Chapter Twenty-five

Ben met the stripped-down corrida half way to the Red, and for a few minutes had a great sinking of the heart as he saw from a long way off that Cash was not with his wagons. He found Johnny Portugal straw-bossing, in charge of bringing the wagons and the remuda home. They still did not know Johnny Portugal’s right name, and probably never would, but he had turned into as steady and loyal a hand as they had, since the day Ben had slapped him down in the round corral.

Cassius had ridden on ahead of them, Johnny told Ben at once. Said he had a side trip he wanted to make, on the way home—something he wanted to see, though he didn’t say what. So, the morning of their fourth day out of Wichita, he had taken a fast horse, and a spare on lead, and was soon out of sight. He had told Johnny Portugal to take his time, so the corrida wouldn’t scare hell out of the family by getting home ahead of him. Johnny said he had sure thought he was traveling slow enough; he was eleven days out of Wichita. Which meant they hadn’t seen Cash in a week.

Ben took the corrida on in, and by the time he got home he had worked out a lie. Cassius had always wanted to see where Papa was lost, he told them, and Ben had explained to him how to find it. It would take him a far piece out of his way, because the rivers were down now; the corrida didn’t have to take the roundabout way the herds took in flood season. But the country Cassius would travel was safe now—no game in it, and so no Indians. Johnny Portugal had really made very fast time; Cassius could hardly be expected for two or three days yet. And so on and so forth. Not a word of it had any relationship to fact.

He had supposed that Mama would assume at once that she had lost her son to the dreadful trails, as his father had been lost four years before. Ben himself thought it entirely likely that Cassius was dead, and that they would never find out what had befallen him. A night-long hysteria would not have surprised him. But Matthilda, who could dissolve so easily over trifles, had a way of stiffening surprisingly when truly serious and deadly threats hung over them. She accepted Ben’s conjectures as though they were entirely reasonable; and if fears haunted her all through the dark hours, he was spared them.

Cassius came in the next day. He was gaunted and hollow-eyed; like his father, he was another who could never be caught asleep while he bossed a cattle drive. And he was saddle-weary to the bones from recent hard riding. One of the two horses with which Cash had left the corrida was dead, Ben learned later. The one he still rode was taxed so far past endurance that it might never recover full usefulness. The carbine was missing from his saddle boot, and Ben lent him his own, lest the loss attract attention when they reached the house. But Cash himself was sound, and in high spirits, in spite of his fatigue, and that was the main thing.

As they rode in they agreed to stick with the story Ben had already invented—that Cassius had visited Witch River, as a sort of shrine, because his father had been lost there. Actually, so far as he knew, Cash had been nowhere near it; didn’t know it when he saw it, or how to find it.

Nobody but Ben ever learned the story of where Cassius had been, or what had been his errand. Ben himself was not told right away, or all at once. Events at both ends of the Wichita Trail called for a making up of minds, so that the tale of Cash’s unaccounted days was easily pushed aside.

But what Cash had done was of graver portent than he thought. He had conceived a bold, brilliant, and wholly farfetched stroke; execution involved great personal danger, while the odds against accomplishing anything useful were enormous—which were perhaps the factors that made the plan irresistible to him, once he had thought of it. He was unabashed to have obtained no immediate result. He might or might not have set some wheels turning, but if nothing ever came of it at all, he would not be surprised. What Cash did not realize, and perhaps never fully understood while he lived, was that the action he took in those eight days he was missing in Indian Territory might prove more dangerous to them than anything that had ever happened to the Zacharys before.

Cash had begun by reasoning that Rachel was a Kiowa or she was not; and the truth must be in existence somewhere. If it was, the place to find it was in the lodges of the Kiowas themselves, for they had always kept better records of their history than any other Indians on the plains. He imagined that Striking Horse, a Kiowa warlock Old Zack had once known, could probably lay hands on the facts if anybody could. So Cash had gone to find out.

Four days out from Wichita he had left his corrida, and gone in search of the renegade village with which Striking Horse traveled. The Kiowas were already as good as at war. A furious burst of murders and scalpings was rushing them toward a show-down that could destroy them. A Texican who rode alone into a Kiowa village might not ride out again. “But sometimes,” Cash explained himself, “you have to call for the turning of a card.”

Striking Horse was an old man who for a long time had been what the whites called a medicine chief. The term did not fit too well into the patterns by which the Kiowas lived, for the Kiowas had no official medicine men. A medicine, or spirit power, might deal with anything, from wet joints to bullet proofing; almost every Kiowa warrior had a power of some kind.

What Striking Horse had was a gift of prophecy supposedly conferred by owls, which the Kiowas feared as more or less supernatural, and connected with the world of the dead. He kept with him an owl skin with a bladder in it, enabling him to produce an owl on order by secretly inflating one; and the showpiece among his sacred possessions was a giant thigh bone of a Man-Eating Owl. A man had to be a strong warlock indeed to fool around with owls.

Old Zack had once been Striking Horse’s friend, up to a point, and in a way. Striking Horse had been prominent in the Eagle Sign Society, a group of magicians devoted to sleight of hand. It had amused Zack to contribute to Striking Horse’s reputation by some simple gifts.

And it was Striking Horse who had given Cash’s father the name of Stone Hand, the time Zack knocked a Comanche senseless with a slap. Cash had reason to hope that the father’s name would serve to place the son.

Striking Horse had the gray eyes of his Spanish mother, and the dark skin of his father, who was half Crow; he was a Kiowa by virtue of only a quarter of his blood. So Cash knew the Owl Prophet when he found him. He did not find him quickly, or easily, or without certain moments of great risk. But he got there.

Cash opened by giving Striking Horse his carbine, and all the ammunition he had for it, with no strings whatever attached—thereby putting himself just as far outside the law as the old Indian was.

After that, piecing out his battered Kiowa with quick-running sign language, he had told the Owl Prophet about a medicine dream he claimed to have had, in which he was shown a thing that actually happened, long ago. He had seen a Kiowa village running away from a great force of Tayhahnnas. While he watched, a baby was bounded out of a drag litter unnoticed, and so was lost; and this was what the dream had been sent to show him, for here it ended. He had even been made to know in what year this thing had happened. But something was unclear. The baby had seemed to be a Tayhahnna child, held captive by the Kiowas. Cash made out that it was necessary to his medicine to know whether this was true, or whether the lost baby had been a Kiowa child. This was what he had come to find out from the Prophet of the Owls.

Striking Horse brought out his history calendar, and gravely spread it before Cassius. This was a spiral figure, delicately drawn upon a deerskin, and filled up with tiny pictures, each representing a summer or a winter; for the Kiowas counted time by seasons, rather than years. Each spring and fall the calendar keeper added a little drawing that stood for an event. The single event served to bring the season back to him, reminding him of all other events. A number of Kiowas kept these wheels, each one differently. The Owl Prophet’s wheel went back so far it had grown bigger than a grindstone.

The old Indian told Cassius to point to the time, on the calendar wheel, when this thing happened in his dream. At first it didn’t seem as though this could be done. Counting back didn’t get anywhere, for the calendar keepers commonly left out seasons, or whole years. But Cash studied the wheel; and presently saw a winter distinguished by a speckled face. He had heard of a smallpox epidemic among the tribes during the winter before Rachel was found. So now he pointed to the summer following.

After due thought, Striking Horse decided he didn’t remember any baby being lost that summer. Must have happened in some other village than his own. He said he would ask some other calendar keeper sometime, when he ran into one. If he found out, he would send word. He put the carbine away, and offered Cash a smoke.

“I guess I was a damn fool,” Cash said. “Wasted a carbine, likely. Still…the Kiowas don’t generally lie. Except to damyankee commissions,” he qualified it, “who lie all the time. He might find out. I remembered afterward he never asked where to send word. But I judge they know how to find us, all right.”

Yes, I judge they do, Ben thought. Too dang hootin’ well. He was hiding a bitter anger, for his immediate conviction was that Cash had made out death war-rants for them all. The thin nonsense about a dream could not have fooled Striking Horse for a minute. So here was Abe Kelsey at their throats again; doubtless he had tried to tell the Indians a thousand times that the Zacharys were holding a captive Kiowa girl. Now old Kelsey was dead, and still they weren’t shed of him at all. He was even safe from them, for they could never again hope to hunt him down and kill him as a solution to anything. He put Ben in mind of John Brown, whose dead body had got into a song, and helped bring on a war the South could not win. And here we got another damned hell-raising old hooter amoldering in his grave, while his mischief goes marching on. I suppose the old son of a bitch ain’t ever going to lie still.

Small matter whether the Kiowas had believed Kelsey or not, now that Cash had run to Striking Horse and virtually confirmed the whole thing. Cash didn’t realize, Ben told himself, keeping his mouth shut and his face still until he could get hold of his anger. He had to remember that the dangers with which Cash had been tampering had been far less plain at the time Cash set off up the Wichita Trail. He didn’t know….

“I don’t know why we never thought of this before,” Cash said. “Papa could have proved long ago she hasn’t a drop of Kiowa blood, right out of those Kiowa history calendars. Easier then than now.”

Ben saw, then, what had blinded Cassius to his mistake. Their mother’s wishful assumption that Rachel was of pure blood had stood in Cash’s mind as an unquestioned truth, without alternative, since before he could remember. Only Ben knew why his father had never gone to the Kiowas for an answer.

William Zachary had believed Rachel was a Kiowa child. Perhaps, for all Ben knew, he had known it for certain.

No use to tell Cash that now. “You did a brave thing,” was all Ben said, at last.

But nothing about Striking Horse, or the missing eight days, came up to mar the triumph of Cash’s return, that first day.