Rachel saw Seth’s companions intensify their concentration as they tried to follow Ben’s Kiowa; it had a right to be pretty bad. At first Rachel tried to guess what was being said in that outlandish tongue. She thought Ben might have told them that in his understanding it was those who came to talk who brought gifts. Seth smirked, and took from round his neck a slender gold chain, with something like a quid of tobacco on it. He tossed this at Ben’s feet, but Ben caught it with the toe of his boot, and flipped it into his hand. He barely glanced at it before putting the chain around his neck. Seth seemed blanked by that. He paused a few moments, looking Ben hard in the eye, which seemed strange in a man like that.
Now Seth went into a long, unhurried speech, and Rachel took a look at the other two. Wolf Saddie was the chunkiest of the three, with a broad and yellowish face, as if he might have Comanche blood. His brief interjections seemed to be jokes, for whenever he spoke the other two laughed.
The other Kiowa, called Lost Bird, was in some ways most remarkable of the three. His skin had the dark yet ruddy sun-char of the full-blood Kiowa; but his hair, greased though it was, looked to be auburn. His face was smooth, lineless, placidly at rest. When Rachel had looked at him for a moment, she realized a strange thing. This face was beautiful, and in an odd way, as a girl’s face should be beautiful. She was fascinated, and at the same time repelled.
As if he felt her gaze, Lost Bird turned his head and looked her straight in the eye; she felt as if the whole door was suddenly open in front of her, and not just the loophole. His eyes were green, now—no, a dark yellow. They darkened as he tried to see into the shadows behind the loophole, until they seemed almost black, and surface-lighted. Yet as he turned his eyes to Seth again they appeared the gray of pale slate. She had a frightened sense of having known eyes like that before, though she was certain she had never seen Lost Bird in her life. A moment of uncertainty weakened her middle, so definite that she felt a touch of nausea.
But he began to speak, and the illusion was gone. He spoke with broad gestures, flowing or emphatic. His voice rose and fell; his chest puffed, and his head lifted with hauteur. Yet he became smaller as he spoke, until his threat was no more than that of a deadly weapon with the legs of a fast horse, con-trolled by nothing with any depth of mind. He had talked no more than a minute when he ended upon what was obviously both a question and a demand. Ben was standing close enough to the door so that Rachel saw a drop of sweat trickle down behind his ear, only a few inches from her eyes.
Instead of answering at once, Ben spoke in English to the people behind him. “Andy. I want a few cartridges. But stay where you are. Let Rachel bring them to you.”
By his softened tone Rachel knew Ben was smiling, and she wondered if the Indians knew by this how angered he was. Did you have to know him to tell that? She became scared again, aware that he was close to an explosion of temper that could bring disaster upon himself and them all. She could not see his right hand, but felt sure it had not moved.
“I want two fifty-caliber metallic, and one rim-fire forty-four,” Ben said.
Andy unbarred the door to put the three cartridges in Ben’s hand. “Bar it again,” Ben said and Andy obeyed. They saw Ben toss one cartridge to each Indian. Then he made a brief final statement in the Kiowa tongue.
The three sat quiet a moment more, their eyes fixed on Ben, faces as expressionless as mud. None threw their cartridges away. Seth kept tossing and catching the gift cartridge without looking at it. He took another slow look at the carbine snouts sticking out of the shutters, on his left and on his right, and he looked at the loophole where he knew Andy must be. Then he spit at Ben’s feet, and unhurriedly turned his horse.
The others followed Seth, walking their horses slowly, their backs exposed arrogantly to the carbines in the house. Andy softly lifted the bar, and Ben slid inside. The Kiowas jumped their horses out of sight over the cutbank of the Dancing Bird.
“That may be all, for now,” Ben said; but he kept Andy and the hands on watch for a long while more. Nobody on earth was Indian-wise enough to say for sure whether an attack would come, or when.
“We’re getting kind of low on metallic,” Andy said, and it was a question.
“I told them to use those when they came again,” Ben answered him.
Mama let her lip tremble, now that it was over. She whimpered, “I only wish those people would stay away.”
Ben said, “There weren’t any people here, Mama. Those were Indians.”
Rachel moved close to Ben, so that she could make her tone low, yet urgent, demanding. “What did Seth want of us?”
He turned to her slowly, took her face between his two hands, and for some moments looked straight down into her eyes. He had never done that before; and, though she met his gaze steadily, the unaccustomed fixity with which his eyes probed into hers so flustered her that her mind would not work. She had long had a notion that she could tell what he was thinking, if he would meet her eyes, but this did not work for her now. It came to her that she could not read his mind because he was trying to read hers, so that all she could see was the questioning at the front of his mind.
Then a twinkle appeared, and his face softened with the first warmth before a smile. “They were trying to buy you,” he told her.
It seemed so far-fetched, so unexpected, that she couldn’t tell it from the kind of foolishness with which he often put people off, when he didn’t want to answer them. She heard herself reply nonsensically, in kind. “Well, did you sell me?”
“I held out for more horses.”
But later she saw that she had no real reason to disbelieve his statement of Seth’s purpose. She was chilled, and shaken. There was something dreadful about the impassable gulf between the Kiowa ways of thinking and those of her own people. Sometimes it was hard to believe that this strange bloody-minded red race was human at all. It was as if giant lizards had come here on horses, mouthing and grunting their unearthly language that so few white men had ever understood.
And there was something else. If Seth was determined, or believed himself humiliated before the other war chiefs, the hard strike of his answering raid would be the same as if sense and reason were behind it; and the unbelievable cruelties in the event of victory would be no different.
Mama suddenly exclaimed, “Ben! Take that dreadful thing off!” He had forgotten Seth’s gift, but now he took the gold chain from around his neck, and looked at the dried human ear it carried as a trophy. Then he threw it in the fire.
Chapter Nineteen
Two days passed, and the moon was dead full, but Seth did not return. No new Indian trails appeared upon Dancing Bird land. For the moment the country seemed to have emptied of Kiowas. Ben doubled his precautions, turning more irritable every day over the time lost from the work while they scouted the terrain. But the prairie remained blank and still.
Unexpectedly, on the sixth night of the Kiowa Moon—in the very heart of danger—Effie popped up in the foreground of their lives again. Ben brought the word when he came in at nightfall, the Rawlins split of the crew having been joined up with his own early that morning. It seemed that a rider had reached the Rawlinses pretty late the night before, and hollered them up. His news was that Effie and her promised young man—his name was Harry Whittaker—were only one day behind him. The messenger had left them at Fort Richardson, when he was sent on ahead with the word. They meant to come right on.
“Why, she must be home right now!” Matthilda marveled.
Ben supposed they were. The rider, whom Ben knew only as Gus, had come from Fort Richardson in a day, having changed horses at the Rountree ranch, forty miles out. Gall it about seventy-five miles from Fort Richardson to the Rawlinses, with a road of sorts for fifty miles of the way—Effie’s spring buggy should make it with fair ease in two days, stopping overnight with the Rountrees.
These times and distances became of sharp interest, a little later.
