But the lower counties were well salted with men who had themselves lost wives or children, or had otherwise been brought too close to the persistent massacres. These were very ready to believe Abe’s story without any special scrutiny at all; they angered, and they were men who acted on their angers. Hell-bent couriers raced out in five directions, carrying Abe’s appeal for help in recovering his little son. And a posse of more than thirty riders swarmed into their saddles in answer to the call.
William Zachary, then of Round Rock, was one of those who believed Abe because he wanted to believe him. Old Zack, as William was called before he was forty, had ridden with Abe Kelsey in a number of earlier pursuits; he knew Abe as only a so-so Indian-fighter, given to unexpected foolishness and sudden blunders. Yet Zack did not see how even Abe could mistake his own son, only two years gone.
With Abe to guide him, Zack rode on ahead to scout Pacing Wolf’s village, days before the posse was complete. He hoped to make a deal for the boy without a fight that would put the captive child himself in deadly danger; or failing that, he wanted to form a strategy of attack that would promise success. He named a rendezvous on Cache Creek where Abe and he would meet the posse.
Abe and Old Zack beat the more unwieldy posse across the Red by more than a week; found Pacing Wolf; and rode openly into his camp. At this point, Zack had already gone to great effort and great risk—and had framed himself into the false position of his life.
For, the instant Zack laid eyes on the boy he knew they had wasted their time. The Pacing Wolf boy was white, or nearly so, but there all resemblance ended, so far as Zack could see. Young Kelsey would have been only nine, in 1865, and all Abe had hold of was a great lout at least thirteen years old. He had actually been on the war trail already, and had the scalp of a little Negro child, to prove it.
Zack talked to the boy in two languages, neither of which Abe Kelsey understood. The boy was fluent in Kiowa, and knew a little Spanish, but about the only English word Zack could trap him into recognizing was “squaw.” He said he had always lived in the lodge of Pacing Wolf, his father, and knew nothing at all about Kelsey except that he was a bad nuisance and got him laughed at. He offered Zack a Mexican concho to shoot Kelsey; couldn’t do it himself, for a Kiowa believed that his own medicine would turn on him if he killed a crazy person, or even seriously harmed one.
As for answering to his name—the young savage answered to Set, for Set-Tayhahnna-tay, which means Texan bear. And Kelsey’s boy happened to be named Seth.
Time was going to prove that all this common sense could but barely hold its ground, in public opinion, against the farther’s total conviction; years later people would still be arguing over it. For a door of doubt had been left open, forever.
Not in Zack’s mind. He was convinced that Abe was absolutely wrong, beyond any shadow of doubt, and he told him so, in no uncertain terms. Abe was thrown into an uncontrollable rage, in which he tried to kill Zack, and Zack had to take his carbine away from him. Unfortunately, Zack lost his own patience in this flurry, and smashed the lock of the carbine on a rock. Kelsey carried the broken breechlock with him a long time, and it gave his own version of the story substance for unimaginative listeners.
But a far more unlucky thing happened before Zack got back to Texas. Instead of turning back across the Red, Zack pointed his pony toward Fort Cobb. Neither the Union nor the Confederacy had been able to spare troops for a real campaign in the Indian country, though each side was accused of efforts to turn the Indians against the other. The Federals had, however, intermittently garrisoned Fort Cobb, up in Indian Territory. Old Zack carried a list of brands worn by some hundreds of horses known to be in the hands of Indians under Federal protection. Zack’s bold demand upon the Fort Cobb commandant was for a release of the horses—or a strapping indemnity. He had a case, and later it was going to rage in the courts for a quarter of a century. Zack almost, but not quite, got something on account.
What he did not know was that the Fort Cobb cavalry was out on one of its recurrent patrols along the Red. Abe’s belated posse, charging out of Texas to rescue little Seth, ran smack into a squadron of yellowlegs on Cache Creek. The handful of Texans were told to get the hell back where they came from, and fast—before they were set upon for taking military action, and out of uniform at that. Whatever opportunity for rescue there had been was destroyed in five minutes, and never recurred again.
Abe Kelsey forever believed, and persuaded whom he could, that Old Zack had betrayed the rescue party to the damyankees; thereby purchasing the friendship of the Kiowas, and perpetual immunity to their raids, at the price of Abe’s son. A stigma of Indian-loving, involving a betrayal totally unforgivable under any code on earth, was thus prooflessly affixed to one of the greatest Indian-fighters, perhaps, that Texas ever knew.
Delusion and frustration seemed to unhinge Kelsey’s mind, after that. He became hipped on at least winning the confidence of the supposed son who denied him. Endless failure only narrowed and hardened his obsession, until he was willing to be-come an Indian himself, if that would do it. He tagged the Kiowas around, living on what scraps they threw him. He ran whisky to them when he could get whisky, guns when he could get guns. He even scouted out easy kills for them among his own people, which would have made him deadly dangerous if the Indians had trusted a word he said.
And still the Kiowas would have none of him. Fearing to kill or maim a crazy man, they abused him in every other way they could think of, in hopes of driving him away. They robbed him of everything he got hold of, they dumped him in rivers, they played games in which they threw him about. And the boy he thought was his son would do nothing but spit on him.
For all this, Abe blamed William Zachary.
After Kelsey became a squaw man, the Zacharys were able to face down his libel, to some extent. They must have faced it down, or they wouldn’t be here. For there was no such thing as a lone cattleman, and never could be, on open range. No practical fence was known. All winter the Zacharys rode themselves saddle blind, trying to hold their cattle. Yet every spring found half of their cows long gone, and their range cluttered with pilgrims, sometimes of three hundred brands. They had to calfbrand for them all, drive the beef with their own, and get the market money back to the owners; meanwhile depending on others to work their own far-strayed cows.
Even in this hateful state of interdependence, Kelsey had been unable to stop them. But presently Abe found another weapon to use against the Zacharys—a far more potent one than his unprovable charge of betrayal. It was a weapon so strange to them that they knew no defense against it; yet so deadly that Kelsey could punish and drive them with it. Even if they killed him—which Old Zack would have done if Abe had not eluded him—it might someday destroy them.
Before Old Zack died, under his drowning cattle in that far, lost river crossing, Abe Kelsey had all but smoked the Zacharys out of Texas.
So now Cassius was furious, baffled, and talking to himself. “Close by, someplace. Less’n six miles from the house, by God. Must be watching us now—”
“How’s that?”
“Shut up until you’re spoken to!” Cash yelled at Andy.
Chapter Four
Now Ben got back at last, to the great secret relief of Cassius. Even the weather seemed to have changed for his homecoming. The cloud mat was gone, the sun blazing bright; and the wind gave place to a gentle breeze, still dry, and smelling more of last year’s wild hay than of new grass, but of a pleasant warmth. Cash and Andy, having trailed Kelsey and lost him, were cow-hunting to the south that day, toward the Little Beaver, trying to bunch the scattered and winter-driven cattle for a ready gather. As they rode they looked often to the southeast, hoping for a dust that would mean Ben was finally coming in from Fort Worth, and points beyond. They could see a long way in the clean air, but nothing showed.
They were looking the wrong way. In the middle of the morning they were puzzled by a considerable dust, big enough for a company of cavalry, but far to the southwest. Nothing lay in that direction short of Fort Griffin—more than ninety miles away, for a horse, which is always having to go around something. Between lay an unholy loneliness. Buffalo hunters, men bolder than angels and dirtier than wolves, crossed this wild land in slaughter
