Chapter Thirty-three
Matthilda slept lightly, nervously. The twilight seemed to hold on forever, and when at last it was gone the moon rose earlier, and shone more brightly through the skeleton cottonwoods, than they had expected of it, so soon. Four times before midnight Rachel stole out of the bedroom, and each time Matthilda came broad awake.
“Rachel—you up—”
“Drink of water. It’s hot tonight.”
Then Matthilda would like some water too, so that she was fully waked up again. And the patient waiting began all over again.
An hour after midnight Matthilda began to moan. Rachel thought her to be having a nightmare, and tried to get out of the room. But Matthilda’s voice sounded, faint but wide awake, through the warm dark. “I don’t feel very good.” It was almost a whimper. “I have the awfullest pain….”
The pain seemed to be right in her middle, so they decided it was indigestion. Rachel closed the shutters, and saw to it that the loopholes were all plugged, so that she could build a fire. They had drawn the coals at dusk, so she had to start anew, setting tinder to burning with a flash of powder from the snaphaunce firelighter. She set a kettle on, but lighted no candles, and fumbled by memory for the herbs she supposed she should put together, verifying them close to the fire. Finally she made a brew, believed to be good for indigestion, out of peppergrass, ginger, and some pinches of stuff such as mandrake root.
This concoction, brought scalding hot, must surely have been the worst thing she could have dished up, for it induced hard vomiting. A little later, before her breath was entirely recovered, Matthilda gave a long, groaning cry of pain, and went unconscious.
The next three hours went to make up the longest night Rachel had ever lived in her life. Matthilda regained consciousness in half an hour, but moaned continuously until daylight. She tried to lie quiet, but could not; the sounds were wrung out of her against her will. Finally she took to putting words to the moans, in an effort to get control. “Oh, mercy, mercy…Oh, mercy, me…Oh, dear, oh dear me, oh deary, deary me…Oh, mercy, mercy…” On and on forever, without end. Sometimes she asked for water, but if she swallowed a mouthful she could not keep it down.
When Cash and Andy rode in together, in the first dawn, Rachel knew she had never been so glad to see anybody before. Matthilda tried to smile at them. “Something I ate,” she whispered. They felt her forehead for fever, but she was wet with sweat. A little later she seemed to doze, out of sheer exhaustion; or perhaps she lost consciousness again, for her breathing sounded strange.
“Seems like a busted blood vessel,” Andy thought. “Somewhere in her chest.”
“You don’t know what it is any better than I do,” Cash set him back. “All I know, it don’t look like any natural kind of bellyache, to me. I’ve got to get help.”
Rachel was appalled. “All the way to—where? The Rountrees’? You won’t be back before tomorrow night!”
“I’ll fetch Georgia Rawlins.”
“They wouldn’t let her come here if the world was falling down!”
“She’ll come.”
Matthilda rested more easily after the sun came up. Her breathing became more natural, and she slept almost peacefully through the middle of the day.
Cash brought Georgia late in the afternoon. They came in at the gallop on beat-out horses—not wind-broke, but spent to the last notch that they could be without permanent damage. They would not work again in a month. Cash let Georgia down at the stoop, threw her saddle on the ground, and turned loose her horse. “Got to look around a minute!” he shouted, and rode to the corral to get a fresh pony.
“What’s the matter with him?” Andy asked the outdoors, afraid to speak to Georgia.
“He’s been fretty the last four miles,” Georgia told them. “Something spooked him. Didn’t say what it was. Let’s see your mother.”
Matthilda had gone worse again, seemingly half conscious but unable to recognize Georgia, and breathing with great labor. Georgia asked when it had begun, and looked overpowered. “This is bad. She’s bust a blood vessel.”
“I told you,” said Andy.
“Shut up and fetch my saddle bags…. We’ve got to quieten her what we can. Keep her warm. Wish we could get dry sheets around her. But I don’t dast mess with her. I sure hope I’m mighty wrong. She looks a whole lot like a goner.”
She pounded some dried leaves and pieces of root into a powder, and made a tea of it. They got about a half a cupful into Matthilda; it was the first liquid she had kept down so far. “Make her sleep, some, maybe. Won’t do no other good, though.”
Rachel tried to find out how Georgia had got away from her mother.
“Ma? Never asked her. Just lit out.”
“Don’t she know you’re gone?”
“Bound to. Saw me ride off with Cash, I reckon.”
“But what will you tell her when you go back?”
“Hell, Rachel, how do I know? Maybe I’ll tell her I’m carryin’ by him. Whatever seems needful.”
“She’ll kill you!”
“Not me. Oh, she’s game to pull a trigger, all right! But me, I’m all the girl she’s got left.”
That was the nearest they came to talking about Rachel’s bad time with Hagar. Listening, they became aware that Matthilda’s breathing was already quieter. Rachel was impressed and Georgia explained that it seemed like there had been a power of sick folks around, wherever she was. But she did not look confident; perhaps she was not entirely sure she had not killed Matthilda, with her witch-woman herbs.
Now Andy roused them up, speaking in a low tone, but urgently. “Stand over by the windows. No—one to each side. Get ready to bar them up. Not yet!”
They could hear the hoofs of Cash’s horse coming in, walking quietly. Standing by the windows, but out of line, they could not see Cash, but they knew he had given Andy some kind of signal.
“We got trouble,” Andy told them. “But don’t touch the shutters! We can’t let on we know it. Lest they never let Cash get here.”
He pulled a loophole plug from the door, and stood behind it, ready to swing it open. The sound of the walking hoofs came on, and on. How could hoofs so near approach for so long, yet never seem to get here? Suddenly Andy swung the door wide, and Cassius, bent low over the horn, jumped his horse across the stoop and intp the room. Andy slammed and barred the door behind him. “Now fort up,” he shouted.
Chapter Thirty-four
“I figure there’s about a dozen of ’em,” Cash said as he dismounted. His horse seemed enormous, in here, making the house and everything in it look smaller than they had ever seen it before; the wooden floor boomed under the hoofs. “Knock open a loophole in the west wall. Rachel—get one open in Mama’s room. Georgia, pull the slide on the north lookout—better bust out the glass.”
They posted themselves as he told them, each alone, one to each side. And after that there was silence in the house. Matthilda seemed to be sleeping peacefully. Half an hour passed, and the sun went down. The shuttered interior darkened, but a clear dry light remained outside; it would not dwindle enough to harm marksmanship for the next two hours.
