The Unforgiven
Authors: Alan LeMay
Alan LeMay
LEISURE BOOKS 
NEW YORK CITY
Cassius raised his carbine to the loophole and put a bullet close past Lost Bird’s ear. The blackpowder smell was plain in the room as he reloaded. Outside, the gray war pony quivered, but did not move its feet. Lost Bird was smiling, and the smile expressed more contempt than he could have shown in any other way.
“You shoot well,” his hands said. “You do not shoot to hit. You hit me, nobody in your house will see the sun again.”
Rachel startled Cash by speaking almost in his ear. “This is no good,” she said.
“You get back where I put you!” he ordered her.
“There isn’t going to be any fight,” she said. “Let me by. I understood what he said, this time.”
“Never mind them damned Indian lies! You’re going to—“
“He’s telling the truth. I’ve known all about it for a long time. I’m going to end all this trouble now…”
Dancing Bird River was the Zachary family’s name for a little run of live water ten miles below the Red, in the unsettled country west of the Wichita. Their soddy was cut into a slope beside it, in the last miles before the deep-grass petered out into the flinty apron of the cap rock. Some sketchy pole corrals marked this place as a cattle stand, but the house itself hardly showed. Its forward walls were built of the same mud and grass-roots into which it was dug, and so was its roof, which had a good stand of feed. It squatted low and lonely, backed like a badger into the hill; and its nearest neighbor was eighteen miles away.
Inside this hole in the ground, late in the afternoon of March 15, 1874, a dark-haired girl of seventeen was getting ready to put supper on. Her name was Rachel Zachary.
Her brothers had saddled before daylight, and had been gone ever since; but through most of this day, Rachel and her mother had found their absence a relief. The soddy was not a cramped one, as soddies went. The slit of a bedroom Rachel shared with her mother wasn’t much, but the main room was big for a dugout, even with bunks for the three boys filling one end. And they worked doggedly at keeping things picked up. “Put away one thing, put away all,” was the first rule of life, indoors. Yet with five people in one room and a fraction, the paraphernalia of even the simplest living hung from the beams, dripped from the walls, and kept the place forever cluttered. They were seldom weather-bound; the boys rode longest when the weather was worst. But on days when they did stay in, the place soon seemed packed with people.
High above the prairie a mat of black rainless clouds moved steadily across the world in a seemingly inexhaustible supply, dimming the afternoon to a twilight that would merge imperceptibly with the early dark. Under this overcast a wind from the north blew tirelessly, as it had for many days. Sometimes it rose briefly to the fury of a full norther, sending hundred-foot sand-devils spinning across the Red into Texas; but mostly it just blew, hard and monotonously, hour after hour, day in and day out, until silence became unrememberable.
That wind might have come a thousand miles, Rachel knew, without finding many people in its path to be bothered by it. Up in Indian Territory, along the tributaries of the Washita, it must be ripping at some hundreds of buffalo-hide lodges, sheltering such of the Wild Tribes as were insolent enough to be wintering on Agency rations. The mile-long villages of those hostiles could have mounted enough warriors to engulf a brigade, yet made no more impression upon the vast emptiness of the Territory than a dribbled pinch or two of sand. Surely the wind-moan in the cottonwoods along the Dancing Bird River must have been the lonesomest sound on earth.
About midafternoon Mama had gone to their bedroom for a nap. The partition was no strung-up horse blanket, such as was common to soddies, but a decently solid turf wall, plastered with homeburnt lime. Once the heavy door had closed, Rachel was alone with the sound of the wind. She didn’t mind that; at least, not for a while. Rachel Zachary was a shy, thin girl, lightly boned and not very big, but with considerable wire built into her by the kind of places in which she had been raised. The Zacharys had shifted ground a good deal, though not all of them understood why, always toward untamed land. Now, though, they had stuck it out in this one remote soddy for going on five years—more nearly a third, than a quarter, of Rachel’s entire life. While she could not help knowing that this was a desolate and sometimes menacing place in which to live, she seldom thought about it any more.
This year had begun with high hopes. Just lately, in January, Texas had got hold of its own government at last, for the first time since the War. Now the Rangers would come back, and the Border Battalions, and settlers would get some help in their ever-lasting defense against the Wild Tribes. At the same time, the beef market at Wichita was winding up to boom again, after a series of collapses that had left the Zacharys about as cattle-poor as they could stand. They were going to be rich, like as not—soon, this year, this very summer.
Only, first they must get through this deadly, dragging time of waiting, while winter held on, and on, as if spring were never coming back to the world again. Ben, Rachel’s oldest brother, had ridden down the Trinity a month ago to look for trail hands. He should get back any day now, with a corrida of at least twenty men—thirty, if he could find them—and immediately all this dull marking of time would be over. There would be a great swarming of men and horses, and hard-pressing action every day, as their first huge herd of the year was made up for the drive to Wichita.
Ben was twenty-four, old enough to seem at the full power of maturity from the standpoint of seventeen. He had been head of the family since he was twenty, when they had lost their father in the roily waters of a cattle crossing, far to the north. He was their rock of strength, upon whom they leaned in every situation of doubt. Perhaps they all felt at loose ends when Ben was gone. Certainly he could take care of himself anywhere on the frontier if anybody could—even in a wolf-howl of a town of three or four hundred people, like Fort Worth. Yet sometimes Rachel’s throat hurt as her thought skirted the possibility that they might never see him again, for this could happen out here, as Papa had already proved. Was he overdue? Well—not really; not quite yet.
She knocked the ash off the wood coals in the fireplace, and set on the three-legged skillet they called a spider. Then she looked at the clock on the mantel beam. It was one of the few truly nice things they had, with a little ship rocking away on painted waves where the pendulum might be expected.
It said exactly eleven minutes of four. She remem-bered that hour all the rest of her life.
She had been fooled by the unnaturally early dusk; it was still too early to start cooking anything. She set the spider off the coals, and went to one of their two real windows. These, even more than the clock, were their special pride, for they had eighteen panes of real glass apiece. They looked south across the Dancing Bird, so Rachel had to lean her temple against a cold pane to look eastward, past the corrals and downstream. She was hoping, for about the thousandth time, to sight a distant disturbance that would be Ben, at the head of his grand corrida.
Maybe he’s remembered to fetch me some pretty anything-he-could-get. To make just one nice dress
…. She knew perfectly well he had remembered; he always remembered, though often he might be prevented. The shakier question was what it would look like. Men didn’t know anything about yard goods. With the best intentions in the world, he might bring her something perfectly awful. In which case she would make it up and wear it anyway—for years, likely—rather than see him chagrined, after he had tried.
He wasn’t coming of course. Men never did come while their women watched for them. Only when least expected. But they always watched, nevertheless, so now Rachel went to their north lookout, to see if Cassius and Andy were riding in. The lookout was no more than a tiny-paned tunnel through the sod wall. It was set high, and though Cash could stand flat-footed to fire through it, and Ben might even have to stoop a little, Rachel had to stand on a box to see out. This brought her eyes only a few inches above the ground at the back. Yet this worm’s-eye view commanded a surprising reach of prairie, for the land fell away behind the soddy, to rise again in swells and gentle ridges rolling northward to the end of sight.
Most of the time the prairie was worth looking at, for it changed constantly, like the sea, to which so many have compared it. People thought of the deep-grass as brown, but usually it looked almost anything else—purple, or gold, or red, or any kind of blue; for a little while each year, as spring came on, it even looked green. Often, when cloud shadows crossed the long swells, the whole prairie stirred, and seemed to mold and flow, as if it breathed. But nothing like that was to be seen out there now. The land lay winter-defeated, lightless and without color. Out of those dead spaces her brothers would presently come jogging. But she could not see them yet.
Behind Rachel the shadows were growing in the corners, crawling toward the banked embers on the hearth. They brought a faint, penetrating chill, felt more in the heart than in the fingers of the skin, as if the earth itself were dying, instead of just this one bleak day between the winter and spring. And now for once, Rachel became strangely aware of the awful emptiness of this far lost prairie where they lived; and a loneliness took hold of her, with a hollow sinking of the heart. Afterward she came to believe that she had recognized this at once for a premonition of something unknown and dreadful already beginning to happen to them as this daylight failed. But it wasn’t true, for no clear thought of any kind came to her, then.
Just as she turned away from the lookout, something out there changed, and she looked again without knowing what she had seen. The first ridge was scarcely a furlong off, and they kept its crest burned off, to deprive horse-thieving enemies of cover commanding the house. On this burn had appeared a dark, narrow object, about three feet high. It looked a little like a scorched rock; only, it had never been there before. She tried to see it better by looking beside it, instead of straight at it; she looked away and glanced back; she moved her head in circles, as an owl does, when it is trying to give shape to something unknown. “What
is
that?” she whispered; and her whisper was lost in the sound of the wind.
Now the object moved, and the mystery cleared, but without reassurance. She had been looking at the upper half of a man, whose horse was hidden by the swell of ground. The oddly behaving visitor now pushed onto the crest of the burn, and stopped again. Even at an eighth of a mile, Rachel could judge that there stood about the sorriest horse she had ever seen in her life; and somehow she knew that the rider was old too, and in all ways as poorly as his horse. She supposed he would ride on in when he had looked them over enough to suit him, and usually she would have welcomed any such diversion. But this time she felt an unaccountable dread, almost a horror, of his coming nearer.
He came no nearer, then. She watched him as long as he was there, yet somehow she never saw him leave. He was there, and then he was gone. Rachel whipped on a coat, meaning to saddle a pony and ride that ridge. She saw it as her bounden duty to keep an eye on the fellow, and see what he was up to, for his actions had no reason unless he meant them harm. At the door she took the Sharp & Hankins carbine from its pegs, and clashed open its sliding barrel, to load. Then she stopped, knowing that she was not going out there, could not go out there. A nameless fear held her powerless to leave the house.
She heard her mother moving about in their bedroom. Soundlessly she eased the sliding barrel back into its seat, and returned the Sharp & Hankins to its pegs. She was building up the fire by the time Matthilda Zachary appeared, misty-eyed and yawny from her nap. “Did I hear a sound?” she inquired vaguely.
Rachel hesitated. Often Matthilda was so absentminded she missed half you said, but she was capable of sharp flashes of observation, too, all unexpected. She came up with one now. “Thought I heard you breech the Sharp & Hankins,” she said.
They spoke with the trailing double vowels of the cotton lowlands, from which most of the early Texans had come. Matthilda was strict with her children about those lapses she regarded as “po’ white”; but her own soft speech made the carbine a “Shahup ‘n’ Hay-’nkins.”
Rachel was silent a moment more, then blurted it out. “There’s something spooky going on out there! Back of the north ridge.” She saw she had her mother’s startled attention. “Some awful old longhair—he’s been watching us. Sitting the dread-fulest old horse, out on the burn…” She put a lot more to it, about how she came to look, and all, but actually she hadn’t seen much more.
“Poor old man,” Mama said.
“What?”
She had not conveyed one speck, evidently, of her lonely dread.
“Some old hunter, doubtless; been alone so long he was likely too shy to come in. No matter how much he wanted. What a shame! We’d have fed him, so gladly, if only he’d known.”
“Yes, and filled the house with smells,” Rachel said sharply. “And fleas, too! I bet he’s been with every fat old squaw that never heard of soap between here and—”
“Rachel! I won’t have you speaking so unkindly!”
Rachel said, “Well, I think he’s harmful to us,” and was disturbed to hear a tremor in her own voice.
“Touch of cabin fever,” her mother said, gently deprecating. Cabin fever was their name for the sensitive, weepy mood that sometimes came on prairie women in the weeks while spring held off. It came from being shut in, hearing too few voices repeating the same dull things for too long. The tiniest things became magnified into horrid slights and dangers, until you were downright unlivable. And the last thing you wanted to hear was that your troubles were imaginary—especially if you knew it to be true.
Mama said with unwelcome sympathy, “I think this waiting time, between the false spring and the green-up, is just the very meanest time of the whole year.” She dipped a pan of cold water from the barrel at the door, freshened her face at the wash shelf, and emptied the pan into the slop pail that served as plumbing. She polished the pan to a tinny shine with a clean flour sack before hanging it up. At the fireplace she pulled the teakettle forward on the hob, so that the boys would have warm water when they came in.
Rachel bided her time in a sulk, confident of getting more of a hooraw out of her brothers. They jogged in pretty late, and took a while shoveling nubbin corn to a dozen winter horses that had come in to be fed. The women never knew when to have supper hot, having no way of telling how long the boys would fool around on chores like that. Matthilda set out candles, and as she lighted them with a fat-wood splinter, her hair caught their yellow glow in its silver mist. Matthilda’s hair had been white since she was thirty, nearly twenty years ago. Nobody remembered when her hair was any other color, except after she washed it, when it was blue. But they remembered when she had been light and bouncy of step, with quick ungnarled hands, and they still saw her that way, for the changes in these things had come slowly, unseen.
