The Unforgiven (19 page)

He pivoted as he fell, and came down partly on his side and partly on his face, arms and legs jackknifing in an awkward heap. As Rachel turned him over he was in the stunned moment between the first shock of pain and its return in full force.

“I’m all right—I’m all right—” he said, without seeming to know how to help himself. “You—your mouth’s bleeding….”

For an instant she could not see where he had been hurt, but a rush of blood was already puddling into the patch of moonlight two feet away. It was the inside of his upper arm, just below the shoulder, and the back muscle of his arm; the tumbling bullet had torn a jagged channel, so deep that his arm seemed half severed. An artery was cut, and the bone broken—perhaps shattered—so that when she straightened the arm it had a joint where none should be.

She tore off the hem of her skirt and made a tourniquet. It had to go almost at the armpit, the wound was so high up. Nothing was in reach for a turn-stick except the barrel of the Whitney revolver, so she used that. She twisted the heavy cord of cloth tighter, and tighter, and still the blood ran in a pulsing stream.

Pain was returning, making muscles jerk all over his body. “Don’t—don’t—” he kept saying through his teeth, while still the pistol must be turned, and turned, and the tourniquet disappeared into his flesh. When the rush of blood dwindled to a trickle, she tied the Whitney where it was, and fetched the pillow from her bed. Ripped open, this yielded masses of raw cotton in lumpy wads, as it had come from the bale. He choked back a scream, then went unconscious, as she turned him on his face to get at the wound.

It took bandage after bandage, for in spite of great handfuls of cotton the blood kept coming through. After the bandaging she had to make splints, and by the time that was done he was able to help her get him to his feet. She half carried him, taking his whole weight when he lurched, and got him onto his bunk. He was breathing hard and irregularly, in gasps and gulps, but he cried out no more. “Walker—th’ Walker Colt—Bring me—”

She put the gun into his hand, and after that he wanted water. That was all, though. He was past noticing that the Whitney revolver was in his tourniquet, so that she could no longer use a final shot as he had wished. She got the Henry carbine, and started to refill its magazine, but found it fully loaded. She didn’t remember when she had done that. She sat on the floor beside Andy’s bunk, and what she was feeling most was such a weight of weariness that she could hardly lift her hands. Except for those few short dozes, twenty-four hours ago, they had not slept in more than thirty-six hours. Her head ached, her balance was poor, and a steady ringing filled her ears. And yet, there was still that single thin thread of resolution to hold her up. It was stretched taut, and near the cracking point, but it had not broken yet.

She could hear the Kiowas singing again, someplace a good ways off, not so loudly this time. They were using a single drum, muffled by wetting its stretched hide. She couldn’t tell how many voices there were. She tried to estimate the time by the position of the squares of moonlight on the floor. Midnight was hardly past; the dawn had a long, long way to come.

A soft, dragging sound was coming from someplace, as though the Kiowas might be creeping close again, along the outside of the walls. Somehow it didn’t sound quite like that. It sounded as if it were here, near her, in this room; yet she could see nothing move. After she had listened a while she put her ear to the planking. The sound was coming from under the floor.

This seemed out of all reason, yet the dragging sound went on, stopping for minutes at a time, but always beginning again. There was a space under the joists at this end of the room, of uneven depth, but with room for one man to crawl around on his stomach. You could squeeze into it from the root cellar; Rachel and Andy had explored it long ago. Papa had brought out a bunch of friends to help him build their soddy, before the family came out. They had used a pan of water for a level when they built the floor, but while they were digging they didn’t need to be so particular, and for a level they had used a whisky bottle. Trouble with that, there was whisky in it only at first, and after the bottle was empty they had kept on using it for a level anyway. By the time they were down to grade at this end they were working with more enthusiasm than eye for straight. “There’s a power of digging in a case of whisky,” Papa had said.

So that was where something was dragging itself around, either stealthily, or else feebly and with great difficulty. Now she remembered the shots she had fired through the root-cellar slide, when an enemy was trying to chop his way in. Maybe one of the shots had creased one, or skulled him, so that he had come to in the dark, not knowing where he was. Or she might have put a bullet in his head. Men shot in the head did not always die at once. She had even heard of a man who had been shot straight through the temples, in the War, yet had lived, and had recovered.

Maybe the savage dragging himself around under the floor was blind—or even without any mind at all—just a body that lived, and crawled, not knowing what it did….The intermittent sound of the thing creeping under there went on for a long time, and the distant singing went on, and the moonlight on the floor would not move at all.

The big carved secretary lifted two inches and dropped again, with a bump that shook the whole floor. She had to think for a while before she knew what had happened, and she had forgotten how to think. One end of the heavy walnut piece was standing on the Glory Hole, and the trap door had tried to open. Whoever was under the floor was not mindless; he had found the Glory Hole, and guessed that a trap door must be above it. Not feeble, or weakened, either—he must have the strength of a grizzly. Under the floor was no wounded man, crawling around blind, but a stalking hunter, carrying out a plan. Maybe he had meant to locate them by ear, and fire upward through the floor. Inching toward her, he must have come upon the Glory Hole because she was beyond it.

As quietly as she could, Rachel hitched herself back into the corner by Andy’s bunk, where the deepest shadows were. She couldn’t see the sights of the Henry, but she would not need them, for she could fire along the floor. She cocked the carbine and held it in her lap, ready to fire it from there. The carved secretary began to quiver.

Slowly, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, the trap door of the Glory Hole began to rise.

Ben had ridden late and started early. His tired horse had gone low-headed, and its running walk had slowed; though the bullion mule, more lightly laden now, jogged steadily on his quarter. The sun was going down as he came in sight of home approaching from the south, across the Dancing Bird.

From a long way out, as he crossed a far rise, he saw that the chimney showed no least haze of smoke beyond the bare trees; and suddenly he knew that something was very wrong. He stopped a moment; then threw away the mule’s lead, pulled his carbine from its boot, and went on at as hard a run as his horse had left. Behind the last ridge he stepped down, dropping the reins, and ran forward to the crest on foot. And there he stood for many minutes, looking at the soddy from across the Dancing Bird, at two hundred and fifty yards.

The door of the soddy still stood, but the windows were black empty holes, shutterless, with only a few splinters of framing where the glass had been. A misshapen dead horse, bloating in the summer heat, lay on the roof, its position queerly distorted, as if it were partly buried in the roof itself. The red horizontal light of the sunset struck across the house front, bringing out sharply some hundreds of pock holes, where bullets had blasted cone-shaped craters, big as a man’s hand, out of the dry mud. The door of the saddle shed was torn out. That was about all there was to see. But the empty corrals left this place more still than it had ever been, since first anyone came here; not even a bird sailed or whistled, anywhere along this sector of the Dancing Bird. No place Ben had ever seen, not even No Hope, had ever looked more dead.

His carbine slid from his fingers into the dust; if he had been aware of it he would not have cared, or supposed he needed it any more. He walked to the creek, neither quickly nor slowly, but only plodding heavily, one foot and then the other. Not even his sick dread of what he must face within those walls could matter to him now. He reached the creek bed, dropped into it, and waded the mucky shallows to climb the cut-bank. Some broad bloodstains, clotted but blackening, marked the slope; but he walked across them unheeding, moving steadily uphill to the house. He was within ten yards when a strange, unnatural sound from within the dark soddy made him falter. What he heard, he knew as he came nearer, was someone moaning and muttering some sort of gibberish, in a voice he did not know. It sounded as much like Kiowa as anything else. He drew his long-barreled Colt, and stepped over a window sill, into the soddy; and there he stopped.

He was standing in a shambles. Great blood pools, some still clotting and sticky-looking, most dried and darkening, spread under both windows, over a great area in the middle of the room, and even showed where a flow had run out of the fireplace, across the hearth, and onto the floor. The carved secretary was lying on its face, the only whole piece of furniture in the room. Broken glass, and a great litter of shattered wood was everywhere, from splintered shutters and furniture put to the ax in efforts at repair; the table was a pile of drift. Three walls, but especially the back wall, were covered with the same bullet craters that pocked the front wall outside. A leg of the dead horse hung down in the middle of the room from a great sag in the broken roof. The clock was bullet-smashed, the water barrel was split and overturned. No greater havoc could have been expected if a regiment had fought here for a week.

The voice Ben had not recognized was Andy’s, where he lay half out of his bunk in a fever delirium; and he was begging for water. He moved feebly and aimlessly in a kind of writhing, and his eyes saw nothing.

Rachel stood in the shadows at the far end of the room, a carbine in her hands; and she looked so like a spook Ben hardly recognized her. Her eyes stared at him like dead eyes, out of black hollows. One side of her mouth was puffed enormously; her nose was skinned, and perhaps broken. Blood smeared from her mouth and nose was crusted all over one side of her face, and what remained of her dress was stiff with great dark stains.

He failed to speak, on his first effort. On the second try he said, “It’s over, Rachel. Now everything’s going to be all right.”

She stood the carbine on its butt, out in the middle of the floor, as if she were leaning it against an invisible wall. It balanced a moment, then rattled on the planks as she turned away. She stumbled to the bedroom door, and got it open. She almost reached the bed, but struck its edge as she fell; and lay face downward on the floor.

He picked her up, and started to put her on her bed; but he saw the sheeted corpse in the other bed, so carried her away. At the other end of the soddy he found his own bunk smoothly made, untouched in all that chaos. He stripped off the ruins of Rachel’s dress, and put her poor dirty little body between the clean sheets, before he went to Andy.

Nine of the range crew came in soon after daylight. They had lost the cook, whom the Kiowas had caught in his overturned wagon. And they thought they had had a pretty bad time, until they saw what had happened here. The two men who had gone missing when they went to hunt for Rachel had not been seen again. And nobody knew where Cash was.

They moved both Andy and Rachel to improvised beds in the saddle shed, and strapped Andy down to dress the wreckage of his arm. Ben himself bathed Rachel, and made her as comfortable as he could. Sometimes, for a few moments, she came half awake; she knew Ben then, but said very little. She knew that Matthilda was dead, and that they had forted up, and Andy had been hurt. For the present she didn’t seem to remember much more, and Ben was glad for that. He poured soup into her when he could, and she slept.

Between stages of delirium, Andy was able to tell Ben what had happened here, but only up to a point. He remembered Rachel’s firing through the root cellar slide, but he didn’t know what had overturned the walnut secretary, or what had happened in the fireplace—or maybe the chimney; or what had busted the water barrel. He thought that after he was wounded he had fired at something, from where he lay—maybe several times. And he knew a gun had continued to let off near him, from as far back as he could remember. He had the impression that he had lain there many days.

Late in the morning, shortly after they buried Matthilda, a rider from the Rawlinses brought word that Cash had been found, and he was dead. But he didn’t seem to know anything more about it, and rode away without dismounting. They learned nothing else, until Georgia Rawlins rode in at noon.

She said somberly, “I’m glad to see
you
here, Ben.” Her face looked bloodless under her tan, and very drawn; somehow harder, around the mouth and eyes. She made Ben walk out to the creek with her, where they could talk. “I sent a man. Did he get here? We found Cash.”

He nodded.

She went on in a lifeless monotone, and told him of the night she had spent here, describing that first night’s fight as a “brush.” After Cash rode her home or pretty near, he seemingly had lined out to fetch his crew in. But after the Kiowas cut him off, she believed, he must have tried to fight his way home. The signs appeared to show that he had fought a long way from where he was hit, and his horse killed, to where he had ended. Georgia herself had gone out to identify him for certain. She had sewed him into a wagon sheet; and they had buried him on the hill-side above the place where he fell.

“Ben, can it be, that was only day before yesterday, he was alive!” Her face crinkled up, and the tears came. “I loved him, Ben. I was going to marry him, soon as we could tell you. It was always him, I guess, in spite of all different I knew I should do. It can’t ever be no other man.”

She leaned against him, much as she would have leaned against a gentle horse; and her tears wet his shirt. Her words came muffled. “You’re the better man. You’re a better man than Cash ever could have been. But somehow, nothing like that seemed to matter….”

She stood back, and dried her tears. “You want me to look at Andy’s arm?”

They walked back toward the saddle shed. Ben had sent a rider to bring a surgeon from Fort Richardson, but he might have to go all the way to Fort Worth. Might be days. If he didn’t get here in time, Ben would have to take off the arm himself, or they’d lose Andy, next. “Will you help me, Georgia?”

“I’ll help you all I can. Always.”