Work’s going fair, I guess. No, they haven’t heard from Effie, far’s I know. You folks need anything?” He filled his pockets with cold vittles, and was actually at the door, when he turned back to cut Rachel’s girth for her, once and for all. “Oh, by the way—Sis—you’ll have to quit all this ramboodling around the country. You’ve got to stay home.”
“Now wait a minute!”
“For a lot of reasons,” Ben explained. He had found Indian sign almost every day he had been out. No big war parties, looking for fight—ponies not ready, yet, to shake off a pursuit. Mainly horse thieves, playing hide-and-sneak. But the whole Indian situation looked bad. Fort Sill troops had been fired into—not just once, but three times that he knew about. Ben predicted a full-out uprising, come summer. “Just wait till their ponies are ready. Then you’ll see!”
“Well, they’re not ready yet! Never heard such a far-fetched excuse in my life,” Rachel argued. “What are you up to out there you don’t want me to know about?”
“Who, me?”
“What about Georgia? I notice she rides on the wild loose every day of the world! Everyplace you do!”
“Who’s Georgia? Oh, Georgia. I’m not running Georgia. It’s you I’m responsible for,” Ben answered her, making out it was all a matter of sweet concern for his sister’s welfare.
Rachel was left low in her mind, and haunted by suspicions. Georgia pretended to be helping with the tallies, but Rachel thought it was mighty funny that she was always to be found tallying for Ben. Never felt called on to help her own brothers, who got on fine without any put-in from Georgia, seemingly. Not much to go on. Rachel couldn’t really convince herself that anything was wrong. All she knew for sure was that a spring of seeming promise was turning into something pretty tiresome, with fly season not even begun.
But now Abe Kelsey was in the Dancing Bird country again.
Chapter Fourteen
Kelsey did not come to the house this time, though he might have been on his way there. Neither Rachel nor Matthilda saw him. If Rachel’s understanding of her younger brother had been less acute, she would not have known about the ugly thing that happened then, in those days before the Kiowa moon.
One afternoon Andy rode in two hours before he could rightly be expected, in a dusky rain; and Rachel ran down to the corral, a carbine under her slicker, to unsaddle for him, in case he was of a mind to catch up with a few chores. One look at Andy’s face brought her up short. He had a greenish pallor, for one thing, like something under water.
“Andy! You’re fetching down with something!”
“No—oh, no—I’m fine—” He tried to keep his face turned away from her as he stepped down.
“Then you’re hurt. Either a colt stacked you, or—” Another possibility struck her. “Is Ben all right?”
He nodded, and pushed his rein into her hands; and he ran around behind the trough shelter. She could hear him being sick back there, as soon as he was out of sight. She tied the pony, and got a gourd of water from the well by the Dancing Bird.
Andy gulped at it. “Tell me one thing. Was he here? Did you see him?”
Confused, she almost said, “Who, Ben?” Then she understood. “No,” she answered him. “I haven’t seen him. But I think you have. Today.”
“I didn’t say…” He let it die out, and made a vague move toward his pony.
She said, “You weren’t going to tell me that, were you? And there’s more you haven’t told me.
“Nobody,” Andy said, and looked as if he wanted to be sick again. He drank the rest of the water. “We had a chance at him. But somehow—something went wrong.”
She got the rest out of him, then. Andy had been with Ben, a long way out from the wagon, when Kelsey showed himself. He came toward them, first, as if he wanted to talk—maybe had been watching for a time when they were apart from the others. But when they pointed their horses at him he lost his nerve, and ran for it. Andy thought he must be trying to lead them into an ambush; he pulled up, yelling at Ben. But Ben went on, so Andy drew carbine and followed. Kelsey rode a pretty fair horse this time, but with no grain to it, of course. Ben closed on him fast, and pulled his pistol. Kelsey took one look back, and the next thing he did was unbelievable. He pitched away his rifle—and went tearing on with his hands up, kicking his horse full stretch. Ben seemed flabbergasted; plainly he didn’t know what to do. He could have gone ahead and shot Kelsey, but he didn’t seem to think of that. He hesitated a few seconds, then stuck away the pistol and shook out his reata. And the rest was a night- mare.
Kelsey was jerked off his horse, but the loop had got an arm and a shoulder, as well as the neck, and he hit the ground alive. Ben didn’t seem to know what to do about that, either. He just spurred on….
“When finally he stopped, and I come up, there wasn’t nothing on that reata but…”
Rachel let him skip that part of it.
“Ben threw away his reata, rather than step down and loose it,” Andy ended.
“You don’t call that killing him?”
He shook his head. “We went back to the wagon, for tools to dig a grave. And it started to rain. Took us two hours, before we got back where we left him. And when we did…he was gone from there.”
“Didn’t you cut for sign?”
“It was raining hard by then. We couldn’t find out anything.” They never did find out how Kelsey left there. “I never knew Ben to foozle so. I suppose I should have shot Kelsey, somewhere in there. I guess,” Andy finished uncertainly.
“Why should you?”
Andy stood opening and closing his mouth. “Ben told us we had to,” he said finally.
They stood out there talking a long time, though Matthilda twice came to the door of the house and banged on the triangle. Andy didn’t know anything more. But talking had got some of the kinks out of him, and he returned to his normal color. They didn’t have to explain anything to Matthilda, which was just as well. The truth was that they didn’t know then just what had happened—whether Kelsey was alive, or dead, or what.
That night Rachel wept a little, silently, into her pillow, thinking sentimentally about her brothers. She was sorry for Andy; in this mood she thought of him as still the little innocent-eyed boy of whom he sometimes reminded them. And she was sorriest for Ben, the one who had always been so steady, so gentle, and so kind, yet had somehow been driven to saddle not only himself but his brothers with a commitment to murder. Perhaps he still did not know whether he had killed the old man or not. But if he had, he had done it in the clumsiest way it could be done, and she could believe he might be haunted all his life by that.
She hoped for a while that Kelsey was indeed dead, so that the whole nightmare was over with. Then she thought how awful it was if the corpse was stiffening somewhere out there under the brush tonight; and she was horrified at herself, and filled with a sense of guilt.
She believed she would be able to make Ben tell her, now.
It did not work out that way. Before she ever spoke to Ben again, another thing happened. This time it happened to Rachel herself, and to nobody other, except as everyone in the family was affected by a disaster to one. And the world as Rachel knew it turned from beneath her, past all possible recovery.
Chapter Fifteen
