A week passed. Ben and Cash alternated days on the range, one staying in with two or three hands, picked for their interest in gun-fighting. The range crew quickly whipped through the last of the calf branding, and began to sort the cattle and shove them around. They started cross-branding, adding the Dancing Bird brand to cattle otherwise branded, but their own on paper. Whichever one was home spent many hours a day at Papa’s carved secretary, sorting and rebooking the hopelessly complicated accounts and tallies.
The Rawlinses did send a rep, at last, and the Zacharys were glad to see that Jake Rountree was the man who had let himself be talked into the job. Jake was nearing fifty, a stooped, gaunt man with wild eyes and a look of perpetual fatigue. The tired look may have been the result of chronic malaria; some days he complained of a general ache. The years of bad markets and irregular weather had all but squeezed him out of the cattle business, so that his own outfit was hardly more than a token and a hope of building again. Zeb Rawlins was paying him a strapping hundred a month—had had to pay it, in order to get him, hard up as he was. Ben promptly put a hundred a month of his own on top.
Jake knew cattle. Neither Cash nor Ben ever had any trouble with him. “Trying to give everything away,” was his only objection to the way they were handling the bust-up. The Rawlinses, for the time being, stayed off the range.
But afterward, when the parting of the herds was complete? Doubtless Rawlins could comb up a corrida. He could even scrape up a corrida of Yankee outlaws, if that was what he wanted; he could throw fifty killers onto this range. Maybe both outfits would be cool and careful, at the first. Then bickerings would begin, and presently somebody’s temper would break. Once the guns began to smoke, how could they ever be quieted again? They didn’t know. They did the work in hand, judging that they would know how to handle what came next, some way, when they saw what it was.
Meantime their debts had to be paid, a big job in itself; for all those thousands were owed in dribbles, to hundreds of cowmen, spread out over most of Texas. It was a job Ben felt he had to do himself; wanted to find out what kind of friends he still had in Texas, for one thing. He would be in the saddle many weeks, and he was eager to get at it. As soon as he got Cash and Jake Rountree well started with the cross-branding he would be on his way.
As Ben bored into the range work, setting a brutal pace for the corrida, Rachel was watching the calendar in a little horse race of her own. Ben’s birthday was coming up; she wanted him to be home for it. She had thought of something she could make for him, something that would have no practical use at all, but which she hoped would look pretty to him, and surprising.
The calendar had no chance in a race with Ben. Three days on the range, three nights in a deluge of papers at the secretary, and that was it.
They were at breakfast when he told them that he would ride south in the morning, leading the old bullion mule. No, he wasn’t taking any men with him…. Because he didn’t need any, that was why…. Robbers? What about robbers? Robbers had to take their chances same as anybody else. Come fooling around him, they probably deserved it. Shanghai Pierce had ridden all over Texas with a mule of money, time and again. So had Papa. Ben judged he could handle it.
He was leaving Cassius with twelve men, including the cook, and Andy. Four or five men, and either Cash or Andy, were going to be at the house all the time. The place would never be unguarded, regard-less of the moon.
He shouted from the door for somebody to catch the mule up.
Mama exclaimed, “But I thought you said tomorrow!”
“Oh, sure; only thing, if I happen to be twelve, fifteen miles in the right direction comes sundown, hardly any sense in riding it two ways. Pretty near amounts to a day. Though it’s hardly likely; I expect to be home, all right, if you want to set a plate—”
“Now, Ben, you can come home for dinner just this one last night,” Matthilda pleaded. “Please, now, won’t you?”
“I’ll sure try,” he promised. He was always shy, and embarrassed when it came time for any big build-up of goodbys. They knew he had maybe seized upon this way to get out of saying any at all. But Rachel could only take a chance on it, and bake him a birthday cake ahead of its time, in hopes he would come home, this last night he could.
When the cake was frosted, she made for Ben the creation she had invented. Summer had turned hot early this year, and as they neared the end of June the swampy sedge pockets along the Dancing Bird were green- scummed and still. This was the kind of summer that made a good firefly year. Some years they saw hardly any, but this time they were all along the creek, all through the trees, by the middle of June. And the ground cherries—the other thing she needed—were ready early, too. These were tiny plants that hid under the deep grass; they bore papery little lanterns the size of a strawberry, each with two small yellow berries inside. Experimenting, Rachel found she could get the twin berries out of the little lanterns and put a firefly in each, instead.
So she made a firefly tree—and if there had ever been one in the world before, she hadn’t heard of it. She cut a dried-out smoke bush, a skeleton of silvery twigs, about two and a half feet tall, and tied the ground-cherry lanterns all over it, dozens of them—though they looked like hundreds before she was through. After that she had to wait for dusk, when the fireflies came out. Half the time she worried for fear Ben wouldn’t come home, and the rest of the time for fear he would come early, before she was ready. If he came too soon she would have to wake him up to show his cake to him; he always went sound to sleep, as soon as he had eaten.
As soon as the first fireflies rose into the twilight she began lighting the firefly tree. On and off went the little lanterns, more and more of them lighting as she got fireflies into them, until by full dark the whole firefly tree was alive, working all the time. It showed up well; for, though they were about at the end of the current Kiowa Moon, they lighted no candles, preferring to leave the shutters open for air. Rachel stuck the contraption in the middle of the birthday cake, and waited for Ben to come and see.
She sat up for a long time, in the dark beside the firefly tree; until finally she put her head on her arms and went to sleep.
It was close to midnight when Ben got home. The ringing of his spurs waked her. She raised her head as he came clumping in, and heard his fingers slap his holster before he knew who was there, in the dark.
“I made you a cake,” she said stupidly. “It’s right here.”
“Seems like some kind of a tumble weed, or something, has grown up out of it,” he said, fumbling in the dark. “My God, am I as late as that?”
She started to say, “It’s supposed to—” Then she realized that the firefly tree was dark.
“There’s a lightning bug climbing on it,” Ben said. One little lantern had gleamed weakly, once, and then quit. She shook the tree, but nothing happened; the fireflies wouldn’t light any more. Maybe they were dead.
Chapter Twenty-nine
She tried to tell him how the firefly tree had been meant to work, and had worked, before she went to sleep. She wanted to make him see how pretty it had been, with the little lanterns lighting up all over it, on and off, on and off. But in a minute she knew it didn’t sound like anything, just told in words. And she began to cry.
He took her in his arms, tangled his fingers in her hair, and let her cry against his chest. He said, “I believe that was the very nicest thing I ever knew anybody to do.”
She realized then that she was actually close in his arms, there in the dim dark, and she forgot about the firefly tree; but she still pretended to cry a little, for a while more, so that he would keep on holding her. She thought,
“Well, anyway,” he finally said, “we can eat the cake.”
They took it out on the stoop, in the faint light of the waning moon. He sat with his back against the house, and when Rachel had cut the cake she sat close by him, leaning against his shoulder, while they ate. Before they were through, they ate it all.
