The Unforgiven (4 page)

They watched the grass. Kiowas wouldn’t try a long foray, or any at all, until their war ponies were in shape. So the grass could tell you when the danger time had come.

Most important thing to know of all was that Horse Indians never fought well against walls. They raided for loot, which meant horses, and glory, which meant scalps, and they liked to get them cheap. If your house was proof against bullets and fire, its doors and shutters few and heavy, the Kiowas were unlikely to come against you at all. Only—

Ben now saw something ahead that might change the whole quality of danger on the Dancing Bird, past hope of survival. Suddenly he felt sick in the pit of his stomach, and sick in his heart. A decision he had put off for a long time, and that his father had put off before him, would have to be stood up to, now.

“Bring ’em on,” he ordered Cassius; and he rode ahead.

Clear of the corrida, Ben jogged slowly, his eyes habitually sweeping and quartering. With the Rawlinses, the Zacharys claimed by right of use a strip some twenty miles wide by thirty or forty long, coming to six or seven hundred sections. The sum total of accomplishment of Old Zack’s life lay in their precarious hold upon this land. “Damn the range,” Ben had said to Cassius; and now he was wondering if he could ever bring himself to mean it.

The Dancing Bird range was carrying upward of twelve thousand head, about half of which the two families hoped were their own; not counting as many again that carried their brands, but were scattered over half of Texas. They had cows, all right. Everybody had cows, and virtually nothing else. A handful of strays had escaped the early Spaniards, three centuries ago; and these had multiplied into the countless wild cattle that had tantalized and frustrated Texans since before the Alamo. Hundreds of thousands had been killed for their hides, without making a dent. Yet Texas beef remained value-less, until after the war, for want of a market, or any way to reach one.

Then, as the Civil War ended, a railroad poked into Missouri, as far as Sedalia. Ben remembered the excitement that swept Texas. Below the Neuces, where wild cattle ran thickest, a cow might be worth two or three dollars, but you couldn’t get it, because nobody had it. The same cow should be worth ten times that, and in cash, at the end of the track. Hundreds of cow-hunting outfits swarmed into the deep brush.

From the Neuces to Sedalia was a drive of more than twelve hundred miles, but William Zachary was only one of many who thought it could be made. With scarcely a dollar, and no place to borrow any, he scoured the brush country, contracting cattle from cow hunters on credit, on shares, or any way he could. He drove north three thousand head, with nine tough brush riders who brought their own grub, plus Ben, then sixteen. Ahead of them and behind them a hundred herds strung out for five hundred miles. Ben remembered his own boyish exultation, greater than he would ever feel again, as 260,000 head of cattle were thrown into the great march.

And he remembered the stunning, crushing disappointment of that year. The Texans drove a thousand miles, to be stopped two hundred short of their goal. Longhorns carried the deadly tick-transmitted Texas fever. Kansas farmers, fearing epidemic among their own livestock, threw up a quarantine barrier, stubbornly manned. The great herds were lost; and so were some of the drovers, who tried to fight their way through, and forever stayed in Kansas.

That was the first year. There had been seven since. That way north became the Chisholm Trail, as the rails pushed westward across Kansas to Abilene, then to Ellsworth, to Newton, and now to Wichita. Two and a half million cattle had made the long march to the railheads, and still they came on. Still the hearts of men and horses broke upon that cruel trail; and still the promise of fortune shone at its end, fabulous as the gold beyond the rainbow—and just as elusive, to most.

Of the seven years since Sedalia, three had been chancy, spotty years, in which they paid off debts in money, to borrow again in cows. Three years had been so bad that they had turned their weary herds and driven them back to Texas—which was how the Dancing Bird got stocked. Of “normal” years, in which successful drives found good markets, they had seen exactly—

One.

Their spring drive in 1870 had paid off every cent they owed. But it was also the last drive of Zack’s life, for that was the year he died under his drowning cattle, in the flash-flooded Witch River crossing.

They hadn’t made a nickel since. One reason was the treachery of the trail. Stampede, balk, scatter and give-out must be dealt with all the time. Thirst and starvation spelled off high water and bogged prairies; they had wars between rivals, banditry, stock diseases, failures of men and breakdowns of horses. There were freak disasters, as in ’69, when grasshoppers stripped half the prairie. The trail boss was a trouble-shooter, at all times so beset that the Indian danger, ever-present and often deadly, was almost the least of his troubles.

But the market itself was more shifty than the trail. The arrival of too many herds close together, or a shortage of cars, or a wobbly day on the stock exchange—anything—could leave tens of thousands of head standing unsold. For a good market, you first needed a country-wide corn surplus, for an un-fed longhorn was worse eating than a wolf. And next you needed a shortage of farm cattle, for the huge longhorn, unhappily, was the worst beef animal you could buy. Those vast bawling, earth-rumbling herds set fire to the imagination, until you thought you were seeing the advance of an empire, over the prairie grass. But the desolate truth was that trail cattle were of small importance to the meat supply; in its best years, the Chisholm Trail delivered less than ten per cent of the national kill. Only a special situation could make the low-grade wild beef marketable at all.

In the years since their first costly drive to Sedalia, the Zacharys had been neither lucky nor unlucky in their cattle dealings. They had simply worked along among the inherent paradoxes of the cattle trade. It was a way of life in which you might own ten thousand head of cattle, without a pound of sugar in the house. You might carry your gold around on a pack mule, while you knew you weren’t worth a cent. You might strip your range to bunch four thousand head, and find that you had gathered only six hundred of your own. You could start out with two thousand head, and in four years drive cattle worth half a million dollars; and in the end come out with two thousand head of cattle still, except that now, somehow, you owed for them all. You might even, in some long-dreamed-of year, hide a powder keg of gold eagles under the floor of a mud hut—and keep on making your own soap and candles, for lack of time to ride a hundred and fifty miles to the nearest store….

Yet Ben believed his father had left them the means to wealth and power. Here lay their great, deep-grass range, heavily stocked—even overstocked, since the turnaround of the year before. A year of booming markets was due, had to be due, for last year’s light buying might result in a national shortage. And the supply would be less, for many Texas cattlemen were discouraged, and more were in no position to drive. All winter long, Ben had made journey after journey, his pack mule loaded with tally books, this time. He had traded his own distant strays for cattle already on his range; when he had nothing to trade, he bought outright—on Zachary credit—hundreds upon hundreds of cows actually using the Dancing Bird grass. Their debts were sky-high again. Ben himself only had a loose general idea of how much they owed.

But this year they could put up a herd with more big feeder beeves in it, and more of them their own, than they had ever driven before. They would make back everything they owed five times over—if only they could make this year go right.

If the Zacharys took this year to move on, to some far-off new land—Nebraska, Dakota, Montana—much more than a great year would be lost. It was one thing for Old Zack to let go of things he had built up himself, and start again. It was another thing altogether for Ben to throw away a stake into which had gone eight years of his father’s life—and his life itself, at the end.

I can’t do it,
Ben thought.
I can’t run. Not now. Not yet. We’ve got to stand, now, here on this river Papa found. No matter what comes. No matter what.

Sometimes Ben felt awkward, and a little bit embarrassed, as he came in sight of the house after being away for a while, for no more reason than that they were always so danged glad to see him. But he forgot that in the first moment he was there, for everything seemed natural, easy, and familiar. He never supposed he knew how to be homesick nor realized how much he missed the people whom he left behind, until he saw them again.

Tears were running down Matthilda’s cheeks, and Rachel’s eyes had a wet shine, as Ben stepped from the saddle to the stoop. They hung around his neck, asking stupid questions, and making all the fuss they knew how. “Did you bring—” Rachel started to ask, then dropped it. He had never yet failed to do the best he could, and now that he was here it didn’t even matter.

In the house, where everything was shined up fit to eat and sleep the Governor, the best they had was ready to go onto the table, as soon as the women could leave Ben alone long enough to get it on. It was Ben’s duty to say grace, now that he was home. They had always said grace once a day, and ordinarily Ben’s quick mumble didn’t put much into it. They had used the same few words all their lives, until nobody really listened any more, or felt any meaning. But tonight, perhaps because he had had a rest from it, Ben said the little prayer so that they heard it again.

“Dear merciful Father, we thank Thee for these vittles, and for all Thy blessings this day. Now guide us, and guard us, and shield us from evil, we pray in Jesus’ name….Amen.” The others made an inarticulate sound on the “Amen.”

At one time Rachel had secretly thought the first part should go, “We thank Ben, mostly, for beating his saddle to death catching up with these vittles—not helped much by all this frolicky weather we’re being booned with lately, either.” And that short list of chores, repeated daily on the evident theory that the Almighty could not retain, had seemed to Rachel to be failing of attention, to judge by general results. But conformity had shaped an attitude of piety by sheer habit, and she no longer remembered her childish heresies.

Tonight they were all together again, all there were left of them, safe, and snug, and fed; and Rachel was truly thankful. Ben saw how happy she was, seemingly in all ways trustful of her world. He felt a hard twinge of pity, of anger, seeing her so innocently un-aware of the black hostility that was hanging over her, ugly enough to darken the lives of them all.

But if any except Ben had a worry it didn’t show. Ben’s return with the corrida ended the long tyranny of winter for everybody. He brought the spring, and the rebirth of their world. Rachel and Matthilda had seen no women except each other for many long months on end. Now they would see the Rawlinses, at least, practically all the time, for the two families must work together closely, from here on. Or so they thought then; because it had always been that way before.

After supper Ben brought in the slim parcels he had fetched home for Rachel and Matthilda. He explained that he was sorry about not bringing more. Had to carry everything in his saddlebags with his gear, till be bought the wagon at Fort Griffin. They found he had brought a piece of blue-checked gingham, too short, and a piece of red-checked, extra long—had he thought they could use one to piece the other out? But there was also nine yards of a flower-sprigged muslin that they wanted to hug him for; only he was gone from there, down by the corrals with the rest, by then.

By ten o’clock, when the boys came in, Matthilda had sent Rachel to bed; and Andy, turning in at once, was soon asleep. After that, as the owls began to fly, Matthilda seemed older than she had before, and Ben let himself go tired. Only Cassius was still crisp as the three of them took a look at the trouble they shared.

“Cash and I talked to the hands,” Ben told their mother. “Didn’t use Kelsey’s name, of course. Just said a horse thief. Told ’em how he looks. And we put up a hundred dollars.”

“A hundred—?”

“Those ’ramuses can’t count over a hundred dollars. More would only scare ’em.”

Matthilda looked strangely vague, so that Ben wondered if she had followed him. These vague-nesses were appearing oftener, as her age advanced. But now she said, “What if they catch him?”

Ben and Cash exchanged a glance, and Ben said slowly, “Mama, we never told them to catch him.”

“What?”

“The hundred,” Cassius said plainly, “is for his scalp.”

Mama gave a little shuddering gasp. “But Abe couldn’t fight them. He wouldn’t even try. Why, they’d have to shoot him with his hands up!”

“Yes,” Cassius said.

The tears that came so easily nowadays sprang to Matthilda’s eyes. She said, “Poor old man,” in a sort of plaintive whimper, and sat staring into space. The boys waited in silence for the moment of emotion to pass.

“If somehow, in spite of us, he sneaks up near the house again,” Ben said, “I want you to fort up, same as if he had the Kiowa nation behind him. And he’s got to be fired on. If nobody else is here to do it, Rachel has to fire on him. And, Mama—for God’s sake will you believe me?—you mustn’t stop her!”

Matthilda said nothing, but seemed to accept it.

“Now,” Ben said to her gravely, “I’m going to ask you to think of something else. I don’t know if Kelsey has been around the Rawlinses, or any neighbor. I’ll warn Zeb, he’s a squaw man and a thief. But Kelsey has friends in Texas, even yet; and the old, black lie he started against us is still alive, just as much as ever it was. If Kelsey gets to the Rawlinses, they may listen to him, Mama—just as likely as not.”

“That,” Matthilda said, surprisingly matter-of-fact, “is something that will happen, or it won’t.”

“Maybe it’s bound to happen, someday,” Ben said. “Maybe, if the Rawlinses hadn’t been looked on as no better than damyankees, they’d have been told long ago. Mama, have you thought about what we’d best do, when it does come?”

“Well, we’ll have to stop seeing them, I suppose.”

“There’ll be trouble. No way to work the range with those people, once they turn against us. Every county in Texas has had its gun feuds. We can very easy have one of our own, right here.”

“I know,” Matthilda said.

“There’s one thing more,” Ben said; but now he was interrupted.

Rachel had appeared in the bedroom doorway, bare-footed and in her muslin nightie, her hair in long braids. She asked in a plaintive, little-girl fashion, if she couldn’t come out and sit up with the rest of them, for a little while. She kept hearing their voices without being able to make out the words. This was a teasing thing, and kept her from getting to sleep.

Coaxingly, Matthilda asked her to keep trying, anyway. “The Rawlinses will be over tomorrow, like as not. We don’t want to look just awful.” Rachel’s eyes went to Ben with a quick appeal, but he did not intercede. The door closed softly behind her.

While she had stood there Ben had noticed again, unhappily, how pretty she had become, still wideeyed and childlike, yet so plainly a woman, even in the shapeless nightdress. A new, fresh little flower of a woman, as he saw her now, such as any Kiowa buck with eyes in his head would surely want to own. How often would unseen eyes be watching her this year? The Kiowas scouted this place all the time, for it lay on the way they took in search of farther, easier kills. This girl whom he had so long thought of as his sister had suddenly turned into murder bait.

For surely old Kelsey was now preaching to the Kiowas the same story he had started against the Zacharys in Texas, long ago—though to a different purpose. Strange that so cruel a people should set such great store by their own children, their own kin, as the Kiowas did. The deeper the gulch, the higher the hill, it seemed sometimes. So long as that sick-minded old man was trying to cadge favor with the Kiowas, what better way could he find than to lead them to a long-captive Kiowa child? Not that they would ever believe one word the old loony said. But if he kept on dinging the idea into their heads, one of them was sure to see the advantages in it, pretty soon. A Kiowa who wanted to think something generally found a way to prove it to himself.

Like, some young buck might get a Kiowa warlock to find out from the spirits if, by any chance, the crazy old man had hold of something true. He could hire one of the Owl Prophets, like Sky Walker, or Striking Horse, for a sample, to consult an owl. With a couple of gift horses in the offing for the prophet, it was wonderful how the owl would come up with whichever answer was wanted, about nine times out of ten. And if a single young war leader concluded that his people had a claim on the girl he could very easily find great lashings of fight-loving young bucks eager to take him at his word, and follow him all out in a holy crusade. Then you’d see Kiowas come against walls, and with all they had.

“There’s another thing,” he began patiently, again. “This is going to be an awful bad Indian year. Maybe the worst Texas has ever seen. You realize more than a dozen people have been killed since the turn of the year, right in the neighborhood of Fort Sill? They even stole a herd of mules out of the fort’s stone corral. And there’s a hundred other warning signs, as well.”

Matthilda shrugged. Not that she underrated the Indian danger; on the contrary, she feared the Kiowas unreasoningly. This year, as Ben described it, sounded about like any other year, to her. “I’ve never known the time,” she said, “but what an Indian could lie right out there on that ridge, and shoot down any one of us he picked.”

Actually, a Kiowa out on the ridge was bound to be a scout, alone, or with only two or three others. He wasn’t going to start trouble in decent shooting light unless he caught somebody far from support. Or, if he was from a nearby war party, he wasn’t going to give that show away, either, by poking into the best-forted hornet’s nest on the frontier. Not without even a chance at a scalp. Matthilda would never know things like that. To her the Wild Tribes seemed weird, unearthly, past hope of comprehension; and their cruelties so repelled her that she was forever denied a closer look. Ben was stumped. Nothing he could say seemed to help his case. His mother already held the Kiowas in the greatest fear she was capable of knowing, yet was unswayed by it.

He now attacked the key point of decision with a reluctance amounting to dread, yet head on, having found no other way to come at it. “Mama,” he asked, “would you be willing—-just for this one year—to take Rachel off to some safe place, like maybe Fort Richardson, or maybe Fort Worth—”

Matthilda was looking at him as if she couldn’t believe her ears.

“Or Austin?” he tried again. “Even Corpus Christi—”

“Have you gone mad?” his mother demanded.

He knew what he was up against, then. He felt a moment of chill, almost of panic; he had been hogtied before now by this gentle, lovingly inflexible will. He was hunting for a persuasion that would move Matthilda; without that, he was helpless to care for them or defend them. He could not very well take his mother and Rachel to Fort Richardson in irons, with a demand that they be held secure. It came to him that the fight of his life was not going to be made in the saddle, or in the smoke of black powder, but here, now, in this room. And it must be made with no weapons he knew how to use. Words never did come to him the way a gun or a reata came effortlessly into his hands.

“We’ve pushed the work hard,” he said, groping. “Cash and me both. We’ve had a right to hope we’d be so far in the clear, before trouble broke, it wouldn’t matter. One good year—maybe this year—and you can school Rachel in Switzerland, or—or—wherever—”

He saw how sadly his mother was looking at him. For a moment he glimpsed a pity as deep as a sorrow, as deep as her love, so that he was nonplused, and stopped. Matthilda no longer believed this hopeful story of a fortune just ahead; she had heard it too many times, since Old Zack’s first disastrous drive to Sedalia.

Matthilda Zachary would have hated and feared the prairie if no Indian had ever ridden it. The galling month-long winds; the dust that sifted forever from the walls and roof of the hole in the ground where they lived; the spreading stains of mud that leaked through with every rain; the few poor things they had to do with, so that endless toil showed no return; the cruelly harsh, home-boiled soap, which made cracked, hurting hands the price of just keeping clean—all this Matthilda could have forgiven. But she could not forgive what seemed to her the prairie’s vast malignance, as boundless as its emptiness, and as mighty as its storms.

A grass fire, a blizzard, or a parching drouth was always dotting the earth with carcasses, so that the deep-grass everywhere hid uncounted bones. For all its birdsongs, its flowers, and its wind-turned grass, the prairie kept changing into a horrid maw, that could swallow the labors of whole lifetimes in one savage night. It had taken her husband, and had even withheld his lifeless body, to be thrown away. The bright will-o’-the-wisp he had followed, and which now led on his sons, was part of a monstrous and cruel lie.
I know that, now
, she told herself.
But men have the hearts of little boys. They love to make up big golden dreams, to treasure as if they were true….

“Well talk about it when the good year comes,” she answered Ben.

“Mama, I tell you—will you believe me just this once? You’ve got to get her out of here now, before the first Kiowa Moon—or it’s going to be too late!”

“What little money we have wouldn’t carry us a step out of Texas. And I’ll never take her to a Texas town again—never. I’ll not see her heart broken, and her life ruined, before my very eyes. Have you forgotten Round Rock? And the San Saba? The whisperings, the snubs, the turned backs—while the poor little thing turns bewildered, and so cruelly hurt—How long can that go on before somebody says it to her face?”

“Says what to her face?” Cash asked sharply.

“Do I have to say it? I will then! Red nigger.
Red nigger!
”

It was strange to hear Matthilda speak the rough words, forbidden in her house. She might pronounce “Negro” as “Niggra,” but to her nothing on earth could have been a nigger. The disused words had effective force, even shock, as they heard her say them.

“Tell me,” Matthilda said, “you could bear to hear your own little sister called that?” Sometimes they could not tell whether Mama forgot that Rachel was not her own, or whether she was just playing her chosen role.

“I’ll hear no man say it twice,” Cash promised.

“It won’t be said by a man, or to you. It’s Rachel will hear it said.” Matthilda had left an infant daughter under the swept sand of a Round Rock churchyard. From the very first, Rachel had fulfilled for Matthilda a deep maternal need. Perhaps it was the same need that makes a mare break loose, and travel a hundred miles to haunt a cactus patch, where once she dropped a stillborn foal. Her face twisted now, and she sounded as though she were crying, while her eyes remained strangely dry. “Have you any faintest idea of what that would do to her?”

They supposed they knew how she’d feel; but maybe they didn’t. Perhaps men who live mainly in the saddle can never entirely put themselves in the place of a young girl when the world turns its back upon her, and draws off.

“She’s so dear, so precious,” Matthilda said. “How can you even think of letting that happen to her?”

“I’d choose it before I’d risk her death,” Ben said stubbornly.

“It’s the same thing.”

“What?”

“Do you believe she’d stay on a minute, once she thought she was drawing harm? She wouldn’t care where she went, or if she lived or died. We’d never see her again.” She was pleading with them to understand, and at the same time despairing that they ever could. “I don’t believe you know her at all!”

“I sure don’t see how it serves any useful purpose to hold her here, trapped, in the one most dangerous place she can be!”

“I can protect her here,” Matthilda said.

There it was, the softly indomitable purpose that came before everything else in Matthilda’s world. Because of it she had made Old Zack bring her here, which he never would have done of his own accord, knowing how she felt about the prairie. And because of it she stayed, in spite of every appeal Ben could make. “I can protect her here.” It was the end of argument, standing stronger than hope or fear. Stronger than common sense, too, of which it was the very opposite, Ben thought. He supposed that what he faced here was a female way of thinking. To a male, plain physical danger was the first consideration; it had better be, if he was responsible for a family on the prairie frontier. Matthilda’s conclusions would always be in some part incomprehensible to him.

“What when the Kiowas come?” he asked her.

“Well, then, we’ll fight, I suppose.”

She knew no more about fighting than she knew about Indians, and would be no help whatever if they were forced to a defense of the soddy. Probably she could not have said a thing like that in so maddeningly casual a way if she had known what she was talking about. Yet she had touched the weakest point in his whole position. This place could be defended, for the brothers, and Old Zack before them, had made sure of that. Even overwhelmingly out-numbered, they stood a pretty fair chance of giving attacking Kiowas a licking.

“Nothing more I can say,” Ben mumbled, baffled and defeated.

But there was something he could say to Cassius, when their mother had gone to bed. “You saw the hands I hired,” he said.

“They look all right to me. I told you that.”

“Could you take about twenty of ’em, and get four thousand head to Wichita?”

Cassius flared up, roweled on the same old gall. “What the hell you want to ask a thing like that for? You know it damn hootin’ well!”

“All right,” Ben said. “It’s your herd, Cash.”

“It’s what?”

“I’m staying back.”