Cash had made his drive in thirty-one days, and it had leaned him to the bone. By all accounts, he had no more than dozed against a wagon wheel once in a while, and the rest of the time had slept in the saddle, or not at all. Once his deals were made, the rest of his time was spent in retrieving his cook and the best seven men that he had from Delano, Wichita’s whisky-and-women suburb, across the Arkansas River.
The same collection of saloons and dance halls had been called Nauchville, when it stood outside Ellsworth, and Hide Park at Newton. Each time the railhead advanced, these shaky buildings were pulled down and flat-carred, to be set up again at the new shipping point, with the same cadre of bartenders, faro dealers, and girls—plus the new faces of additions and replacements. It was a cowhand’s paradise, such as no man could rightly appreciate until he had behind him the brutal hardships of the trail. But Cash finally combed the men he wanted, heavily hungover, out of the sawdust floors of Delano. He believed he knew them, now; and he was paying them the highest wages offered on any trail.
He could afford it, for he was riding the high wave of success. After the heartbreaking drives from which the Zacharys had turned their cattle back to trail them home again, after years in which they had dumped whole herds at the price of hides in order to pay off their men, Cassius had sold high at last.
Until Cassius got home, Ben had not touched the huge strongbox carried in the cook wagon. It was built of heavy steel plates, and it took four men to carry it into the house. Instead of padlocks, it had blacksmith-welded iron straps, and they were the better part of an hour getting it open at all.
Inside, sewed up in a great number of small deer-skin pouches, Cassius was carrying a little more than $104,000 in gold.
Ben was chilled as it got through to him what Cash had left in the hands of the tough renegades Ben himself had hired in Fort Griffin. Cash claimed he knew his men. Ben didn’t believe anybody knew these men, or any men, well enough to justify trusting them with a fortune like that. Well—they had got there with it; that was the final answer to that.
They moved the carved secretary Papa had made—it weighed about a ton—out into the middle of the room, to get at what they called the Glory Hole. This was a trap door, fitted of random-length planks so as not to show, with a keg set into the earth underneath, to keep their money in. It had been empty, or nearly so, most of the time for quite a while. But tonight they filled it up again; and tried to realize that they were rich.
After Rawlins had been paid some thirty thousand dollars for his lesser share of the herd, and they had paid off seventy-five or eighty other brands for nearly a thousand strays they had driven and sold, and when they had paid off twenty-two thousand in debts, they would still have thirty thousand dollars left—a fortune, clear and unencumbered; plus a couple of thousand head of breeders and young stock, not counting calves and yearlings, standing on the range.
They could send Matthilda and Rachel to safety far away, to the east coast, or abroad; they could do anything they wanted to now—if only they could find out what it was. For now Matthilda balked. She feared even to cross Texas with Rachel while Kelsey’s hanging still had the whole doomful dispute over her birth still fresh in everybody’s mind. They were certainly safe here, with a corrida, now with a strength of twelve men plus the Zacharys themselves, right here on the place. She wanted her sons with her, at least as far as the Mississippi, and they certainly could not leave the work now. Wait till the work was done this fall; it all would be easy, then.
She made it sound natural and sensible to delay their departure, for the sake of safety alone. But Ben felt a deep foreboding. Rachel probably came first, in his mother’s heart; he was fairly sure of that. Yet he began to doubt that she would ever leave her sons, of her own will.
After Matthilda went to bed Ben and Cassius still sat up, talking all through most of Cash’s first night home. Andy slept, unbothered, but Rachel lay wakeful in her bed, listening to that ominous-seeming, indistinguishable mumbling, on and on. And though she knew what times they poured themselves fresh coffee, not one word they said came through the heavy door. Bird songs were starting up along the Dancing Bird before they quit. Yet they were up, red-eyed but un-friendly to sleep, in the early dawn.
First thing they did was to send a rider down the Dancing Bird with a note to Zeb Rawlins, naming the halfway point at which he must meet them, late that day.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Zeb Rawlins and his two sons met the three Zachary brothers on a stripped and barren flat ten miles down the Dancing Bird. The wheels of Zeb’s buggy crackled as they cut through the baked and curling crust, for here an endless network of earth cracks made cruelly visible the damage this year had done the range. Jude and Charlie carried their carbines in their hands as they rode on either side of their father; and Zeb himself carried a long rifle in his lap as he drove. Saddle horses and buggy team were freshly groomed and tail-plucked, and every inch of rigging had been rubbed to a shine, under the film of the fast-gathering dust. This spit and polish, as much as the weapons in their hands, bespoke a predetermination that this showdown should be official, final, and complete.
Each of the Zachary boys saw at a glance that only the two carbines were repeaters. Jude’s weapon was a Triplett & Scott, and Charlie’s a Henry; but Zeb’s rifle, with its uncommonly long 30-inch barrel, was an old cap-and-ball Snyder—the weapon of a man who means to shoot once, and make the one shot do. The Zacharys left their carbines in their boots, but they were wearing their revolvers. Cassius had his father’s Dragoon; Ben, his big Walker Colt, with a 9-inch barrel; and Andy, a Confederate copy of the Whitney, with which he had proved to his brothers he could “wipe their noses for them,” if ever he got anybody to hold still for it. All three wore their guns butt first on the left, for cross-drawing, when in the saddle.
The two parties pulled up with the noses of their animals a horse-length apart.
Zeb Rawlins sat motionless, looking so solid and immovable that the buggy was made to look frail. Ben noticed how his great weight bore down its springs. Probably these two had never had any chance of understanding each other, from the first. Zeb had been born of corn-country pioneers, up on the Ohio River; every time he had ever mentioned such a thing as a “gant-lot,” Ben had had to stop and figure out all over again what he meant. If either of the two had actually fought in the War, they would never have tried to work together at all. Yet Ben no longer wondered how a man unable to ride could undertake to whip the open range. Zeb had a motto: “When Bull takes holt, heaven and ’arth can’t make him let go!” It was neither a slogan nor a preachment; it was a description of the man.
“My brother sold your cows,” Ben said shortly.
Zeb’s eyes went to Cassius, who spoke briskly. “Twelve hundred and nineteen head, as loaded at Wichita. Average for the herd, twenty-six dollars and eight cents a head. Your prorate of cost, one thousand and four. Leaves you thirty-one thousand, seven hundred and ninety-one dollars and fifty-two cents.”
Watching Zeb’s face, Ben could see no change in his neighbor’s dark and heavy mood. Cash had described a great golden flood, all but unbelievable, after the lean years that had gone before. Ben supposed Zeb must already have had news of the market from another source. There was a short silence.
“You’ll be paid off in gold coinage,” Ben said. “Say when and where.”
“I’ll send for what’s due me,” Zeb said.
They waited, until Zeb Rawlins was ready to go on.
“The charges made against you have not been fully proved,” Zeb said. “Not yet.”