The Unforgiven

by Alan Lemay

  And it was Striking Horse who had given Cash’s father the name of Stone Hand, the time Zack knocked a Comanche senseless with a slap. Cash had reason to hope that the father’s name would serve to place the son.

  Striking Horse had the gray eyes of his Spanish mother, and the dark skin of his father, who was half Crow; he was a Kiowa by virtue of only a quarter of his blood. So Cash knew the Owl Prophet when he found him. He did not find him quickly, or easily, or without certain moments of great risk. But he got there.

  Cash opened by giving Striking Horse his carbine, and all the ammunition he had for it, with no strings whatever attached—thereby putting himself just as far outside the law as the old Indian was.

  After that, piecing out his battered Kiowa with quick-running sign language, he had told the Owl Prophet about a medicine dream he claimed to have had, in which he was shown a thing that actually happened, long ago. He had seen a Kiowa village running away from a great force of Tayhahnnas. While he watched, a baby was bounded out of a drag litter unnoticed, and so was lost; and this was what the dream had been sent to show him, for here it ended. He had even been made to know in what year this thing had happened. But something was unclear. The baby had seemed to be a Tayhahnna child, held captive by the Kiowas. Cash made out that it was necessary to his medicine to know whether this was true, or whether the lost baby had been a Kiowa child. This was what he had come to find out from the Prophet of the Owls.

  Striking Horse brought out his history calendar, and gravely spread it before Cassius. This was a spiral figure, delicately drawn upon a deerskin, and filled up with tiny pictures, each representing a summer or a winter; for the Kiowas counted time by seasons, rather than years. Each spring and fall the calendar keeper added a little drawing that stood for an event. The single event served to bring the season back to him, reminding him of all other events. A number of Kiowas kept these wheels, each one differently. The Owl Prophet’s wheel went back so far it had grown bigger than a grindstone.

  The old Indian told Cassius to point to the time, on the calendar wheel, when this thing happened in his dream. At first it didn’t seem as though this could be done. Counting back didn’t get anywhere, for the calendar keepers commonly left out seasons, or whole years. But Cash studied the wheel; and presently saw a winter distinguished by a speckled face. He had heard of a smallpox epidemic among the tribes during the winter before Rachel was found. So now he pointed to the summer following.

  After due thought, Striking Horse decided he didn’t remember any baby being lost that summer. Must have happened in some other village than his own. He said he would ask some other calendar keeper sometime, when he ran into one. If he found out, he would send word. He put the carbine away, and offered Cash a smoke.

  “I guess I was a damn fool,” Cash said. “Wasted a carbine, likely. Still…the Kiowas don’t generally lie. Except to damyankee commissions,” he qualified it, “who lie all the time. He might find out. I remembered afterward he never asked where to send word. But I judge they know how to find us, all right.”

  Yes, I judge they do, Ben thought. Too dang hootin’ well. He was hiding a bitter anger, for his immediate conviction was that Cash had made out death war-rants for them all. The thin nonsense about a dream could not have fooled Striking Horse for a minute. So here was Abe Kelsey at their throats again; doubtless he had tried to tell the Indians a thousand times that the Zacharys were holding a captive Kiowa girl. Now old Kelsey was dead, and still they weren’t shed of him at all. He was even safe from them, for they could never again hope to hunt him down and kill him as a solution to anything. He put Ben in mind of John Brown, whose dead body had got into a song, and helped bring on a war the South could not win. And here we got another damned hell-raising old hooter amoldering in his grave, while his mischief goes marching on. I suppose the old son of a bitch ain’t ever going to lie still.

  Small matter whether the Kiowas had believed Kelsey or not, now that Cash had run to Striking Horse and virtually confirmed the whole thing. Cash didn’t realize, Ben told himself, keeping his mouth shut and his face still until he could get hold of his anger. He had to remember that the dangers with which Cash had been tampering had been far less plain at the time Cash set off up the Wichita Trail. He didn’t know….

  “I don’t know why we never thought of this before,” Cash said. “Papa could have proved long ago she hasn’t a drop of Kiowa blood, right out of those Kiowa history calendars. Easier then than now.”

  Ben saw, then, what had blinded Cassius to his mistake. Their mother’s wishful assumption that Rachel was of pure blood had stood in Cash’s mind as an unquestioned truth, without alternative, since before he could remember. Only Ben knew why his father had never gone to the Kiowas for an answer.

  William Zachary had believed Rachel was a Kiowa child. Perhaps, for all Ben knew, he had known it for certain.

  No use to tell Cash that now. “You did a brave thing,” was all Ben said, at last.

  But nothing about Striking Horse, or the missing eight days, came up to mar the triumph of Cash’s return, that first day.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Cash had made his drive in thirty-one days, and it had leaned him to the bone. By all accounts, he had no more than dozed against a wagon wheel once in a while, and the rest of the time had slept in the saddle, or not at all. Once his deals were made, the rest of his time was spent in retrieving his cook and the best seven men that he had from Delano, Wichita’s whisky-and-women suburb, across the Arkansas River.

  The same collection of saloons and dance halls had been called Nauchville, when it stood outside Ellsworth, and Hide Park at Newton. Each time the railhead advanced, these shaky buildings were pulled down and flat-carred, to be set up again at the new shipping point, with the same cadre of bartenders, faro dealers, and girls—plus the new faces of additions and replacements. It was a cowhand’s paradise, such as no man could rightly appreciate until he had behind him the brutal hardships of the trail. But Cash finally combed the men he wanted, heavily hungover, out of the sawdust floors of Delano. He believed he knew them, now; and he was paying them the highest wages offered on any trail.

  He could afford it, for he was riding the high wave of success. After the heartbreaking drives from which the Zacharys had turned their cattle back to trail them home again, after years in which they had dumped whole herds at the price of hides in order to pay off their men, Cassius had sold high at last.

  Until Cassius got home, Ben had not touched the huge strongbox carried in the cook wagon. It was built of heavy steel plates, and it took four men to carry it into the house. Instead of padlocks, it had blacksmith-welded iron straps, and they were the better part of an hour getting it open at all.

  Inside, sewed up in a great number of small deer-skin pouches, Cassius was carrying a little more than $104,000 in gold.

  Ben was chilled as it got through to him what Cash had left in the hands of the tough renegades Ben himself had hired in Fort Griffin. Cash claimed he knew his men. Ben didn’t believe anybody knew these men, or any men, well enough to justify trusting them with a fortune like that. Well—they had got there with it; that was the final answer to that.

  They moved the carved secretary Papa had made—it weighed about a ton—out into the middle of the room, to get at what they called the Glory Hole. This was a trap door, fitted of random-length planks so as not to show, with a keg set into the earth underneath, to keep their money in. It had been empty, or nearly so, most of the time for quite a while. But tonight they filled it up again; and tried to realize that they were rich.

  After Rawlins had been paid some thirty thousand dollars for his lesser share of the herd, and they had paid off seventy-five or eighty other brands for nearly a thousand strays they had driven and sold, and when they had paid off twenty-two thousand in debts, they would still have thirty thousand dollars left—a fortune, clear and unencumbered; plus a couple of thousand head of breeders and young stock, not counting calves a
nd yearlings, standing on the range.

  They could send Matthilda and Rachel to safety far away, to the east coast, or abroad; they could do anything they wanted to now—if only they could find out what it was. For now Matthilda balked. She feared even to cross Texas with Rachel while Kelsey’s hanging still had the whole doomful dispute over her birth still fresh in everybody’s mind. They were certainly safe here, with a corrida, now with a strength of twelve men plus the Zacharys themselves, right here on the place. She wanted her sons with her, at least as far as the Mississippi, and they certainly could not leave the work now. Wait till the work was done this fall; it all would be easy, then.

  She made it sound natural and sensible to delay their departure, for the sake of safety alone. But Ben felt a deep foreboding. Rachel probably came first, in his mother’s heart; he was fairly sure of that. Yet he began to doubt that she would ever leave her sons, of her own will.

  After Matthilda went to bed Ben and Cassius still sat up, talking all through most of Cash’s first night home. Andy slept, unbothered, but Rachel lay wakeful in her bed, listening to that ominous-seeming, indistinguishable mumbling, on and on. And though she knew what times they poured themselves fresh coffee, not one word they said came through the heavy door. Bird songs were starting up along the Dancing Bird before they quit. Yet they were up, red-eyed but un-friendly to sleep, in the early dawn.

  First thing they did was to send a rider down the Dancing Bird with a note to Zeb Rawlins, naming the halfway point at which he must meet them, late that day.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Zeb Rawlins and his two sons met the three Zachary brothers on a stripped and barren flat ten miles down the Dancing Bird. The wheels of Zeb’s buggy crackled as they cut through the baked and curling crust, for here an endless network of earth cracks made cruelly visible the damage this year had done the range. Jude and Charlie carried their carbines in their hands as they rode on either side of their father; and Zeb himself carried a long rifle in his lap as he drove. Saddle horses and buggy team were freshly groomed and tail-plucked, and every inch of rigging had been rubbed to a shine, under the film of the fast-gathering dust. This spit and polish, as much as the weapons in their hands, bespoke a predetermination that this showdown should be official, final, and complete.

  Each of the Zachary boys saw at a glance that only the two carbines were repeaters. Jude’s weapon was a Triplett & Scott, and Charlie’s a Henry; but Zeb’s rifle, with its uncommonly long 30-inch barrel, was an old cap-and-ball Snyder—the weapon of a man who means to shoot once, and make the one shot do. The Zacharys left their carbines in their boots, but they were wearing their revolvers. Cassius had his father’s Dragoon; Ben, his big Walker Colt, with a 9-inch barrel; and Andy, a Confederate copy of the Whitney, with which he had proved to his brothers he could “wipe their noses for them,” if ever he got anybody to hold still for it. All three wore their guns butt first on the left, for cross-drawing, when in the saddle.

  The two parties pulled up with the noses of their animals a horse-length apart.

  Zeb Rawlins sat motionless, looking so solid and immovable that the buggy was made to look frail. Ben noticed how his great weight bore down its springs. Probably these two had never had any chance of understanding each other, from the first. Zeb had been born of corn-country pioneers, up on the Ohio River; every time he had ever mentioned such a thing as a “gant-lot,” Ben had had to stop and figure out all over again what he meant. If either of the two had actually fought in the War, they would never have tried to work together at all. Yet Ben no longer wondered how a man unable to ride could undertake to whip the open range. Zeb had a motto: “When Bull takes holt, heaven and ’arth can’t make him let go!” It was neither a slogan nor a preachment; it was a description of the man.

  “My brother sold your cows,” Ben said shortly.

  Zeb’s eyes went to Cassius, who spoke briskly. “Twelve hundred and nineteen head, as loaded at Wichita. Average for the herd, twenty-six dollars and eight cents a head. Your prorate of cost, one thousand and four. Leaves you thirty-one thousand, seven hundred and ninety-one dollars and fifty-two cents.”

  Watching Zeb’s face, Ben could see no change in his neighbor’s dark and heavy mood. Cash had described a great golden flood, all but unbelievable, after the lean years that had gone before. Ben supposed Zeb must already have had news of the market from another source. There was a short silence.

  “You’ll be paid off in gold coinage,” Ben said. “Say when and where.”

  “I’ll send for what’s due me,” Zeb said.

  They waited, until Zeb Rawlins was ready to go on.

  “The charges made against you have not been fully proved,” Zeb said. “Not yet.”

  “Watch your Goddamned mouth,” Ben said; and he saw Zeb’s jowls begin to purple and shake.

  “My daughter has been murdered,” Zeb said, still speaking with slow weight. “Her mistreated remains are under the ground. It’s enough for me that any part of the blame could be charged to you at all, by anybody whatsoever. Yet I’ll do this one thing more. I’ll buy out any rights you think you have here, together with whatever cattle of yours you don’t want to drive off. Figure up your price, and send me word what it is. But I want to know soon!”

  Ben answered so reasonably that Cash shot him a glance of angry disbelief. “I might buy, or I might sell,” he said. “Either way, I mean to cross-brand, first. There’s too many cows on this range owned by marks on paper, and not enough owned by the right marks on cows. If you want me to work yours, too, send a rep. It’ll cost you the standard fifty cents a head.”

  “I’ll send a rep,” Rawlins conceded. “See that you keep your damned iron off the odd-brand cattle until he comes!”

  Ben’s voice rose in anger for the first time. “I’ll brand any damned critter I see fit!”

  “All I want,” Zeb roared back at him, “is to get you red-nigger lovers to hell off my range!”

  “You’ve got no range,” Ben said dropping back into his drawl again. “This is Texican land. It’ll take a sight more than a fat-gutted damyankee son of a bitch to put me off it.”

  In the quiet that followed, Andy shortened his reins, and flipped the ends out of the way of his draw.

  “I’m sick of looking at them,” Ben told his brothers. He turned his horse; and the moment for gunfire went past.

  But something else had happened that might build up to a bigger and longer fight than any six men could have had, on the flats by the Dancing Bird.

  Up to here Ben’s trouble had been that he loved the Dancing Bird country for itself. Even the Kiowas had been a boon, in a way, holding this grassland in trust for them, until some good year would enable them to buy land scrip, and take it up. Ben had a hundred long-range plans. He had picked a dozen places where he wanted dams, to establish permanent water in far, dry grasslands where now only brief flash floods ran. He had located clay he could haul from a long way off to line the tanks behind the dams, so that the waters would not seep away. He was experimenting with a hedge of wild-rose bramble to stop winter drift, and the everlasting shuffle-up with half the brands in Texas. With fences up he could grade up his stock, bringing in bulls that otherwise wasted themselves on anybody’s cows but your own. He meant to bring in fruit trees, and Mexican labor to raise garden truck; he planned to build such a house as would be a showpiece forever.

  Now he had his good year; he could think in miles of land, instead of pounds of powder. But if he was going to scrip this land, he had no time to lose. Once the Rangers came back to make this border safe, the country would flood with people, and all this beautiful grass would begin to go under the plow, never to be recovered again. Confederate Texas had sold land scrip by the wagonload, to finance the War. Much of it was still knocking around, and could be cheaply had. But a lot of it had been used to tie up land by map landmarks, as a speculation. Ben saw reason to think that some of the country he now used was already the private property of absent
ee owners who had never seen it yet. These would have to be bought out at a stiff advance in price.

  Because of this he could not expect to buy all of the range he used at once. But he could get title to both sides of the Dancing Bird, though he paid a thousand dollars a section, where once four dollars in scrip would have been enough; he might be able to take up a part of the Little Beaver, and a strip along the Red. With his water secure, he could count on scooping up the rest in other good years, later on.

  Or else—the returns from this one good year could be used to run away once more. It had to be one thing or the other, and right away. History would not stand back and wait much longer.

  Once Ben would have been willing to give up the Dancing Bird, drive a stocker herd to some new land, and start again, rather than drag his family into a war he might not be able to win. But it seemed to him now that if he gave ground this time, he would never make any stand again.

  He no longer believed that he would ever be able to give up this land.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  A week passed. Ben and Cash alternated days on the range, one staying in with two or three hands, picked for their interest in gun-fighting. The range crew quickly whipped through the last of the calf branding, and began to sort the cattle and shove them around. They started cross-branding, adding the Dancing Bird brand to cattle otherwise branded, but their own on paper. Whichever one was home spent many hours a day at Papa’s carved secretary, sorting and rebooking the hopelessly complicated accounts and tallies.

  The Rawlinses did send a rep, at last, and the Zacharys were glad to see that Jake Rountree was the man who had let himself be talked into the job. Jake was nearing fifty, a stooped, gaunt man with wild eyes and a look of perpetual fatigue. The tired look may have been the result of chronic malaria; some days he complained of a general ache. The years of bad markets and irregular weather had all but squeezed him out of the cattle business, so that his own outfit was hardly more than a token and a hope of building again. Zeb Rawlins was paying him a strapping hundred a month—had had to pay it, in order to get him, hard up as he was. Ben promptly put a hundred a month of his own on top.