The Unforgiven (10 page)

Thunderstorms could spook a herd into stampede after stampede, or a herd could go “spoiled” of its own accord, and run four nights a week. What with the time it took to gather, after a run, and the exhausted state of the cattle, the boss might get to thinking he lived on the trail now, making one drive his lifelong work. And the worse the conditions, the more you needed a corrida of fast, game horsemen who knew how to handle this wildhorn Texican stock. You never did have enough men like that.

After the first week or two Rachel didn’t even know which river Cash would be crossing next. Ben’s old logs showed that he had not always been sure himself. She found places where he had noted the time of certain crossings, but had put the names in later with a blunter pencil. Not so with Papa’s logs. These were hastily scrawled, and sometimes illegible, cross-scribbled in every direction with notes on losses, stuff issued from the wagons, and every kind of thing. But if he didn’t know where he was, he said so. The boys made a great legendary figure of Papa as a trail driver. They claimed nobody had ever seen Old Zack lie down while he had a herd on the trail. Maybe once in a while you might see him doze a little, sitting on the ground with his back against a cook-wagon wheel. But even then he would have a cup of coffee in his hand, so that if he went full asleep it would spill on his legs, and get him up from there. Any real sleep he had was actually in the saddle; he used up about five horses a day.

Old Zack had left them no record for the drive from the Dancing Bird to Wichita, for they were still driving to Abilene, far up in the eastern part of Kansas, at the time of his death. Ben’s second drive, in 1871, had made Wichita in four weeks and two days, which was his best time, and would have been a credit to his father. He also had made the same drive in nine weeks and three days. Cassius had made one drive, which the Rawlinses had sat out, in 1872, in five weeks even, which was cracking good time. You could call six weeks good time, and seven weeks pretty fair. No telling, though, how long they’d be held up in Wichita, waiting to sell, and sometimes they had to load the cars, holding until cars could be had. Call it a week or two—maybe a lot more. Then it would take about ten days for the riders to get back. There was no part of the operation not hedged all round with ifs and providings.

During this time occurred one of the smallseeming, unreadable things, the seriousness of which was hidden at the time it happened. They lost a horse, which was a common-place if anything was, except that this one went missing in broad daylight, out of the up-horse corral. Well, somebody must have turned it out, though no one would admit it. The animal was a sleepy old pony named Apples, because it had some Appaloosie blood, shown in a pale, speckled wash across its hindquarters. It might never have been missed, except that it happened to belong to Andy, who called it his night horse; he hunted, and complained, and harped on his loss, until everybody was sick of hearing about Apples.

Cassius had now been gone upwards of six weeks, and they were coming into the just-barely-possible area. The land was already yielding dust again where the grass was poor, or the run off had scoured the earth barren. So now they watched for a distant stir-up.

But when they sighted one, early in an unseasonably hot afternoon, it was in an unlikely direction; and it was a Fort Worth posse that came there, before Cash ever got home.

The light, intermittent dust the posse made was seen by Ben from where he worked a long way off, and he judged at once that it could only mean more trouble. He came on in, with Andy and his two hired hands. By lathering the horses, he got home just ahead of the slower-moving posse. Immediately he sent Andy up to the house, with word that Matthilda and Rachel were to stay inside, whatever happened. And shortly after that, nine riders came jogging around the corral to where the Zachary men waited, sitting their sweated horses.

The man in front, gray-thatched and graymustached, with a dried-out look, Ben knew for Sol Carr of Tarrant County. He had been a Ranger, once, before the War Between the States, and would be one again, now that Texas could bring the Rangers back. Ben did not know why his father had disliked Sol Carr but remembered that this was so. For the time being Carr was head of a loosely organized bunch of volunteers from the Fort Worth neighborhood. They chased thieves and war parties, and some of them rode all the time.

Behind Sol Carr and to one side, respectfully aloof, rode an Indian in the butternut clothes of a cowhand, but with no dents or creases in his hat. He had the squat look of a huge frog, and graying pigtails hung beside his jowls. Ben believed this to be a Delaware called Humpjack, who had scouted for troops and Rangers against the Wild Tribes since long ago.

Most conspicuous, because they hung back and would not meet his eye, were Jude and Charlie Rawlins. But Ben could have named three of the five others. He had exchanged powers of attorney with them, for handling drifted cattle. They nodded slightly, noncommittally and without smiling, as he looked at them one after another; and this con-firmed that the posse was hostile. The chilling thing was that these were ordinary men, who were Texans and cowmen, but not renegades, nor of any special faction. Sometimes a kind of tide seemed to run across the empty spaces of Texas, a tide of sentiment, of opinion, so that far-separated, lonely settlers were swayed the same way all at once. To stand against such a thing was to stand against the State. Sooner or later the guns would start clearing their throats, and you might find yourself fighting feud after feud, without any future or any end.

Behind the mounted men, a tenth man drove a light wagon, with a horse tied to the tail gate; and the led horse was Apples.

Andy swung down. “That’s my horse you got there! What’s that contraption you got on him?” Apples was carrying an Indian saddle of sticks and straps; it looked to be broken.

Somebody shouted, “Let that horse alone, boy!”

“That thing’s eating him in two! I got to get it off him!”

But Ben said sharply, “Come back here, Andy!” And his brother obeyed.

Carr dismounted now, without invitation, and Ben stepped down to meet him. They stopped two paces apart, and did not offer to shake hands. Both had left their carbines on their saddles, but Ben wore his holster slung low on his right, and Sol Carr was similarly armed.

“We’ve been following out the No Hope massacre,” Carr said to Ben, “and we’ve been lucky. Found out quite a bit.” He let an edge come into his voice, as if he were talking to a man under arrest, or about to be. “I’m here to learn the rest of it from you.”

Ben flared up, but his voice remained quiet. Rachel, watching from the house, heard no word of what followed.

“Those were your last words in that tone,” he told Sol Carr, “while you stand on my land.”

“You can back that up, too,” Carr said, dry as the dust, “just by taking on all these men. How many do you figure you’ll have time to get?”

“One,” Ben said.

Maybe the old Ranger modified his tone, some, then—or maybe he didn’t, actually. Certainly his purpose was not softened.

“We taken a prisoner,” Carr said. “A white squaw man, and I believe you know him. Name of Abe Kelsey.”

“We’ve been looking for Kelsey a long time,” Ben said.

“That’s as may be. What interests us, he was mixed up with them red niggers at the massacre. Laying aside what he says he was doing there, he anyway messed into it enough to get himself shot up. And we got him.”

“Alive?”

“Just about. We got the names of the main war chiefs out of him. Seth was there, and so was Wolf Saddle. But he says Lost Bird was the leader. Though he may be protecting Seth, seein’s he claims he’s Seth’s old man.”

“If he’s alive,” Ben demanded, “why haven’t you hung him?”

“We may get around to it,” Carr answered. “Meantime, he’s spieled off a whole string of charges against you. I thought you might want to face him, and answer him. I’ve got him here, in that wagon.”

“Let him lift his head,” Ben said. “And I’ll put a ball between his eyes in the next tenth of a second!”

“You’d shoot an unarmed man?”

“Yes,” Ben said.

“Then I better tell you what he says myself. Bein’s I’m in better shape to shoot back. He says, to start, the Kiowas used your place, here, for their point of assembly.”

“The three you named were here,” Ben acknowledged. “We forted up, and stood ’em off.”

“He says Lost Bird learned from you that the people they massacred were on the road, and there was no other way the red niggers could have learned of it.”

A stir of surprise ran over the posse as Ben laughed in Carr’s face. It was a nasty laugh, with promise of fight in it, yet unexpected. “The Rawlinses are the people we have to work with,” Ben said.

“They’re also the damyankees that crowded in on your range,” Carr reminded him. “Your old man had his eye on this grass for a long time. When he finally come to settle on it, Rawlins was ahead of him, and he had to go splits. It’s possible to believe you wanted them out of here.”

“Oh, good God almighty,” Ben said with contempt.

“There’s plenty to say it’s the Kiowas you have to work with, not Rawlinses, if you want to last where you are. They say this foundling girl, this foster sister of yours, you people have raised—”

He broke off, stopped by the blaze of pure murder that had lighted Ben’s eyes, contradicting his smile. “What about her?” Ben prodded him.

“They say she’s the key to your understanding with the Kiowas,” Sol Carr went on coolly. He had been startled, but he was not the man to be frightened. “Kelsey says your old man found the girl on the prairie, and rescued her. And she proved out to be a Kiowa quarter-breed baby, lost out of a drag litter—Lost Bird’s half sister, out of a white woman captive. They say the Kiowas are friendly because you’re raising one of their own.”

“Carr,” Ben said, “if you don’t have enough Indian-savvy to know that’s impossible, it’s no use to talk to you. You ought to know there’s nothing could bring the whole tribe down on us any quicker than if they thought we was holding a captive Kiowa child!”

“I would have supposed so,” Sol Carr admitted. “Only there’s one thing more. After the massacre, Abe Kelsey made his way here. His horse had been hit; died about two miles out. He’s showed us the bones, stripped clean by the wolves. God knows he was in no shape to catch another. He says you people gave him a horse. You gave him that horse, right there. You helped him get away on it. And he got back to some of his red niggers—what time he could keep up with ’em.”

“That horse was stolen,” Andy said. “Out of this corral right here. And within an hour of noon!”

“Nobody around at all?” Carr said with disbelief.

“I had two men here all the time,” Ben told him. He glanced at Tip and Joey, and found them looking blank, and frightened.

“Do you accuse the two men?” Carr asked sharply.

“I do not! I don’t think they know anything about this at all.”

“Yet somebody gave Kelsey this horse!”

In the moment of silence that followed, Ben saw Sol Carr look past him, and start to say something more, then close his mouth again. Ben had not known that Matthilda had left the house, until she spoke from behind him.

“I did,” Matthilda said clearly. “I gave him the horse.”

Matthilda had not explained to Rachel, as she left the house, what it was she meant to do. Rachel made as if to go with her. Perhaps she would not have obeyed an order from Matthilda to stay back; perhaps Matthilda knew it.

“Ben won’t like this,” Matthilda said. “Please don’t make him mad at you, too.”

That worked. Rachel stayed at the window, and watched Matthilda walk down there, to butt in on the men, where she wasn’t wanted. But mostly her eyes were on Ben. She thought,
I ought to be there. I’m the one should be beside him, now.
Suddenly she went and got the Sharp & Hankins, and chambered a cartridge. If a fight broke, she was sure she could not fail to get some of those who were against Ben. About one with every shot, at this range, firing from a rest. After that she felt better about staying where she was.

Down by the corral, Sol Carr lifted his hat to Matthilda, and spoke courteously, covering his objections to being thrown off his line of attack.

“I remember you, M’am,” Carr said. “You are Mrs. Zachary.”

“And you are Sol Carr,” Matthilda responded, “who tried to do my husband out of six thousand dollars.”

Carr may have reddened a little, but his tone did not change. “I understood you to say you gave Kelsey this horse. Did you realize, then, he had come direct from the No Hope massacre?”

“I realize nothing of the kind. The day he came here was more than two weeks after the massacre.”

That stopped Carr for a moment or two; but he said, “He had been wounded, though?”

“He had a gunshot wound in the limb,” Matthilda said. “A new one. The blood was fresh on the bandage. It wasn’t a bad wound, then. I should judge it’s bad now—I can smell green-flesh from here. You’d better get him some doctoring, or you won’t get him as far as his trial!”

“M’am,” Carr said, “this is his trial.”

“I’ll be interested to hear the verdict,” Matthilda said saltily.

“What was your belief, then, as to how he got wounded?”

“I supposed he was caught stealing horses. Our horses, likely.”

“You thought he was a horse thief,” Carr said wonderingly. “You knew he was a squaw man. You knew he’s spread tales against you, to your great harm. Yet you gave him a horse to get away on?”

“Yes,” said Matthilda.

“M’am, in God’s name—exucse me, M’am—why?”

“Poor old man,” Matthilda said. “I was sorry for him.”

“After all he’s done, you tell me you were sorry—”

“Suppose one of my little children had been taken by red savages,” Matthilda said. “Do you think there’s anything I wouldn’t do, any lengths I wouldn’t go to, to bring my child back to me? I have no doubt I would go crazy, as crazy as Abe, before the end of it. Of course I’m sorry for him!”

There were a lot more questions. Like, where were the two men Ben had left at the house, while Matthilda was giving away Apples. Smoked out, Tip and Joey admitted they had been reining a couple of colts, and had jumped a loafer wolf. They had taken after it, to rope it, and run it a far piece. Tip like to got a loop on it, but his colt spooked at the rope, and throwed him. Joey had had a hard time catching Tip’s colt for him, so, all in all, they had been out of sight maybe two hours.