all bright and new, someplace not too far away. And wherever I am, I’ll be loving you, always, always, with all my heart…. Don’t go away. Not yet…”
She closed her eyes for a moment. Tiny beads of new perspiration on her forehead told them she was in pain, though her face was still. But when she opened her eyes her voice was steadier, and sounded more like herself, than before.
“Someday, when your time comes to pass away—I want you to remember how it was this time, when you were born. Mama was waiting for you, with all your little clothes made, and everything all ready for you, to take care of you….” Her eyes were turning slowly, from one to the other of them. She did not remember, now, that Rachel was not her own child; she was thinking of Rachel as having been born to her, as she had always wished it could be. “So it will be again. Mama will be there. And I’ll have everything ready for you, to take care of you, and make everything all right. So you must think of it as a glad new time. You mustn’t be afraid.”
Andy said softly, “I won’t be afraid, Mama.” Rachel could not speak.
Matthilda smiled at them, a wavering, gentle smile, without sadness; and she let their hands slip from her fingers as she closed her eyes.
They wondered whether they should heat up some of the brew Georgia had made; they were a little afraid of it, so long as Matthilda was able to rest without it.
They watched, and the sun climbed; it was straight overhead. A haze that appeared to be made of pure light crept halfway up the sky from the horizon, increasing the glare. And now they saw the horsemen in the sky.
This country produced mirages every day, in the summer heat. Mostly these were a shimmering near the earth, as of distant water riffling in a breeze. Sometimes a cowhand came riding in through a knee-deep mirage of this kind, and it would reflect him, exactly as if he were riding in shallows. Other times the mirages changed different kinds of animals, like antelopes, into huge shapeless things, un-recognizable, and strange of movement. Then you could imagine that you were looking at the spirits of those giant beasts, from another age, whose huge bones were sometimes uncovered by the freshets. The Zacharys could only speculate on what incredible animals had left those mighty bones deep in the ground; if there was a book in Texas with a picture of a woolly mammoth in it, they had never seen it. The Kiowas believed the bones to be those of the Man-Eating Owl, a living monster of enormous spirit power. Watching the vast shapes in a mirage you could almost believe they were right.
But today’s mirage was different from any they had ever seen before. Andy saw it first, and stood astonished for a moment, before calling Rachel. Across the sky, miles above the land, rode a file of horsemen, tall beyond natural proportions, on horses of a fantastic length of leg. They seemed to come wavering into existence from the east, moving at a walk across the sky until ten were in view at a time; then the leaders shimmered into nothing as they passed on into the west. The riders in the middle were the most distinct; you could judge them to be Indians, for some seemed to carry shields. Neither size nor distance could be judged. Except for their long legs, the horses could have been six feet tall at the quarter mile. Or maybe they were a quarter of a mile tall, at fifty miles. About twenty ghost riders had passed when the whole thing became indistinct, and disappeared.
They had heard of things like that; yet Andy seemed shaken. Rachel would have liked to help him believe the riders in the sky had been a natural thing to see. But she didn’t know what to say, for to her they had seemed a sign, of unclear meaning, but ominous portent.
A little after the mirage gave out, a loud, dreadful cry came from Matthilda’s room. They rushed to her, and found her half on the floor. When they had lifted her, she lay staring-eyed unconscious, her breathing hoarse and full of struggle. Too late, now, to try Georgia’s brew; they could not expect a chance would come again.
When they had pulled themselves together, they went back to traversing the ridges and the cutbank of the creek with the telescope sight of the buffalo gun, as Cash had wanted. The weapon was an ancient .69-caliber muzzle-loader, once a smoothbore, but now rifled for the expanding Minie bullet they called a Minnie ball. So altered, the old gun deserved the telescope sight they had fitted to it, for it took whatever charge anybody dared to ram down it, and its range was fantastic. Because of its great weight, Andy used the telescope to sweep the land from the higher ports, while Rachel was responsible for the loopholes just above the floor, overlooking the creek. She had put a few sticks of firewood and a blanket at each port, for a gun rest, and she traversed by hitching herself in a quarter circle behind the port, on her stomach. They hadn’t been finding anything.
But now, as Rachel worked the field of the scope past the base of a cottonwood, she stopped, and went back. After a moment she adjusted the great gun carefully upon its improvised rest and looked again.
She spoke softly. “Andy.”
He had been chipping with a crowbar at the mud sides of the port at the other end of the room, trying to give it a wider field of fire. His bare feet were silent on the scrubbed planking as he came to her, but the floor carried his tread, so that she knew when he was beside her without looking up.
“Don’t even breathe on this,” she said, and made room for him. “But quick! Look where I’m sighted.”
He spraddle-armed over the gun, glancing along the side of the barrel to place the scopes tight field, before putting his right eye to the sight. Rachel saw his left eye focus and stare blankly, trying to see through the wall. “That wad of leaves is a bust-off branch,” she explained, hiding her nervousness.
“It’s lying on that big alamo root, where the bank cuts under. See, where the cross-hairs mark?”
She waited, then, while Andy looked for a long time through the scope. From the grasshopper-stripped cottonwoods along the creek came the zinging of the locusts—winding, winding, metallic and tireless, the voice of the dry heat.
“The cross-hairs,” she jogged him.
He spoke absently, as if his mind were out by the creek, but he didn’t seem to be seeing much. “She won’t hit there, you realize. Ben’s got her sighted in at four hundred yards; God knows why. She’ll overcarry more’n a foot.”
“I know all that!” She would never handle a gun with the ease of daily use, as Andy did, but she remembered things better, and now she was losing patience. “Do you see it or not?”
“See what?”
He tensed, but in another moment rolled clear of the gun and sat up. “Nothing there now. Sun shows through.”
She looked, and it was true. Only a glimpse of bright sand showed at the cross-hairs, where before had been a lightless patch, obscured by close-framing leaves, but presently resolving into part of a dark face. She thought Andy was going to ask her if she was sure of what she had seen, and she was ready to snap at him. But he raised no question, so she backed up quite humbly, of her own accord. “Sometimes, you look at a thing too hard, for too long, it begins to look like something else. Like, maybe a bird was sitting there…”
Andy did not answer. He sat slackly, his eyes vacant upon the floor. “It’s changed,” he said at last.
Rachel knew without asking that this referred to nothing outside. Through their silence, under the spiraling zing of the locusts, they were both hearing again their mother’s struggle for breath. Something was worsening. The breathing was louder, and a flat sound had come into it, expressionless and not entirely human, like the impersonal creaking of a door. Andy raised his eyes, and gathered himself uncertainly, as if he would go to Matthilda; but Rachel moved her head faintly, and he settled back.
“It couldn’t just fall there,” Andy said, and again her thought followed his, this time back to the mystery by the creek. “Our trees don’t have any leaves, since the grasshoppers was here. That’s a pulled-up greasebush, brought from someplace. And it wasn’t there early on. It’s never been there before. So—I guess you know what it has to be.”
She knew, all right. But she just sat looking at Andy, her eyes widening a little, and seeming to darken. Her mind was at a balk, weaving like a horse that tries to refuse an ugly jump. She did not want to accept the only explanation there could be, or to believe she had really seen what she knew she had seen.
“That’s a blind.” Andy said. He spoke slowly, and he sounded tired, rather than under strain. He seemed to be feeling his way, as if everything that would happen here and everything they must do were parts of a pattern worked out somewhere long ago, so that nothing was left for them but to study out what it was. “They’ve put it there to spy on us from, without letting on.”
Rachel’s face came alive as her composure broke, and her words were breathless. “Then they’re out there— all around us! Oh, Andy—” She broke off, stopped by her brother’s quick glance of surprise, of appraisal. Perhaps a very great compliment to her was behind his surprise that she could falter, but now she was shamed by it, and made to get hold of herself. “They’re watching us,” she said more evenly. “Now. They’ve come back.”
