“Watch your Goddamned mouth,” Ben said; and he saw Zeb’s jowls begin to purple and shake.
“My daughter has been murdered,” Zeb said, still speaking with slow weight. “Her mistreated remains are under the ground. It’s enough for me that any part of the blame could be charged to you at all, by anybody whatsoever. Yet I’ll do this one thing more. I’ll buy out any rights you think you have here, together with whatever cattle of yours you don’t want to drive off. Figure up your price, and send me word what it is. But I want to know soon!”
Ben answered so reasonably that Cash shot him a glance of angry disbelief. “I might buy, or I might sell,” he said. “Either way, I mean to cross-brand, first. There’s too many cows on this range owned by marks on paper, and not enough owned by the right marks on cows. If you want me to work yours, too, send a rep. It’ll cost you the standard fifty cents a head.”
“I’ll send a rep,” Rawlins conceded. “See that you keep your damned iron off the odd-brand cattle until he comes!”
Ben’s voice rose in anger for the first time. “I’ll brand any damned critter I see fit!”
“All I want,” Zeb roared back at him, “is to get you red-nigger lovers to hell off my range!”
“You’ve got no range,” Ben said dropping back into his drawl again. “This is Texican land. It’ll take a sight more than a fat-gutted damyankee son of a bitch to put me off it.”
In the quiet that followed, Andy shortened his reins, and flipped the ends out of the way of his draw.
“I’m sick of looking at them,” Ben told his brothers. He turned his horse; and the moment for gunfire went past.
But something else had happened that might build up to a bigger and longer fight than any six men could have had, on the flats by the Dancing Bird.
Up to here Ben’s trouble had been that he loved the Dancing Bird country for itself. Even the Kiowas had been a boon, in a way, holding this grassland in trust for them, until some good year would enable them to buy land scrip, and take it up. Ben had a hundred long-range plans. He had picked a dozen places where he wanted dams, to establish permanent water in far, dry grasslands where now only brief flash floods ran. He had located clay he could haul from a long way off to line the tanks behind the dams, so that the waters would not seep away. He was experimenting with a hedge of wild-rose bramble to stop winter drift, and the everlasting shuffle-up with half the brands in Texas. With fences up he could grade up his stock, bringing in bulls that otherwise wasted themselves on anybody’s cows but your own. He meant to bring in fruit trees, and Mexican labor to raise garden truck; he planned to build such a house as would be a showpiece forever.
Now he had his good year; he could think in miles of land, instead of pounds of powder. But if he was going to scrip this land, he had no time to lose. Once the Rangers came back to make this border safe, the country would flood with people, and all this beautiful grass would begin to go under the plow, never to be recovered again. Confederate Texas had sold land scrip by the wagonload, to finance the War. Much of it was still knocking around, and could be cheaply had. But a lot of it had been used to tie up land by map landmarks, as a speculation. Ben saw reason to think that some of the country he now used was already the private property of absentee owners who had never seen it yet. These would have to be bought out at a stiff advance in price.
Because of this he could not expect to buy all of the range he used at once. But he could get title to both sides of the Dancing Bird, though he paid a thousand dollars a section, where once four dollars in scrip would have been enough; he might be able to take up a part of the Little Beaver, and a strip along the Red. With his water secure, he could count on scooping up the rest in other good years, later on.
Or else—the returns from this one good year could be used to run away once more. It had to be one thing or the other, and right away. History would not stand back and wait much longer.
Once Ben would have been willing to give up the Dancing Bird, drive a stocker herd to some new land, and start again, rather than drag his family into a war he might not be able to win. But it seemed to him now that if he gave ground this time, he would never make any stand again.
He no longer believed that he would ever be able to give up this land.
Chapter Twenty-eight
A week passed. Ben and Cash alternated days on the range, one staying in with two or three hands, picked for their interest in gun-fighting. The range crew quickly whipped through the last of the calf branding, and began to sort the cattle and shove them around. They started cross-branding, adding the Dancing Bird brand to cattle otherwise branded, but their own on paper. Whichever one was home spent many hours a day at Papa’s carved secretary, sorting and rebooking the hopelessly complicated accounts and tallies.
The Rawlinses did send a rep, at last, and the Zacharys were glad to see that Jake Rountree was the man who had let himself be talked into the job. Jake was nearing fifty, a stooped, gaunt man with wild eyes and a look of perpetual fatigue. The tired look may have been the result of chronic malaria; some days he complained of a general ache. The years of bad markets and irregular weather had all but squeezed him out of the cattle business, so that his own outfit was hardly more than a token and a hope of building again. Zeb Rawlins was paying him a strapping hundred a month—had had to pay it, in order to get him, hard up as he was. Ben promptly put a hundred a month of his own on top.
Jake knew cattle. Neither Cash nor Ben ever had any trouble with him. “Trying to give everything away,” was his only objection to the way they were handling the bust-up. The Rawlinses, for the time being, stayed off the range.
But afterward, when the parting of the herds was complete? Doubtless Rawlins could comb up a corrida. He could even scrape up a corrida of Yankee outlaws, if that was what he wanted; he could throw fifty killers onto this range. Maybe both outfits would be cool and careful, at the first. Then bickerings would begin, and presently somebody’s temper would break. Once the guns began to smoke, how could they ever be quieted again? They didn’t know. They did the work in hand, judging that they would know how to handle what came next, some way, when they saw what it was.
Meantime their debts had to be paid, a big job in itself; for all those thousands were owed in dribbles, to hundreds of cowmen, spread out over most of Texas. It was a job Ben felt he had to do himself; wanted to find out what kind of friends he still had in Texas, for one thing. He would be in the saddle many weeks, and he was eager to get at it. As soon as he got Cash and Jake Rountree well started with the cross-branding he would be on his way.
As Ben bored into the range work, setting a brutal pace for the corrida, Rachel was watching the calendar in a little horse race of her own. Ben’s birthday was coming up; she wanted him to be home for it. She had thought of something she could make for him, something that would have no practical use at all, but which she hoped would look pretty to him, and surprising.
The calendar had no chance in a race with Ben. Three days on the range, three nights in a deluge of papers at the secretary, and that was it.
They were at breakfast when he told them that he would ride south in the morning, leading the old bullion mule. No, he wasn’t taking any men with him…. Because he didn’t need any, that was why…. Robbers? What about robbers? Robbers had to take their chances same as anybody else. Come fooling around him, they probably deserved it. Shanghai Pierce had ridden all over Texas with a mule of money, time and again. So had Papa. Ben judged he could handle it.