Chapter Forty-four

Ben had ridden late and started early. His tired horse had gone low-headed, and its running walk had slowed; though the bullion mule, more lightly laden now, jogged steadily on his quarter. The sun was going down as he came in sight of home approaching from the south, across the Dancing Bird.

From a long way out, as he crossed a far rise, he saw that the chimney showed no least haze of smoke beyond the bare trees; and suddenly he knew that something was very wrong. He stopped a moment; then threw away the mule’s lead, pulled his carbine from its boot, and went on at as hard a run as his horse had left. Behind the last ridge he stepped down, dropping the reins, and ran forward to the crest on foot. And there he stood for many minutes, looking at the soddy from across the Dancing Bird, at two hundred and fifty yards.

The door of the soddy still stood, but the windows were black empty holes, shutterless, with only a few splinters of framing where the glass had been. A misshapen dead horse, bloating in the summer heat, lay on the roof, its position queerly distorted, as if it were partly buried in the roof itself. The red horizontal light of the sunset struck across the house front, bringing out sharply some hundreds of pock holes, where bullets had blasted cone-shaped craters, big as a man’s hand, out of the dry mud. The door of the saddle shed was torn out. That was about all there was to see. But the empty corrals left this place more still than it had ever been, since first anyone came here; not even a bird sailed or whistled, anywhere along this sector of the Dancing Bird. No place Ben had ever seen, not even No Hope, had ever looked more dead.

His carbine slid from his fingers into the dust; if he had been aware of it he would not have cared, or supposed he needed it any more. He walked to the creek, neither quickly nor slowly, but only plodding heavily, one foot and then the other. Not even his sick dread of what he must face within those walls could matter to him now. He reached the creek bed, dropped into it, and waded the mucky shallows to climb the cut-bank. Some broad bloodstains, clotted but blackening, marked the slope; but he walked across them unheeding, moving steadily uphill to the house. He was within ten yards when a strange, unnatural sound from within the dark soddy made him falter. What he heard, he knew as he came nearer, was someone moaning and muttering some sort of gibberish, in a voice he did not know. It sounded as much like Kiowa as anything else. He drew his long-barreled Colt, and stepped over a window sill, into the soddy; and there he stopped.

He was standing in a shambles. Great blood pools, some still clotting and sticky-looking, most dried and darkening, spread under both windows, over a great area in the middle of the room, and even showed where a flow had run out of the fireplace, across the hearth, and onto the floor. The carved secretary was lying on its face, the only whole piece of furniture in the room. Broken glass, and a great litter of shattered wood was everywhere, from splintered shutters and furniture put to the ax in efforts at repair; the table was a pile of drift. Three walls, but especially the back wall, were covered with the same bullet craters that pocked the front wall outside. A leg of the dead horse hung down in the middle of the room from a great sag in the broken roof. The clock was bullet-smashed, the water barrel was split and overturned. No greater havoc could have been expected if a regiment had fought here for a week.

The voice Ben had not recognized was Andy’s, where he lay half out of his bunk in a fever delirium; and he was begging for water. He moved feebly and aimlessly in a kind of writhing, and his eyes saw nothing.

Rachel stood in the shadows at the far end of the room, a carbine in her hands; and she looked so like a spook Ben hardly recognized her. Her eyes stared at him like dead eyes, out of black hollows. One side of her mouth was puffed enormously; her nose was skinned, and perhaps broken. Blood smeared from her mouth and nose was crusted all over one side of her face, and what remained of her dress was stiff with great dark stains.

He failed to speak, on his first effort. On the second try he said, “It’s over, Rachel. Now everything’s going to be all right.”

She stood the carbine on its butt, out in the middle of the floor, as if she were leaning it against an invisible wall. It balanced a moment, then rattled on the planks as she turned away. She stumbled to the bedroom door, and got it open. She almost reached the bed, but struck its edge as she fell; and lay face downward on the floor.

He picked her up, and started to put her on her bed; but he saw the sheeted corpse in the other bed, so carried her away. At the other end of the soddy he found his own bunk smoothly made, untouched in all that chaos. He stripped off the ruins of Rachel’s dress, and put her poor dirty little body between the clean sheets, before he went to Andy.