Chapter Seventeen
During grass season they were under the Kiowa Moon only a few days more than half the time; but the fort- up periods were such a nuisance that they seemed to come directly on top of each other, and to last forever.
While the moon was full you must never leave the house unarmed, and even in broad daylight you must never go alone beyond gunshot of support. You must fort up every night, battle shutters barred and weapons ready, as if certain of attack while you slept. After dark you could strike no light, and even the ashes on the hearth must be drenched, lest a coal should wake and show a gleam. You must remember where the plaster-covered loopholes were in the walls, and be ready to knock them open with a blow. When a Kiowa scout came feeling out your defenses, you had better whistle a shot or two over his head without hitting him, as a persuasion to look farther. The water barrel must be kept filled from the well by the creek, the homemade ammunition kept in supply, the gunlocks taken down over and over. There was a lot more. The very success of all these precautions made them the more difficult to maintain; for it was pretty hard to keep up to scratch when nothing ever actually happened.
Ben had been saving the work near home for the Kiowa Moon. Of the six hired hands held back from the drive, he had meant to give half to Zeb, for the Rawlins defense, but Zeb, perhaps in a spasm of thrift, had accepted only two. Ben could only hope that the Rawlinses were getting a little something done, now and then, over at their end of the range; for though the Rawlinses were maintaining a taciturn truce, they could not now join forces in a single range crew every day. Of his remaining four men, Ben picked the best shots, a couple of boys named Tip and Joey, for a permanent home guard; while with Andy and the other two he got on with the calf branding, bringing all hands in every night.
Rachel and Matthilda, who were cooking for them all, made breakfast in the dark, over a little Indian-sized fire that they masked as best they could. But Ben waited for daylight before he saddled now, and spent a while cutting for sign—sometimes a couple of hours, before leading off for the work. Even so, the boys came in dog-tired at the edge of night. They ate enormously and in silence, and were asleep with their clothes on before the women could wash up and get out of the room. Yet loneliness was banished from the Dancing Bird while so many people were around, even if they were sound asleep.
Rachel watched her chance to catch Ben alone. For a couple of days it seemed as though there was no way this could be done. He had turned short of speech, and was showing strain, as if he did not like what his houndlike casting told him was happening around there, during these moonlit nights. Sometimes she thought he had guessed what she was up to, and was wary of being pinned. But on the third day of the Kiowa Moon he broke a stirrup leather, and had to stop in the saddle shed to rig another. And there she cornered him.
“Funny how seldom you ever seen one. An Indian, I mean.” he said, and rambled on as if trying to avoid questions by doing all the talking himself. “Once or twice I’ve seen a little speck, a long piece off, on a ridge, where nobody ought to be, and that’s about all. But there’s lots going through here, just the same. I’ve cut three trails in two days. One of eight-ten horses, ridden in travel file, without any loose stock; and another—”
“Ben,” Rachel cut in, “is Abe Kelsey dead? Do we know yet if he’s dead or not?”
He did not look at her, but his hands stopped their work. When he answered his words were toneless, without any ring, or jump. “He’s alive,” Ben said.
She did not make him go into how he knew. He was lacing leather again and would soon be out of there. “I have to know one thing,” she came straight at it. “What was the great hurt we did Abe Kelsey?”
“Us? Hurt Kelsey?”
“He hates us, Ben! Why? Because Papa wouldn’t help him get back his son?”
“The Kiowas don’t have Kelsey’s son—never did have him. Kelsey’s boy is in his grave at Burnt Tree.”
“Sure looks like a father would know his own son.”
“Would, huh? That one damn-fool notion has kept the whole thing a-simmer! I talked to this Seth two years ago. In Kiowa, naturally. He already had two squaws, and three-four kids. All this at sixteen? That buck is twenty- two if he’s a minute!”
“Ben, you mean to tell me that old man would fetch down a raid on us just because Papa wouldn’t—”
“A raid? Him? They wouldn’t move an inch for him.”
“I heard he’s virtually one of ’em!”
“They’d have killed him long ago if he wasn’t crazy. They bat him around, and misuse him, and take his stuff away from him—you saw the horse they left him with. But let him scout for them? Hell! They’d never believe a word out of him.”
He hadn’t seen it coming. He had dug his own trap, and galloped straight into it. He opened his mouth, and closed it, and for a moment wouldn’t look at her.
But Ben balked; he could think of no dodge, but he balked anyway. He met her eyes, not with candor, but with plain obstinacy. “Horse thief,” he said shortly, and shut his mouth like a trap. He knotted the stirrup-leather lacing, finished or not, and took his saddle by the fork, to go out.
She was beaten, and she knew it. Nagging him would serve no purpose. She asked him, “Does Seth ever come here, Ben?”
He stopped. “Maybe. I don’t know. We find tracks where Indian ponies come and go; sometimes moccasin tracks, close in. He could have been here a lot of times. Why?”
“Want to see what he looks like.”
He said with a startling intensity, “I pray God you’ll never see his face! Because if you ever do, there’ll be war paint on it.”
He left her; and she was disheartened as she thought how near she had come to a glimpse behind a dark veil. They were coming no closer together. He would go on treating her as a sister, even thinking of her as one, probably, until Rachel herself made known to him that she was undeceived. But he was preoccupied and edgy all the time now, so that the time never seemed right.
Ben had been wrong about one thing. Seth came the next day, without war paint, and in plain light.
Chapter Eighteen
Texans always called him Seth. Even when they tried to say Set-Tayhahnna-tay they couldn’t get the singsong gobble to it that a Kiowa would understand. He had been no more than a fable when Abe Kelsey first called him Seth, a riddle, in an old man’s tale. But since then he had become a reality to be dreaded, in his own right. There were other white and nearwhite warriors, such as Red Hair, Kiowa Dutch, and Kiowa Frank, and perhaps many more less widely known. All of these had been captured, enslaved, and finally Indianized, when very young; only one or two of them remembered their native speech. The Kiowas had no chiefs, either hereditary or elected, nor any other constituted authority with powers of discipline. A war chief was any man who could scheme up a raid and persuade others to follow him. The white war chiefs had made their names in open competition, by the boldness, ingenuity, and ruthlessness with which they made war on their own race. Most believed the white warriors more savage than the Kiowas of blood, but this was because of the resentment aroused by their anomaly of race. They could equal the cruelty of their adopted people; they could not hope to exceed it.
On the day Seth came, Ben left the others hauling water to the house, while he rode circle alone to read what news of the night had been written upon the prairie soil. He was back in twenty minutes, and had the up- horses moved to the corral nearest the house, where they were covered by its guns. Then he brought Andy and the hands into the house and forted up. The battle shutters had been opened to let in the first sun, but now they were barred again. They pried the plugs out of one shutter loophole at each of the two windows facing the Dancing Bird, and opened two loopholes in the door.
