“Cash and I talked to the hands,” Ben told their mother. “Didn’t use Kelsey’s name, of course. Just said a horse thief. Told ’em how he looks. And we put up a hundred dollars.”
“A hundred—?”
“Those ’ramuses can’t count over a hundred dollars. More would only scare ’em.”
Matthilda looked strangely vague, so that Ben wondered if she had followed him. These vague-nesses were appearing oftener, as her age advanced. But now she said, “What if they catch him?”
Ben and Cash exchanged a glance, and Ben said slowly, “Mama, we never told them to catch him.”
“What?”
“The hundred,” Cassius said plainly, “is for his scalp.”
Mama gave a little shuddering gasp. “But Abe couldn’t fight them. He wouldn’t even try. Why, they’d have to shoot him with his hands up!”
“Yes,” Cassius said.
The tears that came so easily nowadays sprang to Matthilda’s eyes. She said, “Poor old man,” in a sort of plaintive whimper, and sat staring into space. The boys waited in silence for the moment of emotion to pass.
“If somehow, in spite of us, he sneaks up near the house again,” Ben said, “I want you to fort up, same as if he had the Kiowa nation behind him. And he’s got to be fired on. If nobody else is here to do it, Rachel has to fire on him. And, Mama—for God’s sake will you believe me?—you mustn’t stop her!”
Matthilda said nothing, but seemed to accept it.
“Now,” Ben said to her gravely, “I’m going to ask you to think of something else. I don’t know if Kelsey has been around the Rawlinses, or any neighbor. I’ll warn Zeb, he’s a squaw man and a thief. But Kelsey has friends in Texas, even yet; and the old, black lie he started against us is still alive, just as much as ever it was. If Kelsey gets to the Rawlinses, they may listen to him, Mama—just as likely as not.”
“That,” Matthilda said, surprisingly matter-of-fact, “is something that will happen, or it won’t.”
“Maybe it’s bound to happen, someday,” Ben said. “Maybe, if the Rawlinses hadn’t been looked on as no better than damyankees, they’d have been told long ago. Mama, have you thought about what we’d best do, when it does come?”
“Well, we’ll have to stop seeing them, I suppose.”
“There’ll be trouble. No way to work the range with those people, once they turn against us. Every county in Texas has had its gun feuds. We can very easy have one of our own, right here.”
“I know,” Matthilda said.
“There’s one thing more,” Ben said; but now he was interrupted.
Rachel had appeared in the bedroom doorway, bare-footed and in her muslin nightie, her hair in long braids. She asked in a plaintive, little-girl fashion, if she couldn’t come out and sit up with the rest of them, for a little while. She kept hearing their voices without being able to make out the words. This was a teasing thing, and kept her from getting to sleep.
Coaxingly, Matthilda asked her to keep trying, anyway. “The Rawlinses will be over tomorrow, like as not. We don’t want to look just awful.” Rachel’s eyes went to Ben with a quick appeal, but he did not intercede. The door closed softly behind her.
While she had stood there Ben had noticed again, unhappily, how pretty she had become, still wideeyed and childlike, yet so plainly a woman, even in the shapeless nightdress. A new, fresh little flower of a woman, as he saw her now, such as any Kiowa buck with eyes in his head would surely want to own. How often would unseen eyes be watching her this year? The Kiowas scouted this place all the time, for it lay on the way they took in search of farther, easier kills. This girl whom he had so long thought of as his sister had suddenly turned into murder bait.
For surely old Kelsey was now preaching to the Kiowas the same story he had started against the Zacharys in Texas, long ago—though to a different purpose. Strange that so cruel a people should set such great store by their own children, their own kin, as the Kiowas did. The deeper the gulch, the higher the hill, it seemed sometimes. So long as that sick-minded old man was trying to cadge favor with the Kiowas, what better way could he find than to lead them to a long-captive Kiowa child? Not that they would ever believe one word the old loony said. But if he kept on dinging the idea into their heads, one of them was sure to see the advantages in it, pretty soon. A Kiowa who wanted to think something generally found a way to prove it to himself.
Like, some young buck might get a Kiowa warlock to find out from the spirits if, by any chance, the crazy old man had hold of something true. He could hire one of the Owl Prophets, like Sky Walker, or Striking Horse, for a sample, to consult an owl. With a couple of gift horses in the offing for the prophet, it was wonderful how the owl would come up with whichever answer was wanted, about nine times out of ten. And if a single young war leader concluded that his people had a claim on the girl he could very easily find great lashings of fight-loving young bucks eager to take him at his word, and follow him all out in a holy crusade. Then you’d see Kiowas come against walls, and with all they had.
“There’s another thing,” he began patiently, again. “This is going to be an awful bad Indian year. Maybe the worst Texas has ever seen. You realize more than a dozen people have been killed since the turn of the year, right in the neighborhood of Fort Sill? They even stole a herd of mules out of the fort’s stone corral. And there’s a hundred other warning signs, as well.”
Matthilda shrugged. Not that she underrated the Indian danger; on the contrary, she feared the Kiowas unreasoningly. This year, as Ben described it, sounded about like any other year, to her. “I’ve never known the time,” she said, “but what an Indian could lie right out there on that ridge, and shoot down any one of us he picked.”
Actually, a Kiowa out on the ridge was bound to be a scout, alone, or with only two or three others. He wasn’t going to start trouble in decent shooting light unless he caught somebody far from support. Or, if he was from a nearby war party, he wasn’t going to give that show away, either, by poking into the best-forted hornet’s nest on the frontier. Not without even a chance at a scalp. Matthilda would never know things like that. To her the Wild Tribes seemed weird, unearthly, past hope of comprehension; and their cruelties so repelled her that she was forever denied a closer look. Ben was stumped. Nothing he could say seemed to help his case. His mother already held the Kiowas in the greatest fear she was capable of knowing, yet was unswayed by it.
He now attacked the key point of decision with a reluctance amounting to dread, yet head on, having found no other way to come at it. “Mama,” he asked, “would you be willing—-just for this one year—to take Rachel off to some safe place, like maybe Fort Richardson, or maybe Fort Worth—”
Matthilda was looking at him as if she couldn’t believe her ears.
“Or Austin?” he tried again. “Even Corpus Christi—”
“Have you gone mad?” his mother demanded.
He knew what he was up against, then. He felt a moment of chill, almost of panic; he had been hogtied before now by this gentle, lovingly inflexible will. He was hunting for a persuasion that would move Matthilda; without that, he was helpless to care for them or defend them. He could not very well take his mother and Rachel to Fort Richardson in irons, with a demand that they be held secure. It came to him that the fight of his life was not going to be made in the saddle, or in the smoke of black powder, but here, now, in this room. And it must be made with no weapons he knew how to use. Words never did come to him the way a gun or a reata came effortlessly into his hands.
“We’ve pushed the work hard,” he said, groping. “Cash and me both. We’ve had a right to hope we’d be so far in the clear, before trouble broke, it wouldn’t matter. One good year—maybe this year—and you can school Rachel in Switzerland, or—or—wherever—”
He saw how sadly his mother was looking at him. For a moment he glimpsed a pity as deep as a sorrow, as deep as her love, so that he was nonplused, and stopped. Matthilda no longer believed this hopeful story of a fortune just ahead; she had heard it too many times, since Old Zack’s first disastrous drive to Sedalia.
Matthilda Zachary would have hated and feared the prairie if no Indian had ever ridden it. The galling month- long winds; the dust that sifted forever from the walls and roof of the hole in the ground where they lived; the spreading stains of mud that leaked through with every rain; the few poor things they had to do with, so that endless toil showed no return; the cruelly harsh, home-boiled soap, which made cracked, hurting hands the price of just keeping clean—all this Matthilda could have forgiven. But she could not forgive what seemed to her the prairie’s vast malignance, as boundless as its emptiness, and as mighty as its storms.
