lay—maybe several times. And he knew a gun had continued to let off near him, from as far back as he could remember. He had the impression that he had lain there many days.
Late in the morning, shortly after they buried Matthilda, a rider from the Rawlinses brought word that Cash had been found, and he was dead. But he didn’t seem to know anything more about it, and rode away without dismounting. They learned nothing else, until Georgia Rawlins rode in at noon.
She said somberly, “I’m glad to see
He nodded.
She went on in a lifeless monotone, and told him of the night she had spent here, describing that first night’s fight as a “brush.” After Cash rode her home or pretty near, he seemingly had lined out to fetch his crew in. But after the Kiowas cut him off, she believed, he must have tried to fight his way home. The signs appeared to show that he had fought a long way from where he was hit, and his horse killed, to where he had ended. Georgia herself had gone out to identify him for certain. She had sewed him into a wagon sheet; and they had buried him on the hill-side above the place where he fell.
“Ben, can it be, that was only day before yesterday, he was alive!” Her face crinkled up, and the tears came. “I loved him, Ben. I was going to marry him, soon as we could tell you. It was always him, I guess, in spite of all different I knew I should do. It can’t ever be no other man.”
She leaned against him, much as she would have leaned against a gentle horse; and her tears wet his shirt. Her words came muffled. “You’re the better man. You’re a better man than Cash ever could have been. But somehow, nothing like that seemed to matter….”
She stood back, and dried her tears. “You want me to look at Andy’s arm?”
They walked back toward the saddle shed. Ben had sent a rider to bring a surgeon from Fort Richardson, but he might have to go all the way to Fort Worth. Might be days. If he didn’t get here in time, Ben would have to take off the arm himself, or they’d lose Andy, next. “Will you help me, Georgia?”
“I’ll help you all I can. Always.”
Chapter Forty-six
The swarm of hands cleaning up the house found two corpses still hidden in it. Wolf Saddle was dead in the root cellar; and Seth, shot through one eye, was in the Glory Hole. That the two war leaders had died trying to come to close quarters was no coincidence. They were the ones with no way to let go. Doubtless they would have chosen this, rather than a return to the Kiowas in defeat and dishonor.
Only a few Kiowas, such as Kicking Bird and Hunting Horse, were able to see that the tribe itself had little farther to go. Others of the Wild Tribes would presently lose out as the buffalo vanished; but the Kiowas would be whipped and driven, and broken as power, even before that. The Kiowa raids into Texas and Mexico had never been in defense of their lands. The Kiowa homeland had been north of the Red, in what had become the Territory itself, since long before the Texans came. The Kiowas raided for glory, loot, and sport.
And now the military was in charge, and the cavalry moving up. A handful of hard-riding warriors, kept few by their very way of life, could no longer use the Territory as a sanctuary from which to launch their forays. Satank was dead, and his son, Sitting Bear; young White Wolf, and Lives-in-the-Saddle, favorite son of Lone Wolf, died in a defeated raid. Within six months Yellow Wolf, Rising Bird, Wild Dog, Singing Tree, Striking Horse, Red Otter, and Lame Wolf would be dead. Of those who survived, Lone Wolf, Satanta, Big Tree, Sky Walker, Woman’s Heart, War Eagle, White Horse, and Bear Paw, and fifty more—all those who had been the hard cutting edge of the Kiowas— would be on their way to imprisonment and exile. And the great Kicking Bird would die, poisoned by the warlike of his own tribe, because he had preached the ways of peace.
The vast areas the Horse Indians required, in order to live by the hunt, could not much longer be held against a race that fed a thousand people upon land the Wild Tribes needed to feed one. The buffalo, the one great essential to nomadic life on the prairie, was already going, and would soon be gone. The Kiowas as a people would survive, and someday increase. But the Kiowas as the great war tribe of the southwest prairies would be gone before the buffalo.
With more hands at work than there was room for, the soddy turned new again overnight. The roof was mended, the floors scrubbed and sandstoned; new battle shutters were built. A new smooth-over of plaster dried overnight, and was whitewashed the next day. The place looked kind of bare, but they moved Andy and Rachel into the lower bunks of the main room. And still Rachel slept.
Now other people began to come; they were going to keep on coming for days. People they had known long ago, and people they had never seen, would travel from as far away as the Palo Pinto, as the story spread, all of them eager to help in any way that could be found. Not one of them all could remember having called the Zacharys Indian-lovers, or ever questioning for one moment the origins of the girl Old Zack had found upon the prairie, seventeen years ago. Only Zeb Rawlins, when at last he came, would recall his errors, every one; and own to them as forthrightly as he had stood against them.
For while Andy would become a hero, Rachel was going to be idolized. She could have anything in Texas; she could have Texas. Though Ben didn’t believe she would want it, any more.
But up through the third day after the fight, the cowhands were able to keep people out of the house. Andy was resting easier, and Rachel asleep; and Ben sat on a box near the hearth, keeping an eye on them. He didn’t want to see anybody else.
A cowhand named Roddy came and hung around near the stoop, balancing on one leg and then the other, and bashfully trying to see in; he didn’t want to disturb anybody by knocking. Ben went out to him.
“Indians lanced a caow last night,” Roddy said. “Just out of pyore meanness. Never took no part of her. Then
