During the night the rain stopped; the skies were clear, the day after Kelsey was dragged. Rachel plotted to get a horse saddled and out of there. She meant to find Ben at once. She knew about where his crew was at work.
Only a year or so back, it had been hard to get Matthilda to go and lie down, or to take any daytime rest at all. But her afternoon had hardly begun when the bedroom door closed upon her. Rachel was out of the house in the same minute. She walked past the corrals, and along the Dancing Bird, pretending to size up the driftwood brought them by the spring rise, in case Matthilda happened to be watching her out of sight.
In another minute, as soon as she had given her mother a chance to doze, she would have turned back to rope a pony.
She never got it done, for Ben appeared unexpectedly, and Georgia was with him, stirrup to stirrup. They came surging up out of an arroyo some distance downstream and Georgia was laughing, having a great time. Then Rachel saw her do an odd thing. Georgia’s laughter stopped abruptly; she checked, and whirled her horse in what looked very much like an attempt to get out of sight. Too late, of course. Georgia recovered herself at once, and stopped where she was. Her horse shied, she explained afterward. It was not important. What mattered was the way Rachel took it. For her resentment of this girl suddenly popped sparks like a sap log.
Georgia exchanged a word or two with Ben. Then both waved at Rachel, and came on at a walk. Rachel saw she wasn’t going to have any chance to talk to her brother at all, not even here in their own house, what with this interloper butting in.
She was getting ready to fix Ben something to eat, and wondering if she could bring herself to set a plate for Georgia, when Georgia dismounted at the stoop, letting Ben take her pony to the corral.
“Ben lost his reata,” Georgia said as she walked in. “That’s a man for you. Doesn’t even know where or how, seemingly. Had to come in to get a rope.”
Rachel must have known that it was jealousy had hold of her, a very different jealousy than she had ever felt when Georgia was fooling around with Cassius. For just a moment she wondered whether she had better start a war she could not finish, or risk an open bust-up with any member of that other family with whom they were already having difficulty enough.
“Been seeing a good deal of Ben lately, haven’t you?”
“I help keep the tallies. It frees a man for the work. Anyway, we have to keep a cross-tally. For Pa.”
“Who’s cross-tallying for Cash? Oh, I forgot. Cash is way far up the Wichita Trail. Out of sight, out of mind. I guess that’s plenty easy, for some.”
Georgia answered shortly, but reasonably. She had not come looking for this fight, and felt no need of it. “Get this through your head. I’m not bespoke. Not to Cash or anybody else. When I am, I’ll tell you.”
She moved away, toward the wash bench; and Rachel, turning to the table, picked up the long Bowie knife with which they carved, and cut a paper-thin slice from the pot roast. The run of the honed blade through the meat felt good to her in her present mood. She knew she had said enough. She had a chance to drop it now—the last chance she would have in her life; but she couldn’t let it alone.
With her back to Georgia she said, “Ben isn’t fixing to settle down. He likes to ride free on the trails.”
Georgia stood looking at her sideways. She hadn’t angered yet. Her riding had taken the winter softness off of her, and now she was thoughtfully rubbing the palm of one hand on a hip bone. “Neither am I fixing to settle down,” she said. “Not for a while, anyway.”
“Then why do you keep tolling them on—each behind the other’s back? We have a name for that, where I come from!”
Georgia’s eyes seemed to go higher in her head, signaling that if Rachel wanted fight she could have it. “Oh, hell, Rachel! Why don’t you quit acting like a brat?”
“I won’t have you coming between Cash and Ben—you hear me?”
“I hear you very well,” Georgia said slowly. “You sound like a spying little sneak, to me.”
Rachel’s head came up. “I am Rachel Zachary,” she said. “Everywhere in—”
“You’re what?” Georgia got in.
“Everywhere in Texas, they know who the Zacharys are. And do you know how many people there are in Texas can give a Zachary slack? Not one!”
“That’s right,” Georgia answered. “It’s a big pity you ain’t one.”
Rachel stared, no more than puzzled then.
“You’re no Zachary,” Georgia made it plain for her. “You’re no tittle of relation to a Zachary.”
“You out of your mind?”
“Why, I knowed it first time I seen you. Look at yourself! Where’s the Zachary bone? You got bones like a snuff stick. Look at your hide! The sun ain’t hardly touched you, and already you’re the color of a red hog in a mudhole. You couldn’t pass for a Zachary in a thousand years!”
With shock, with bewilderment, Rachel saw that Georgia believed what she was saying. She stammered out, “How do you think I got here—if—”
“You’re nothing but a catch-colt, a foundling—picked up bare-nekkid in the road, at that! You don’t know who you be, or what—and you never will! And everybody knows it.”
Rachel’s lips turned white, and curved in a little smile, while her eyes went wide and fixed. The knife in her hand poised in front of her, edge upward, and she moved toward Georgia, light and quick on the balls of her feet.
From the bedroom door Matthilda screamed—“Rachel!”
She stopped short, and the knife clattered from her hand. Before her eyes the room careened and darkened, so that she almost fell.
Georgia had retreated from her, stumbling over her awkward riding skirt. She was not a girl who scared easily, but this time there was horror in her eyes; for she knew she had never been nearer death in her life. Before Rachel’s vision had cleared she was gone.
Matthilda held Rachel in her arms, conforting her, crooning to her. “There, now, there…dear girl…dear, dear little girl….Everything’s all right.”
“What did she mean? Mama—what could she mean?” Rachel was shaking weakly, but her mind was working again.
“Don’t think about it. Put it all out of your mind—please, Rachel—please!”
“She believes it. I’d have known if she was making it up. Mama—is it true?”
Long ago, Matthilda had known this moment might come. In her mind she had rehearsed what she would say, forming two opposite answers, hoping to know when the time came which one to use. One was a straight-out denial, relying upon vehemence and a pretended astonishment. “Why! Shockin’! Fiddlesticks!” The other was meant to be a natural and easy acceptance as of something unimportant. “Why, yes, dear. Of course. Didn’t I ever tell you? Never thought about it, I guess….” An uneasy feeling had remained that neither answer could save the tranquillity she desired for Rachel above all things. Some third way seemed to be hovering just beyond her reach; she never found it.
But the years had come between, dimming the danger and the need. She had almost been able to forget that Rachel was not her own, because she so wanted to forget. Now as she reached for the answers she had devised she could not remember what they had been.
She faltered, “Why—why, Rachel—why, I—” And in that moment of groping it became too late.
“So it’s true, then,” Rachel said.
Chapter Sixteen
