so. For the time being Carr was head of a loosely organized bunch of volunteers from the Fort Worth neighborhood. They chased thieves and war parties, and some of them rode all the time.
Behind Sol Carr and to one side, respectfully aloof, rode an Indian in the butternut clothes of a cowhand, but with no dents or creases in his hat. He had the squat look of a huge frog, and graying pigtails hung beside his jowls. Ben believed this to be a Delaware called Humpjack, who had scouted for troops and Rangers against the Wild Tribes since long ago.
Most conspicuous, because they hung back and would not meet his eye, were Jude and Charlie Rawlins. But Ben could have named three of the five others. He had exchanged powers of attorney with them, for handling drifted cattle. They nodded slightly, noncommittally and without smiling, as he looked at them one after another; and this con-firmed that the posse was hostile. The chilling thing was that these were ordinary men, who were Texans and cowmen, but not renegades, nor of any special faction. Sometimes a kind of tide seemed to run across the empty spaces of Texas, a tide of sentiment, of opinion, so that far-separated, lonely settlers were swayed the same way all at once. To stand against such a thing was to stand against the State. Sooner or later the guns would start clearing their throats, and you might find yourself fighting feud after feud, without any future or any end.
Behind the mounted men, a tenth man drove a light wagon, with a horse tied to the tail gate; and the led horse was Apples.
Andy swung down. “That’s my horse you got there! What’s that contraption you got on him?” Apples was carrying an Indian saddle of sticks and straps; it looked to be broken.
Somebody shouted, “Let that horse alone, boy!”
“That thing’s eating him in two! I got to get it off him!”
But Ben said sharply, “Come back here, Andy!” And his brother obeyed.
Carr dismounted now, without invitation, and Ben stepped down to meet him. They stopped two paces apart, and did not offer to shake hands. Both had left their carbines on their saddles, but Ben wore his holster slung low on his right, and Sol Carr was similarly armed.
“We’ve been following out the No Hope massacre,” Carr said to Ben, “and we’ve been lucky. Found out quite a bit.” He let an edge come into his voice, as if he were talking to a man under arrest, or about to be. “I’m here to learn the rest of it from you.”
Ben flared up, but his voice remained quiet. Rachel, watching from the house, heard no word of what followed.
“Those were your last words in that tone,” he told Sol Carr, “while you stand on my land.”
“You can back that up, too,” Carr said, dry as the dust, “just by taking on all these men. How many do you figure you’ll have time to get?”
“One,” Ben said.
Maybe the old Ranger modified his tone, some, then—or maybe he didn’t, actually. Certainly his purpose was not softened.
“We taken a prisoner,” Carr said. “A white squaw man, and I believe you know him. Name of Abe Kelsey.”
“We’ve been looking for Kelsey a long time,” Ben said.
“That’s as may be. What interests us, he was mixed up with them red niggers at the massacre. Laying aside what he says he was doing there, he anyway messed into it enough to get himself shot up. And we got him.”
“Alive?”
“Just about. We got the names of the main war chiefs out of him. Seth was there, and so was Wolf Saddle. But he says Lost Bird was the leader. Though he may be protecting Seth, seein’s he claims he’s Seth’s old man.”
“If he’s alive,” Ben demanded, “why haven’t you hung him?”
“We may get around to it,” Carr answered. “Meantime, he’s spieled off a whole string of charges against you. I thought you might want to face him, and answer him. I’ve got him here, in that wagon.”
“Let him lift his head,” Ben said. “And I’ll put a ball between his eyes in the next tenth of a second!”
“You’d shoot an unarmed man?”
“Yes,” Ben said.
“Then I better tell you what he says myself. Bein’s I’m in better shape to shoot back. He says, to start, the Kiowas used your place, here, for their point of assembly.”
“The three you named were here,” Ben acknowledged. “We forted up, and stood ’em off.”
“He says Lost Bird learned from you that the people they massacred were on the road, and there was no other way the red niggers could have learned of it.”
A stir of surprise ran over the posse as Ben laughed in Carr’s face. It was a nasty laugh, with promise of fight in it, yet unexpected. “The Rawlinses are the people we have to work with,” Ben said.
“They’re also the damyankees that crowded in on your range,” Carr reminded him. “Your old man had his eye on this grass for a long time. When he finally come to settle on it, Rawlins was ahead of him, and he had to go splits. It’s possible to believe you wanted them out of here.”
“Oh, good God almighty,” Ben said with contempt.
“There’s plenty to say it’s the Kiowas you have to work with, not Rawlinses, if you want to last where you are. They say this foundling girl, this foster sister of yours, you people have raised—”
He broke off, stopped by the blaze of pure murder that had lighted Ben’s eyes, contradicting his smile. “What about her?” Ben prodded him.
“They say she’s the key to your understanding with the Kiowas,” Sol Carr went on coolly. He had been startled, but he was not the man to be frightened. “Kelsey says your old man found the girl on the prairie, and rescued her. And she proved out to be a Kiowa quarter-breed baby, lost out of a drag litter—Lost Bird’s half sister, out of a white woman captive. They say the Kiowas are friendly because you’re raising one of their own.”
“Carr,” Ben said, “if you don’t have enough Indian-savvy to know that’s impossible, it’s no use to talk to you. You ought to know there’s nothing could bring the whole tribe down on us any quicker than if they thought we was holding a captive Kiowa child!”
“I would have supposed so,” Sol Carr admitted. “Only there’s one thing more. After the massacre, Abe Kelsey made his way here. His horse had been hit; died about two miles out. He’s showed us the bones, stripped clean by the wolves. God knows he was in no shape to catch another. He says you people gave him a horse. You gave him that horse, right there. You helped him get away on it. And he got back to some of his red niggers—what time he could keep up with ’em.”
“That horse was stolen,” Andy said. “Out of this corral right here. And within an hour of noon!”
“Nobody around at all?” Carr said with disbelief.
“I had two men here all the time,” Ben told him. He glanced at Tip and Joey, and found them looking blank, and frightened.
“Do you accuse the two men?” Carr asked sharply.
“I do not! I don’t think they know anything about this at all.”
“Yet somebody gave Kelsey this horse!”
In the moment of silence that followed, Ben saw Sol Carr look past him, and start to say something more, then close his mouth again. Ben had not known that Matthilda had left the house, until she spoke from behind him.
“I did,” Matthilda said clearly. “I gave him the horse.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Matthilda had not explained to Rachel, as she left the house, what it was she meant to do. Rachel made as if to go with her. Perhaps she would not have obeyed an order from Matthilda to stay back; perhaps Matthilda knew it.
“Ben won’t like this,” Matthilda said. “Please don’t make him mad at you, too.”
That worked. Rachel stayed at the window, and watched Matthilda walk down there, to butt in on the men, where she wasn’t wanted. But mostly her eyes were on Ben. She thought,
