The Unforgiven Alan LeMay
The Enemy at Gunpoint
Cassius raised his carbine to the loophole 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.
“You shoot well,” his hands said. “You do not shoot to hit. You hit me, nobody in your house will see the sun again.”
Rachel startled Cash by speaking almost in his ear. “This is no good,” she said.
“You get back where I put you!” he ordered 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…”
Chapter One
Dancing Bird River was the Zachary family’s name for a little run of live water ten miles below the Red, in the unsettled country west of the Wichita. Their soddy was cut into a slope beside it, in the last miles before the deep- grass petered out into the flinty apron of the cap rock. Some sketchy pole corrals marked this place as a cattle stand, but the house itself hardly showed. Its forward walls were built of the same mud and grass-roots into which it was dug, and so was its roof, which had a good stand of feed. It squatted low and lonely, backed like a badger into the hill; and its nearest neighbor was eighteen miles away.
Inside this hole in the ground, late in the afternoon of March 15, 1874, a dark-haired girl of seventeen was getting ready to put supper on. Her name was Rachel Zachary.
Her brothers had saddled before daylight, and had been gone ever since; but through most of this day, Rachel and her mother had found their absence a relief. The soddy was not a cramped one, as soddies went. The slit of a bedroom Rachel shared with her mother wasn’t much, but the main room was big for a dugout, even with bunks for the three boys filling one end. And they worked doggedly at keeping things picked up. “Put away one thing, put away all,” was the first rule of life, indoors. Yet with five people in one room and a fraction, the paraphernalia of even the simplest living hung from the beams, dripped from the walls, and kept the place forever cluttered. They were seldom weather-bound; the boys rode longest when the weather was worst. But on days when they did stay in, the place soon seemed packed with people.
High above the prairie a mat of black rainless clouds moved steadily across the world in a seemingly inexhaustible supply, dimming the afternoon to a twilight that would merge imperceptibly with the early dark. Under this overcast a wind from the north blew tirelessly, as it had for many days. Sometimes it rose briefly to the fury of a full norther, sending hundred-foot sand-devils spinning across the Red into Texas; but mostly it just blew, hard and monotonously, hour after hour, day in and day out, until silence became unrememberable.
That wind might have come a thousand miles, Rachel knew, without finding many people in its path to be bothered by it. Up in Indian Territory, along the tributaries of the Washita, it must be ripping at some hundreds of buffalo-hide lodges, sheltering such of the Wild Tribes as were insolent enough to be wintering on Agency rations. The mile-long villages of those hostiles could have mounted enough warriors to engulf a brigade, yet made no more impression upon the vast emptiness of the Territory than a dribbled pinch or two of sand. Surely the wind-moan in the cottonwoods along the Dancing Bird River must have been the lonesomest sound on earth.
About midafternoon Mama had gone to their bedroom for a nap. The partition was no strung-up horse blanket, such as was common to soddies, but a decently solid turf wall, plastered with homeburnt lime. Once the heavy door had closed, Rachel was alone with the sound of the wind. She didn’t mind that; at least, not for a while. Rachel Zachary was a shy, thin girl, lightly boned and not very big, but with considerable wire built into her by the kind of places in which she had been raised. The Zacharys had shifted ground a good deal, though not all of them understood why, always toward untamed land. Now, though, they had stuck it out in this one remote soddy for going on five years—more nearly a third, than a quarter, of Rachel’s entire life. While she could not help knowing that this was a desolate and sometimes menacing place in which to live, she seldom thought about it any more.
This year had begun with high hopes. Just lately, in January, Texas had got hold of its own government at last, for the first time since the War. Now the Rangers would come back, and the Border Battalions, and settlers would get some help in their ever-lasting defense against the Wild Tribes. At the same time, the beef market at Wichita was winding up to boom again, after a series of collapses that had left the Zacharys about as cattle-poor as they could stand. They were going to be rich, like as not—soon, this year, this very summer.
Only, first they must get through this deadly, dragging time of waiting, while winter held on, and on, as if spring were never coming back to the world again. Ben, Rachel’s oldest brother, had ridden down the Trinity a month ago to look for trail hands. He should get back any day now, with a corrida of at least twenty men—thirty, if he could find them—and immediately all this dull marking of time would be over. There would be a great swarming of men and horses, and hard-pressing action every day, as their first huge herd of the year was made up for the drive to Wichita.
Ben was twenty-four, old enough to seem at the full power of maturity from the standpoint of seventeen. He had been head of the family since he was twenty, when they had lost their father in the roily waters of a cattle crossing, far to the north. He was their rock of strength, upon whom they leaned in every situation of doubt. Perhaps they all felt at loose ends when Ben was gone. Certainly he could take care of himself anywhere on the frontier if anybody could—even in a wolf-howl of a town of three or four hundred people, like Fort Worth. Yet sometimes Rachel’s throat hurt as her thought skirted the possibility that they might never see him again, for this could happen out here, as Papa had already proved. Was he overdue? Well—not really; not quite yet.
She knocked the ash off the wood coals in the fireplace, and set on the three-legged skillet they called a spider. Then she looked at the clock on the mantel beam. It was one of the few truly nice things they had, with a little ship rocking away on painted waves where the pendulum might be expected.
It said exactly eleven minutes of four. She remem-bered that hour all the rest of her life.
She had been fooled by the unnaturally early dusk; it was still too early to start cooking anything. She set the spider off the coals, and went to one of their two real windows. These, even more than the clock, were their special pride, for they had eighteen panes of real glass apiece. They looked south across the Dancing Bird, so Rachel had to lean her temple against a cold pane to look eastward, past the corrals and downstream. She was hoping, for about
