Two cowhands were put up at the window loops. The one called Tip was gangly and hatchet-faced, and in this situation was tense enough to ring like the blade of a knife. His eyes darted about the room, and came to rest on the fireplace. “Ain’t that chimney pretty big?”
“It’s got iron hooks built into it, big as scythe blades,” Ben told him. “The buck that jumps down it will stay there.”
Mama was puttering in a cupboard, pretending that nothing was happening; but she was careful to make no noise, except for a soft, almost tuneless humming, that was rapidly working on Rachel’s nerves. She tried to think of some way to tell Mama to stop, but none came to her. She opened the ammunition chest under the rifle rack, got out a handful of rim-fires, and took them to the cowhand called Joey. He was a tow-headed, Dutchy-looking boy, with white eyelashes, and China blue eyes which he was too shy ever to raise to Rachel. He thanked her without looking at her.
Suddenly everybody was motionless and silent, a man at each loophole, with no places left over from which to see out. Mama stopped her humming and held perfectly still, her hands idle in the cupboard. Ben said, “Ground your carbines, you fellows. I’ll kill the man who shoots before I tell him.” Perhaps they didn’t know him well enough to be sure whether he would do it or not. He seemed so relaxed and easy, even pleased with the whole situation, Rachel was not sure she knew him herself.
He spoke now in a queer, soft tone. “Sis…Speak of the devil. You want to see what Seth looks like?…Let her look, Andy.”
What she saw was astonishing. Three Indians sat their ponies on the near bank of the Dancing Bird, in full view of the house at less than fifty yards. They were recognizable at once as Kiowas; their strong, flat-stomached build, prepotent in the Kiowa blood no matter how diluted, could not be mistaken for that of any other Indian. They carried carbines in their hands, but wore no paint, no headdresses. They rode light Indian-made saddles with elkhorn trees or none, and the tails of their ponies were blowing free, instead of clubbed for battle. In all ways, these three were equipped for travel, not for fighting.
“There’s fifteen or twenty more of ’em around someplace,” Ben believed. Kiowa warriors would take any risk to put you off your guard. “He’s a whopper, isn’t he? Big as Satanta.”
She knew then, for the first time, which Seth was. You couldn’t tell he was a white man, at the distance. Kiowas came in as many sizes as white men did, but when they were big, they were big all over, heavy-limbed, but never paunched like a Sioux or Comanche.
“Carbine, Andy,” Ben said, still casual, still as if pleased, but concentrated, now. He reached back without turning from the loophole, and Andy put his own Spencer in Ben’s hand. After working with Andy all his life, Ben did not need to ask if a ball was chambered. “I’m going to waste one,” he said, raising his voice to reach Tip and Joey. “Now don’t be poking your muzzle out! I’ll tell you when.”
Ben took aim unhurriedly, but fired without delay. Rachel saw the Kiowa ponies stutter their feet, yet they were held in place so closely that their riders only swayed lithely at the hips; their heads and shoulders were not displaced an inch. The three remained relaxed, and Rachel saw that they were grinning. They glanced at each other, before their eyes returned to the house. Seth raised his right hand in the peace sign.
Rachel was awe-struck. “Medicine,” she whispered. “They think they’ve got bullet-proof medicine!”
“Not them,” Ben said. “I know all three. The one to the left of Seth—there’s a tough one! That’s—that’s—” he tried a Kiowa word—it sounded like
The used shell went bouncing and twinkling across the floor as Andy ejected it. A thin, sharp smell of black powder came to Rachel’s nose, bringing a nervous sense of urgency, and an impatience with Ben, who could dally over shades of meaning, as if nothing deadly and immediate was hanging over them. Yet he was right. The behavior of these Indians did not explain itself; they had no exact parallel for it in their experience. A thing like this had to be waited out. The worst thing you could do was to let yourself be choused into any kind of move at all before you knew just what was up.
Outside, Rachel saw Seth speak shortly to the others, then start his horse straight toward the house, at a walk. His right hand was still up, in the sign of peace. Wolf Saddle and Lost Bird followed on either side of him, unevenly, despising any discipline of formation.
“Uh-huh,” Ben said. “Well, I’m going out there.”
Mama cried out, “Ben! Please! I won’t let you—”
Ben was wearing a Colt’s Dragoon revolver, in a holster black with years of saddle-soapings. Both had belonged to his father. He had the weapon closebelted on his left, butt forward, for a cross-draw in the saddle; but now he loosened and turned the belt, so that the gun hung lower, and on his right. He said, conversationally, “I’ll have to ask you to be quiet, Mama. I’d hate to have to shut you in your room.”
“Why!” Mama gasped. Ben had never spoken to her like that before; but Papa would have said it, and meant it. Matthilda did not speak again.
Ben took a look at his percussion caps. “Bar the door after me,” he told Andy. “You fellows—Tip and Joey— better poke your front sights out, soon as I’m on the stoop. I won’t shoot unless one of ’em swings gun on me—and don’t you cut loose until I do. All right, lay holt of this bar, here, Andy.”
He went out on the stoop, hatless, and stood lightly, his hands hanging empty. The three Kiowas stopped in front of him, their ponies spread a little, less than two horse-lengths away. Andy took the loophole Ben had left, and each had his own, now, except Mama, whom Rachel forgot for the next few minutes. When next noticed, Matthilda was at the table, her Bible before her but unopened, her hands folded upon it; she sat staring at nothing, and took no part in what followed.
Seth took a deliberate look at each of the carbine snouts, where they now poked through the shutter loop- holes, well to the right and left of the door. He smiled a little, faintly contemptuous, mildly entertained. Andy had not brought up his weapon, but Seth let them see that he noticed the loopholes in the door, behind Ben, too. Rachel studied him with the fixity of apprehension. His hair hung in two braids in front of his shoulders, and looked to be a rusty red, in spite of its shine of grease, which must have darkened it. A mixed-blood Kiowa might have had hair that color.
But the low-bred face, punkin-rounded, and what they called owl-nosed, showed an uneven splotching, as if it wanted to freckle. And the narrow-set eyes were wrong. They were muddy blue, bloodshot by wind and sun. The lashes were invisible, giving the eyes a baldish, lizardy look. His shirt and leggings were of fringed buckskin, almost new, and his moccasins were heavily decorated. It had cost a lot of Texan horses—some of them doubtless Dancing Bird horses—to buy the squaws who made him stuff like that. But the breech clout that converted the leggings to trousers was of the dark blue cloth to be found only in officers’ tunics; and this might or might not have been given to him.
She was thinking of a story told of this white Indian. A dozen others were told, and a hundred might be someday, without adding anything more. Two years ago, far down near the Rio Grande, a small farmer had come home to find the remains of his wife—or parts of them, for they were not all in one place. Their four-year-old daughter was missing. Pursuit was organized, and recovered what was left of the baby girl a hundred miles away. The stripped and mutilated small body, a pitiful rag, had been left impaled upon a broken post oak. Since then the two scalps had been seen upon Seth’s medicine shield, the wavy light chestnut of the mother’s hair beside a curly soft tuft of fine-spun pale gold. Surely Ben must be wasting his time, trying to talk to Seth; for how could anybody reach a kind of people who found honor and glory in a deed like that?
Seth’s eyes settled upon Ben, and held steadily, waiting for Ben to speak first. The marauder looked selfsatisfied, insolent and sure of himself; yet Ben outwaited him. Finally Seth grunted, and began to talk in signs, letting his carbine hang in the crook of his arm. The conventionalized signs his hands made ran off smoothly, and very fast; yet the message was simple, and Rachel could understand it well enough. “We come as friends. We came to talk to our friend,” Seth’s hands said; then added, “Sometimes friends are given gifts.”
Those in the house understood no more, for now Ben did an exasperating thing. He refused the sign language known to everybody on the prairie, and made the Indians speak in their own tongue. To show off? To impress them? Presently Rachel knew he had done it so those within would not know what he said.
The Kiowa sentences came in slurred bursts, full of clicks, drawn-out nasals, raised and lowered tones.
