earth! Wherever one drop of their blood is found, it must be destroyed! For that is man’s most sacred trust, before Almighty God.”
“Suppose,” Matthilda said, with surprising self-possession, “suppose a little child—a helpless baby—came into your hands—”
A dreadful glow came up behind Hagar’s cavernous eyes. She extended her hands, gnarled and clawed, and they were shaking. “A
Matthilda remained steady, and rode it through. “I have no question to ask,” she said.
Hagar crumpled weakly, and her words were faint. “If Effie is in their hands tonight…how can I ever again say…God’s will be done….”
Rachel held deathly still, hardly daring to breathe. She believed Hagar Rawlins to be insane.
Ben was harnessed and hooked before dawn; and he found his womenfolks more than ready to be taken home.
Chapter Twenty-one
Two days more, and the Kiowa Moon had waned. Matthilda thought Ben should take Andy and his two hired hands and go help look for the missing wedding party. But Ben had become wary since Seth’s visit. Moon or no moon, he would not leave his womenfolk alone,
It was Georgia who rode out to where Ben was working the calves, with the word that Effie was dead. An ambush in the ruins of No Hope, only twenty-five miles from home, had left no survivors. Those last rains, as the year turned dry, had not only delayed discovery, but prevented pursuit.
Ordinarily the Zacharys would have been expected to hurry back there. But in this situation Georgia believed, and told Ben, neighborly custom did not rightly apply. Shy off, she advised them, at least until her sister’s body was brought home. She’d be able to tell better, then, how her mother was going to ride this thing out; and she would secretly fetch word. Might be the Rawlins cabin would be no fit place for visitors of any kind, she put it tactfully, for quite some time to come.
She and Ben agreed upon a rendezvous, where he could look for her at certain times. By picketing her horse on the crest of a particular ridge, she could let him know from about five miles off if she was there; save him some of the ride. She’d come there any day she had something they ought to know.
Now there was a strange delay. Ten days passed before the body of Effie Rawlins was brought home. It turned out that Jude had gone on down the Trinity, all the way to Fort Worth to have a proper casket built. He had even tried to get silver handles, but had not found them in supply. The coffin he at last brought back was strong and heavy as a safe, with the lid sealed down, and no way to open it intended.
But Hagar was determined to make sure for herself that the body Jude had brought home was really Effie’s. Though they did all they could to restrain her, she got up in the night, found tools, and forced the coffin lid.
Inside she found only a sealed lead box, about a foot wide, by thirty inches long.
Chapter Twenty-two
Time was getting on to where they could begin hoping for Cash to get home, pretty soon. They never could tell, within a matter of weeks, how long their trail drivers were likely to be gone.
In the end of the soddy’s main room, between the bunks that filled the corners, stood a huge cabinet, with a leaf that let down to write on, which they called the “secretary.” Papa had made this, the winter his broken leg was healing, and it was the only really good piece in the house. Its main structure was of heavy walnut, but the doors and drawer fronts were of fruitwood, covered with carvings of birds, leaves, flowers—even a few antelopes and buffaloes could be found on it. Within, along with their bushels of stock tallies, and the family Bible, and a great pile-up of odds and ends they never used but didn’t know how to throw away, were stowed the logbooks of every drive they had ever made. Three times they had made two drives in the same year, and once they had made three, so that in the seven years since ’67 they had accumulated logbooks covering a dozen.
Rachel had dug these out, and had been poring over them since the drive first rolled. But no part of that long push seemed ever to have gone twice just the same. No two drives took exactly the same route, for one thing. The Wichita Trail had a destination at its other end, but outside of that it was no more than a name, and not any one particular way. Weather made a big difference; in wet years the herd plugged slowly through hock-deep mud, and every creek became both a hazard and a hard day’s work. The grass made a difference, for if it was poor the weakening cattle must graze slowly all the way.
Thunderstorms could spook a herd into stampede after stampede, or a herd could go “spoiled” of its own accord, and run four nights a week. What with the time it took to gather, after a run, and the exhausted state of the cattle, the boss might get to thinking he lived on the trail now, making one drive his lifelong work. And the worse the conditions, the more you needed a corrida of fast, game horsemen who knew how to handle this wildhorn Texican stock. You never did have enough men like that.
After the first week or two Rachel didn’t even know which river Cash would be crossing next. Ben’s old logs showed that he had not always been sure himself. She found places where he had noted the time of certain crossings, but had put the names in later with a blunter pencil. Not so with Papa’s logs. These were hastily scrawled, and sometimes illegible, cross-scribbled in every direction with notes on losses, stuff issued from the wagons, and every kind of thing. But if he didn’t know where he was, he said so. The boys made a great legendary figure of Papa as a trail driver. They claimed nobody had ever seen Old Zack lie down while he had a herd on the trail. Maybe once in a while you might see him doze a little, sitting on the ground with his back against a cook- wagon wheel. But even then he would have a cup of coffee in his hand, so that if he went full asleep it would spill on his legs, and get him up from there. Any real sleep he had was actually in the saddle; he used up about five horses a day.
Old Zack had left them no record for the drive from the Dancing Bird to Wichita, for they were still driving to Abilene, far up in the eastern part of Kansas, at the time of his death. Ben’s second drive, in 1871, had made Wichita in four weeks and two days, which was his best time, and would have been a credit to his father. He also had made the same drive in nine weeks and three days. Cassius had made one drive, which the Rawlinses had sat out, in 1872, in five weeks even, which was cracking good time. You could call six weeks good time, and seven weeks pretty fair. No telling, though, how long they’d be held up in Wichita, waiting to sell, and sometimes they had to load the cars, holding until cars could be had. Call it a week or two—maybe a lot more. Then it would take about ten days for the riders to get back. There was no part of the operation not hedged all round with ifs and providings.
During this time occurred one of the smallseeming, unreadable things, the seriousness of which was hidden at the time it happened. They lost a horse, which was a common-place if anything was, except that this one went missing in broad daylight, out of the up-horse corral. Well, somebody must have turned it out, though no one would admit it. The animal was a sleepy old pony named Apples, because it had some Appaloosie blood, shown in a pale, speckled wash across its hindquarters. It might never have been missed, except that it happened to belong to Andy, who called it his night horse; he hunted, and complained, and harped on his loss, until everybody was sick of hearing about Apples.
Cassius had now been gone upwards of six weeks, and they were coming into the just-barely-possible area. The land was already yielding dust again where the grass was poor, or the run off had scoured the earth barren. So now they watched for a distant stir-up.
But when they sighted one, early in an unseasonably hot afternoon, it was in an unlikely direction; and it was a Fort Worth posse that came there, before Cash ever got home.
The light, intermittent dust the posse made was seen by Ben from where he worked a long way off, and he judged at once that it could only mean more trouble. He came on in, with Andy and his two hired hands. By lathering the horses, he got home just ahead of the slower-moving posse. Immediately he sent Andy up to the house, with word that Matthilda and Rachel were to stay inside, whatever happened. And shortly after that, nine riders came jogging around the corral to where the Zachary men waited, sitting their sweated horses.
The man in front, gray-thatched and graymustached, with a dried-out look, Ben knew for Sol Carr of Tarrant County. He had been a Ranger, once, before the War Between the States, and would be one again, now that Texas could bring the Rangers back. Ben did not know why his father had disliked Sol Carr but remembered that this was
