Rachel did not tie. When she had dismounted she led her pony to the door, keeping hold of him, for she was frightened now, more so with every step that she advanced. At the door she raised her knuckles to rap, but still hesitated, all but unable to face the ordeal she had laid out for herself. What, after all, could she possibly say?
She never knocked. The door was suddenly snatched open in front of her, and Hagar was standing there, glaring at her with a total hostility. The sunlight was pitiless upon the deep lines and rough-nesses of her face, and it was a death’s-head face.
Chapter Thirty-one
Rachel tried to speak, and could not. She was seeing devil-lights come up behind Hagar’s eyes, the same dreadful glow she had seen upon that awful night in this same house when they had heard the story of Hagar’s captivity. She wanted to turn, vault onto her horse, and get away, but not a muscle would move.
“You,” Hagar said. The word was voiceless, a rasping of breath in her throat. She had not seemed to breathe at all, at first, but now she was breathing hard, almost gasping for air. “You,” she repeated. “You dare to come here?”
“I—only—” Rachel could not remember a word that she had ever thought of to say.
“You come here,” Hagar said. “To this house. You come and stand afore me.” She had regained her voice, though it shook, and her words seemed to choke her. “What blasphemy can there be, you would draw back from?”
Looking into the terrible eyes, Rachel was certain Hagar was insane. Yet she still stood there.
“Squaw!” Hagar accused her. “Ki’way squaw! Yet you stand here afore me!” Her voice still shook but rose strongly now. “Red nigger as ever was, yet you dare face up to me? For now we know all. Your own brother put knife to my little girl at No Hope—her dear pretty hair has been seen on his shield! Yes, and he stopped by your place, as he rode to that butchery, didn’t he? Boasted to you of what he would do—and from you rode straight to the massacre! And his knife—your own brother’s knife—it was at work when they cut apart her darling body—past all decent laying out of it—leaving no part with another—”
Overrun by Hagar’s storm of words, Rachel was in bewilderment. Hagar had seemed to accuse Ben, or Andy—perhaps Cash, even, forgetting in her madness that Cash had been far away. But Hagar’s raving still poured on.
“Oh, I know you now! Dear God in heaven, how I know you! For I know the work of red-nigger squaws, when they be nigh a massacre, and get a chance at the bodies. Had you been longside your brother, you would have bloodied your hands like his own. But not again! All Texas knows the truth now, save those too blind to see. You will be struck from the face of this earth. You, and all your kin, and all who give you help or feed you—you’ll be hunted and driven—”
She lost her breath in a hard fit of coughing. Yet through it she managed to force out, “Yet now—you stand afore—me—” Spittle foamed and dribbled at the corners of Hagar’s mouth, and it was flecked with blood. She turned blindly from the door, went to her knees as her crippled feet betrayed her, and clawed herself up again. “Rifle,” she croaked, as if someone were standing there to hand it to her. “M’ rifle—gi’ me m’ rifle—”
The spell broke, and Rachel could leave there. Perhaps she could have moved before, had not some unaccountable inner compulsion held her standing rigid to hear Hagar out. She had a scared moment in which her pony reared and spun away from her, spooked by her billowing skirt as she whirled. The leather burned through her fingers, and she all but lost him. She made cast after cast of the split-rein, while the pony ran backward from her, and she stumbled over her skirt, unable to quiet him. But she got the rein over his neck at last, and a foot in the stirrup; she was no better than lying across the saddle, but with him, as he lit out.
No bullet came. In the Rawlins cabin, Georgia had finally got to her mother, from wherever she had been, and caught Hagar as she stumbled toward the door. Hagar had got down a heavy rifle musket, and was fumbling to seat its coiled Maynard primer.
“Ma! You can’t!” Georgia threw arms around her.
Hagar fought her daughter with an unnatural strength. Georgia’s lip split as an elbow struck her mouth, and a rib cracked as the musket butt drove into her body. Yet she held on; and in a matter of moments Hagar’s cough came back, and the strength went out of her. She lost her grip on the musket, and went to her knees. Georgia picked her up, and carried her to her bed.
Chapter Thirty-two
When Rachel could gain her seat, her knee over the horn, she bent low on the pony’s neck, letting him bolt; and only then looked back. Hagar had not reappeared in the open door. But still she urged the pony flat out and belly to the ground, winging over gullies, sailing high over brush they could more quickly have swerved to pass, wanting only more space behind her.
By the time she pulled up, the pony was shaking as badly as she was, and all the wind was beaten out of both of them by the headlong run. It took her a while to recover herself sufficiently to take a look at what had happened. None of it made much sense at first. The wildness of Hagar’s accusations had the effect of disconnecting all she said from reality, blurring what basic meaning had been in it. Rachel had the impression that Hagar had accused her of taking part in the No Hope massacre.
Going back over it, taking apart what Hagar had said, and looking at each piece of it alone, she found that the meanings became more clear. Hagar had not said Rachel was at No Hope; her reference had been to what could be expected of squaws, if they were present at a slaying. And the accusation of her brother—Hagar had not meant any of the Zacharys. Nor had she meant Seth, who was a savage, but not a red savage. The mad woman had been repeating some part of Abe Kelsey’s babblings. She had called Rachel a Kiowa Squaw, whose brother had ridden with Seth.
Strangely, she felt no real surprise. She could not remember that the possibility had ever come to the surface of her mind; certainly she had never con-ciously considered it. Yet some part of awareness must have been there, someplace. She found herself calm in the face of this answer; it was almost as though she had felt relief, that the long mystery and foreboding were over. I think, now, that I already knew it. I think I must have known it for a long time.
She unsaddled methodically and put away her saddle and bridle. With a corncob she cuffed up the wet back of her pony, so that it would dry without chilling. She walked into the house unexcited and unhurried; yet Matthilda knew what had happened in the first moment that she saw her.
This time Matthilda did not panic. She had known for quite a while that her struggle to stand off the in-evitable was a hopeless one. She said, “You’ve been to the Rawlinses’.”
Rachel nodded. “The bones are out of the tree.” It was an expression they had brought with them from the San Saba, where the Indians had formerly made tree burials; sometimes riders still came upon skeletons in tattered wrappings, high above the ground among the branches.
Neither Cash nor Andy was home that day. More than either Ben or Andy, Cassius followed the crash-on, bust-’em-down, keep-em-hustled tactics their father had brought out of the Big Thicket; and now he was trying to complete the redistribution of the herds in an all-out rush, before the Kiowa Moon came full. The two cow-hands supposed to be garrisoning the home layout were out looking for Rachel—poor trackers, obviously, searching where she had not been.