She spoke softly. “Andy.”
He had been chipping with a crowbar at the mud sides of the port at the other end of the room, trying to give it a wider field of fire. His bare feet were silent on the scrubbed planking as he came to her, but the floor carried his tread, so that she knew when he was beside her without looking up.
“Don’t even breathe on this,” she said, and made room for him. “But quick! Look where I’m sighted.”
He spraddle-armed over the gun, glancing along the side of the barrel to place the scopes tight field, before putting his right eye to the sight. Rachel saw his left eye focus and stare blankly, trying to see through the wall. “That wad of leaves is a bust-off branch,” she explained, hiding her nervousness.
“It’s lying on that big alamo root, where the bank cuts under. See, where the cross-hairs mark?”
She waited, then, while Andy looked for a long time through the scope. From the grasshopper-stripped cottonwoods along the creek came the zinging of the locusts—winding, winding, metallic and tireless, the voice of the dry heat.
“The cross-hairs,” she jogged him.
He spoke absently, as if his mind were out by the creek, but he didn’t seem to be seeing much. “She won’t hit there, you realize. Ben’s got her sighted in at four hundred yards; God knows why. She’ll overcarry more’n a foot.”
“I know all that!” She would never handle a gun with the ease of daily use, as Andy did, but she remembered things better, and now she was losing patience. “Do you see it or not?”
“See what?”
“An eye.”
He tensed, but in another moment rolled clear of the gun and sat up. “Nothing there now. Sun shows through.”
She looked, and it was true. Only a glimpse of bright sand showed at the cross-hairs, where before had been a lightless patch, obscured by close-framing leaves, but presently resolving into part of a dark face. She thought Andy was going to ask her if she was sure of what she had seen, and she was ready to snap at him. But he raised no question, so she backed up quite humbly, of her own accord. “Sometimes, you look at a thing too hard, for too long, it begins to look like something else. Like, maybe a bird was sitting there…”
Andy did not answer. He sat slackly, his eyes vacant upon the floor. “It’s changed,” he said at last.
Rachel knew without asking that this referred to nothing outside. Through their silence, under the spiraling zing of the locusts, they were both hearing again their mother’s struggle for breath. Something was worsening. The breathing was louder, and a flat sound had come into it, expressionless and not entirely human, like the impersonal creaking of a door. Andy raised his eyes, and gathered himself uncertainly, as if he would go to Matthilda; but Rachel moved her head faintly, and he settled back.
“It couldn’t just fall there,” Andy said, and again her thought followed his, this time back to the mystery by the creek. “Our trees don’t have any leaves, since the grasshoppers was here. That’s a pulled-up greasebush, brought from someplace. And it wasn’t there early on. It’s never been there before. So—I guess you know what it has to be.”
She knew, all right. But she just sat looking at Andy, her eyes widening a little, and seeming to darken. Her mind was at a balk, weaving like a horse that tries to refuse an ugly jump. She did not want to accept the only explanation there could be, or to believe she had really seen what she knew she had seen.
“That’s a blind.” Andy said. He spoke slowly, and he sounded tired, rather than under strain. He seemed to be feeling his way, as if everything that would happen here and everything they must do were parts of a pattern worked out somewhere long ago, so that nothing was left for them but to study out what it was. “They’ve put it there to spy on us from, without letting on.”
Rachel’s face came alive as her composure broke, and her words were breathless. “Then they’re out there—all around us! Oh, Andy—” She broke off, stopped by her brother’s quick glance of surprise, of appraisal. Perhaps a very great compliment to her was behind his surprise that she could falter, but now she was shamed by it, and made to get hold of herself. “They’re watching us,” she said more evenly. “Now. They’ve come back.”
“Beginning to, anyway. Might be they’re kind of sifting back, by ones and fews.”
Rachel hitched herself nearer the big gun; her movements were jerky, and her hands were shaking as she stretched them to the weapon. “I’ll sight her down—fix that overshoot—” Andy would be the one to fire, when the time came, because of this gun’s heavy kick. “He’s bound to fill the sights again, soon or late.”
“Wait.” Andy had gone back to thinking, methodically, carefully, wary of hurrying into some panicky mistake. These spells of stillness were new to him, and Rachel was not quite sure what they meant. He didn’t look as though he were thinking. More as if he might be going to sleep. “I question,” he said finally, “if it’s a real good idea. Maybe they’ll bide their time, a spell, if we don’t seem to know they’re there. And time’s what we need. Cash is the one we have to make know.”
They suspected, in spite of his taciturnity, that Cash meant to fetch home his crew, and maybe even his wagon—by what miracle of hard riding they could only imagine. But eleven men would melt to nothing in a hurry, if they came high-looping into an ambush. Rachel wanted to try making a smoke. In this still air, even a thread of smoke would rise tall and straight into the sky; it would be seen from far away. They could smudge it with wet rags and grease drippings, and soak a blanket for sending the smoke up in puffs, lest it be mistaken for a cooking fire gone out of hand. What they had no way to figure, Andy objected, was how their brother would take it. “Cash sets no store by any size-up us young’ns are liable to make.” He said it without bitterness. He judged Cash would as lief charge in headlong as lay back; he had been that way all his life. Anyway, by the time they got through fooling with a smudge and a blanket, the place would be smoked in fit to blunt an ax, and hotter than hell’s back oven besides. Which hardly seemed right, with Mama in the shape she was in.
They finally decided that the only signal Cash could not very well misread would be a sound of fighting. They would have to fire in bursts, to make it sound real, or it would have the failing of any other kind of signal. Two shots, nearly together, then one, at the space of a reload; then wait a while to save ammunition, and run it off backwards. They had not started their clock again, lest its loud tick interfere with listening. But they had a little minute glass they had made, for boiling an egg when they had an egg; its sand was measured to run through in three minutes. Guessing at how far downstream their guns could be heard, they thought they could make do with one burst to every three turns of the glass.
For their first burst they used a Sharp’s Fifty, and a cap-and-ball Walker. Then Rachel watched the sand dribble through the minute glass while Andy made the round of the lookouts, to see if the besiegers had reacted. The Kiowas should be able to see that the shots from the house were going wild, as if nobody knew anything, but you could never be sure.
They went on with this for fourteen turns of the minute glass. The sun would set in an hour more. Out on the cottonwood root by the creek the up-rooted greasebush still lay, its leaves curled now by the heat; but the telescope sight had picked up no other sign that any ememy was near. Rachel was worring about the wasted ammunition.
“It’s terrible, how fast the powder burns away. We’re doing an awful thing, here, if it turns out we’re wrong.”