Chapter Twenty-four

Ben came in reluctantly. He didn’t want to talk to anybody. His black moods were uncommon, but when he was in them he could bite, and he was in one now. Rachel knew no way to approach him, or question him. He paced, sometimes beating a fist into his palm, his lips moving in long strings of silent blasphemies. Or else he sat sullen and bitter on the edge of his bunk, burning holes in the floor with his eyes. He didn’t hear you the first time you spoke to him, and when he did hear you he snapped. When it was time to feed him he ate doggedly, straight through one thing after another, with no idea of what he was putting in his mouth. Later, Rachel would wish she had served him a cloth potholder, to see if it would go down, but such an impertinence was unthinkable while the black mood was on. She would as soon have bitten a mule on the ankle as trifle with him, then.

Andy only picked at his food, and stuck close to Ben, refusing to meet Rachel’s eyes. A mumbled, “I d’know,” was all she could get out of him, and she knew it wasn’t his fault. He had been told to shut up, and stay shut up. She was alone, now, beyond the wall of this secretiveness; everyone in the house knew things that she did not. The hands came in to eat, but they kept their eyes down, and their mouths as close shut as Andy’s. The Kiowa Moon would soon be riding above them once more, and Ben up-dated it a number of days. He wouldn’t say just what he was expecting to come against them; perhaps he was not entirely sure himself. But it was plain he felt easier with all the carbines within ready call.

Once Rachel asked him outright if it was horse stealing Kelsey had been hung for. He said it was not.

“Mixed up in the No Hope massacre,” he said.

Andy saw a chance to put in, for once, without telling anything more than Ben had said. “They charged him with aiding and betting on hostiles.”

“Abetting,” Ben snapped. “Aiding and abetting, damn it!”

“What?”

“Nothing! Don’t talk so much.” But he let down enough to tell Rachel a little bit more. “He was with Seth, when they killed Effie. By his own admission.”

“They were trying to pull us into it some way—weren’t they?” she pressed him. “Weren’t they?”

He blazed up. “Who told you that?”

“Why—nobody—”

“Then forget it! And stop making up things!”

Sometimes she tried to find out what the Rawlinses had done against them, or were waiting for a chance to do, but nobody would give her a clue to that, either.

“No way to fight them,” Ben said once. Sometimes, now, he seemed less grim than discouraged, which was a new thing. “Jude and Charlie can shoot, all right, if you give them all the time in the world. So can old Zeb. But they don’t know how to fight anything that shoots back. If they hurry a shot it goes wild. Any one of us could put all three of them down. Only…it would be like a man shooting a bunch of boys.”

As bad as that, then. Bad enough to send Ben on the shoot, to smoke out their neighbors, except that he wasn’t ready for outright murder, yet. She saw he was sorry he had said so much; and she could draw out nothing more. Ben paced and fretted, sometimes pulling weapons off the gun rack in an irritable pretense of examining them. He was like that now whenever he was in the house. Daytimes the men loitered and puttered; no more work on the range was attempted.

That waiting time lasted barely a week, as the Kiowa Moon came on, though it seemed a lot longer than that. The seemingly hopeless stack-up of chores melted away. The house got whitewashed, and even received a wash of lime and brown sand on the out-side. Only the mud-leaky roof stayed the same, for lack of shingles. The cowhands took to playing end-less games of high-low-jack on a blanket under the trees by the creek.

There was a day when Andy thought of something he could do; and it was a different kind of thing than had ever entered his mind before. He started out to build a pansy bed.

Matthilda had always had pansies, every year of their lives. Even when time pressed hard, she had managed to grow a few, for seed to be saved over. If they moved during the growing season, a few pansy plants had to go along in bedding boxes, so that the little flowers would not be lost out of their world. Matthilda loved the little faces, which came out more distinctly upon her blooms than they ever did upon any others, and in more different bright colors. Sometimes when Matthilda bent over a bed of them, working the lumps out of the soil with gentle fingers, Rachel could have sworn that all the little flowers turned upwards, and peered into Matthilda’s face, as if trying to talk to her. Why not? Matthilda sometimes talked to the flowers.

The pansy bed Andy made beside the stoop was built up more than knee high, with stones from the creek. He carried the first stones in his arms up the slope, but later hitched the work team to the stone boat, and went at it right. After a while, Ben and the cowhands got interested, and pitched in, and before they were through they had a raised bed on either side of the stoop, each six feet across, and so solidly built that they were an easy bet to outlast the house by half a century. The boys hauled dirt from the corral, hoof-churned and manured by five years of horse-critters; and lightened it by mixing in sand. Matthilda hummed gaily, her face shining, as she set out the tiny plants she had already started. Surely the pansies would grow here as they had never grown before, if only they were still here to see them.

Suddenly the waiting days were over. Eight men of Cash’s corrida got back, with the reduced remuda, and both wagons. But Cassius was not with them.