Читать книгу The Unforgiven - Alan Le May - Страница 6

Table of Contents

NOW Ben got back at last, to the great secret relief of Cassius. Even the weather seemed to have changed for his homecoming. The cloud mat was gone, the sun blazing bright; and the wind gave place to a gentle breeze, still dry, and smelling more of last year’s wild hay than of new grass, but of a pleasant warmth. Cash and Andy, having trailed Kelsey and lost him, were cow-hunting to the south that day, toward the Little Beaver, trying to bunch the scattered and winter-driven cattle for a ready gather. As they rode they looked often to the southeast, hoping for a dust that would mean Ben was finally coming in from Forth Worth, and points beyond. They could see a long way in the clean air, but nothing showed.

They were looking the wrong way. In the middle of the morning they were puzzled by a considerable dust, big enough for a company of cavalry, but far to the southwest. Nothing lay in that direction short of Fort Griffin—more than ninety miles away, for a horse, which is always having to go around something. Between lay an unholy loneliness. Buffalo hunters, men bolder than angels and dirtier than wolves, crossed this wild land in slaughter seasons. Sometimes they came upon the charred skeleton of a cabin, and camped upon its graves. Other times they ran into Kiowa-Comanche war parties, and found out how came the graves there. During the war, and the nine years since, the undefended frontier had been pushed eastward a hundred miles.

They went on with their work. Along about noon the dust was replaced by a signal smoke. They watched it go up in puffs and long sausages, bitten off sharply at earth level, blurring out into long scraves of nothing as they rose; and they recognized one of the family signals. It meant, “I’m coming in.”

Andy let out a long yell—“Wa-a-a-a-ah-hoo!”—of pure celebration. “Whoppee!” he added, finding he had enthusiasm left over.

Cassius took a more nonchalant attitude, now that Ben was actually in sight, for he resented his own relief. “Well, I’ll chew up a whistle-pig,” was his comment. “What in all hell is he doing down there?”

“Maybe he taken a short cut,” Andy suggested. Away from the house they dropped very easily into the looser speech of the cowhands among whom they worked, having learned very early in life that this was wise.

They rode southwest toward the dust, and closed on the corrida in a couple of hours. They saw from a long way off that Ben had fetched home some thirty riders and a wagon—about the most successful hiring of hands they had accomplished yet. And he had around fifty head of loose saddle stock; for their range leaked horses so badly, all year round, that they had to bring in replacements every year, on land that should have produced a market surplus. So far, so good, Cassius admitted, subject to a closer look. He had wanted to go after the corrida himself.

Ben himself loped ahead to meet them at near half a mile, and the brothers exchanged a brief, hard handshake. Ben was big, shock-headed; as a boy he had been round-faced and chunky, and even now that he was gaunted, he was so heavily boned that people thought of him as burly, which he was not. Where Cassius had inherited old Zack’s flash, Ben had his father’s force and authority. Four years as head of the family had aged him to look more than thirty, instead of his rightful twenty-four, which was perhaps why he seemed steadier than his father had been, or his brother would ever be.

“Well, another damned rickety, wamber-jawed wagon, I see,” was Cash’s opening comment. “But that’s all right, I can fix it, in a few hundred hours.”

“Had to have it for the cook,” Ben explained mildly. “Crippled, of course—or why’s he a cook? This here’s a spring wagon; Mama will be crazy about it. How is Mama?”

“She’ll be fine, soon’s you show her how to drive two wagons.”

“I figure she can run between them,” Ben said, to ditch an argument that did not interest him. He blamed himself for the way he and his brother graveled each other, almost on sight. Maybe Ben had inherited responsibility for his brothers too suddenly, and too soon. He got along all right with Andy, because he still thought of Andy as a little boy, in whom any reasonable competence came as a surprise. But Cassius was another matter. He expected great things of Cash—and he wasn’t about to get them. The upshot would be that they would lose Cassius pretty soon, in just about the first year he thought the family could stand on its feet without him.

“I guess they must have moved Fort Worth,” Cash said now. “I always thought of it as more to the eastward, like.”

Ben explained reasonably that he had picked up a few hands there, but not enough. Seemed the Chisholm Trail dreened off most of the Tarrant County riders. So he had turned southwest, racking down the ruts of the old Overland Mail another hundred miles, past the ruins of old Fort Belknap, all the way to Fort Griffin.

“Where a man can find all the damned hide hunters he wants,” Cash said. “Them stinkies must have laughed theirselfs sick at the mention of work. No cowhands, of course.”

“The buffaloes make it bad, all right,” Ben admitted. Only a few stragglers troubled the Dancing Bird nowadays, but farther west there were still buffaloes aplenty. Pretty hard to boon a man with a slow-death job a-horseback, when he could get rich just banging a gun. Only thing, you had to have your own wagon outfit. Hide hunters with wagons weren’t looking for gunbangers; what they wanted was skinners. All those riders, who had sifted down there like sand into the toe of a sock, would sooner starve than skin buffaloes. So Ben had been able to hire some, such as they were.

Both brothers had things they wanted to talk about, but not in front of Andy, or with the overemphasis of haste. So, “Come have a look,” Ben said.

They rode back, now, along the straggle of newly hired cowhands, who numbered twenty-eight, plus a cook who drove a six-horse team in the drag. In the performance of these men could lie the difference between calamity and a great year. From the Dancing Bird to Wichita was a drive of only two hundred and sixty or seventy miles—no drive at all, compared to some Old Zack had made to Abilene from below the Neuces River; and they could expect wohaw—a tribute paid in gifts of beef—to satisfy the roving bands of Indians, who had no stomach for a fight with an armed crew anyway. Nevertheless, several thousand head of wolf-wild stock must not only be moved, but in some degree coddled, through uneasy country every mile of the way. The herd could get into big trouble any time, any place, if its trail hands were not up to snuff.

Seen from this standpoint, the new hands Ben had to show his brother looked none too encouraging. As usual, the greater number were youngsters; born misfits, mostly, hangdog and unsure of themselves, but with wretched hats cocked jauntily, as if they hoped they were dangerous. One thing was pretty plain about them all. These were wanted men, or thought they were, or they would not have been here. The Dancing Bird was too far from town and too close to the Kiowas to be easy to hire for, no matter where you looked for men. At Fort Griffin you took what you could get. Yet Ben believed he saw a certain toughness, or the makings of it, in these downwind drifters; and he was hoping his brother would see it too.

Cash looked them over with a show of indifference. He had bossed a trail herd when he was nineteen, and believed he had proved himself a cowman. But Zeb Rawlins, with whom they pooled their drives, had been disappointed in the returns, and had never okayed Cash to drive again. Ben might blame himself, but actually most of the ill-nature with which Cash had greeted Ben’s return grew out of Cash’s resentment over having been unfairly shelved.

“Looks like you did all right,” he finally brought himself to say.

So much for that. Ben now sent Andy back to the remuda to cut out any five of the new horses he wanted, for his own string. And the two older brothers drifted off to the flank, where they could talk alone.

Cassius waited until they were beyond earshot of the corrida, before he fired his cannon. “Abe Kelsey was here.”

Ben’s startled glance acknowledged that he had heard, but he didn’t say anything right away. “Close to the house?” he asked at last.

“Rode up to a window. Leaned down to look in.”

Another pause; then two questions more. “What kind of a horse was he on?”

“A mighty sorry horse, the way they tell it. I didn’t see him. Mama and Rachel saw him.”

Ben nodded, gravely. If Kelsey rode a bad horse, it meant the Kiowas still took away his horses as fast as he could steal them; so he had gained no influence with them, or favor. Well, that was something.

And his other question: “Does Rachel—?”

Cassius shook his head. “She hasn’t found out anything. Only—this floored me, Ben—she did call off his name. Whether Mama let something slip, or she guessed it from—well, that ain’t what signifies.”

“No,” Ben said slowly. “That ain’t what signifies. You want to know something?”

He pulled his horse to a walk, and Cassius waited. Looking at his brother sidelong, Cassius saw he looked a whole lot tireder than a man should, coming off so easy a trip—virtually a vacation.

“Cash,” Ben said, “I had to kill a man.”

He was looking straight ahead, so that Cassius was able to cover up his first startled, even excited reaction. When Cash spoke his tone was quiet. “The same thing?”

“It’s always the same thing. But this time I had no warning. The guns let off, and a stranger-boy I hired that day was down in the dirt. Seems he pulled first, but he was baited into it. The bastard who done it accused him of going to work for ... a red nigger lover.”

“But when did you—”

“Oh. Me. I stepped out in the middle, and the killer swung round on me. I heard his hammer cock, so I fired.”

They were silent awhile. Cash finally smiled a little. “Well, that makes us even.” He held out his hand, and Ben gripped it. “I run into pretty near the same thing last year,” Cash said. “I kind of figured you knew about it.”

Ben nodded. “Wasn’t going to say anything, till you wanted to.”

“Thanks, Ben.” For a moment, there, they were probably closer than they had ever been in their lives; and they weren’t even thinking about it. “We’ve got to catch this Kelsey and hang him,” Cassius said. “We should have tracked him down long ago. I’m thinking of the Rawlinses. No scale-horn on earth ever come stubborner than old Zeb. And nobody hates Indians worse. If Kelsey ever stirs him up we’ll have a finish fight on our hands. Else he’ll gore us off the range.”

“Damn the range,” Ben said.

“What?”

Ben held his voice low, but a shake came into it, beyond his control. “Cash, I know, I know in my heart, I’ll go after them, and I’ll kill them, every man ... the day they turn on her.”

A shade of emphasis fell on the last word, “her,” and that was where it belonged. It was Rachel whom Kelsey had been able to turn into a hostage, and a way to get at the Zacharys. In a dozen pioneer crises, the Zacharys had been held defenseless by the special vulnerability of this girl. And their great fear, keeping them forever on their guard through these years, was that she herself would find it out. Their perpetual vigilance in itself had made her far more precious to them than another child could ever have been.

Rachel, called Rachel Zachary, had been raised in the belief that she was their own. But she was not a Zachary, nor of any kin. Nobody knew who she was, or could ever know. It was not even known of what blood she might have come.

Abe Kelsey claimed he knew. He, and he alone, had been present when Old Zack found a naked baby on the prairie, seventeen years ago; and this gave him the color of authority, for some. After Kelsey turned on Old Zack, these listened when Abe pointed to what he claimed was the Zacharys’ strange immunity to raids.

“Kiowas won’t touch ’em. Never have, and never will! Bought themselves Scott free when they sold out my boy. Even took in a red nigger whelp on swap, to bind the deal. Go see for yourself! A squaw young’n as ever was—growing up in the Zachary name!”

No worse nonsense was possible. If the Kiowas had believed for a moment that the Zacharys were holding a Kiowa child, however fractional of blood, they would have attacked without let-up. Yet it was the kind of theory that easily took root in this blood-soaked ground. In the past twenty years Kiowa and Comanche raiding parties had killed more than eight hundred Texas settlers. Among them had been a great number of women killed by incessant rape; and a lot of stolen children who died most pitifully in captivity. The victims were not only scalped but often gruesomely dismembered.

Ben thought that Texans should at least have learned by this time that the Horse Indians used fast travel as a weapon, and great space as a shield. Old Zack himself had helped teach the Kiowas that a blood-angry posse might soon be charging in among their own lodges if they left too short a trail. Kiowas raided from the top of Kansas to Santa Fe; they could cross Texas at eighty miles a night to raid deep in Mexico, and be back above the Red while the same moon held. Not how far away, but how watchful, was the measure of safety on this frontier.

Yet people in the worst-hurt counties still built houses with bullet-leaky walls and tinder roofs, without lookouts, rifle loops, or battle shutters. They let their children wander unwatched, and left their women alone for days while they fogged off on senseless errands. They couldn’t learn and wouldn’t be told, and no amount of bloody murder ever changed that.

Perhaps a man whose family had been chopped up could not be expected to blame his own negligence. Easier on his peace of mind if he assumed he had done the best possible job, and found other explanations for the better results of others. There were people who asked too recklessly and too often why war parties always passed up the Zacharys, exposed in handy reach, to jump families two hundred miles beyond.

An unheard-of heresy crossed Ben’s mind. A man could learn to hate Texas. He could learn to hate it all.

Ben himself never feared the Kiowas much. What he feared was a moment of carelessness, at the wrong place or the wrong time, by one of his own people.

They watched the moon. Kiowas on raid might attack by night or by day, but traveled only by moonlight. When the moon was full, you could figure war parties were sifting all over Texas, unseen; while in the dark of the moon you wouldn’t cut fresh sign of a single band. The Zacharys allowed twelve days a month for the full moon, and lived differently, then.

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.