And still the Kiowas would have none of him. Fearing to kill or maim a crazy man, they abused him in every other way they could think of, in hopes of driving him away. They robbed him of everything he got hold of, they dumped him in rivers, they played games in which they threw him about. And the boy he thought was his son would do nothing but spit on him.
For all this, Abe blamed William Zachary.
After Kelsey became a squaw man, the Zacharys were able to face down his libel, to some extent. They must have faced it down, or they wouldn’t be here. For there was no such thing as a lone cattleman, and never could be, on open range. No practical fence was known. All winter the Zacharys rode themselves saddle blind, trying to hold their cattle. Yet every spring found half of their cows long gone, and their range cluttered with pilgrims, sometimes of three hundred brands. They had to calfbrand for them all, drive the beef with their own, and get the market money back to the owners; meanwhile depending on others to work their own far-strayed cows.
Even in this hateful state of interdependence, Kelsey had been unable to stop them. But presently Abe found another weapon to use against the Zacharys—a far more potent one than his unprovable charge of betrayal. It was a weapon so strange to them that they knew no defense against it; yet so deadly that Kelsey could punish and drive them with it. Even if they killed him—which Old Zack would have done if Abe had not eluded him—it might someday destroy them.
Before Old Zack died, under his drowning cattle in that far, lost river crossing, Abe Kelsey had all but smoked the Zacharys out of Texas.
So now Cassius was furious, baffled, and talking to himself. “Close by, someplace. Less’n six miles from the house, by God. Must be watching us now—”
“How’s that?”
“Shut up until you’re spoken to!” Cash yelled at Andy.
Chapter Four
Now Ben got back at last, to the great secret relief of Cassius. Even the weather seemed to have changed for his homecoming. The cloud mat was gone, the sun blazing bright; and the wind gave place to a gentle breeze, still dry, and smelling more of last year’s wild hay than of new grass, but of a pleasant warmth. Cash and Andy, having trailed Kelsey and lost him, were cow-hunting to the south that day, toward the Little Beaver, trying to bunch the scattered and winter-driven cattle for a ready gather. As they rode they looked often to the southeast, hoping for a dust that would mean Ben was finally coming in from Fort Worth, and points beyond. They could see a long way in the clean air, but nothing showed.
They were looking the wrong way. In the middle of the morning they were puzzled by a considerable dust, big enough for a company of cavalry, but far to the southwest. Nothing lay in that direction short of Fort Griffin—more than ninety miles away, for a horse, which is always having to go around something. Between lay an unholy loneliness. Buffalo hunters, men bolder than angels and dirtier than wolves, crossed this wild land in slaughter seasons. Sometimes they came upon the charred skeleton of a cabin, and camped upon its graves. Other times they ran into Kiowa-Comanche war parties, and found out how came the graves there. During the War, and the nine years since, the undefended frontier had been pushed eastward a hundred miles.
They went on with their work. Along about noon the dust was replaced by a signal smoke. They watched it go up in puffs and long sausages, bitten off sharply at earth level, blurring out into long scraves of nothing as they rose; and they recognized one of the family signals. It meant, “I’m coming in.”
Andy let out a long yell—“wa-a-a-a-ah-hoo!”—of pure celebration. “Whoppee!” he added, finding he had enthusiasm left over.
Cassius took a more nonchalant attitude, now that Ben was actually in sight, for he resented his own relief. “Well, I’ll chew up a whistle pig,” was his comment. “What in all hell is he doing down there?”
“Maybe he taken a short cut,” Andy suggested. Away from the house they dropped very easily into the looser speech of the cowhands among whom they worked, having learned very early in life that this was wise.
They rode southwest toward the dust, and closed on the corrida in a couple of hours. They saw from a long way off that Ben had fetched home some thirty riders and a wagon—about the most successful hiring of hands they had accomplished yet. And he had around fifty head of loose saddle stock; for their range leaked horses so badly, all year round, that they had to bring in replacements every year, on land that should have produced a market surplus. So far, so good, Cassius admitted, subject to a closer look. He had wanted to go after the corrida himself.
Ben himself loped ahead to meet them at near half a mile, and the brothers exchanged a brief, hard handshake. Ben was big, shock-headed; as a boy he had been round-faced and chunky, and even now that he was gaunted, he was so heavily boned that people thought of him as burly, which he was not. Where Cassius had inherited old Zack’s flash, Ben had his father’s force and authority. Four years as head of the family had aged him to look more than thirty, instead of his rightful twenty-four, which was perhaps why he seemed steadier than his father had been, or his brother would ever be.
“Well, another damned rickety, wamber-jawed wagon, I see,” was Cash’s opening comment. “But that’s all right, I can fix it, in a few hundred hours.”
“Had to have it for the cook,” Ben explained mildly. “Crippled, of course—or why’s he a cook? This here’s a spring wagon; Mama will be crazy about it. How is Mama?”
“She’ll be fine, soon’s you show her how to drive two wagons.”
“I figure she can run between them,” Ben said, to ditch an argument that did not interest him. He blamed himself for the way he and his brother graveled each other, almost on sight. Maybe Ben had inherited responsibility for his brothers too suddenly, and too soon. He got along all right with Andy, because he still thought of Andy as a little boy, in whom any reasonable competence came as a surprise. But Cassius was another matter. He expected great things of Cash—and he wasn’t about to get them. The up-shot would be that they would lose Cassius pretty soon, in just about the first year he thought the family could stand on its feet without him.
“I guess they must have moved Fort Worth,” Cash said now. “I always thought of it as more to the eastward, like.”
Ben explained reasonably that he had picked up a few hands there, but not enough. Seemed the Chisholm Trail dreened off most of the Tarrant County riders. So he had turned southwest, racking down the ruts of old Fort Belknap, all the way to Fort Griffin.
“Where a man can find all the damned hide hunters he wants,” Cash said. “Them stinkies must have laughed theirselfs sick at the mention of work. No cowhands, of course.”
“The buffaloes make it bad, all right,” Ben admitted. Only a few stragglers troubled the Dancing Bird nowadays, but farther west there were still buffaloes aplenty. Pretty hard to boon a man with a slow-death job a-horse-back, when he could get rich just banging a gun. Only thing, you had to have your own wagon outfit. Hide hunters with wagons weren’t looking for gunbangers; what they wanted was skinners. All those riders, who had sifted down there like sand into the toe of a sock, would sooner starve than skin buffaloes. So Ben had been able to hire some, such as they were.