Chapter Thirty

After Ben was gone, the summer ran on; and it was turning into one of the driest they had known since they had been on the Dancing Bird. The grass cured on the stem before it was halfway up, and the range, heavily overstocked the year before, was overgrazed and haunted by dust devils, wherever the livestock used. Trail men who drive late would bust, as most had busted, the last three years in a row.

This year the things that had made Rachel’s childhood happy didn’t seem to interest her any more.

Other years she had trapped pets, often collecting a regular zoo of them. Once she had raised an elf owl, no bigger than a sparrow when it was full-grown. Another time she had spoon-fed a nest of ravens until they flew. For several years one or another of them had come back, from time to time, to squawk for handouts around the stoop, but fewer appeared each year, until no more came home. She had tamed any number of deer mice, and jumping mice. These were magical little creatures, with delicate oversized ears that the sun shone through. If one of them tried to hide in the grass, with no dark place to crawl into, all you could see of it was those sun-shot ears, like two glowing pink flower petals, all alone. Once there had been a kangaroo rat that Ben had caught for her somewhere in the dry, a bouncy, tassel-tailed bit of fluff with no fear of people whatever.

Most exciting, and at the same time most disappointing, had been a coyote pup. Cash had dug it out for her before its eyes were open, and until it was nearly grown it had seemed to be turning into a dog. But it had ended by snapping at her whenever she touched it, and had finally run away. A few times afterward she had seen it sitting on a hummock to watch her from a long way off, but it had never come home again, or answered her call.

But this year what she remembered best was how much work pets make. Only children had much fun, she guessed, and she wasn’t a child any more. Hadn’t been for a long time. She dug up extra tasks for herself, which in other years she had delayed as long as she could. She boiled down antelope blood to a stickum, and made a couple of quarts of percussion caps. She set up the big outside kettles, to begin the annual soap boiling and candle making.

She was trying to forget another task that she knew she must someday undertake. No one had assigned it to her; indeed, she would be prevented if she were found out. Her restless industry was an attempt at escape, for she dreaded this thing, and even saw reason for physical fear. But she could not drive it from the back of her mind. The five hands who were always loafing at home, a different combination every day, were a help in putting off the job she feared. They played poker endlessly, on a blanket laid in the dust by the creek, shifting position with the shade; some of them followed her with their eyes whenever she was in sight. These, with either Cash or Andy always around, gave her an excuse for believing she could not slip away. But her time was running out. July passed, and they were into August; she knew Ben might already be on his way home.

Then the grasshoppers came.

When the first great cloud of them appeared in the north, Rachel didn’t know what they were. They had heard of northern Texas being devastated by them in ’68, but they had not amounted to anything on the San Saba. At first she mistook the strange low darkness on the horizon for a dust storm, and she watched for twisters. The billions of grasshoppers rolled swiftly across the grassland, and only shreds and fibers were left where they touched. The cotton-woods along the Dancing Bird turned to skeletons, with only chewed tags and remnants of leaves left on the branches. The day they were thickest they made it impossible to walk outside. They covered you, and got down your neck, and tangled their spiny legs in your hair. You could not set foot to the ground without crushing them, or lay a hand upon anything without snatching it back from a bristly, kicking handful of them.

It was the grasshoppers that gave Rachel a chance to get away. When they had passed, the cicadas, which everybody called locusts, resumed their metallic shrilling in the bare cottonwoods—what on earth did they find to eat? But the cattle were left standing in helpless bunches upon the stripped land; and the prairie moaned night and day with their bawling. Cash worked as though possessed.

He sent riders in seven directions, hunting for belts and pockets of grass the grasshoppers might have missed. When these were found, the cows had to be moved to them, with Jake Rountree on hand to see that the Rawlins cattle got an even break.

Zeb Rawlins himself was in Fort Worth, seeking a deal with somebody to put together a corrida, with which he wanted Jude to drive a herd of stockers to Wichita with the first cool weather. Jude was the drawback, there; Zeb was not having an easy time finding the men he had to have. But if word went down to him that he was coming out on the short end at home, he might be able to flood the Dancing Bird with gun-toting riders, and take over the whole range.

Cash still came in at night, or sent Andy, with three or four of their crack shots, but only a couple of hands were left home to sleep away the days. They had almost, but perhaps not quite, come into the first days of their next Kiowa Moon.

“One day’s work more,” Cash kept saying, “and we’ll have done what we could.” But at night there would again be just one day’s work more, still ahead.

No excuse was left. Rachel could get away now, and must, if she was ever going to. Early one morning, when the locusts were already grinding away in the heat of sun-up, Rachel saddled a fast pony, and got away unnoticed.

She pointed downstream, and to the east, toward the Rawlinses.

She had told herself she was going there to try to make peace with Hagar. The men were feisty enough, but there was a bare chance that they would draw back from a war if Hagar could be made friendly again. Her chance of getting through to Hagar was obviously not much, but if there was any chance at all she could not forgive herself, ever, if she did not take it.

Or so she had told herself, and told herself again as she rode. Something else in the back of her mind was still unrecognizable in shadows; she would not look at it, or let it out into the light. So well had she suppressed it that she could not have named what it was, even if she had dared to try.

Half a dozen horses shuffled themselves in he Rawlins saddle corral, restless in the morning sun. They watched her approach, and whinnied at her pony, so that she was announced from a long way off. Nothing else stirred around the Rawlins place; the cabin was closed up, tight-shuttered against the morning heat, and the chimney was smokeless. Except for the corralled horses, the place might have been deserted for a long time.

Rachel did not tie. When she had dismounted she led her pony to the door, keeping hold of him, for she was frightened now, more so with every step that she advanced. At the door she raised her knuckles to rap, but still hesitated, all but unable to face the ordeal she had laid out for herself. What, after all, could she possibly say?

She never knocked. The door was suddenly snatched open in front of her, and Hagar was standing there, glaring at her with a total hostility. The sunlight was pitiless upon the deep lines and rough-nesses of her face, and it was a death’s-head face.