by Alan Lemay
“I pray God she’s dead.” Hagar spoke out strongly, her voice dry and harsh in her throat.
“Hagar,” Matthilda protested helplessly.
“I know whereof I speak,” Hagar said. “I was in the hands of red savages, long ago….”
And this became the dreadful night in which they learned what had crippled Hagar, and made her strange. They did not know how to stop her, or to close their ears, no matter now much they might wish forever they had never had to hear.
Hagar had been orphaned, by the time she “come of full growth.” Two uncles and a brother were starting for California, by wagon across the plains, and she had made them take her along. But they were late at Independence; the last wagon train of the year had pulled out a week before. They could not afford to lay over until spring, so they joined one other belated wagon, and set out to overtake the train.
They never caught up. A woman and her three-year-old boy, from the other wagon, and Hagar herself, were the only survivors when the Indians struck. She had never known what Indians they were; all the Horse Indians looked alike to an inexperienced eye. “In number, they was eleven, after their wounded died.”
She judged they knew how the savages had used her then, and the other woman too. For a few days the two women took turns carrying the child as they rode the bareback Indian ponies. But one day the mother could comfort the little boy no more, and he began to cry. Hour in and hour out he cried, until they came to a stream. There an Indian took the child by the feet, and slung him high in the air, into the river. He was hardly more than a baby; didn’t know what swimming was, but there under the river he fought for his life. Soon they saw him crawling to the bank, slipping in the wet clay, but making it out of the water.
A young savage fitted an arrow, and shot the little struggling fellow in the face. The child went under—yet, in a few moments appeared again, floundering and strangling. The arrow had fallen away, but the little face was streaming blood. The bow twanged again, and again the river closed over the child’s head. Then, unbelievably, the little boy appeared one time more. One eye socket was empty, but he was trying still. It took still another arrow before the child went down to stay, under the muddy water.
The mother slumped to the ground, and could not be beaten to her feet. The savages scalped her before they went on. Hagar worked herself free of the horse upon which she was tied, and tried to get hold of the bowman, to kill him with her hands. After that they always bound her ankles together with rawhide, under the horse’s belly, when they rode; and that was how they crippled her forever.
“At first I prayed to die. Wouldn’t you think, as time run on, the body would die and let the soul go free? No; it ain’t that way. I know now why we’re taught beasts have no souls. It takes the soul to tell the body when to die. But the soul goes faint, and lies as though dead. Naught is left but an animal, and the animal schemes to live….” Hagar had at last stolen two of the fastest horses the savages had, and got away. Some soldiers found her, finally, on a wagon trail.
“The body heals as best it can. But it was Zeb Rawlins raised me up among the living again. A whole man, then, and a proud one, and I told him all. Yet it was Zeb gave me back my soul. Or so I thought, until this very now….”
Hagar’s voice had gone lifeless, a dragging monotone; yet she felt the need of telling them one thing more. “This one thing I know. The red niggers are no human men. Nor are they beasts, nor any kind of earthly varmint, for all natural critters act like God made them to do. Devil-spirits, demons out of red hell, these be, that somehow, on some evil day, found way to clothe themselves in flesh. I say to you, they must be cleansed from the face of this earth! Wherever one drop of their blood is found, it must be destroyed! For that is man’s most sacred trust, before Almighty God.”
“Suppose,” Matthilda said, with surprising self-possession, “suppose a little child—a helpless baby—came into your hands—”
A dreadful glow came up behind Hagar’s cavernous eyes. She extended her hands, gnarled and clawed, and they were shaking. “A red nigger whelp? Into these hands?”
Matthilda remained steady, and rode it through. “I have no question to ask,” she said.
Hagar crumpled weakly, and her words were faint. “If Effie is in their hands tonight…how can I ever again say…God’s will be done….”
Rachel held deathly still, hardly daring to breathe. She believed Hagar Rawlins to be insane.
Ben was harnessed and hooked before dawn; and he found his womenfolks more than ready to be taken home.
Chapter Twenty-one
Two days more, and the Kiowa Moon had waned. Matthilda thought Ben should take Andy and his two hired hands and go help look for the missing wedding party. But Ben had become wary since Seth’s visit. Moon or no moon, he would not leave his womenfolk alone,
It was Georgia who rode out to where Ben was working the calves, with the word that Effie was dead. An ambush in the ruins of No Hope, only twenty-five miles from home, had left no survivors. Those last rains, as the year turned dry, had not only delayed discovery, but prevented pursuit.
Ordinarily the Zacharys would have been expected to hurry back there. But in this situation Georgia believed, and told Ben, neighborly custom did not rightly apply. Shy off, she advised them, at least until her sister’s body was brought home. She’d be able to tell better, then, how her mother was going to ride this thing out; and she would secretly fetch word. Might be the Rawlins cabin would be no fit place for visitors of any kind, she put it tactfully, for quite some time to come.
She and Ben agreed upon a rendezvous, where he could look for her at certain times. By picketing her horse on the crest of a particular ridge, she could let him know from about five miles off if she was there; save him some of the ride. She’d come there any day she had something they ought to know.
Now there was a strange delay. Ten days passed before the body of Effie Rawlins was brought home. It turned out that Jude had gone on down the Trinity, all the way to Fort Worth to have a proper casket built. He had even tried to get silver handles, but had not found them in supply. The coffin he at last brought back was strong and heavy as a safe, with the lid sealed down, and no way to open it intended.
But Hagar was determined to make sure for herself that the body Jude had brought home was really Effie’s. Though they did all they could to restrain her, she got up in the night, found tools, and forced the coffin lid.
Inside she found only a sealed lead box, about a foot wide, by thirty inches long.
Chapter Twenty-two
Time was getting on to where they could begin hoping for Cash to get home, pretty soon. They never could tell, within a matter of weeks, how long their trail drivers were likely to be gone.
In the end of the soddy’s main room, between the bunks that filled the corners, stood a huge cabinet, with a leaf that let down to write on, which they called the “secretary.” Papa had made this, the winter his broken leg was healing, and it was the only really good piece in the house. Its main structure was of heavy walnut, but the doors and drawer fronts were of fruitwood, covered with carvings of birds, leaves, flowers—even a few antelopes and buffaloes could be found on it. Within, along with their bushels of stock tallies, and the family Bible, and a great pile-up of odds and ends they never used but didn’t know how to throw away, were stowed the logbooks of every drive they had ever made. Three times they had made two drives in the same year, and once they had made three, so that in the seven years since ’67 they had accumulated logbooks covering a dozen.
Rachel had dug these out, and had been poring over them since the drive first rolled. But no part of that long push seemed ever to have gone twice just the same. No two drives took exactly the same route, for one thing. The Wichita Trail had a destination at its other end, but outside of that it was no more than a name, and not any one particular way. Weather made a big difference; in wet years the herd plugged slowly through hock-deep mud, and every creek became both a haza
rd and a hard day’s work. The grass made a difference, for if it was poor the weakening cattle must graze slowly all the way.
Thunderstorms could spook a herd into stampede after stampede, or a herd could go “spoiled” of its own accord, and run four nights a week. What with the time it took to gather, after a run, and the exhausted state of the cattle, the boss might get to thinking he lived on the trail now, making one drive his lifelong work. And the worse the conditions, the more you needed a corrida of fast, game horsemen who knew how to handle this wildhorn Texican stock. You never did have enough men like that.
After the first week or two Rachel didn’t even know which river Cash would be crossing next. Ben’s old logs showed that he had not always been sure himself. She found places where he had noted the time of certain crossings, but had put the names in later with a blunter pencil. Not so with Papa’s logs. These were hastily scrawled, and sometimes illegible, cross-scribbled in every direction with notes on losses, stuff issued from the wagons, and every kind of thing. But if he didn’t know where he was, he said so. The boys made a great legendary figure of Papa as a trail driver. They claimed nobody had ever seen Old Zack lie down while he had a herd on the trail. Maybe once in a while you might see him doze a little, sitting on the ground with his back against a cook-wagon wheel. But even then he would have a cup of coffee in his hand, so that if he went full asleep it would spill on his legs, and get him up from there. Any real sleep he had was actually in the saddle; he used up about five horses a day.
Old Zack had left them no record for the drive from the Dancing Bird to Wichita, for they were still driving to Abilene, far up in the eastern part of Kansas, at the time of his death. Ben’s second drive, in 1871, had made Wichita in four weeks and two days, which was his best time, and would have been a credit to his father. He also had made the same drive in nine weeks and three days. Cassius had made one drive, which the Rawlinses had sat out, in 1872, in five weeks even, which was cracking good time. You could call six weeks good time, and seven weeks pretty fair. No telling, though, how long they’d be held up in Wichita, waiting to sell, and sometimes they had to load the cars, holding until cars could be had. Call it a week or two—maybe a lot more. Then it would take about ten days for the riders to get back. There was no part of the operation not hedged all round with ifs and providings.
During this time occurred one of the smallseeming, unreadable things, the seriousness of which was hidden at the time it happened. They lost a horse, which was a common-place if anything was, except that this one went missing in broad daylight, out of the up-horse corral. Well, somebody must have turned it out, though no one would admit it. The animal was a sleepy old pony named Apples, because it had some Appaloosie blood, shown in a pale, speckled wash across its hindquarters. It might never have been missed, except that it happened to belong to Andy, who called it his night horse; he hunted, and complained, and harped on his loss, until everybody was sick of hearing about Apples.
Cassius had now been gone upwards of six weeks, and they were coming into the just-barely-possible area. The land was already yielding dust again where the grass was poor, or the run off had scoured the earth barren. So now they watched for a distant stir-up.
But when they sighted one, early in an unseasonably hot afternoon, it was in an unlikely direction; and it was a Fort Worth posse that came there, before Cash ever got home.
The light, intermittent dust the posse made was seen by Ben from where he worked a long way off, and he judged at once that it could only mean more trouble. He came on in, with Andy and his two hired hands. By lathering the horses, he got home just ahead of the slower-moving posse. Immediately he sent Andy up to the house, with word that Matthilda and Rachel were to stay inside, whatever happened. And shortly after that, nine riders came jogging around the corral to where the Zachary men waited, sitting their sweated horses.
The man in front, gray-thatched and graymustached, with a dried-out look, Ben knew for Sol Carr of Tarrant County. He had been a Ranger, once, before the War Between the States, and would be one again, now that Texas could bring the Rangers back. Ben did not know why his father had disliked Sol Carr but remembered that this was so. For the time being Carr was head of a loosely organized bunch of volunteers from the Fort Worth neighborhood. They chased thieves and war parties, and some of them rode all the time.
Behind Sol Carr and to one side, respectfully aloof, rode an Indian in the butternut clothes of a cowhand, but with no dents or creases in his hat. He had the squat look of a huge frog, and graying pigtails hung beside his jowls. Ben believed this to be a Delaware called Humpjack, who had scouted for troops and Rangers against the Wild Tribes since long ago.
Most conspicuous, because they hung back and would not meet his eye, were Jude and Charlie Rawlins. But Ben could have named three of the five others. He had exchanged powers of attorney with them, for handling drifted cattle. They nodded slightly, noncommittally and without smiling, as he looked at them one after another; and this con-firmed that the posse was hostile. The chilling thing was that these were ordinary men, who were Texans and cowmen, but not renegades, nor of any special faction. Sometimes a kind of tide seemed to run across the empty spaces of Texas, a tide of sentiment, of opinion, so that far-separated, lonely settlers were swayed the same way all at once. To stand against such a thing was to stand against the State. Sooner or later the guns would start clearing their throats, and you might find yourself fighting feud after feud, without any future or any end.
Behind the mounted men, a tenth man drove a light wagon, with a horse tied to the tail gate; and the led horse was Apples.
Andy swung down. “That’s my horse you got there! What’s that contraption you got on him?” Apples was carrying an Indian saddle of sticks and straps; it looked to be broken.
Somebody shouted, “Let that horse alone, boy!”
“That thing’s eating him in two! I got to get it off him!”
But Ben said sharply, “Come back here, Andy!” And his brother obeyed.
Carr dismounted now, without invitation, and Ben stepped down to meet him. They stopped two paces apart, and did not offer to shake hands. Both had left their carbines on their saddles, but Ben wore his holster slung low on his right, and Sol Carr was similarly armed.
“We’ve been following out the No Hope massacre,” Carr said to Ben, “and we’ve been lucky. Found out quite a bit.” He let an edge come into his voice, as if he were talking to a man under arrest, or about to be. “I’m here to learn the rest of it from you.”
Ben flared up, but his voice remained quiet. Rachel, watching from the house, heard no word of what followed.
“Those were your last words in that tone,” he told Sol Carr, “while you stand on my land.”
“You can back that up, too,” Carr said, dry as the dust, “just by taking on all these men. How many do you figure you’ll have time to get?”
“One,” Ben said.
Maybe the old Ranger modified his tone, some, then—or maybe he didn’t, actually. Certainly his purpose was not softened.
“We taken a prisoner,” Carr said. “A white squaw man, and I believe you know him. Name of Abe Kelsey.”
“We’ve been looking for Kelsey a long time,” Ben said.
“That’s as may be. What interests us, he was mixed up with them red niggers at the massacre. Laying aside what he says he was doing there, he anyway messed into it enough to get himself shot up. And we got him.”
“Alive?”
“Just about. We got the names of the main war chiefs out of him. Seth was there, and so was Wolf Saddle. But he says Lost Bird was the leader. Though he may be protecting Seth, seein’s he claims he’s Seth’s old man.”
“If he’s alive,” Ben demanded, “why haven’t you hung him?”
“We may get around to it,” Carr answered. “Meantime, he’s spieled off a whole string of charges against you. I thought you might want to face him, and answer him. I’ve got him here, in that wagon.”
“Let him lift his head,” Ben said. “And I’ll put a ball between his eyes in the next tenth of a second!”
“You’d shoot an unarmed man?”
“Yes,” Ben said.
“Then I better tell you what he says myself. Bein’s I’m in better shape to shoot back. He says, to start, the Kiowas used your place, here, for their point of assembly.”
“The three you named were here,” Ben acknowledged. “We forted up, and stood ’em off.”
“He says Lost Bird learned from you that the people they massacred were on the road, and there was no other way the red niggers could have learned of it.”
A stir of surprise ran over the posse as Ben laughed in Carr’s face. It was a nasty laugh, with promise of fight in it, yet unexpected. “The Rawlinses are the people we have to work with,” Ben said.
“They’re also the damyankees that crowded in on your range,” Carr reminded him. “Your old man had his eye on this grass for a long time. When he finally come to settle on it, Rawlins was ahead of him, and he had to go splits. It’s possible to believe you wanted them out of here.”
“Oh, good God almighty,” Ben said with contempt.
“There’s plenty to say it’s the Kiowas you have to work with, not Rawlinses, if you want to last where you are. They say this foundling girl, this foster sister of yours, you people have raised—”
He broke off, stopped by the blaze of pure murder that had lighted Ben’s eyes, contradicting his smile. “What about her?” Ben prodded him.
“They say she’s the key to your understanding with the Kiowas,” Sol Carr went on coolly. He had been startled, but he was not the man to be frightened. “Kelsey says your old man found the girl on the prairie, and rescued her. And she proved out to be a Kiowa quarter-breed baby, lost out of a drag litter—Lost Bird’s half sister, out of a white woman captive. They say the Kiowas are friendly because you’re raising one of their own.”