Farther back. There were the talking animals—the dwarf owl, only as big as your thumb; the spotted coyote, the mud hen, and the red mare. For a couple of years, when Rachel was seven-eight years old, Ben had kept bringing home accounts of conversation with such-like critters. They told him all kinds of stories, mostly without much sense to them, and never with any moral, unless it was useless. (“Never stick your head in a clam,” the mud hen had advised him.) Whatever became of them all? They just kind of died out. Perhaps Ben knew when she outgrew them.
Still farther back, when she was four, five, and six. Moments of mixed terror and delight while Ben was introducing her to horses. She had first been on a horse in his arms, but later had stood barefoot behind his saddle, arms around his neck, while he chased a dodging brush rabbit, and almost roped it. Later, through over-confidence in an old roping horse, he had got her a fall that knocked her senseless; but she hadn’t blamed him. Those were the same years when she had been most afraid of the dark, and sometimes when she had been sent to bed alone he had come and sung to her while she went to sleep. His songs were the same woebegone, bloody, yet somehow soothing ballads the cowhands sang to the cattle: “Pore young dying cowboy, Never more he’ll roam, Shot right through the chest five times, He ain’t never coming home….” Could it be that Ben had been only eleven years old when she was four? She couldn’t remember when he hadn’t seemed as big and safe as a fort.
Even before that. When she was three, and had nightmares, she remembered running in her nightie, over floors icy to her bare feet, to jump into Ben’s bunk; for he was the one who never sent her away.
In a few days she was thinking: All I want is to wait on him, and take care of him. Even if he married somebody else, I’d be happy if I could just work for him all my life. But later she knew it wasn’t so. No—I couldn’t stand for anybody else to have him. I’d rather die.
She began to light up again; and Matthilda was so relieved to see it that she never dared to ask her what had come over her.
Rachel sent a note out to Georgia, next time Andy stopped home. “I take pen in hand to say I’m right sorry,” she wrote. “I had no call to act up so. You taken me by surprise, first off. But I see now you told me something I bad needed to know, and I’m right thankful.”
Georgia’s prompt answer was scrawled on a leaf from a tally book, and appeared to have been written in the saddle. During a fit of pitching, Rachel criticized, but was glad to get it. “Freind Rachel,” it began, and went on to express relief. She hadn’t told anybody what their Donnybrook was about, and hoped Rachel hadn’t. All Ben knew was that she “got run the Hell out with a bucher Nife.” Laughed fit to die every time he throwed it up to her. What she needed was her mouth sewed up, Georgia finished.
Whatever it was the Rawlins family had gone so sour about seemed either to have been withheld from Georgia, or had not affected her. So they fixed it up, as they thought, and just about in time. For now the moon was coming full again; and this time the Kiowa war ponies would be tough and full of run.
Chapter Seventeen
During grass season they were under the Kiowa Moon only a few days more than half the time; but the fort-up periods were such a nuisance that they seemed to come directly on top of each other, and to last forever.
While the moon was full you must never leave the house unarmed, and even in broad daylight you must never go alone beyond gunshot of support. You must fort up every night, battle shutters barred and weapons ready, as if certain of attack while you slept. After dark you could strike no light, and even the ashes on the hearth must be drenched, lest a coal should wake and show a gleam. You must remember where the plaster-covered loopholes were in the walls, and be ready to knock them open with a blow. When a Kiowa scout came feeling out your defenses, you had better whistle a shot or two over his head without hitting him, as a persuasion to look farther. The water barrel must be kept filled from the well by the creek, the homemade ammunition kept in supply, the gunlocks taken down over and over. There was a lot more. The very success of all these precautions made them the more difficult to maintain; for it was pretty hard to keep up to scratch when nothing ever actually happened.
Ben had been saving the work near home for the Kiowa Moon. Of the six hired hands held back from the drive, he had meant to give half to Zeb, for the Rawlins defense, but Zeb, perhaps in a spasm of thrift, had accepted only two. Ben could only hope that the Rawlinses were getting a little something done, now and then, over at their end of the range; for though the Rawlinses were maintaining a taciturn truce, they could not now join forces in a single range crew every day. Of his remaining four men, Ben picked the best shots, a couple of boys named Tip and Joey, for a permanent home guard; while with Andy and the other two he got on with the calf branding, bringing all hands in every night.
Rachel and Matthilda, who were cooking for them all, made breakfast in the dark, over a little Indian-sized fire that they masked as best they could. But Ben waited for daylight before he saddled now, and spent a while cutting for sign—sometimes a couple of hours, before leading off for the work. Even so, the boys came in dog-tired at the edge of night. They ate enormously and in silence, and were asleep with their clothes on before the women could wash up and get out of the room. Yet loneliness was banished from the Dancing Bird while so many people were around, even if they were sound asleep.
Rachel watched her chance to catch Ben alone. For a couple of days it seemed as though there was no way this could be done. He had turned short of speech, and was showing strain, as if he did not like what his houndlike casting told him was happening around there, during these moonlit nights. Sometimes she thought he had guessed what she was up to, and was wary of being pinned. But on the third day of the Kiowa Moon he broke a stirrup leather, and had to stop in the saddle shed to rig another. And there she cornered him.
“Funny how seldom you ever seen one. An Indian, I mean.” he said, and rambled on as if trying to avoid questions by doing all the talking himself. “Once or twice I’ve seen a little speck, a long piece off, on a ridge, where nobody ought to be, and that’s about all. But there’s lots going through here, just the same. I’ve cut three trails in two days. One of eight-ten horses, ridden in travel file, without any loose stock; and another—”
“Ben,” Rachel cut in, “is Abe Kelsey dead? Do we know yet if he’s dead or not?”
He did not look at her, but his hands stopped their work. When he answered his words were toneless, without any ring, or jump. “He’s alive,” Ben said.
She did not make him go into how he knew. He was lacing leather again and would soon be out of there. “I have to know one thing,” she came straight at it. “What was the great hurt we did Abe Kelsey?”
“Us? Hurt Kelsey?”
“He hates us, Ben! Why? Because Papa wouldn’t help him get back his son?”
“The Kiowas don’t have Kelsey’s son—never did have him. Kelsey’s boy is in his grave at Burnt Tree.”
“Sure looks like a father would know his own son.”
“Would, huh? That one damn-fool notion has kept the whole thing a-simmer! I talked to this Seth two years ago. In Kiowa, naturally. He already had two squaws, and three-four kids. All this at sixteen? That buck is twenty-two if he’s a minute!”