The Unforgiven (6 page)

While it lasted, the lively horse-handling made every day a fiesta, but it was over in less than a week. The colts would have to learn their work as it went along. The cook wagon and the bed wagon began to roll. From here on the corrida would get home only every third or fourth night, coming in long after dark and pulling out before the first light. A couple of hands were left at the home layout, cleaning out the well, or mending saddles, or burning lime; there were always plenty of odd jobs to keep them busy while they served as a garrison. And one of the brothers always came in overnight when the corrida was out. This seemed all the precaution that was needed, for the moon was at deep wane; and even when it waxed again, the Kiowas would remain pinned for one moon more, while their ponies regained weight.

Almost every day Rachel rode out to the wagons with whichever brother had slept home. The range hands were rounding up, cutting out the beeves that would make up the first drive, and chousing them into bunches that would finally be thrown into one great herd. The Zachary boys worked cattle in the hell-for-leather way Old Zack had learned in the brush country, where you rode full stretch or lost your cow. Often Zeb Rawlins watched the parting of the cattle from his buggy, and Rachel knew he was sometimes angered by what seemed to him a brutal roughing of the stock. But she wasn’t going to worry about old Zeb’s opinions or anything else, while these treasured days of the green-up lasted, to her the most precious of the year.

Part of it was the good smells, of cows and horses, and leather, and beans boiling, and salt pork frying, sometimes the spice of trampled sage; while every-where, and above all, the fragrance of young grass responding to the rains made a magic like nothing else ever known. It rose upon a new warmth, gentle, moist, and living, from the unlocked vitality of the earth itself—the smell of hope, of promise, of a world reborn. Under the ground and upon it and in the air, every winter-deadened thing awoke, turned young and eager; and human hearts rose singing in answer.

And partly it was the sounds. From the increasing herds came a continuous bawling that is like no other music on earth, to cow-folks’ ears. Underneath it ran a perpetual soft, deep tone that was the voice of the sod itself under the beating of innumerable hoofs.

Before long she was sleeping out with the wagons half the time. Matthilda had never been so easygoing with her before. The truth was that Matthilda had been unable to shake off the forebodings she had been made to feel by Kelsey’s appearance on the Dancing Bird. Often when she looked at Rachel she seemed to see a shadow hanging over her, menacing the child’s place in the world, and her will to live—perhaps threatening her life itself; and she was moved to a loving pity, in which she wanted nothing in the world so much as for Rachel to enjoy a free and happy time, in her innocence, while yet she could.

Out in the overnight camps, Rachel was the only one ever allowed to sleep in a wagon, sheltered by its bowed canvas. Even Ben and Cash, even the cook, slept on the ground, and would if it were under water. At night the herd was quieter, though never entirely still. When a critter lay down it made a big, contented-sounding “whoof,” as it settled, knees first, into the trampled grass. If there were thunderstorms they would shuffle themselves all night, tense and ready to run, and all hands might have to stay in the saddle. Even on quiet nights the cattle might get restless, for no apparent reason, snuffy and always listening. What did they listen for, spooks? Wolves? They could get themselves strung up until the crash of a falling cigarette ash was enough to explode them, and they would jump and go, all at once. One night when they broke they like to ran down the wagon, rocking it as they blundered past, until it almost turned turtle.

Singing to the cows seemed to quiet them, and help to keep them from going snuffy, nobody knew just why. Maybe it covered up small sounds that the cattle might think were suspicious, and gave them something meaningless to listen to. Or maybe it kept them assured that the two or three men who rode spur-jingling and saddle-creaking round them all night weren’t up to anything. So all night long some of the hands would be singing out there, while they slowly circled the bedded herd.

The long rides between the wagons and the house, yellow-slickered in the bursts of rain, were almost the best. It was only when she was alone in the vast-ness of the night that the prairie ever made Rachel afraid. They were getting a lot of rainbows; once she counted eleven in a day. Between showers, all over the prairie, the meadow larks were singing. When she was learning to talk, way back in the first year she could remember, she had known the meadow larks were saying “Happy—new year—to you!” And they were saying it yet.

But the day came when Rachel realized, with a hard shock of disappointment, that the spring work was almost over. She could not understand how so big a herd as they were going to drive could have been made up so soon. But now the long-winged chutes went up, for a quick road-branding of the herd; and that was always the last thing they did. As the hands began bunching the cattle for the push through the squeezers, Rachel knew the lovely green-up time was done.

Jude had forged eight stamp-irons for each of the two squeezes they built, so that plenty of irons were always cherry red, no matter how fast the critters came through. Using plenty of branders and plenty of fires, they branded a cow on both sides at once; while ear-markers cut a dangling strip of skin, called a jingle, on each ear, at the same time. The cows went through there on the run.

For a road brand Cash was using a kind of Galloping X, only he said it was a bird, and that it was dancing. Plenty big, and burned high on the ribs, it could be seen as far as you could see the cow; and the jingles served to identify an animal that so much as raised its head in the middle of a herd. Zeb Rawlins had some grumbling to do about the size of the road brand, which he declared cut down the value of the hide; and he disliked the ear jingles, which seemed to him a senseless disfigurement. Ben undertook the job of assuaging Zeb, and fending him off, determined that the tough job ahead of his brother should be made no harder; and the herd was branded as Cash wanted it.

Then suddenly all grumbling stopped. Georgia Rawlins, who had been riding virtually alongside Cash every day, came out no more; Jude and Charlie took to scouring distant corners of the range on their own, far away from the wagons. Only old Zeb still sat lumpishly in his buggy, watching over his interest with what looked like a jaundiced eye.

“Reckon they got the word,” Cash said.

“Yes,” Ben answered.

Together they rode to Zeb’s buggy.

“Zeb,” Ben said, “you got something you want to say to me?”

“Well, no; not now,” Zeb scratched his jowls, looking them over with the stoniest eyes they had ever seen in a human head. “Not right now…”

They knew they had got answer enough. Kelsey had been to the Rawlinses—or else had stirred up somebody else, who had carried his lie to them.

Cassius was for dragging the whole thing into the open, and at once. Settle the matter once and for all, so far as it concerned the Rawlinses and this range, in a single explosion, as violent as needful. He never did have any use for a waiting game.

“Red niggers,” he said through his teeth, furious enough to go to the guns. “We’re all of us red niggers to them, right now! You going to stand hitched for that?”

“What about Georgia?”

“Georgia will stand by me or she won’t,” Cash said in his anger. “And right now I don’t care a hell’s hoot which it is!”

Ben judged it was time to get his own back up. “Now listen here! You bust up this drive, and you’ll never boss another—you hear me? Because I’ll bust your Goddamned back! You get that herd to Wichita, before you talk feud-fight around me!”

Cassius wasn’t worried about his back, or what his brother might do, but the thought of having his drive broken up before it even started threw a scare into him. He shut up.

Rachel drove her mother out in the democrat wagon to see the herd start off. Matthilda always announced, on the eve of every drive, that she didn’t believe she’d go out this time. The chill of the darkness before dawn made her knees hurt, and when you’d seen one you’d seen them all. But hot coffee and the excitement of the move-out always changed her mind when morning came.

They began to hear the moaning of the cattle a long way off, and the sound of the herd, coming to them across the long prairie miles, carried a sense of its great mass, as vast in proportions as its importance to their lives. For an hour the herd remained hidden from them by the roll of the land, while its earth rumble increased imperceptibly, and its voice developed until they could hear the bawling of individual cows. Then they came out upon a ridge that Rachel had chosen the day before, and below them moved the herd.

The first drive of the year always seemed new, as if it were the first drive of the world. The longhorns themselves were spectacular—almighty tall, gaunt, long-striding beasts, armed with horns spreading six, eight, and even ten feet; and Cash was driving more than four thousand head. They had moved some bigger herds than this, and driven them a whole lot farther than this one had to go. But you couldn’t look at this broad, slow-moving belt of horned stock, seemingly stretched out as far as the eye could reach, without feeling that here was the most portentous pilgrimage ever undertaken by man.

Far out ahead the point rider rode at a walk, followed waveringly by the lead cattle, a long way back, held loosely to the line by the forward swing riders. No single critter had yet emerged as leader. Rachel picked a slab-sided claybank steer, of great height and spread of horns, as the one she’d bet on to be plodding in front when the herd raised Wichita, someday, beyond the curve of the earth.

Behind the leaders the herd was a rebellious muddle for a mile and a half, but a winding backbone, where the cattle were thicker, was already beginning to show. In a couple of weeks the cattle would put themselves into traveling order of their own accord. But even in this first disorder, their very numbers gave the long straggle the effect of moving at a measured pace, and with a great, slow majesty. They went past for a long time.

A steer broke for the brush, so far off that it appeared no more than a humping, tail-high speck; but as a pony streaked after it, closing in long jumps, Rachel knew the rider was Andy. He got the steer by the tail, and busted it end over end; whereafter it trotted back where it belonged, satisfied. A hard disappointment was ahead for Andy, and Rachel wondered if he knew it yet. Ben and Cash had told Andy a thousand times that he couldn’t be spared from home, but Andy wanted so badly to go up the trail that he wouldn’t believe they meant it. Only yesterday he had cleaned and mended all his gear, and packed his bedroll ready to go. But Ben would turn back tomorrow, with the six hands Cash was leaving him, as soon as the herd was across the Red. And when he did, Andy would be with them.

Up from the drag came the chuck wagon under its narrow-hooped canvas, bounding most marvelously behind six apparently unbroken horses. It looked like a runaway, but the brake wasn’t on. This manner of driving seemed to be one of the ways range cooks expressed their defiance of the fate that had made them cooks. After the chuck wagon followed the bed wagon, not visibly driven at all. Some unfortunate green hand with the job of nighthawk, who herded the saddle stock by night and drove the bed wagon by day, rustling wood for the cook in between, was probably already asleep among the bedrolls, letting his team follow that of the cook as it chose.

Behind the last cattle the cavy of saddle stock, something around a hundred and seventy head, came wandering and loafing along, let to move about as the ponies pleased. And finally Cash came loping from the farthest tail, on his way up to the point. He came up the ridge to the democrat wagon, and leaned from the saddle to kiss his mother and his sister, then galloped forward. The point was already out of sight beyond a distant rise.

Matthilda reached for Rachel’s hand, and they held onto each other hard, as the last of the great herd passed beyond them, and out of their world.

After the herd was gone, the work went on; and for a while it seemed pretty lonely around the little soddy.

The Rawlinses came visiting no more; but the present coolness was easily explained, entirely aside from any part that Abe Kelsey might have played. Effie had been delayed, and Jude had stayed home to wait for her. None of the Rawlinses, except Georgia, thought Cassius could handle any part of the drive without Jude along, and Hagar had actually wanted the drive held up, until after the wedding. Even Zeb saw that this was ridiculous; the market would not wait for Effie, or anybody else. But Zeb himself could not forgive Ben’s failure to consult him before making Cassius trail boss, for Zeb had hoped to put Jude in charge. Rachel could understand why the two families had better stay away from each other, for awhile.

And Ben was gone all the time. Cash had left Ben with six men and Andy, as well as both Rawlins boys—theoretically; though Jude was supposed to ride and overtake the drive after his sister’s wedding. There was no Indian danger yet. The moon had been full as the herd rolled, but now it was on the wane; the Kiowas would let their ponies strengthen on the spring feed until the moon waxed again. Ben left two men at the house—though even this seemed hardly needful—and worked a single wagon far out. He was trying to catch up with the calfbranding in the far corners of the range, so that he could work closer home when the danger time came.

Meanwhile, Rachel was having a harder and harder time getting away from the house. The inside work had piled up some, during the green-up; but aside from that, Matthilda seemed to feel lonelier, and less secure, as Cassius got farther away. No sense to it, of course. But Rachel was finding out that the less sense there is to a thing like that, the harder it is to talk away. This quirk of the mind went back to the year they lost Papa up there, in the crossing of the Witch River, Rachel supposed. What few times Rachel did get out to the brandings, Georgia was always there; that was what made her mad.

Andy rode home every day or so, but Ben got home only once during that wane, and he might much better have stayed away. He came in very late, and drank his coffee without sitting down. “You all right, here? I’m fine. Work’s going fair, I guess. No, they haven’t heard from Effie, far’s I know. You folks need anything?” He filled his pockets with cold vittles, and was actually at the door, when he turned back to cut Rachel’s girth for her, once and for all. “Oh, by the way—Sis—you’ll have to quit all this ramboodling around the country. You’ve got to stay home.”

“Now wait a minute!”

“For a lot of reasons,” Ben explained. He had found Indian sign almost every day he had been out. No big war parties, looking for fight—ponies not ready, yet, to shake off a pursuit. Mainly horse thieves, playing hide-and-sneak. But the whole Indian situation looked bad. Fort Sill troops had been fired into—not just once, but three times that he knew about. Ben predicted a full-out uprising, come summer. “Just wait till their ponies are ready. Then you’ll see!”

“Well, they’re not ready yet! Never heard such a far-fetched excuse in my life,” Rachel argued. “What are you up to out there you don’t want me to know about?”

“Who, me?”

“What about Georgia? I notice she rides on the wild loose every day of the world! Everyplace you do!”

“Who’s Georgia? Oh, Georgia. I’m not running Georgia. It’s you I’m responsible for,” Ben answered her, making out it was all a matter of sweet concern for his sister’s welfare.

Rachel was left low in her mind, and haunted by suspicions. Georgia pretended to be helping with the tallies, but Rachel thought it was mighty funny that she was always to be found tallying for Ben. Never felt called on to help her own brothers, who got on fine without any put-in from Georgia, seemingly. Not much to go on. Rachel couldn’t really convince herself that anything was wrong. All she knew for sure was that a spring of seeming promise was turning into something pretty tiresome, with fly season not even begun.

But now Abe Kelsey was in the Dancing Bird country again.