A grass fire, a blizzard, or a parching drouth was always dotting the earth with carcasses, so that the deep- grass everywhere hid uncounted bones. For all its birdsongs, its flowers, and its wind-turned grass, the prairie kept changing into a horrid maw, that could swallow the labors of whole lifetimes in one savage night. It had taken her husband, and had even withheld his lifeless body, to be thrown away. The bright will-o’-the-wisp he had followed, and which now led on his sons, was part of a monstrous and cruel lie.
“Well talk about it when the good year comes,” she answered Ben.
“Mama, I tell you—will you believe me just this once? You’ve got to get her out of here now, before the first Kiowa Moon—or it’s going to be too late!”
“What little money we have wouldn’t carry us a step out of Texas. And I’ll never take her to a Texas town again—never. I’ll not see her heart broken, and her life ruined, before my very eyes. Have you forgotten Round Rock? And the San Saba? The whisperings, the snubs, the turned backs—while the poor little thing turns bewildered, and so cruelly hurt—How long can that go on before somebody says it to her face?”
“Says what to her face?” Cash asked sharply.
“Do I have to say it? I will then! Red nigger.
It was strange to hear Matthilda speak the rough words, forbidden in her house. She might pronounce “Negro” as “Niggra,” but to her nothing on earth could have been a nigger. The disused words had effective force, even shock, as they heard her say them.
“Tell me,” Matthilda said, “you could bear to hear your own little sister called that?” Sometimes they could not tell whether Mama forgot that Rachel was not her own, or whether she was just playing her chosen role.
“I’ll hear no man say it twice,” Cash promised.
“It won’t be said by a man, or to you. It’s Rachel will hear it said.” Matthilda had left an infant daughter under the swept sand of a Round Rock churchyard. From the very first, Rachel had fulfilled for Matthilda a deep maternal need. Perhaps it was the same need that makes a mare break loose, and travel a hundred miles to haunt a cactus patch, where once she dropped a stillborn foal. Her face twisted now, and she sounded as though she were crying, while her eyes remained strangely dry. “Have you any faintest idea of what that would do to her?”
They supposed they knew how she’d feel; but maybe they didn’t. Perhaps men who live mainly in the saddle can never entirely put themselves in the place of a young girl when the world turns its back upon her, and draws off.
“She’s so dear, so precious,” Matthilda said. “How can you even think of letting that happen to her?”
“I’d choose it before I’d risk her death,” Ben said stubbornly.
“It’s the same thing.”
“What?”
“Do you believe she’d stay on a minute, once she thought she was drawing harm? She wouldn’t care where she went, or if she lived or died. We’d never see her again.” She was pleading with them to understand, and at the same time despairing that they ever could. “I don’t believe you know her at all!”
“I sure don’t see how it serves any useful purpose to hold her here, trapped, in the one most dangerous place she can be!”
“I can protect her here,” Matthilda said.
There it was, the softly indomitable purpose that came before everything else in Matthilda’s world. Because of it she had made Old Zack bring her here, which he never would have done of his own accord, knowing how she felt about the prairie. And because of it she stayed, in spite of every appeal Ben could make. “I can protect her here.” It was the end of argument, standing stronger than hope or fear. Stronger than common sense, too, of which it was the very opposite, Ben thought. He supposed that what he faced here was a female way of thinking. To a male, plain physical danger was the first consideration; it had better be, if he was responsible for a family on the prairie frontier. Matthilda’s conclusions would always be in some part incomprehensible to him.
“What when the Kiowas come?” he asked her.
“Well, then, we’ll fight, I suppose.”
She knew no more about fighting than she knew about Indians, and would be no help whatever if they were forced to a defense of the soddy. Probably she could not have said a thing like that in so maddeningly casual a way if she had known what she was talking about. Yet she had touched the weakest point in his whole position. This place could be defended, for the brothers, and Old Zack before them, had made sure of that. Even overwhelmingly out-numbered, they stood a pretty fair chance of giving attacking Kiowas a licking.
“Nothing more I can say,” Ben mumbled, baffled and defeated.
But there was something he could say to Cassius, when their mother had gone to bed. “You saw the hands I hired,” he said.
“They look all right to me. I told you that.”
“Could you take about twenty of ’em, and get four thousand head to Wichita?”
Cassius flared up, roweled on the same old gall. “What the hell you want to ask a thing like that for? You know it damn hootin’ well!”
“All right,” Ben said. “It’s your herd, Cash.”
“It’s what?”
“I’m staying back.”
Chapter Eight
Five of the Rawlinses arrived next day, to visit overnight while Zeb Rawlins and Ben straightened out their affairs.
“Let’s not mention Abe Kelsey to them,” Matthilda asked of Rachel. She made it oddly confidential, and urgent.
“Why?”
“It just isn’t needful. I can’t see it’s needful at all!” Tears came easily to Matthilda’s eyes, but Rachel was surprised, and a little shaken, to see them appear now. “Promise me. Please promise!”
It was the last thing she said to Rachel before their visitors came.
Zeb Rawlins and his wife, Hagar, appeared first, with a team and rig. All hands but Rachel and Matthilda were out horse hunting; they used ten horses to the man, so driving in a hundred and fifty head more was the first task of the spring work. The Rawlinses’ two grown boys were out with the hands, and Georgia Rawlins, nineteen, had tagged along, as Rachel would have done had she been allowed. Zeb and Hagar Rawlins made a peculiar couple, unlike in most ways, yet held uncommonly close together by the circumstance that each had a handicapping “infirmity,” of which they never spoke, and to which neither yielded an unnecessary inch. “Two old crocks,” one of them might say with curious tenderness, when realizing that the other was concealing pain; but never a word more.
The nature of Zeb’s infirmity had been unclear. Zeb was tall sitting down, and short standing up; his thick arms and shoulders had the great strength that sometimes goes with this build. But he moved with a slow, ponderous step, and always traveled by team, unable to mount a horse or sit a saddle. The Zacharys, inventing an explanation, had once believed that Zeb carried a bullet in his heart. Later the boys had learned what Zeb had was a “rupture”—a hernia of the type for which out-country folk knew no remedy but the truss.
Impeded in movement, but a heavy eater still, Zeb had become vast of heft and paunch; but he handled a team with great skill, once he made it to the seat. He now wheeled his rig close to the house, to let his wife dismount directly upon the stoop; then doffed his hat with a broad gallantry, bellowed at Matthilda that he hoped she was well, M’am, and was off like a runaway to look for the horse hunt.
Hagar Rawlins was taller than her husband, gaunt, grim-jawed, with hollowed cheeks and deep-set eyes. Rachel was afraid of her, for she had often caught Hagar eyeing her strangely, as if with antipathy, or perhaps with some nameless suspicion. As soon as Hagar was afoot, her own physical handicap was plainly visible, though
