The Unforgiven (15 page)

Matthilda slept lightly, nervously. The twilight seemed to hold on forever, and when at last it was gone the moon rose earlier, and shone more brightly through the skeleton cottonwoods, than they had expected of it, so soon. Four times before midnight Rachel stole out of the bedroom, and each time Matthilda came broad awake.

“Rachel—you up—”

“Drink of water. It’s hot tonight.”

Then Matthilda would like some water too, so that she was fully waked up again. And the patient waiting began all over again.

An hour after midnight Matthilda began to moan. Rachel thought her to be having a nightmare, and tried to get out of the room. But Matthilda’s voice sounded, faint but wide awake, through the warm dark. “I don’t feel very good.” It was almost a whimper. “I have the awfullest pain….”

The pain seemed to be right in her middle, so they decided it was indigestion. Rachel closed the shutters, and saw to it that the loopholes were all plugged, so that she could build a fire. They had drawn the coals at dusk, so she had to start anew, setting tinder to burning with a flash of powder from the snaphaunce firelighter. She set a kettle on, but lighted no candles, and fumbled by memory for the herbs she supposed she should put together, verifying them close to the fire. Finally she made a brew, believed to be good for indigestion, out of peppergrass, ginger, and some pinches of stuff such as mandrake root.

This concoction, brought scalding hot, must surely have been the worst thing she could have dished up, for it induced hard vomiting. A little later, before her breath was entirely recovered, Matthilda gave a long, groaning cry of pain, and went unconscious.

The next three hours went to make up the longest night Rachel had ever lived in her life. Matthilda regained consciousness in half an hour, but moaned continuously until daylight. She tried to lie quiet, but could not; the sounds were wrung out of her against her will. Finally she took to putting words to the moans, in an effort to get control. “Oh, mercy, mercy…Oh, mercy, me…Oh, dear, oh dear me, oh deary, deary me…Oh, mercy, mercy…” On and on forever, without end. Sometimes she asked for water, but if she swallowed a mouthful she could not keep it down.

When Cash and Andy rode in together, in the first dawn, Rachel knew she had never been so glad to see anybody before. Matthilda tried to smile at them. “Something I ate,” she whispered. They felt her forehead for fever, but she was wet with sweat. A little later she seemed to doze, out of sheer exhaustion; or perhaps she lost consciousness again, for her breathing sounded strange.

“Seems like a busted blood vessel,” Andy thought. “Somewhere in her chest.”

“You don’t know what it is any better than I do,” Cash set him back. “All I know, it don’t look like any natural kind of bellyache, to me. I’ve got to get help.”

Rachel was appalled. “All the way to—where? The Rountrees’? You won’t be back before tomorrow night!”

“I’ll fetch Georgia Rawlins.”

“They wouldn’t let her come here if the world was falling down!”

“She’ll come.”

Matthilda rested more easily after the sun came up. Her breathing became more natural, and she slept almost peacefully through the middle of the day.

Cash brought Georgia late in the afternoon. They came in at the gallop on beat-out horses—not wind-broke, but spent to the last notch that they could be without permanent damage. They would not work again in a month. Cash let Georgia down at the stoop, threw her saddle on the ground, and turned loose her horse. “Got to look around a minute!” he shouted, and rode to the corral to get a fresh pony.

“What’s the matter with him?” Andy asked the outdoors, afraid to speak to Georgia.

“He’s been fretty the last four miles,” Georgia told them. “Something spooked him. Didn’t say what it was. Let’s see your mother.”

Matthilda had gone worse again, seemingly half conscious but unable to recognize Georgia, and breathing with great labor. Georgia asked when it had begun, and looked overpowered. “This is bad. She’s bust a blood vessel.”

“I told you,” said Andy.

“Shut up and fetch my saddle bags…. We’ve got to quieten her what we can. Keep her warm. Wish we could get dry sheets around her. But I don’t dast mess with her. I sure hope I’m mighty wrong. She looks a whole lot like a goner.”

She pounded some dried leaves and pieces of root into a powder, and made a tea of it. They got about a half a cupful into Matthilda; it was the first liquid she had kept down so far. “Make her sleep, some, maybe. Won’t do no other good, though.”

Rachel tried to find out how Georgia had got away from her mother.

“Ma? Never asked her. Just lit out.”

“Don’t she know you’re gone?”

“Bound to. Saw me ride off with Cash, I reckon.”

“But what will you tell her when you go back?”

“Hell, Rachel, how do I know? Maybe I’ll tell her I’m carryin’ by him. Whatever seems needful.”

“She’ll kill you!”

“Not me. Oh, she’s game to pull a trigger, all right! But me, I’m all the girl she’s got left.”

That was the nearest they came to talking about Rachel’s bad time with Hagar. Listening, they became aware that Matthilda’s breathing was already quieter. Rachel was impressed and Georgia explained that it seemed like there had been a power of sick folks around, wherever she was. But she did not look confident; perhaps she was not entirely sure she had not killed Matthilda, with her witch-woman herbs.

Now Andy roused them up, speaking in a low tone, but urgently. “Stand over by the windows. No—one to each side. Get ready to bar them up. Not yet!”

They could hear the hoofs of Cash’s horse coming in, walking quietly. Standing by the windows, but out of line, they could not see Cash, but they knew he had given Andy some kind of signal.

“We got trouble,” Andy told them. “But don’t touch the shutters! We can’t let on we know it. Lest they never let Cash get here.”

He pulled a loophole plug from the door, and stood behind it, ready to swing it open. The sound of the walking hoofs came on, and on. How could hoofs so near approach for so long, yet never seem to get here? Suddenly Andy swung the door wide, and Cassius, bent low over the horn, jumped his horse across the stoop and intp the room. Andy slammed and barred the door behind him. “Now fort up,” he shouted.

“I figure there’s about a dozen of ’em,” Cash said as he dismounted. His horse seemed enormous, in here, making the house and everything in it look smaller than they had ever seen it before; the wooden floor boomed under the hoofs. “Knock open a loophole in the west wall. Rachel—get one open in Mama’s room. Georgia, pull the slide on the north lookout—better bust out the glass.”

They posted themselves as he told them, each alone, one to each side. And after that there was silence in the house. Matthilda seemed to be sleeping peacefully. Half an hour passed, and the sun went down. The shuttered interior darkened, but a clear dry light remained outside; it would not dwindle enough to harm marksmanship for the next two hours.

Cassius was trying to listen. “Georgia, for God’s sake, stop that damned clock!”

They had not heard the familiar ticking at all until Georgia stopped the pendulum, and the little painted ship on its painted sea rocked no more. When the ticking had stopped it left an emptiness that fairly rang in their ears.

“See there!” Andy spoke from the west loophole. “One’s riding in the creek bed. I can bead right on his head!”

“I see him,” Cash said.

“You want I should—”

“Let him come on.”

Up over the cutbank of the Dancing Bird, squarely in front of the house, came a single Indian rider. “Lost Bird,” Cash said, so that they all could hear it.

He came as he had come before, except that he rode bareback, and with a war bridle, a single cord tied on the lower jaw. He was without war paint, and his shirt was on; a four-inch silver concho shone in his hair. And this time they could see he carried no weapon at all. It was a strange thing for a Kiowa to present himself like that, entirely unarmed. But that was the worst thing about Kiowas; they were always doing something original, unpredictable, so you could never figure what kind of way they were fixing to come at you.

“That gray he’s riding is a famous racer,” Cash said with a peculiar detachment.

Lost Bird’s right hand was raised in the peace sign. He did not lower it as he pulled up five yards out, directly in front of the door, and made his pony stand like a rock.

Cash said something in Kiowa, and Lost Bird began to speak. Andy had returned to his station. Nobody was unglued from his loop to see Rachel creep through the shadows to one of the front shutter loopholes.

She remembered the smooth, beautifully molded face, the small, pleasant-appearing smile, the dark-reddish glow in the thick braids. But his eyes were only dark slits now. Rachel felt the peculiar revulsion that she had felt before. Lost Bird was speaking slowly in Kiowa, a phrase at a time; and he matched his words with the conventional sign language of the prairies that they all knew. So this time she knew what he said.

“We many times take your people,” he said, and though the sign language does not translate well in its literal meanings, the thought came through clearly; “You come, you want them, you buy. You pay us. We let you take them back. Many times. All friendly. All good.”

Cash said something through the door in Kiowa, and Lost Bird acknowledged it with a brief grin. But he went on with the speech he had doubtless carefully prepared. “Long ago,” Lost Bird’s signs said, “you take a child of ours. You take my sister. We look for her very long. Now we find. Now we come. We want her back now. She is ours. We pay. You pay us, now we pay you. All friendly, all good. I give ten horses for my sister. You give me. I take home.”

Cash spat out an angry Kiowa phrase.

“Tell what you want more. Price is good. But I give more,” Lost Bird’s hands said. “I do not leave this place without my sister. I have twenty-two men. You have two men, three women—one very old. No good.”

Cassius raised his carbine to the loophole, aimed steadily, 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. He believed he knew whom he was dealing with, and how their minds worked, and what Cassius, particularly, would do and would not do.

“You shoot well,” his hands said. “You do not shoot to hit. You hit me, nobody in your house will see the sun again. You know that. Now listen. I tell you all this again.” He started over with the same prepared speech as before. “Few times, we take your people….”

Rachel startled Cash by speaking almost in his ear. He didn’t know how she got there, standing at his elbow. “This is no good,” she said.

“You get back where I put you!” he ordered her, through his teeth. He was abruptly, bitterly angered, for her intrusion threatened a betrayal of all their long efforts to shield 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!”

“You’ll not go out there, because I’ll stop you,” he said; but he was less sure of himself, thrown off by her revelation.

“Maybe you can stop me. But they’ll be in here, while you have your hands full with me. Now let me go.

He stared at her, bewildered by the flat, dead-sounding tone in which she threatened outlandish, unbelievable things. “Is everybody crazy but me?” he demanded. “By God, I know how to settle this!”

Out in the clear twilight, Lost Bird was patiently, slowly, going through his smooth, clear signs. His gruff Kiowa phrases came steadily to them, through the door. Cash raised his carbine again, and instantly fired. Lost Bird’s head jerked violently with the impact of the bullet; he was dead as he fell. The whole back of his skull seemed to be gone as he lay face down in the dirt. The gray war pony shied, found itself free, and stampeded.

Cash had fired to kill, from cover and without warning, at a range from which failure was impossible to him; while Lost Bird had sat horse before him, unarmed, fully exposed under the peace sign. Any justification would have to be found in the necessity Cash had believed governed his decision. He never thereafter spoke one word in his own defense, or gave any sign of regret.

“Oh, Cash, Cash!” Rachel cried out. “They’ll never draw back now! They’ll fight till we’re dead!”

“You can bet on it,” Cassius said.

“They’ll never let up, so long as—”

He cut in harshly. “Then there’s no use you going out, is there? Now get back to your loop!”

For a few moments stillness held outside. The zinging of the locusts in the cottonwoods by the creek had been silenced by the gunshots; and this made the quiet unnatural, as if the whole prairie lay stunned.

Before the locusts could begin again, the “Wa-wa-wa-wah!” of a war cry sounded from the creek, immediately followed by an uncountable chorus. The creek bed seemed to be full of Kiowas, while yet no Indian but the dead Lost Bird could be seen. Two rifles slammed, down there; then a ragged volley. The windowpanes burst outside the battle shutters, and fell tinkling.

“Close your slide,” Cash called to Georgia, who stood at the back of the room, at the north lookout. “Get down on the floor!”

Andy, at the end, complained, “I can’t line up on nothing from here!”

“Stay there anyway.” Cash turned away from his door loop, and leaned against the plastered sod wall, at rest. A buffalo slug broke through a shutter, and rattled, spent, across the floor. A little after that a bullet nicked a splinter out of the side of the door loop where Cash had stood, and lodged above the fireplace.

“They’ll quit this, in a minute,” Cash said.

He was right. The Kiowas were firing at the house in an expression of anger; they had no plan to fit what had happened. The guns in the creek bed fell silent, and Cash looked out again.

“Two-three of ’em have gone to popping up and down,” Cash said, puzzling everybody. “Guess they want to see what we’ll do.”

“What
will
we do?” Andy asked him.

“Nothing,” Cash said, but kept his carbine ready. He watched an Indian leap straight up to expose half of his painted body, then drop from sight again. Another tried it in a different place. Then a single white-streaked warrior sprang out of the creek bed, and stood in the open upon the bank. Cash fired, and the Kiowa came down in a heap. The lip of the bank crumbled, and the body began to slide over the edge. Cash fired again, and hit, he thought, before the body disappeared from view.

That was the end of that experiment. The Kiowas could not be heard withdrawing, but they could be expected to take council now. Ten minutes passed without event.

“This might be a good chance to eat,” Cash said. “They’re not liable to give us too many good ones, from here on in. Not for a while.” He looked for the Kiowas to try a jump at them in about the last of the dusk. He believed they’d want to make use of poor light, on account of he’d bothered them a little bit, he thought. They had had him all figured out, just how he would act, only he hadn’t acted that way. Still…all he could say for certain was that no Kiowa was going to leave here yet, unless to bring more. They would never leave the body of Lost Bird lying out there in front, where it was.

Rachel accepted that the body out there was that of her brother, or perhaps a half brother—incredibly of her own flesh and blood. Yet she felt nothing toward him, or toward any of the Kiowas, other than the bitter enmity you feel for halfhumans who have come to destroy everything you love.

Georgia helped her push furniture around, and make a tent of blankets in front of the fireplace, so that no gleam would show outside the ports. They heated nothing but coffee. The boys had to stay on watch, and wanted only cold meat and bread, such as could be eaten with one hand. When each had coffee and a sandwich, Rachel remembered grace. Once, long ago, when Andy was too little to be still when Papa bowed his head, she had said a stupid thing in trying to quiet him, for she was little, too. Her words came back to her now.

“Wait, Andy—Papa has to read his plate.”

“What?”

“I’m going to say grace.” The locusts were going again, out in the limpid twilight, but her low words came clearly through the quiet of the room. “Dear Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for these vittles, the—the gifts of—” She faltered. Remembering the long ago had made her remember Ben, too, and what this prayer had made her think when she was halfgrown. She had almost said,
these vittles, the gifts of Ben’s hard work….
She recovered herself. “The gifts of Thy love,” she finished steadily. “Now guide us, and guard us, and keep us from evil…”

Cassius’ horse began to paw again, making a thunderous noise on the wooden floor, so that the rest was lost. The horse was trying to fudge around toward the smell of water, in the barrel by the door. Rachel got him a bucket, unbridled, and fed him a loaf of bread; then put the bridle back on. The animal drowsed after that, well-practiced in going un-satisfied.

After that, Rachel chewed her bread and meat methodically. It seemed dry, and sticky in the throat, all but impossible to wash down. But—
No feed, no distance
, she was remembering; she made herself get through it all. The motions of feeding people brought a hard ache into her, sometimes in her middle and sometimes in her throat; too many memories went with these people, and this room. The uneasy quiet left time to think, which was the last thing she wanted to do; and she became more miserable the longer the silence held. If she had not worked in a daze, as if hit in the head, she might never have got through it at all.

They damped out the coffee fire, and folded the blankets, so that the chimney could help keep the place aired. Cash and Andy opened more loopholes, including two near the floor, at the ends of the front wall. These were intended to surprise hostiles who crawled along the foot of the wall, under the other gun ports. Cassius talked over with them how they must fight. He and Andy would defend the battle shutters because, though he did not say so, these were an incomplete protection. No one must fire from the same loop twice in a row. They must put backs to the wall to load. When they moved about, they must duck under or step over the lines of fire radiating inward from every port. Each must pocket the cartridges he would need. A lot of their ammunition was out on the range with the wagon, but Cash judged their supply would last the night.

When they were as ready as they were going to be, Rachel and Georgia looked at Matthilda again. She slept so quietly now that they had to bend low to hear her breath. They both felt her pulse. At first Rachel could not find it at all.

“It’s so weak,” she whispered. “Just a cobweb.”

Georgia didn’t say anything. Something about Matthilda’s pulse bothered her more than its lack of strength. Seemed more of a quiver, than a beat. But she was unsure what this meant.

After that there was nothing to do but wait. The last of the twilight was falling very fast. Andy said, “Maybe they’ll wait for the moon.” Nobody answered.

Suddenly Georgia moved. She was sitting against the dug-in back wall, and now she put her ear to it. She tried to say something, but the words only caught and whispered in her throat. On her next try the words came louder than she meant, so that she startled herself, and them all. “They’re comin’!”

In another moment they heard the hoof-murmur coming into the room through the earth of the hill into which they were dug; and soon after they could hear the horses outside, all around them.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a buck,” Cassius said, nonplused.

Rachel ran toward Matthilda’s room; Georgia went to the north lookout slide.

“Leave that shut!” Cash said suddenly. “Rachel—plug the loops in there, and come here! Andy—block the ports at that end! I see this now!”

They obeyed him, closing the ports by knocking home wooden plugs, fitted long ago. Outside, the hoof-rumble rose and rose—an approach so unquiet that it must certainly have been meant to be heard.

“Damn fool that I am!” Cash blamed himself. Ought to have guessed the hostiles would try to come in here the quickest way. Only the door and the two windows overlooking the Dancing Bird offered openings big enough to admit a man. Except for gunports, the bedroom where Matthilda lay had only some slits near the roof, to give air. Neither these nor the north lookout were big enough to get in through. What Cash had imagined was a crawling, swarming attack—Indians along the walls where the guns could not reach, Indians digging under, Indians all over the roof, like ants trying to get into an egg. The Kiowas could dig through the thick turf with hatchet and ironwood lance, making their own gun ports, until the place bristled with guns pointed inward. They could breach the walls and come pouring in; they could level the house to the ground, if they had to.

First defense against this kind of an attack was to pick off the Kiowas as they rushed, before they got tight to the walls. If Cassius’ cowhands had been here, instead of bumbling around somewhere with a bunch of wet cows, they might have fought off the whole Kiowa nation. Even loopholes made by an enemy work two ways—until they become too many. As it was, with only one gun to the side, their chief hope was to hurt enough Kiowas to destroy faith in their medicine, so that maybe they would quit.

But Cash now saw that he had wrongly imagined the whole thing. Mounted warriors could do nothing against walls; they could only create diversion and confusion, while delivering a badly aimed covering fire for a dismounted attack. They would not bother with that against so few, if they were coming from all sides. The attack would be frontal, against the shutters, and perhaps the door.

He now posted Georgia and Rachel belly-down with cocked carbines at the low ports in the front walls, near the ends. If their ports darkened, they must fire, for Kiowas crawling along the base of the wall must pass these ports to get to the shutters. Beyond this, they would play no other part, until knifemen got into the room.

They were barely in position when the war cries broke the night wide open, very near and all at once, an incredibly loud and inhuman yammering. A file of mounted warriors streamed across the front of the house, firing raggedly but continuously. Except for an occasional slug that splintered through a shutter, little was to be feared from this kind of fire. Andy and Cash several times raised their carbines, but lowered without firing. The Kiowas were riding close, too close. Some hung on the far sides of their saddle-less ponies, but even those who sat straight up, firing coolly, whipped past the ports too fast for a decent shot. What Cash did not want was to bring down a horse. A dead horse would make a redoubt at too close a range.

The riders were circling the house now, reloading as they passed behind, and the war cries never ceased. A warrior wearing a buffalo-horn headdress pulled out of the circle and stopped his pony in the open, signaling to the racing circle with his shield. Cash and Andy fired together, and a scalp flew off the Kiowa’s shield. The rider seemed to fall on the far side of his bolting pony, but he never hit the ground.

“No good,” Cash said. “He took cover, that’s all. He was sitting up again, going around the corner.”

“Those black and yellow bands,” Andy said. “In his warpaint, and on his shield—”

“That was Seth,” Cash confirmed. “Wolf Saddle is the one painted up with black and red snakes. Seems like he dropped out of this last round. That one I put a crimp in, down by the creek, was Fast Otter, I think…. Look sharp, now, Rachel, Georgia!”

The circle of racing ponies went on unbroken, and the war cries screamed continuously all round the house. Bullets still slammed into door timbers, and the gunfire out there made the ears ring. But nothing was hitting the shutters now. Cash went to stand by one window, and Andy by the other. And now Rachel’s carbine crashed.

“Get him?”

“My loop’s still blocked,” she fired again into whatever lay against it. Then they heard Georgia’s carbine go, at her port near the other end.

“Good girl,” Cash said. For moment, then, Georgia let her carbine fall. She rolled away from her gun port, sat up, and what sounded half like sobs and half like laughter came through her fingers.

Rachel cried out, “She’s hurt—she’s shot in the mouth!” She ran to Georgia, but attempted no aid. She threw herself upon her stomach across Georgia’s legs, and got her carbine muzzle to the loop Georgia had abandoned. For a split moment she saw what she took for a leg outside the port; she fired, and believed she hit it, but it was snatched away.

Georgia pushed her aside. She was breathing hard, and her voice shook, but, “Nothing hit me,” she said, and she took her porthole back.

An ax, swung by an enemy who stood in the protection of the wall, was splintering into the shutter where Cash waited. He had an answer to that. He coolly studied the angle of the axblows, then struck the wall nearby with the butt of his Colt. A shard of plaster fell, revealing an opening the size of a half dollar. It showed no light, but as he fired through it, the mud that plugged it went to dust and the ax blows ceased.

At the other window the whole frame loosened, and the shutters cracked and bowed inward, under the impact of a boulder no man should have been able to lift. A split opened down the middle, and Andy fired through the crack at a shadow beyond.

And suddenly that was all. The mounted Kiowas circled a few times more, but their fire was thinning. Then both gunfire and war cries stopped altogether, and the rear wall brought them the sound of horses going away.

Matthilda had slept through it all, and still slept; making them believe now that she might never wake.

Lost Bird’s body was gone, when the three-quarter moon came up, but they could see no other dead. Scoring up, they believed that three more Kiowas had been hit, one of them hard. Andy still believed he had touched up Seth, a little bit. Cash didn’t think so. They feverishly carpentered the broken shutters, finding out how hard it is to get anything done right in the total dark.

When that was done, not much was left to do but wait.

“I guess I kind of slipped a stirrup, there for a minute,” Georgia said sheepishly.

“You did fine,” they all assured her. And that was all that ever was said about that.

Cash was encouraged, cocky, even, because they had come through a full-out assault without any hurt. “See how easy? I misdoubt if there’s a Horse Indian alive knows how to fight against walls. If they can stand getting shot, we can sure stand pulling the triggers. Just as long as they want to keep up!”

He told them a story he had picked up from a cow hunter, way over to the east of their range. There had been a big fight, up on the Staked Plains—just lately, too. No more than three—four weeks ago—seemingly about the middle of June. Twelve or fourteen buffalo hunters—Billy Gibson was their ringleader—had moved into an old deserted place up there, called Adobe Walls. And here they had been set upon by the biggest passel of Comanches, along with a fair sprinkle of Kiowas, that anybody had heard of in years. The story had it that there were sixteen hundred Indians in it. “So, let’s say, there maybe was about four hundred Indians,” Cassius trimmed it down. He didn’t know who the war chiefs had been, except that Quanah had been seen there.