Ben nodded. “Wasn’t going to say anything, till you wanted to.”
“Thanks, Ben.” For a moment, there, they were probably closer than they had ever been in their lives; and they weren’t even thinking about it. “We’ve got to catch this Kelsey and hang him,” Cassius said. “We should have tracked him down long ago. I’m thinking of the Rawlinses. No scale-horn on earth ever come stubborner than old Zeb. And nobody hates Indians worse. If Kelsey ever stirs him up we’ll have a finish fight on our hands. Else he’ll gore us off the range.”
“Damn the range,” Ben said.
“What?”
Ben held his voice low, but a shake came into it, beyond his control. “Cash, I know, I know in my heart, I’ll go after them, and I’ll kill them, every man…the day they turn on her.”
A shade of emphasis fell on the last word, “her,” and that was where it belonged. It was Rachel whom Kelsey had been able to turn into a hostage, and a way to get at the Zacharys. In a dozen pioneer crises, the Zacharys had been held defenseless by the special vulnerability of this girl. And their great fear, keeping them forever on their guard through these years, was that she herself would find it out. Their perpetual vigilance in itself had made her far more precious to them than another child could ever have been.
Rachel, called Rachel Zachary, had been raised in the belief that she was their own. But she was not a Zachary, nor of any kin. Nobody knew who she was, or could ever know. It was not even known of what blood she might have come.
Abe Kelsey claimed he knew. He, and he alone, had been present when Old Zack found a naked baby on the prairie, seventeen years ago; and this gave him the color of authority, for some. After Kelsey turned on Old Zack, these listened when Abe pointed to what he claimed was the Zacharys’ strange immunity to raids.
“Kiowa won’t touch ’em. Never have, and never will! Bought themselves scot-free when they sold out my boy. Even took in a red-nigger whelp on swap, to bind the deal. Go see for yourself! A squaw young’n as ever was— growing up in the Zachary name!”
No worse nonsense was possible. If the Kiowas had believed for a moment that the Zacharys were holding a Kiowa child, however fractional of blood, they would have attacked without let-up. Yet it was the kind of theory that easily took root in this blood-soaked ground. In the past twenty years Kiowa and Comanche raiding parties had killed more than eight hundred Texas settlers. Among them had been a great number of women killed by incessant rape; and a lot of stolen children who died most pitifully in captivity. The victims were not only scalped but often gruesomely dismembered.
Ben thought that Texans should at least have learned by this time that the Horse Indians used fast travel as a weapon, and great space as a shield. Old Zack himself had helped teach the Kiowas that a blood-angry posse might soon be charging in among their own lodges if they left too short a trail. Kiowas raided from the top of Kansas to Santa Fe; they could cross Texas at eighty miles a night to raid deep in Mexico, and be back above the Red while the same moon held. Not how far away, but how watchful, was the measure of safety on this frontier.
Yet people in the worst-hurt counties still built houses with bullet-leaky walls and tinder roofs, without lookouts, rifle loops, or battle shutters. They let their children wander unwatched, and left their women alone for days while they fogged off on senseless errands. They couldn’t learn and wouldn’t be told, and no amount of bloody murder ever changed that.
Perhaps a man whose family had been chopped up could not be expected to blame his own negligence. Easier on his peace of mind if he assumed he had done the best possible job, and found other explanations for the better results of others. There were people who asked too recklessly and too often why war parties always passed up the Zacharys, exposed in handy reach, to jump families two hundred miles beyond.
An unheard-of heresy crossed Ben’s mind.
Ben himself never feared the Kiowas much. What he feared was a moment of carelessness, at the wrong place or the wrong time, by one of his own people.
They watched the moon, Kiowas on raid might attack by night or by day, but traveled only by moonlight. When the moon was full, you could figure war parites were sifting all over Texas, unseen; while in the dark of the moon you wouldn’t cut fresh sign of a single band. The Zacharys allowed twelve days a month for the full moon, and lived differently, then.
They watched the grass. Kiowas wouldn’t try a long foray, or any at all, until their war ponies were in shape. So the grass could tell you when the danger time had come.
Most important thing to know of all was that Horse Indians never fought well against walls. They raided for loot, which meant horses, and glory, which meant scalps, and they liked to get them cheap. If your house was proof against bullets and fire, its doors and shutters few and heavy, the Kiowas were unlikely to come against you at all. Only—
Ben now saw something ahead that might change the whole quality of danger on the Dancing Bird, past hope of survival. Suddenly he felt sick in the pit of his stomach, and sick in his heart. A decision he had put off for a long time, and that his father had put off before him, would have to be stood up to, now.
“Bring ’em on,” he ordered Cassius; and he rode ahead.
Chapter Five
Clear of the corrida, Ben jogged slowly, his eyes habitually sweeping and quartering. With the Rawlinses, the Zacharys claimed by right of use a strip some twenty miles wide by thirty or forty long, coming to six or seven hundred sections. The sum total of accomplishment of Old Zack’s life lay in their precarious hold upon this land. “Damn the range,” Ben had said to Cassius; and now he was wondering if he could ever bring himself to mean it.
The Dancing Bird range was carrying upward of twelve thousand head, about half of which the two families hoped were their own; not counting as many again that carried their brands, but were scattered over half of Texas. They had cows, all right. Everybody had cows, and virtually nothing else. A handful of strays had escaped the early Spaniards, three centuries ago; and these had multiplied into the countless wild cattle that had tantalized and frustrated Texans since before the Alamo. Hundreds of thousands had been killed for their hides, without making a dent. Yet Texas beef remained value-less, until after the war, for want of a market, or any way to reach one.
Then, as the Civil War ended, a railroad poked into Missouri, as far as Sedalia. Ben remembered the excitement that swept Texas. Below the Neuces, where wild cattle ran thickest, a cow might be worth two or three dollars, but you couldn’t get it, because nobody had it. The same cow should be worth ten times that, and in cash, at the end of the track. Hundreds of cow-hunting outfits swarmed into the deep brush.
From the Neuces to Sedalia was a drive of more than twelve hundred miles, but William Zachary was only one of many who thought it could be made. With scarcely a dollar, and no place to borrow any, he scoured the brush country, contracting cattle from cow hunters on credit, on shares, or any way he could. He drove north three thousand head, with nine tough brush riders who brought their own grub, plus Ben, then sixteen. Ahead of them and behind them a hundred herds strung out for five hundred miles. Ben remembered his own boyish exultation, greater than he would ever feel again, as 260,000 head of cattle were thrown into the great march.
And he remembered the stunning, crushing disappointment of that year. The Texans drove a thousand miles, to be stopped two hundred short of their goal. Longhorns carried the deadly tick-transmitted Texas fever. Kansas farmers, fearing epidemic among their own livestock, threw up a quarantine barrier, stubbornly manned. The great herds were lost; and so were some of the drovers, who tried to fight their way through, and forever stayed in Kansas.
That was the first year. There had been seven since. That way north became the Chisholm Trail, as the rails pushed westward across Kansas to Abilene, then to Ellsworth, to Newton, and now to Wichita. Two and a half million cattle had made the long march to the railheads, and still they came on. Still the hearts of men and horses broke upon that cruel trail; and still the promise of fortune shone at its end, fabulous as the gold beyond the rainbow—and just as elusive, to most.
