they taken the lance, and stuck it straight up in her ribs, plain to be seen. Right close here, too. It’s getting so they not only jump you, and steal you blind, and murder the hell out of you. Next they got to come back and taunt you.”
“What color was it?” he asked Roddy.
“Oh, I’d call it a kind of a yalla caow.”
“No, damn it, the lance!”
“Oh, I’d call it black, mainly, with a lot of rawhide wrop—”
“Good God almighty! Where is it now?”
“Well, last I saw, the boys was horsing around—”
Ben recovered the thing, finally, and took it into the house. It was a short lance, no more than eleven feet long—a good three feet shorter than the typical fourteen-foot Kiowa lances. The shorter the lance, the braver the Indian, everybody said. Its needle-tapered ironwood, from a perfect shoot of the incredibly hard Osage orange, was stained black and polished to ebony, except for two feet at the tip, which turned out to be painted red, after the clotted beef blood was cleaned off. It was Striking Horse’s lance, all right. His medicine feathers had been removed, but seven spaced ringlets of rawhide showed where they had hung.
The hand hold, placed slightly toward the butt from the balance, was wound with whang, aged iron hard, and worn to a black shine of its own by half a century of use. But six inches of similar winding at the butt did not belong there. Grease and charcoal had been rubbed into the rawhide string to make it less conspicuous, yet it was new. Ben began to suspect what he had here, when he saw that.
He picked at the winding with his knife. It was glued with boiled-down antelopes’ blood, but only at the ends. He unwound the whang, and found it had secured a parchment-like tube of doeskin, which he was able to slide off the butt of the lance. A strange, creepy excitement of imminent discovery stirred his scalp; for he knew, now, and for sure, what this was. Turning the tube in his hands, he read the message picture on the outside, skillfully drafted in delicate, even lines.
An Indian, conventionally represented as having feathers sticking straight up out of his head, was handing something to a white man identified by a stovepipe hat. A wavy line from the Indian’s head led to a small drawing of a horse striking with its forefeet, and a similar line led from the high hat to something like a gourd. “Striking Horse gives Stone Hand a present.” Couldn’t have been any plainer.
He stood up for a look at Andy and Rachel, in the lower bunks at the end of the room. Andy was restless in a fever doze. Two or three times a minute his head rolled and he often murmured, unintelligently. But Rachel was sleeping quietly. Ben let his eyes rest on her for half a minute, before he pried the tube partly open with his thumbnail.
The doeskin had been scraped very thin, but nothing had been done to keep it soft. He supposed the drawings had been made while it was still green, for now it had hardened in the shape of the iron-wood butt, and wanted to stay that way. He had a glimpse of something that might have been the forequarters of a horse, and the speckled face by which the Kiowas indicated 1857, the year of the spotted death, when Old Zack had found a lost baby on the prairie.
So here was one more incomprehensible paradox of Kiowa integrity. Cash had made his brash visit to Striking Horse at a time when the Dancing Bird was being closely and almost continuously scouted, as the sign had plainly shown. A raid in strength must already have been under debate. When Cash asked the old warlock what child, captive or Kiowa, had been lost by Kiowas in the year of the spotted death, he had as good as told Striking Horse outright where that child was now. Ben did not doubt that Striking Horse had used that intelligence, without hesitation and at once, to unleash Seth’s murderous assault. Never said he wouldn’t.
But at the same time, Striking Horse had promised Cash to send him the answer he wanted, if he could find it out. And now he had sent it—even wrapped on his own lance, in token of validity—because he had said he would. Only an Indian would see no contradiction in sending destruction and the fulfillment of a promise almost hand in hand. The war-lock’s answer would be the truth, for if he had not learned it he would have sent nothing at all. This thing in Ben’s hand held the secret of Rachel’s birth.
Shakily he pried at the brittle parchment; then stopped abruptly. Some kind of warning had sounded inside his head, unclear in meaning, yet definite as the dry buzz of a sidewinder. He sat down on a box by the hearth, the tube dangling from his fingers, and his eyes brooding upon the ash-banked coals; and he was wondering why he felt suddenly ashamed. He was missing Cassius in a way he had not expected, for though he grieved for his brother he had not expected to need him so soon. What Ben realized now was that he had no one left to talk to, any more.
Andy had been clear-headed for a while today, but it wasn’t the same thing. Andy had felt it important to make Ben know that it was Rachel, and not himself, who had got them through the siege. He thought he would have gone to pieces very early in that night of terror and endless desperation, if she had let him.
“She sure fought for her life,” Ben said.
“No,” Andy said. “No. She wasn’t fighting for her life.” Almost the last he remembered was Rachel blaming herself, in the belief that she could have prevented the whole thing, had she not moved too late. In those last hours she admitted to Andy that she had been trying to slip away, when Matthilda was taken down, without other plan than to lose herself past finding; and so take out of their lives the disgrace and the danger she had brought them. “It was me she was fighting for. Not herself. She didn’t care about her own life, one way or the other.”
Ben believed it. And he saw now why he had drawn back from prying out the secret of the doeskin scroll. Nobody, not even Andy, knew Rachel as he knew her, or ever could. If she could not look to him for understanding, she could not hope to find it on this earth.
He leaned down and shoved the parchment into the heart of the banked coals. A little shaving of flame had come alive at one end of it before he turned away. He went and stood beside Rachel, looking down at her somberly as she slept; and he had never felt more humble in his life.
When he turned back to the hearth only a crinkled black twist remained of the parchment scroll. He touched it with the toe of his boot, and it went to dust.
About the Author
ALAN LE MAY was born in Indianapolis in 1899 of parents who had both grown up on the plains frontier and from whom he learned firsthand of the hard-ships and the romance of the pioneering life about which he later wrote. He began an unusually varied career by playing football at Stetson University in Florida. During World War I he served as a lieutenant of infantry, afterwards continuing his studies at the University of Chicago. After graduation, he worked as a geologist in the jungles of Colombia, lived for a year in the Vieux Carre of New Orleans, and spent the following winter skiing in Massachusetts. Then, he went West to work on ranches in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Between 1927 and 1937 he wrote a series of adventure tales that quickly won critical acclaim both here and in England. For the next sixteen years, he divided his time between writing screen plays (among these
