As the yellow candlelight came up, the air outside seemed to turn a darker and more icy gray. Rachel closed the heavy shutters, as they must always do when they made a light inside. The north lookout was now a lightless eye, staring in at them. Rachel stepped onto the chest to pull shut its slide, and a shiver crossed her shoulders. Somebody stepped over my grave, she thought. It was what they said when they shivered without feeling cold. She had half expected to find a weird ancient face looking in from close outside. “What are they doing out there?” she complained, her patience dwindling.
But when her brothers finally came in, their reaction to her story was just as big a letdown as her mother’s had been. She built it up all she could, this time, but Cassius was washing and spluttering, and Andy was noisily trying to straighten a spur, all the way through.
“I don’t know what’s got into this soap,” Cassius said when she slowed up. “Bites like a black-foot weasel.”
“Same soap,” his mother told him. “You’ve chapped your hands again. Those buck gloves fend nothing but rope burns. You should have worn your mittens, like I said.”
“Cash! Did you by any chance,” Rachel demanded, “hear one word I said?”
“Oh, sure. Sounds a little like some old joker stands in need of horse flesh. Andy, remind yourself to go put up the bars. So’s we’ll know where at to start tracking from, come morning.”
Rachel could have killed him. Cassius Zachary, twenty-one, was slim, black-haired, and was starting a mustache, not long enough to twist, yet, but sharply trimmed. He did nearly everything well, and carried himself as if he knew it. Ben often said Cassius had most of the brains in the family, and sometimes this seemed to be true. Like the easy way he picked up languages. Lots of people spoke Spanish, of a sort, and some even a dribble of Comanche; but Cassius could handle the weird Kiowa tongue, which had seventy-four vowels, besides a lot of clicks and nasals, and had to be sung. Of course, Ben spoke it, too, but only because he had labored and sweat over it. Not Cassius! He had heard it, hadn’t he? So he knew it. Naturally. Nothing to it. Matthilda said he had learned to read when he was three. And hadn’t cracked a book since, Ben sometimes added. Cassius liked raising hell and cattle. Didn’t want to know anything else.
And he could come up just a little bit too happy-go-lucky for any use, Rachel was thinking now.
But Andy, by his want of sense, went back on her worst of all. He was not yet sixteen, but already tall, and moved well, so that strangers must have thought him older. As small children he and Rachel had stood together against a world of adults, consoling each other when wronged and left out of things. Rachel had always liked to think she had raised Andy herself, almost single-handed, so that he was virtually her own little child. Only, there wasn’t much left of that illusion any more. He was out-growing her, getting away from her; he could ride horses she could not ride, and go places she could not go, disappearing into the vast unknown world of men. All this made him the more exasperating when he came up with something stupid, and he was an expert at it. So now he looked as owlish as he ever had at eight years old.
“Don’t you know what that was you saw? That—” he made it weighty—“was the Ghost of the Bandit!”
This sober idiocy left Rachel speechless, so Cassius took it up. “Ghost? In all this wind? He’d blow away.”
“What about the Skeleton in Spanish Armor, down on Devil’s River? He don’t blow away.”
Cassius pretended uncertainty. “Well—no; but—you take all that ironware he’s got up in—”
“How about that whole platoon of spooks, down on Phantom Hill? Seen time and again, drilling in line!”
“I know, but is it a good straight line? Weather regardless?”
“It’s perfect,” said Andy stoutly.
Most of the feel of danger had left since the men came in. But they had spoiled her story, and Rachel was hurt. One of the little sadnesses that women endured out here in the lonelies was that of never having anything to tell their menfolk when they came home. If the first potato had sprouted in the root cellar, or a jumping mouse had eaten out of Rachel’s hand, that was news to be treasured, told to each separately, and discussed at length. Mostly there was nothing at all. Quite a few pronghorns came in sight of the house, of course, and blacktail deer; often they saw a coyote, sometimes a lobo. But the men saw such things all the time. You couldn’t interest them with anything short of a bear. And tonight, when for once Rachel had been full of a story to tell them, they wouldn’t listen.
She drew into herself, and shut up. Next evening, as twilight closed off another dark, windy day, she felt haunted for a little while, and stole a few glances at the north ridge, to see if the sinister figure would reappear. Nothing happened, though, for two days more.
Then, at the end of the third day, the stranger came again.
Chapter Two
Matthilda saw him first. This was hardly to be expected, for her eyes were far from the best in the house. One of the things that made Matthilda look younger than she was, lively and interested always, was her bright wide-eyed gaze, which may well have been the result of trying hard to see. On this night, though, she had not far to look. She had taken her sewing basket to a south window, and as her hands worked she kept glancing at the prairie across Dancing Bird River, in hope of seeing Ben coming in. She was very often there. It seemed to Rachel that Ben had hardly got out of sight before Mama had started watching for him.
Rachel was in the root cellar, a sort of pit they had dug as an afterthought into the hill behind. It went down four feet below the level of the floor, and could be got into, awkwardly, through a hole at the base of the wall, behind a wooden slide. Fumbling down there in the dark, Rachel had filled her apron with potatoes, when she heard her mother gasp. Immediately wood clattered on wood as a chair went over; and Rachel bumped her head as she came scrambling out. Matthilda stood at the window, so motionless that she looked rigid, staring at something outside. Rachel cried out, “Mama!” and the potatoes bumped across the floor as she went to her mother.
Just outside, no more than two long steps from the window, sat a strange-looking rider; and Rachel knew at once that this was the man she had seen on the ridge. The startling thing was the concentration with which he leaned from the saddle to peer in. Rachel saw a colorless straggle of beard, some stringy long hair flying loose from under a pulpy wool hat, and an Indian-trade kind of rifle too long for a saddle boot, carried across the withers. And the horse—how could so old a horse be living, let alone worked? Age had turned it a flea-bit white, showing patches of black hide, and scabs of mange. The lip dangled slack below long outthrust teeth, and the unseeing eyes had the staring look of pain peculiar to animals of enormous age. Not a muscle stirred in horse or man, yet the wind made a flicker of movement all over them—a small flying of lank hair and wispy mane, a shimmer of tatters.
The sky was full of mud again, and what little light it had left was behind the horseman, so that he sat in a darkness of his own. A man without a face, except for that wind-wavered suggestion of a beard. And yet, even in that first moment of shock—was there something familiar about him? This frightened instant had a feeling of being relived, as if the same thing had happened someplace else, long ago.
“Pull back,” Rachel whispered. “Mama—come away!”
Matthilda said uncertainly, “Can he—can he see us?”