with every shot, at this range, firing from a rest. After that she felt better about staying where she was.
Down by the corral, Sol Carr lifted his hat to Matthilda, and spoke courteously, covering his objections to being thrown off his line of attack.
“I remember you, M’am,” Carr said. “You are Mrs. Zachary.”
“And you are Sol Carr,” Matthilda responded, “who tried to do my husband out of six thousand dollars.”
Carr may have reddened a little, but his tone did not change. “I understood you to say you gave Kelsey this horse. Did you realize, then, he had come direct from the No Hope massacre?”
“I realize nothing of the kind. The day he came here was more than two weeks after the massacre.”
That stopped Carr for a moment or two; but he said, “He had been wounded, though?”
“He had a gunshot wound in the limb,” Matthilda said. “A new one. The blood was fresh on the bandage. It wasn’t a bad wound, then. I should judge it’s bad now—I can smell green-flesh from here. You’d better get him some doctoring, or you won’t get him as far as his trial!”
“M’am,” Carr said, “this is his trial.”
“I’ll be interested to hear the verdict,” Matthilda said saltily.
“What was your belief, then, as to how he got wounded?”
“I supposed he was caught stealing horses. Our horses, likely.”
“You thought he was a horse thief,” Carr said wonderingly. “You knew he was a squaw man. You knew he’s spread tales against you, to your great harm. Yet you gave him a horse to get away on?”
“Yes,” said Matthilda.
“M’am, in God’s name—exucse me, M’am—why?”
“Poor old man,” Matthilda said. “I was sorry for him.”
“After all he’s done, you tell me you were sorry—”
“Suppose one of my little children had been taken by red savages,” Matthilda said. “Do you think there’s anything I wouldn’t do, any lengths I wouldn’t go to, to bring my child back to me? I have no doubt I would go crazy, as crazy as Abe, before the end of it. Of course I’m sorry for him!”
There were a lot more questions. Like, where were the two men Ben had left at the house, while Matthilda was giving away Apples. Smoked out, Tip and Joey admitted they had been reining a couple of colts, and had jumped a loafer wolf. They had taken after it, to rope it, and run it a far piece. Tip like to got a loop on it, but his colt spooked at the rope, and throwed him. Joey had had a hard time catching Tip’s colt for him, so, all in all, they had been out of sight maybe two hours.
But the backbone of the posse’s purpose, if it had been to involve the Zacharys, had been broken for the time being, on the sheer incredibility of Matthilda’s honesty.
Rachel saw the posse leader step into his saddle, at the end of it. Then Ben mounted, though he made Andy and the cowhands stay at the corral. Matthilda turned away, and plodded slowly up the hill to the house, her face white, but held as rigidly expression-less as she could make it. Behind her all the horses began to shift and move; and it was Ben who led out, not in the direction from which the posse had come, but upstream.
As the wagon moved, Abe Kelsey dragged himself up with scaly old hands to hang over the side. Clear up at the house, Rachel could hear him plainly, wailing and pleading.
“I’m an old man—I’m a pore old man—I ain’t got no friends—I ain’t done nothin’—I’m a pore old man—You got no right—”
She could hear him for a long time, over the sound of the hoofs, as the cavalcade moved off, and trailed out of sight beyond the upper bend. Mama reached the stoop then; she fumbled at the door, and Rachel opened it for her. Matthilda was crying, now, quietly, and steadily; she could not, or would not, answer any of the many things Rachel had to ask. Without speaking a word, Matthilda went to her bed and hid her face there, crying still.
It was almost sundown when Ben came back, and unsaddled slowly. A little after that the posse passed, going back the way it had come, but on the far side of the creek. The old man in the wagon no longer made any sound; and Rachel knew, by this time, why the posse had gone upstream. There was a big pin oak, up there, a whopper for its kind and place, with a limb of suitable height and girth. An old tale had it that a bandit had once been caught here, and hanged upon that tree. Some said, and Andy liked to believe, that this ghost from long ago still haunted the Dancing Bird. No matter whether that legend had any truth in it or not.
The Dancing Bird had a ghost to haunt it now.
Chapter Twenty-four
Ben came in reluctantly. He didn’t want to talk to anybody. His black moods were uncommon, but when he was in them he could bite, and he was in one now. Rachel knew no way to approach him, or question him. He paced, sometimes beating a fist into his palm, his lips moving in long strings of silent blasphemies. Or else he sat sullen and bitter on the edge of his bunk, burning holes in the floor with his eyes. He didn’t hear you the first time you spoke to him, and when he did hear you he snapped. When it was time to feed him he ate doggedly, straight through one thing after another, with no idea of what he was putting in his mouth. Later, Rachel would wish she had served him a cloth potholder, to see if it would go down, but such an impertinence was unthinkable while the black mood was on. She would as soon have bitten a mule on the ankle as trifle with him, then.
Andy only picked at his food, and stuck close to Ben, refusing to meet Rachel’s eyes. A mumbled, “I d’know,” was all she could get out of him, and she knew it wasn’t his fault. He had been told to shut up, and stay shut up. She was alone, now, beyond the wall of this secretiveness; everyone in the house knew things that she did not. The hands came in to eat, but they kept their eyes down, and their mouths as close shut as Andy’s. The Kiowa Moon would soon be riding above them once more, and Ben up-dated it a number of days. He wouldn’t say just what he was expecting to come against them; perhaps he was not entirely sure himself. But it was plain he felt easier with all the carbines within ready call.
Once Rachel asked him outright if it was horse stealing Kelsey had been hung for. He said it was not.
“Mixed up in the No Hope massacre,” he said.
Andy saw a chance to put in, for once, without telling anything more than Ben had said. “They charged him with aiding and betting on hostiles.”
“Abetting,” Ben snapped. “Aiding and abetting, damn it!”
“What?”
“Nothing! Don’t talk so much.” But he let down enough to tell Rachel a little bit more. “He was with Seth, when they killed Effie. By his own admission.”
“They were trying to pull us into it some way—weren’t they?” she pressed him. “Weren’t they?”
He blazed up. “Who told you that?”
“Why—nobody—”
“Then forget it! And stop making up things!”
Sometimes she tried to find out what the Rawlinses had done against them, or were waiting for a chance to do, but nobody would give her a clue to that, either.
“No way to fight them,” Ben said once. Sometimes, now, he seemed less grim than discouraged, which was a new thing. “Jude and Charlie can shoot, all right, if you give them all the time in the world. So can old Zeb. But they don’t know how to fight anything that shoots back. If they hurry a shot it goes wild. Any one of us could put all three of them down. Only…it would be like a man shooting a bunch of boys.”
As bad as that, then. Bad enough to send Ben on the shoot, to smoke out their neighbors, except that he wasn’t ready for outright murder, yet. She saw he was sorry he had said so much; and she could draw out nothing more. Ben paced and fretted, sometimes pulling weapons off the gun rack in an irritable pretense of examining them. He was like that now whenever he was in the house. Daytimes the men loitered and puttered; no more work on the range was attempted.
That waiting time lasted barely a week, as the Kiowa Moon came on, though it seemed a lot longer than that. The seemingly hopeless stack-up of chores melted away. The house got whitewashed, and even received a wash of lime and brown sand on the out-side. Only the mud-leaky roof stayed the same, for lack of shingles. The cowhands
