The Unforgiven (11 page)

But the backbone of the posse’s purpose, if it had been to involve the Zacharys, had been broken for the time being, on the sheer incredibility of Matthilda’s honesty.

Rachel saw the posse leader step into his saddle, at the end of it. Then Ben mounted, though he made Andy and the cowhands stay at the corral. Matthilda turned away, and plodded slowly up the hill to the house, her face white, but held as rigidly expression-less as she could make it. Behind her all the horses began to shift and move; and it was Ben who led out, not in the direction from which the posse had come, but upstream.

As the wagon moved, Abe Kelsey dragged himself up with scaly old hands to hang over the side. Clear up at the house, Rachel could hear him plainly, wailing and pleading.

“I’m an old man—I’m a pore old man—I ain’t got no friends—I ain’t done nothin’—I’m a pore old man—You got no right—”

She could hear him for a long time, over the sound of the hoofs, as the cavalcade moved off, and trailed out of sight beyond the upper bend. Mama reached the stoop then; she fumbled at the door, and Rachel opened it for her. Matthilda was crying, now, quietly, and steadily; she could not, or would not, answer any of the many things Rachel had to ask. Without speaking a word, Matthilda went to her bed and hid her face there, crying still.

It was almost sundown when Ben came back, and unsaddled slowly. A little after that the posse passed, going back the way it had come, but on the far side of the creek. The old man in the wagon no longer made any sound; and Rachel knew, by this time, why the posse had gone upstream. There was a big pin oak, up there, a whopper for its kind and place, with a limb of suitable height and girth. An old tale had it that a bandit had once been caught here, and hanged upon that tree. Some said, and Andy liked to believe, that this ghost from long ago still haunted the Dancing Bird. No matter whether that legend had any truth in it or not.

The Dancing Bird had a ghost to haunt it now.

Ben came in reluctantly. He didn’t want to talk to anybody. His black moods were uncommon, but when he was in them he could bite, and he was in one now. Rachel knew no way to approach him, or question him. He paced, sometimes beating a fist into his palm, his lips moving in long strings of silent blasphemies. Or else he sat sullen and bitter on the edge of his bunk, burning holes in the floor with his eyes. He didn’t hear you the first time you spoke to him, and when he did hear you he snapped. When it was time to feed him he ate doggedly, straight through one thing after another, with no idea of what he was putting in his mouth. Later, Rachel would wish she had served him a cloth potholder, to see if it would go down, but such an impertinence was unthinkable while the black mood was on. She would as soon have bitten a mule on the ankle as trifle with him, then.

Andy only picked at his food, and stuck close to Ben, refusing to meet Rachel’s eyes. A mumbled, “I d’know,” was all she could get out of him, and she knew it wasn’t his fault. He had been told to shut up, and stay shut up. She was alone, now, beyond the wall of this secretiveness; everyone in the house knew things that she did not. The hands came in to eat, but they kept their eyes down, and their mouths as close shut as Andy’s. The Kiowa Moon would soon be riding above them once more, and Ben up-dated it a number of days. He wouldn’t say just what he was expecting to come against them; perhaps he was not entirely sure himself. But it was plain he felt easier with all the carbines within ready call.

Once Rachel asked him outright if it was horse stealing Kelsey had been hung for. He said it was not.

“Mixed up in the No Hope massacre,” he said.

Andy saw a chance to put in, for once, without telling anything more than Ben had said. “They charged him with aiding and betting on hostiles.”

“Abetting,” Ben snapped. “Aiding and abetting, damn it!”

“What?”

“Nothing! Don’t talk so much.” But he let down enough to tell Rachel a little bit more. “He was with Seth, when they killed Effie. By his own admission.”

“They were trying to pull us into it some way—weren’t they?” she pressed him. “Weren’t they?”

He blazed up. “Who told you that?”

“Why—nobody—”

“Then forget it! And stop making up things!”

Sometimes she tried to find out what the Rawlinses had done against them, or were waiting for a chance to do, but nobody would give her a clue to that, either.

“No way to fight them,” Ben said once. Sometimes, now, he seemed less grim than discouraged, which was a new thing. “Jude and Charlie can shoot, all right, if you give them all the time in the world. So can old Zeb. But they don’t know how to fight anything that shoots back. If they hurry a shot it goes wild. Any one of us could put all three of them down. Only…it would be like a man shooting a bunch of boys.”

As bad as that, then. Bad enough to send Ben on the shoot, to smoke out their neighbors, except that he wasn’t ready for outright murder, yet. She saw he was sorry he had said so much; and she could draw out nothing more. Ben paced and fretted, sometimes pulling weapons off the gun rack in an irritable pretense of examining them. He was like that now whenever he was in the house. Daytimes the men loitered and puttered; no more work on the range was attempted.

That waiting time lasted barely a week, as the Kiowa Moon came on, though it seemed a lot longer than that. The seemingly hopeless stack-up of chores melted away. The house got whitewashed, and even received a wash of lime and brown sand on the out-side. Only the mud-leaky roof stayed the same, for lack of shingles. The cowhands took to playing end-less games of high-low-jack on a blanket under the trees by the creek.

There was a day when Andy thought of something he could do; and it was a different kind of thing than had ever entered his mind before. He started out to build a pansy bed.

Matthilda had always had pansies, every year of their lives. Even when time pressed hard, she had managed to grow a few, for seed to be saved over. If they moved during the growing season, a few pansy plants had to go along in bedding boxes, so that the little flowers would not be lost out of their world. Matthilda loved the little faces, which came out more distinctly upon her blooms than they ever did upon any others, and in more different bright colors. Sometimes when Matthilda bent over a bed of them, working the lumps out of the soil with gentle fingers, Rachel could have sworn that all the little flowers turned upwards, and peered into Matthilda’s face, as if trying to talk to her. Why not? Matthilda sometimes talked to the flowers.

The pansy bed Andy made beside the stoop was built up more than knee high, with stones from the creek. He carried the first stones in his arms up the slope, but later hitched the work team to the stone boat, and went at it right. After a while, Ben and the cowhands got interested, and pitched in, and before they were through they had a raised bed on either side of the stoop, each six feet across, and so solidly built that they were an easy bet to outlast the house by half a century. The boys hauled dirt from the corral, hoof-churned and manured by five years of horse-critters; and lightened it by mixing in sand. Matthilda hummed gaily, her face shining, as she set out the tiny plants she had already started. Surely the pansies would grow here as they had never grown before, if only they were still here to see them.

Suddenly the waiting days were over. Eight men of Cash’s corrida got back, with the reduced remuda, and both wagons. But Cassius was not with them.

Ben met the stripped-down corrida half way to the Red, and for a few minutes had a great sinking of the heart as he saw from a long way off that Cash was not with his wagons. He found Johnny Portugal straw-bossing, in charge of bringing the wagons and the remuda home. They still did not know Johnny Portugal’s right name, and probably never would, but he had turned into as steady and loyal a hand as they had, since the day Ben had slapped him down in the round corral.

Cassius had ridden on ahead of them, Johnny told Ben at once. Said he had a side trip he wanted to make, on the way home—something he wanted to see, though he didn’t say what. So, the morning of their fourth day out of Wichita, he had taken a fast horse, and a spare on lead, and was soon out of sight. He had told Johnny Portugal to take his time, so the corrida wouldn’t scare hell out of the family by getting home ahead of him. Johnny said he had sure thought he was traveling slow enough; he was eleven days out of Wichita. Which meant they hadn’t seen Cash in a week.

Ben took the corrida on in, and by the time he got home he had worked out a lie. Cassius had always wanted to see where Papa was lost, he told them, and Ben had explained to him how to find it. It would take him a far piece out of his way, because the rivers were down now; the corrida didn’t have to take the roundabout way the herds took in flood season. But the country Cassius would travel was safe now—no game in it, and so no Indians. Johnny Portugal had really made very fast time; Cassius could hardly be expected for two or three days yet. And so on and so forth. Not a word of it had any relationship to fact.

He had supposed that Mama would assume at once that she had lost her son to the dreadful trails, as his father had been lost four years before. Ben himself thought it entirely likely that Cassius was dead, and that they would never find out what had befallen him. A night-long hysteria would not have surprised him. But Matthilda, who could dissolve so easily over trifles, had a way of stiffening surprisingly when truly serious and deadly threats hung over them. She accepted Ben’s conjectures as though they were entirely reasonable; and if fears haunted her all through the dark hours, he was spared them.

Cassius came in the next day. He was gaunted and hollow-eyed; like his father, he was another who could never be caught asleep while he bossed a cattle drive. And he was saddle-weary to the bones from recent hard riding. One of the two horses with which Cash had left the corrida was dead, Ben learned later. The one he still rode was taxed so far past endurance that it might never recover full usefulness. The carbine was missing from his saddle boot, and Ben lent him his own, lest the loss attract attention when they reached the house. But Cash himself was sound, and in high spirits, in spite of his fatigue, and that was the main thing.

As they rode in they agreed to stick with the story Ben had already invented—that Cassius had visited Witch River, as a sort of shrine, because his father had been lost there. Actually, so far as he knew, Cash had been nowhere near it; didn’t know it when he saw it, or how to find it.

Nobody but Ben ever learned the story of where Cassius had been, or what had been his errand. Ben himself was not told right away, or all at once. Events at both ends of the Wichita Trail called for a making up of minds, so that the tale of Cash’s unaccounted days was easily pushed aside.

But what Cash had done was of graver portent than he thought. He had conceived a bold, brilliant, and wholly farfetched stroke; execution involved great personal danger, while the odds against accomplishing anything useful were enormous—which were perhaps the factors that made the plan irresistible to him, once he had thought of it. He was unabashed to have obtained no immediate result. He might or might not have set some wheels turning, but if nothing ever came of it at all, he would not be surprised. What Cash did not realize, and perhaps never fully understood while he lived, was that the action he took in those eight days he was missing in Indian Territory might prove more dangerous to them than anything that had ever happened to the Zacharys before.

Cash had begun by reasoning that Rachel was a Kiowa or she was not; and the truth must be in existence somewhere. If it was, the place to find it was in the lodges of the Kiowas themselves, for they had always kept better records of their history than any other Indians on the plains. He imagined that Striking Horse, a Kiowa warlock Old Zack had once known, could probably lay hands on the facts if anybody could. So Cash had gone to find out.

Four days out from Wichita he had left his corrida, and gone in search of the renegade village with which Striking Horse traveled. The Kiowas were already as good as at war. A furious burst of murders and scalpings was rushing them toward a show-down that could destroy them. A Texican who rode alone into a Kiowa village might not ride out again. “But sometimes,” Cash explained himself, “you have to call for the turning of a card.”

Striking Horse was an old man who for a long time had been what the whites called a medicine chief. The term did not fit too well into the patterns by which the Kiowas lived, for the Kiowas had no official medicine men. A medicine, or spirit power, might deal with anything, from wet joints to bullet proofing; almost every Kiowa warrior had a power of some kind.

What Striking Horse had was a gift of prophecy supposedly conferred by owls, which the Kiowas feared as more or less supernatural, and connected with the world of the dead. He kept with him an owl skin with a bladder in it, enabling him to produce an owl on order by secretly inflating one; and the showpiece among his sacred possessions was a giant thigh bone of a Man-Eating Owl. A man had to be a strong warlock indeed to fool around with owls.

Old Zack had once been Striking Horse’s friend, up to a point, and in a way. Striking Horse had been prominent in the Eagle Sign Society, a group of magicians devoted to sleight of hand. It had amused Zack to contribute to Striking Horse’s reputation by some simple gifts.

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.