The Unforgiven (18 page)

An hour had passed, but the slow twilight was still clear, and the drums were going as before, as she came out of the bedroom and closed the door.

“Well, anyhow,” Andy said, “these here will be the first toy soldiers ever did really fight, I guess. I stretched ’em into twenty more thirty-six caliber. For your Whitney.”

“That was rattle-headed.” Her tone was inert, and sounded cold, even to herself. “What will you do when the Walker’s empty?”

“I always got my knife,” he said—and immediately saw that he didn’t. “Hey—you seen my skin-out knife?”

She went back into the bedroom and got Andy’s narrow-bladed sheath knife, and his belt, from under her mattress.

“I figure you better wear this,” he said. “I’ll punch more holes in the belt, so’s you can—Oh. Somebody already….” He buckled the belt around her, and used the knife to cut off the long tag of strap left over. For himself he got the Bowie they used for a carver, and stuck it in his waistband, punching the blade through the cloth.

They laid out their weapons, and the few loads. Once it was dark, anything that became mislaid would be lost forever. Rachel put six rim-fires in the pocket of her dress, for refilling the Henry’s magazine, and fetched the loading kit for the Whitney revolver. Each cylinder had to be charged with loose powder, then a ball and patch rammed home with the lever under the barrel, and a cap must be stuck on each nipple. She laid the things needed beside the powder horn on a corner of the table, where her hands could find them in the dark. Andy got the ax, and stood it by the door.

Now the drums built up to one more climax, and did not start again. They left a silence that rang in the ears. Andy said wonderingly, “Why, it’s just as if Mama has gone out there, and stopped them some way.”

Rachel said, “Stopped? They’re starting now, more like.”

Again the back wall brought them the sound of hoofs trampling about, somewhere nearby. But the horse movement formed no pattern, other than an unreadable shuffling about, and in a little while was quiet.

“Oh, say—by the way—” Andy had his eye glued to a loop-hole, and he kept it there. He was trying to sound about four times more casual than he knew how to do. “Remember to save your last shot. You will, won’t you? Count careful—just awful careful—every time you let off the six-gun. Because you’ll need one more, if they ever get in. You know?”

She didn’t answer him. She threw a bucket of water on the fire, and stepped away from the answering explosion of steam.

“Rachel? Did you hear?”

“I heard you, Andy.” No use arguing. But she had no intention of wasting even one lead soldier on herself, no matter what.

“The main thing is—” He broke off, and jumped for the buffalo gun. He had to replace its lost-off cap, and his hands shook as he tried to be quick about it.

Rachel got to a door loop. The twilight had lessened, but it was still clear. She saw at once what had roused him up. Two Kiowas sat their horses on the far slope of the Dancing Bird, above the holding corrals. Even at two hundred yards, and in failing light, she could not mistake the black and red snakes painted all over Wolf Saddle’s body, or the broad black and yellow bands that identified Seth. Immediately Andy’s .69 let go with its heavy blast.

A buffalo horn vanished from the side of Seth’s headdress; he was nine-tenths knocked off his horse, and almost went under its belly, but pulled himself up. She saw him pull off the remains of the war bonnet, and slam it down, before she turned away.

Andy was pouring a second full measure of gun-powder down the buffalo gun. “Oh,
damn!
That was Seth! Seth!”

He had missed a chance to take half the hell-fire out of the hostiles, and maybe lift the siege altogether, with a single shot. She judged he would have to be straightened out, if they were to be here long. “Had to shoot at his head, didn’t you? And yanked on the trigger, too—fit to bust it off! Why do you—”

“She kicked high on me,” Andy stuttered, almost in tears. “Honest, I centered square on his bellybutton! What-all powder did Ben have in this thing—a gallon? I should have drug down with my whole weight—” He banged home the rammer, and fitted a cap.

“Put that thing down! That’s her last charge, you’ve got in her now!”

“That’s Seth sitting out there—will you hear me? And Wolf Saddle with him—”

“Well, they’re not sitting out there any more.” Lowtoned, unhurried, she went on to take him apart; then put him back together again. “What was all that scrabbling around? You looked something like a man trying to wash a cat. You know better than that. Now get your dang head up, by God! Because we’ve wasted the last shot we’re going to. There’s not a man in Texas shoots any better than you do. Or handles anything else any better, either. So take your time. There’s a power of Kiowas out there, now. But come morning, they’re going to be mighty few. And you’ll be sitting with pancakes and honey to your fry-meat. Because that’s what I’m going to fix.”

He lowered the hammer of the big .69 to halfcock, set the weapon aside, and stood rubbing his shoulder. When he finally managed the shadow of a grin, she knew he was all right.

And now the Kiowas came, without gunfire, without war cries, without any sound heard within at all, until fifty-pound boulders crashed against both shutters at once, splitting the timbers, and loosening the deep-anchored frames. Others followed, and the same again, over and over, shattering the heavy wood….

After the fourth attack, not much was left of the battle shutters. Andy had split up the table to brace what busted pieces the first and second assaults had left hanging; and after the third they had tied up the splits and splinters into sort of a net with strings of rawhide they had saved to make a reata. But now only some long splinters remained, stuck picketwise along the sills.

For a while they had very easily defended the opened window holes from the opposite wall. The moon was up, and Seth was running out of warriors interested in silhouetting themselves for closerange guns within. Three had been hit there, but the only Kiowa surely killed was one who was shot in the throat, and fell inside. He bled in streams, and though they heaved him out as soon as they could, he left such a great, slippery puddle that Rachel had to fetch ashes by the bucket, to restore the footing.

In the fourth assault the Kiowas had used more gunfire, and used it better, than in any previous attempt. They had found out that those inside were covering the windows from positions at the back wall. Their riflemen fanned out, using the creek bed as an entrenchment; and a heavy blanketing fire poured in. If Andy and Rachel had not gone forward at the first shot, they might very easily have been killed in the next three seconds. They stayed against the front wall after that, reduced to taking in enfilade whoever might choose to climb in.

As the fire lifted, one quick rush was made, in files from both ends of the house. War hatchets struck the splinters away, and a leg came over the east sill. Andy all but severed it with a swing of the ax; and then stepped out from the wall to fire three times into a muddle of shadows at the other embrasure. The Kiowas broke off.

Now there was a letup, during which they had time to deal with a buck who was fooling around with an idea of his own. This one had lodged himself outside an end port with a single-shot. He couldn’t see anything inside, apparently; maybe didn’t want to put his face to the loop. He kept poking his rifle into the room to fire blind, at random angles. Except for the near corners, no part of the room was safe from him. Andy squirmed and dodged to the end wall, and stood waiting with raised ax.

Moonlight slanted through a shutterless window to shine cleanly on the bright-metal muzzle as it next appeared. Andy’s ax struck hard, and perhaps buckled the weapon’s barrel, for they knew by the odd sound of its explosion that the breech blew up. The barrel was driven deeper into the room, and stayed there, pointing at the floor.

“Never, never in all my life,” Rachel said, “did I hear of ’em hanging on like this. Not even for revenge—they’re satisfied to take any old scalp, anywhere, for that. Oh, Andy, what’s happening here?”

Andy wouldn’t admit he saw anything special about it. “Just one night? It’s common.”

“When they’re hurt like we’ve hurt ’em?”

“We don’t hit ’em as square as we hope,” Andy thought now. “I’m only sure we killed about one. Maybe two. I don’t know.”

“I could have stopped this, once,” Rachel said, and Andy had never heard a like bitterness in her tone. “I know what I’m called. I’m a red nigger. Cash should have let me go.”

“That’s nothing but Abe Kelsey’s damn lie! You’re Rachel Zachary, and don’t you forget it!”

I am Rachel Zachary. I said that once. Long ago. The day the world fell down….
“Seth believes it. Lost Bird even—”

“They’d never believe Kelsey. Not in a thousand years! He only drummed on it, till he put it in their heads.”

“All right.” If there was any difference, she didn’t see it.

“Most likely one of ’em had a medicine dream. That’s how they get to believe any old damn thing they want to, that ain’t so. Like, some of ’em think they’re bullet-proof. A critter that can believe that can believe anything. And that’s what happened. One of ’em wanted to own you, so he had a medicine dream. Or said he did.”

“They don’t even know what I look like,” she rejected it.

“Don’t they? They’ve watched you dozens of times. From the creek bed. From the ridge. From the brush.”

“You’d have found their tracks!”

“Yes,” Andy said oddly. “Time and again. Only Ben told us to shut up. One of them wants you for his squaw—or one of his squaws. We should have allowed for that. My guess is Wolf Saddle. I’m willing to bet…”

“Sure,” she said, and now the bitter edge could have whispered just as softly if it were slicing through a bull hide shield. “I’d make a good squaw. A dingin’ squaw. Once they fattened me up.”

Suddenly he turned angry. With her? Maybe with the world. “Don’t you play ignorant with me! Because I don’t give a hoot in hell where at you were born, or who to, or who by. I’m your brother. Raised that way, and I aim to stay that. Right up to the last breath I draw—and one long spit beyond!”

He got up, his bare feet silent, and went to set his ear against the back wall.

“And another thing,” he said, through the moon-tempered dark. “You’re not an Indian—not a red-nigger kind, nor a Civilized Nation kind, nor any other kind. So quit fooling around with the notion you might be, you hear?”

But I am. If I’d been a boy, and raised among ’em, I’d be Seth—no, Lost Bird. I’m a girl—so I’d be one of Wolf Saddle’s squaws. And I may be, yet—until the first time I lay holt of a knife
—Suddenly a hard twist of disgust sickened her, for she realized that a knife in someone’s belly was exactly what an Indian would think of, as easily as he breathed. She remembered what Hagar had said about the knife work of squaws, if they were on hand for a massacre…their bloodied hands…

Andy made his round of the lookouts and came back to her. He spoke softly, from close by. “I didn’t go to sound so mean, and cross. It isn’t you I’m mad at, Rachel. Ever.”

The gentleness of his tone betrayed her, and she let herself slump, where she sat at the foot of the wall. He sat down close beside her. Awkwardly, but without self-consciousness, he took her in his arms, her head in the hollow of his shoulder, his cheek against her hair. He said, “You’re the best sister anybody ever had. You’re more than that. You’re all the family I’ve got left, for all I know.” They had no reason to think anything had happened to Ben; but apparently, in his exhaustion, Andy was willing to concede that Ben was lost to them too. But—“We’ll fight ’em to a stand-still,” he said doggedly. “Forever, if they want. Just you and me. So long as you stand by me, I’ll fight ’em till hell freezes. And then pelt ’em with ice.”

He made her cry, at last. She wept grudgingly, without sound, holding onto him tightly; and presently she knew that he was crying a little, too.
No way out,
she was thinking.
No way out, ever. No matter what happens, now….

Or maybe there was. For now the Kiowas came again, in the weirdest way yet.

This time they didn’t need the telltale back wall to hear the horses come. They came fast, and from not far out, in a thundering storm; and the war cries clamored as never before. A few guns fired wild through the empty windows, without object, other than added noise. The two stood with their backs against the forward wall, watching for any part of a Kiowa to show inside; but no dismounted warriors came.

Instead, a heavy bump shook the very walls, and the door strained inward; clods and plaster fell, loosened by the yielding anchorage of the frame. A Kiowa rider was backing his horse against the door. It would go, in a couple of seconds, driven inward by a thousand pounds of bone and straining muscle. Andy got there, cocking the Walker, and for an instant Rachel was certain Andy would be pinned as the door crashed in. The bulging planks sprung a sudden three inches, spoiling his first shot, but the Walker slammed again, and the door snapped straight. The Kiowa horseman was on the stoop, and would stay there until picked up; and his horse was splashing through the Dancing Bird.

The attack on the door made plain the whole secret of their precarious defense. They could keep only two guns going—but there were only two ways in. Seth must know that now; he had tried to make another way. But this kind of an attempt on the massive door was almost certain death, with the door loopholes placed as they were. All this racket and display had to have some other object than the backing in of one horse as a ram, for although the Kiowas had given up on the door, their yelling riders still circled the house.

A new hoof-rumble began on the roof itself; boards cracked, in spite of the depth of sod on top, and showers of dirt fell. All this was bewildering, but without visible sense. Rachel did not know what snatched her attention to the back wall. Surely she could have heard nothing more; and when she tried to peer into the shadows the small indirect light of the moon was not enough to tell her what she saw. She went to the root-cellar slide, and bent low.

A split had appeared in the boards of the slide. As she watched, the blade of a hatchet struck through, and was wrenched back. She pulled the .36 revolver Andy had made her wear, and fired wildly three times through the slide as the hatchet struck again. The hatchet blade stayed where it was, stuck halfway through, into the room. Andy was trying to shout something to her, but she couldn’t tell what it was. She got down on the floor, which might have been what he wanted her to do. She dared not leave the slide, yet to stay by it left Andy with the defense of both windows in front, and a weakened door that would probably go down, now, before any kind of a ram.

A touch of panic came into her. After four compound mistakes, the Kiowas were at last finding more ways in than the two of them could defend. She saw Andy fire through a wall port, and she started to him with some unclear notion of shuttling between the front and back walls.

She didn’t get there. Halfway across the room she was struck and borne down by a great mass of dirt, sod, and broken boards from the roof as it gave way. Her face hit the floor hard, and she lay stunned and smothering, unaware of where she was or what had happened to her, until Andy pulled her free. She sat against the wall where he put her, strangled by the dust; and blood was running down her front from her nose and cut mouth. But as her head cleared she saw what had happened. A horse had broken through the roof with one hind foot, and was trapped there, its leg stuck down through the roof beyond the stifle. The hoof dangled loosely from a broken cannon, yet tried to kick.

One more way in? It might be, if the enemy could pull the horse clear. Or the struggles of the horse might do it; dirt was still falling, and the hole in the roof enlarging. Andy was watching the front again as Rachel got up shakily. The holster of the Whitney dragged at her belt unnaturally, and she found it filled with dirt. She drew, emptied the holster, and tried to clean the weapon of its grit.

The rocketing horsemen thinned; a horse plunged downward past a window as its rider jumped it off the front of the roof; and once more the Kiowas broke off. The back wall brought diminishing hoof mutterings for a little while, then was quiet. The defenders were left confused. The two tries at the door and through the root cellar had been good ones, and had threatened to finish them, yet seemed but feebly carried out, without tenacity.

Actually, the pull-away had not been ordered. The warriors had drawn off of their own accord, because their horses were blowing. Such failures in following through were always putting a stumble into the tactics of the undisciplined Horse Tribes. Some part of the thing that all the uproar had been meant to cover was still going on.

Andy took the buffalo gun, and for some moments studied the position of the struggling horse, which was still working deeper into the room through the roof. He had to bend backward, awkwardly braced, to fire upward, but the double charge of the .69 took effect through boards, through turf, and through horseflesh. The great thrashing up there stopped as the bullet found the heart. Andy turned away.

He was starting to say, “Do you think, if I’d mock an owl—”

One more wild random shot came in, not even well placed, but ricocheted from the side of the west embrasure. Andy squealed from a suddenly tight-shut throat, and went down.