seasons. Sometimes they came upon the charred skeleton of a cabin, and camped upon its graves. Other times they ran into Kiowa-Comanche war parties, and found out how came the graves there. During the War, and the nine years since, the undefended frontier had been pushed eastward a hundred miles.
They went on with their work. Along about noon the dust was replaced by a signal smoke. They watched it go up in puffs and long sausages, bitten off sharply at earth level, blurring out into long scraves of nothing as they rose; and they recognized one of the family signals. It meant, “I’m coming in.”
Andy let out a long yell—“wa-a-a-a-ah-hoo!”—of pure celebration. “Whoppee!” he added, finding he had enthusiasm left over.
Cassius took a more nonchalant attitude, now that Ben was actually in sight, for he resented his own relief. “Well, I’ll chew up a whistle pig,” was his comment. “What in all hell is he doing down there?”
“Maybe he taken a short cut,” Andy suggested. Away from the house they dropped very easily into the looser speech of the cowhands among whom they worked, having learned very early in life that this was wise.
They rode southwest toward the dust, and closed on the corrida in a couple of hours. They saw from a long way off that Ben had fetched home some thirty riders and a wagon—about the most successful hiring of hands they had accomplished yet. And he had around fifty head of loose saddle stock; for their range leaked horses so badly, all year round, that they had to bring in replacements every year, on land that should have produced a market surplus. So far, so good, Cassius admitted, subject to a closer look. He had wanted to go after the corrida himself.
Ben himself loped ahead to meet them at near half a mile, and the brothers exchanged a brief, hard handshake. Ben was big, shock-headed; as a boy he had been round-faced and chunky, and even now that he was gaunted, he was so heavily boned that people thought of him as burly, which he was not. Where Cassius had inherited old Zack’s flash, Ben had his father’s force and authority. Four years as head of the family had aged him to look more than thirty, instead of his rightful twenty-four, which was perhaps why he seemed steadier than his father had been, or his brother would ever be.
“Well, another damned rickety, wamber-jawed wagon, I see,” was Cash’s opening comment. “But that’s all right, I can fix it, in a few hundred hours.”
“Had to have it for the cook,” Ben explained mildly. “Crippled, of course—or why’s he a cook? This here’s a spring wagon; Mama will be crazy about it. How
“She’ll be fine, soon’s you show her how to drive two wagons.”
“I figure she can run between them,” Ben said, to ditch an argument that did not interest him. He blamed himself for the way he and his brother graveled each other, almost on sight. Maybe Ben had inherited responsibility for his brothers too suddenly, and too soon. He got along all right with Andy, because he still thought of Andy as a little boy, in whom any reasonable competence came as a surprise. But Cassius was another matter. He expected great things of Cash—and he wasn’t about to get them. The up-shot would be that they would lose Cassius pretty soon, in just about the first year he thought the family could stand on its feet without him.
“I guess they must have moved Fort Worth,” Cash said now. “I always thought of it as more to the eastward, like.”
Ben explained reasonably that he had picked up a few hands there, but not enough. Seemed the Chisholm Trail dreened off most of the Tarrant County riders. So he had turned southwest, racking down the ruts of old Fort Belknap, all the way to Fort Griffin.
“Where a man can find all the damned hide hunters he wants,” Cash said. “Them stinkies must have laughed theirselfs sick at the mention of work. No cowhands, of course.”
“The buffaloes make it bad, all right,” Ben admitted. Only a few stragglers troubled the Dancing Bird nowadays, but farther west there were still buffaloes aplenty. Pretty hard to boon a man with a slow-death job a- horse-back, when he could get rich just banging a gun. Only thing, you had to have your own wagon outfit. Hide hunters with wagons weren’t looking for gunbangers; what they wanted was skinners. All those riders, who had sifted down there like sand into the toe of a sock, would sooner starve than skin buffaloes. So Ben had been able to hire some, such as they were.
Both brothers had things they wanted to talk about, but not in front of Andy, or with the overemphasis of haste. So, “Come have a look,” Ben said.
They rode back, now, along the straggle of newly hired cowhands, who numbered twenty-eight, plus a cook who drove a six-horse team in the drag. In the performance of these men could lie the difference between calamity and a great year. From the Dancing Bird to Wichita was a drive of only two hundred and sixty or seventy miles—no drive at all, compared to some Old Zack had made to Abilene from below the Neuces River; and they could expect wohaw—a tribute paid in gifts of beef—to satisfy the roving bands of Indians, who had no stomach for a fight with an armed crew anyway. Nevertheless, several thousand head of wolfwild stock must not be moved, but in some degree coddled, through uneasy country every mile of the way. The herd could get into big trouble any time, any place, if its trail hands were not up to snuff.
Seen from this standpoint, the new hands Ben had to show his brother looked none too encouraging. As usual, the greater number were youngsters; born misfits, mostly, hangdog and unsure of them-selves, but with wretched hats cocked jauntily, as if they hoped they were dangerous. One thing was pretty plain about them all. These were wanted men, or thought they were, or they would not have been here. The Dancing Bird was too far from town and too close to the Kiowas to be easy to hire for, no matter where you looked for men. At Fort Griffin you took what you could get. Yet Ben believed he saw a certain toughness, or the makings of it, in these downwind drifters; and he was hoping his brother would see it too.
Cash looked them over with a show of indifference. He had bossed a trail herd when he was nineteen, and believed he had proved himself a cowman. But Zeb Rawlins, with whom they pooled their drives, had been disappointed in the returns, and had never okayed Cash to drive again. Ben might blame himself, but actually most of the ill-nature with which Cash had greeted Ben’s return grew out of Cash’s resentment over having been unfairly shelved.
“Looks like you did all right,” he finally brought himself to say.
So much for that. Ben now sent Andy back to the remuda to cut out any five of the new horses he wanted, for his own string. And the two older brothers drifted off to the flank, where they could talk alone.
Cassius waited until they were beyond earshot of the corrida, before he fired his cannon. “Abe Kelsey was here.”
Ben’s startled glance acknowledged that he had heard, but he didn’t say anything right away. “Close to the house?” he asked at last.
“Rode up to a window. Leaned down to look in.”
Another pause; then two questions more. “What kind of a horse was he on?”
“A mighty sorry horse, the way they tell it. I didn’t see him. Mama and Rachel saw him.”
Ben nodded, gravely. If Kelsey rode a bad horse, it meant the Kiowas still took away his horses as fast as he could steal them; so he had gained no influence with them, or favor. Well, that was something.
And his other question: “Does Rachel—?”
Cassius shook his head. “She hasn’t found out anything. Only—this floored me, Ben—she did call off his name. Whether Mama let something slip, or she guessed it from—well, that ain’t what signifies.”
“No,” Ben said slowly. “That ain’t what signifies. You want to know something?”
He pulled his horse to a walk, and Cassius waited. Looking at his brother sidelong, Cassius saw he looked a whole lot tireder than a man should, coming off so easy a trip—virtually a vacation.
“Cash,” Ben said, “I had to kill a man.”
He was looking straight ahead, so that Cassius was able to cover up his first startled, even excited reaction. When Cash spoke his tone was quiet. “The same thing?”
“It’s always the same thing. But this time I had no warning. The guns let off, and a stranger-boy I hired that day was down in the dirt. Seems he pulled first, but he was baited into it. The bastard who done it accused him of going to work for…a red-nigger lover.”
“But when did you—”
“Oh. Me. I stepped out in the middle, and the killer swung round on me. I heard his hammer cock, so I fired.”
They were silent awhile. Cash finally smiled a little. “Well, that makes us even.” He held out his hand, and Ben gripped it. “I run into pretty near the same thing last year,” Cash said. “I kind of figured you knew about it.”
