hollow of his shoulder, his cheek against her hair. He said, “You’re the best sister anybody ever had. You’re more than that. You’re all the family I’ve got left, for all I know.” They had no reason to think anything had happened to Ben; but apparently, in his exhaustion, Andy was willing to concede that Ben was lost to them too. But—“We’ll fight ’em to a stand-still,” he said doggedly. “Forever, if they want. Just you and me. So long as you stand by me, I’ll fight ’em till hell freezes. And then pelt ’em with ice.”
He made her cry, at last. She wept grudgingly, without sound, holding onto him tightly; and presently she knew that he was crying a little, too.
Or maybe there was. For now the Kiowas came again, in the weirdest way yet.
Chapter Forty-two
This time they didn’t need the telltale back wall to hear the horses come. They came fast, and from not far out, in a thundering storm; and the war cries clamored as never before. A few guns fired wild through the empty windows, without object, other than added noise. The two stood with their backs against the forward wall, watching for any part of a Kiowa to show inside; but no dismounted warriors came.
Instead, a heavy bump shook the very walls, and the door strained inward; clods and plaster fell, loosened by the yielding anchorage of the frame. A Kiowa rider was backing his horse against the door. It would go, in a couple of seconds, driven inward by a thousand pounds of bone and straining muscle. Andy got there, cocking the Walker, and for an instant Rachel was certain Andy would be pinned as the door crashed in. The bulging planks sprung a sudden three inches, spoiling his first shot, but the Walker slammed again, and the door snapped straight. The Kiowa horseman was on the stoop, and would stay there until picked up; and his horse was splashing through the Dancing Bird.
The attack on the door made plain the whole secret of their precarious defense. They could keep only two guns going—but there were only two ways in. Seth must know that now; he had tried to make another way. But this kind of an attempt on the massive door was almost certain death, with the door loopholes placed as they were. All this racket and display had to have some other object than the backing in of one horse as a ram, for although the Kiowas had given up on the door, their yelling riders still circled the house.
A new hoof-rumble began on the roof itself; boards cracked, in spite of the depth of sod on top, and showers of dirt fell. All this was bewildering, but without visible sense. Rachel did not know what snatched her attention to the back wall. Surely she could have heard nothing more; and when she tried to peer into the shadows the small indirect light of the moon was not enough to tell her what she saw. She went to the root-cellar slide, and bent low.
A split had appeared in the boards of the slide. As she watched, the blade of a hatchet struck through, and was wrenched back. She pulled the .36 revolver Andy had made her wear, and fired wildly three times through the slide as the hatchet struck again. The hatchet blade stayed where it was, stuck halfway through, into the room. Andy was trying to shout something to her, but she couldn’t tell what it was. She got down on the floor, which might have been what he wanted her to do. She dared not leave the slide, yet to stay by it left Andy with the defense of both windows in front, and a weakened door that would probably go down, now, before any kind of a ram.
A touch of panic came into her. After four compound mistakes, the Kiowas were at last finding more ways in than the two of them could defend. She saw Andy fire through a wall port, and she started to him with some unclear notion of shuttling between the front and back walls.
She didn’t get there. Halfway across the room she was struck and borne down by a great mass of dirt, sod, and broken boards from the roof as it gave way. Her face hit the floor hard, and she lay stunned and smothering, unaware of where she was or what had happened to her, until Andy pulled her free. She sat against the wall where he put her, strangled by the dust; and blood was running down her front from her nose and cut mouth. But as her head cleared she saw what had happened. A horse had broken through the roof with one hind foot, and was trapped there, its leg stuck down through the roof beyond the stifle. The hoof dangled loosely from a broken cannon, yet tried to kick.
One more way in? It might be, if the enemy could pull the horse clear. Or the struggles of the horse might do it; dirt was still falling, and the hole in the roof enlarging. Andy was watching the front again as Rachel got up shakily. The holster of the Whitney dragged at her belt unnaturally, and she found it filled with dirt. She drew, emptied the holster, and tried to clean the weapon of its grit.
The rocketing horsemen thinned; a horse plunged downward past a window as its rider jumped it off the front of the roof; and once more the Kiowas broke off. The back wall brought diminishing hoof mutterings for a little while, then was quiet. The defenders were left confused. The two tries at the door and through the root cellar had been good ones, and had threatened to finish them, yet seemed but feebly carried out, without tenacity.
Actually, the pull-away had not been ordered. The warriors had drawn off of their own accord, because their horses were blowing. Such failures in following through were always putting a stumble into the tactics of the undisciplined Horse Tribes. Some part of the thing that all the uproar had been meant to cover was still going on.
Andy took the buffalo gun, and for some moments studied the position of the struggling horse, which was still working deeper into the room through the roof. He had to bend backward, awkwardly braced, to fire upward, but the double charge of the .69 took effect through boards, through turf, and through horseflesh. The great thrashing up there stopped as the bullet found the heart. Andy turned away.
He was starting to say, “Do you think, if I’d mock an owl—”
One more wild random shot came in, not even well placed, but ricocheted from the side of the west embrasure. Andy squealed from a suddenly tight-shut throat, and went down.
Chapter Forty-three
He pivoted as he fell, and came down partly on his side and partly on his face, arms and legs jackknifing in an awkward heap. As Rachel turned him over he was in the stunned moment between the first shock of pain and its return in full force.
“I’m all right—I’m all right—” he said, without seeming to know how to help himself. “You—your mouth’s bleeding….”
For an instant she could not see where he had been hurt, but a rush of blood was already puddling into the patch of moonlight two feet away. It was the inside of his upper arm, just below the shoulder, and the back muscle of his arm; the tumbling bullet had torn a jagged channel, so deep that his arm seemed half severed. An artery was cut, and the bone broken—perhaps shattered—so that when she straightened the arm it had a joint where none should be.
She tore off the hem of her skirt and made a tourniquet. It had to go almost at the armpit, the wound was so high up. Nothing was in reach for a turn-stick except the barrel of the Whitney revolver, so she used that. She twisted the heavy cord of cloth tighter, and tighter, and still the blood ran in a pulsing stream.
Pain was returning, making muscles jerk all over his body. “Don’t—don’t—” he kept saying through his teeth, while still the pistol must be turned, and turned, and the tourniquet disappeared into his flesh. When the rush of blood dwindled to a trickle, she tied the Whitney where it was, and fetched the pillow from her bed. Ripped open, this yielded masses of raw cotton in lumpy wads, as it had come from the bale. He choked back a scream, then went unconscious, as she turned him on his face to get at the wound.
It took bandage after bandage, for in spite of great handfuls of cotton the blood kept coming through. After
