Chapter Forty-five

Nine of the range crew came in soon after daylight. They had lost the cook, whom the Kiowas had caught in his overturned wagon. And they thought they had had a pretty bad time, until they saw what had happened here. The two men who had gone missing when they went to hunt for Rachel had not been seen again. And nobody knew where Cash was.

They moved both Andy and Rachel to improvised beds in the saddle shed, and strapped Andy down to dress the wreckage of his arm. Ben himself bathed Rachel, and made her as comfortable as he could. Sometimes, for a few moments, she came half awake; she knew Ben then, but said very little. She knew that Matthilda was dead, and that they had forted up, and Andy had been hurt. For the present she didn’t seem to remember much more, and Ben was glad for that. He poured soup into her when he could, and she slept.

Between stages of delirium, Andy was able to tell Ben what had happened here, but only up to a point. He remembered Rachel’s firing through the root cellar slide, but he didn’t know what had overturned the walnut secretary, or what had happened in the fireplace—or maybe the chimney; or what had busted the water barrel. He thought that after he was wounded he had fired at something, from where he lay—maybe several times. And he knew a gun had continued to let off near him, from as far back as he could remember. He had the impression that he had lain there many days.

Late in the morning, shortly after they buried Matthilda, a rider from the Rawlinses brought word that Cash had been found, and he was dead. But he didn’t seem to know anything more about it, and rode away without dismounting. They learned nothing else, until Georgia Rawlins rode in at noon.

She said somberly, “I’m glad to see you here, Ben.” Her face looked bloodless under her tan, and very drawn; somehow harder, around the mouth and eyes. She made Ben walk out to the creek with her, where they could talk. “I sent a man. Did he get here? We found Cash.”

He nodded.

She went on in a lifeless monotone, and told him of the night she had spent here, describing that first night’s fight as a “brush.” After Cash rode her home or pretty near, he seemingly had lined out to fetch his crew in. But after the Kiowas cut him off, she believed, he must have tried to fight his way home. The signs appeared to show that he had fought a long way from where he was hit, and his horse killed, to where he had ended. Georgia herself had gone out to identify him for certain. She had sewed him into a wagon sheet; and they had buried him on the hill-side above the place where he fell.

“Ben, can it be, that was only day before yesterday, he was alive!” Her face crinkled up, and the tears came. “I loved him, Ben. I was going to marry him, soon as we could tell you. It was always him, I guess, in spite of all different I knew I should do. It can’t ever be no other man.”

She leaned against him, much as she would have leaned against a gentle horse; and her tears wet his shirt. Her words came muffled. “You’re the better man. You’re a better man than Cash ever could have been. But somehow, nothing like that seemed to matter….”

She stood back, and dried her tears. “You want me to look at Andy’s arm?”

They walked back toward the saddle shed. Ben had sent a rider to bring a surgeon from Fort Richardson, but he might have to go all the way to Fort Worth. Might be days. If he didn’t get here in time, Ben would have to take off the arm himself, or they’d lose Andy, next. “Will you help me, Georgia?”

“I’ll help you all I can. Always.”