Chapter Twenty

A hot sun had come out—and to stay, though they didn’t know that yet; it had quickly dried the prairie. But Ben recalled that it had rained pretty much all day and all night, while Gus was riding from Fort Richardson, and most of the next day, too. Effie’s party must have laid over where they were. Even if they had started from Richardson, the hub-deep mud might have turned them back. Some of that red clay took time to dry. And if they lamed a horse…

Hagar said, “Yes, we thunk of that.” Her deep-set eyes had receded into her head, and she looked hollowed everywhere, as if she had not eaten or slept.

“I’m sure they’re all right,” Matthilda said. “They’re bound to get here. I know they will.”

“Yes,” Hagar said without emphasis. “I expect they’re safe somewheres, Mattie.”

Zeb had welcomed them quietly and gravely, and since had sat staring into the fireplace. Once he said, “Being’s Ben and Andy are here now, I believe I’ll just hitch up and—”

But Hagar said, “I’m going with you, if you do.” And that was the end of it.

Nobody could find much to say more. They had expected to find the cabin thronged, but it had become a sad and awkward place to be. Rachel and her brothers took time carrying in all the fancy cooking they had brought. More stuff piled up inside than there was any place for, and every added hamper made plainer how different things were here than they had expected. Hagar sat inert, looking cadaverous, even failing to protest when Matthilda and Rachel got supper on.

As they gathered at the table, it was Hagar who pulled herself together in an effort to dissimulate. “Like one time in Hog Scrape,” she said. “We had this here bull goose—” She checked herself, and looked timidly at Matthilda. “He-goose—”

“Gander?” Matthilda suggested.

“This here bull gander,” Hagar accepted. The men ate doggedly, as if set on keeping up their strength, as Hagar rambled on. Hog Scrape was what Hagar called the Tennessee hill village where she had been born; actually it had some commonplace name. Willetsville? Like that. Over the years she had piled up enough anecdotes about it to fill a history book. Rachel had always thought her stories funny, and so had Ben. But most people, looking for a point and not finding one, were only bewildered by Hog Scrape. Hagar’s own family took the tales in stolid silence. Tonight Ben was preoccupied, and Rachel could not find the funny part, either, under the layers of foreboding.

It seemed the gander had settled in Hog Scrape of its own accord. Didn’t belong to nobody. Used to sally up and down the board walk like he owned it; dogs learned to slink out of his way. Got to know everybody, friendly-like, and right neighborly, too—always helping folks out. Like if a drunkard was asleep in the street, the gander would run the hogs off, and make the teams go around him. Only, there was this lay preacher they had in Hog Scrape, kept running the gander out of meeting. Claimed he wasn’t housebroken, rightly. Until finally the gander had enough, and took exception….

She trailed off, as if she judged nobody was listening, and Matthilda tried a politeness. “I used to know a…What was his name?”

“Harlow,” Hagar answered. “Only name he answered to, anyway. Though, naturally, he couldn’t tell you; small use asking him.”

Matthilda looked puzzled; she had meant the lay preacher. But Hagar’s stories generally escaped her, somewhere along the line.

“So Harlow called a feud on this here lay preacher,” Hagar picked it up again. “ ’It seemed the gander made about the worst enemy a man could have. Everytime the lay preacher come in view, Harlow taken after him, hissing, and wing-whopping, and tearing the feller’s britches; and him awhooping and acussing, and abusting in anyplace on anybody, for cover. Sometimes five times in an hour…”

She got up to fill a platter, shuffling painfully, but talking on, unwilling to be helped, as always. She said it got so everybody was throwed by such dern carryings-on, and there was talk of a law. Some wanted a law against ganders, and others wanted it against lay preachers—both had their followings. But in the upshot, one evening when a cloud set itself down on Hog Scrape, the lay preacher thrun a shot at the gander, and missed, and taken the constable in the leg. And the constable, he answered fire, out of anguish; and—

She was coming back to the table when she stopped abruptly, and her wandering story stopped. She stood looking downward, as if not seeing the dirt floor, but something deep beneath. Zeb bumped table and bench as he surged up ponderously, to go to her; but before he could leave his place, Hagar let the platter fall. She dragged herself to a seat by the fireplace, and there folded up.

“I can’t go on,” she said, and hid her face. “I can’t play up no more.”

Zeb came to her, and put his hands on her shoulders. “Best you lie down a spell,” he said gently. “I’ll heat up some—”

“No,” Hagar said in a dreadful voice. “No—I can’t stand it back there—all alone in the black dark—”

The Zacharys had no way to leave there. No place for them all to sleep, either, until the main room was changed around, and shakedowns fixed on the floor. The Zachary hands went out to spread their blankets in the barn, and Ben and Andy slipped away to join them as soon as they could. Georgia had a narrow bed, in a lean-to room like a horse stall, and she offered this to Matthilda, then to Rachel. But there was not room for both, and neither would desert the other. Georgia made more coffee, and withdrew. At another time Rachel would have suspected Georgia of going out a window to fool around the boys, but the notion had no interest for her now.

At last Zeb, who had been dozing in his chair, made a feeble effort to take Hagar off to bed; but retired alone when she refused. Maybe he doesn’t want to be alone with her either, Rachel thought. And after that the three women just sat, while the night dragged on.

Rachel had been asleep in her chair when she was startled awake by Hagar’s voice. There was no clock in this room, but the embers in the fireplace were low, as if the night was old.

“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 hazard 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.”

“Carr,” Ben said, “if you don’t have enough Indian-savvy to know that’s impossible, it’s no use to talk to you. You ought to know there’s nothing could bring the whole tribe down on us any quicker than if they thought we was holding a captive Kiowa child!”

“I would have supposed so,” Sol Carr admitted. “Only there’s one thing more. After the massacre, Abe Kelsey made his way here. His horse had been hit; died about two miles out. He’s showed us the bones, stripped clean by the wolves. God knows he was in no shape to catch another. He says you people gave him a horse. You gave him that horse, right there. You helped him get away on it. And he got back to some of his red niggers—what time he could keep up with ’em.”

“That horse was stolen,” Andy said. “Out of this corral right here. And within an hour of noon!”

“Nobody around at all?” Carr said with disbelief.

“I had two men here all the time,” Ben told him. He glanced at Tip and Joey, and found them looking blank, and frightened.

“Do you accuse the two men?” Carr asked sharply.

“I do not! I don’t think they know anything about this at all.”

“Yet somebody gave Kelsey this horse!”

In the moment of silence that followed, Ben saw Sol Carr look past him, and start to say something more, then close his mouth again. Ben had not known that Matthilda had left the house, until she spoke from behind him.

“I did,” Matthilda said clearly. “I gave him the horse.”

Chapter Twenty-three

Matthilda had not explained to Rachel, as she left the house, what it was she meant to do. Rachel made as if to go with her. Perhaps she would not have obeyed an order from Matthilda to stay back; perhaps Matthilda knew it.

“Ben won’t like this,” Matthilda said. “Please don’t make him mad at you, too.”

That worked. Rachel stayed at the window, and watched Matthilda walk down there, to butt in on the men, where she wasn’t wanted. But mostly her eyes were on Ben. She thought, I ought to be there. I’m the one should be beside him, now. Suddenly she went and got the Sharp & Hankins, and chambered a cartridge. If a fight broke, she was sure she could not fail to get some of those who were against Ben. About one with every shot, at this range, firing from a rest. After that she felt better about staying where she was.

Down by the corral, Sol Carr lifted his hat to Matthilda, and spoke courteously, covering his objections to being thrown off his line of attack.

“I remember you, M’am,” Carr said. “You are Mrs. Zachary.”

“And you are Sol Carr,” Matthilda responded, “who tried to do my husband out of six thousand dollars.”

Carr may have reddened a little, but his tone did not change. “I understood you to say you gave Kelsey this horse. Did you realize, then, he had come direct from the No Hope massacre?”

“I realize nothing of the kind. The day he came here was more than two weeks after the massacre.”

That stopped Carr for a moment or two; but he said, “He had been wounded, though?”

“He had a gunshot wound in the limb,” Matthilda said. “A new one. The blood was fresh on the bandage. It wasn’t a bad wound, then. I should judge it’s bad now—I can smell green-flesh from here. You’d better get him some doctoring, or you won’t get him as far as his trial!”

“M’am,” Carr said, “this is his trial.”

“I’ll be interested to hear the verdict,” Matthilda said saltily.

“What was your belief, then, as to how he got wounded?”

“I supposed he was caught stealing horses. Our horses, likely.”

“You thought he was a horse thief,” Carr said wonderingly. “You knew he was a squaw man. You knew he’s spread tales against you, to your great harm. Yet you gave him a horse to get away on?”

“Yes,” said Matthilda.

“M’am, in God’s name—exucse me, M’am—why?”

“Poor old man,” Matthilda said. “I was sorry for him.”

“After all he’s done, you tell me you were sorry—”

“Suppose one of my little children had been taken by red savages,” Matthilda said. “Do you think there’s anything I wouldn’t do, any lengths I wouldn’t go to, to bring my child back to me? I have no doubt I would go crazy, as crazy as Abe, before the end of it. Of course I’m sorry for him!”

There were a lot more questions. Like, where were the two men Ben had left at the house, while Matthilda was giving away Apples. Smoked out, Tip and Joey admitted they had been reining a couple of colts, and had jumped a loafer wolf. They had taken after it, to rope it, and run it a far piece. Tip like to got a loop on it, but his colt spooked at the rope, and throwed him. Joey had had a hard time catching Tip’s colt for him, so, all in all, they had been out of sight maybe two hours.

But the backbone of the posse’s purpose, if it had been to involve the Zacharys, had been broken for the time being, on the sheer incredibility of Matthilda’s honesty.

Rachel saw the posse leader step into his saddle, at the end of it. Then Ben mounted, though he made Andy and the cowhands stay at the corral. Matthilda turned away, and plodded slowly up the hill to the house, her face white, but held as rigidly expression-less as she could make it. Behind her all the horses began to shift and move; and it was Ben who led out, not in the direction from which the posse had come, but upstream.

As the wagon moved, Abe Kelsey dragged himself up with scaly old hands to hang over the side. Clear up at the house, Rachel could hear him plainly, wailing and pleading.

“I’m an old man—I’m a pore old man—I ain’t got no friends—I ain’t done nothin’—I’m a pore old man—You got no right—”

She could hear him for a long time, over the sound of the hoofs, as the cavalcade moved off, and trailed out of sight beyond the upper bend. Mama reached the stoop then; she fumbled at the door, and Rachel opened it for her. Matthilda was crying, now, quietly, and steadily; she could not, or would not, answer any of the many things Rachel had to ask. Without speaking a word, Matthilda went to her bed and hid her face there, crying still.

It was almost sundown when Ben came back, and unsaddled slowly. A little after that the posse passed, going back the way it had come, but on the far side of the creek. The old man in the wagon no longer made any sound; and Rachel knew, by this time, why the posse had gone upstream. There was a big pin oak, up there, a whopper for its kind and place, with a limb of suitable height and girth. An old tale had it that a bandit had once been caught here, and hanged upon that tree. Some said, and Andy liked to believe, that this ghost from long ago still haunted the Dancing Bird. No matter whether that legend had any truth in it or not.

The Dancing Bird had a ghost to haunt it now.