The Unforgiven

about a medicine dream he claimed to have had, in which he was shown a thing that actually happened, long ago. He had seen a Kiowa village running away from a great force of Tayhahnnas. While he watched, a baby was bounded out of a drag litter unnoticed, and so was lost; and this was what the dream had been sent to show him, for here it ended. He had even been made to know in what year this thing had happened. But something was unclear. The baby had seemed to be a Tayhahnna child, held captive by the Kiowas. Cash made out that it was necessary to his medicine to know whether this was true, or whether the lost baby had been a Kiowa child. This was what he had come to find out from the Prophet of the Owls.

Striking Horse brought out his history calendar, and gravely spread it before Cassius. This was a spiral figure, delicately drawn upon a deerskin, and filled up with tiny pictures, each representing a summer or a winter; for the Kiowas counted time by seasons, rather than years. Each spring and fall the calendar keeper added a little drawing that stood for an event. The single event served to bring the season back to him, reminding him of all other events. A number of Kiowas kept these wheels, each one differently. The Owl Prophet’s wheel went back so far it had grown bigger than a grindstone.

The old Indian told Cassius to point to the time, on the calendar wheel, when this thing happened in his dream. At first it didn’t seem as though this could be done. Counting back didn’t get anywhere, for the calendar keepers commonly left out seasons, or whole years. But Cash studied the wheel; and presently saw a winter distinguished by a speckled face. He had heard of a smallpox epidemic among the tribes during the winter before Rachel was found. So now he pointed to the summer following.

After due thought, Striking Horse decided he didn’t remember any baby being lost that summer. Must have happened in some other village than his own. He said he would ask some other calendar keeper sometime, when he ran into one. If he found out, he would send word. He put the carbine away, and offered Cash a smoke.

“I guess I was a damn fool,” Cash said. “Wasted a carbine, likely. Still…the Kiowas don’t generally lie. Except to damyankee commissions,” he qualified it, “who lie all the time. He might find out. I remembered afterward he never asked where to send word. But I judge they know how to find us, all right.”

Yes, I judge they do, Ben thought. Too dang hootin’ well. He was hiding a bitter anger, for his immediate conviction was that Cash had made out death war-rants for them all. The thin nonsense about a dream could not have fooled Striking Horse for a minute. So here was Abe Kelsey at their throats again; doubtless he had tried to tell the Indians a thousand times that the Zacharys were holding a captive Kiowa girl. Now old Kelsey was dead, and still they weren’t shed of him at all. He was even safe from them, for they could never again hope to hunt him down and kill him as a solution to anything. He put Ben in mind of John Brown, whose dead body had got into a song, and helped bring on a war the South could not win. And here we got another damned hell-raising old hooter amoldering in his grave, while his mischief goes marching on. I suppose the old son of a bitch ain’t ever going to lie still.

Small matter whether the Kiowas had believed Kelsey or not, now that Cash had run to Striking Horse and virtually confirmed the whole thing. Cash didn’t realize, Ben told himself, keeping his mouth shut and his face still until he could get hold of his anger. He had to remember that the dangers with which Cash had been tampering had been far less plain at the time Cash set off up the Wichita Trail. He didn’t know….

“I don’t know why we never thought of this before,” Cash said. “Papa could have proved long ago she hasn’t a drop of Kiowa blood, right out of those Kiowa history calendars. Easier then than now.”

Ben saw, then, what had blinded Cassius to his mistake. Their mother’s wishful assumption that Rachel was of pure blood had stood in Cash’s mind as an unquestioned truth, without alternative, since before he could remember. Only Ben knew why his father had never gone to the Kiowas for an answer.

William Zachary had believed Rachel was a Kiowa child. Perhaps, for all Ben knew, he had known it for certain.

No use to tell Cash that now. “You did a brave thing,” was all Ben said, at last.

But nothing about Striking Horse, or the missing eight days, came up to mar the triumph of Cash’s return, that first day.

Chapter Twenty-six

Cash had made his drive in thirty-one days, and it had leaned him to the bone. By all accounts, he had no more than dozed against a wagon wheel once in a while, and the rest of the time had slept in the saddle, or not at all. Once his deals were made, the rest of his time was spent in retrieving his cook and the best seven men that he had from Delano, Wichita’s whisky-and-women suburb, across the Arkansas River.

The same collection of saloons and dance halls had been called Nauchville, when it stood outside Ellsworth, and Hide Park at Newton. Each time the railhead advanced, these shaky buildings were pulled down and flat-carred, to be set up again at the new shipping point, with the same cadre of bartenders, faro dealers, and girls—plus the new faces of additions and replacements. It was a cowhand’s paradise, such as no man could rightly appreciate until he had behind him the brutal hardships of the trail. But Cash finally combed the men he wanted, heavily hungover, out of the sawdust floors of Delano. He believed he knew them, now; and he was paying them the highest wages offered on any trail.

He could afford it, for he was riding the high wave of success. After the heartbreaking drives from which the Zacharys had turned their cattle back to trail them home again, after years in which they had dumped whole herds at the price of hides in order to pay off their men, Cassius had sold high at last.

Until Cassius got home, Ben had not touched the huge strongbox carried in the cook wagon. It was built of heavy steel plates, and it took four men to carry it into the house. Instead of padlocks, it had blacksmith-welded iron straps, and they were the better part of an hour getting it open at all.

Inside, sewed up in a great number of small deer-skin pouches, Cassius was carrying a little more than $104,000 in gold.

Ben was chilled as it got through to him what Cash had left in the hands of the tough renegades Ben himself had hired in Fort Griffin. Cash claimed he knew his men. Ben didn’t believe anybody knew these men, or any men, well enough to justify trusting them with a fortune like that. Well—they had got there with it; that was the final answer to that.

They moved the carved secretary Papa had made—it weighed about a ton—out into the middle of the room, to get at what they called the Glory Hole. This was a trap door, fitted of random-length planks so as not to show, with a keg set into the earth underneath, to keep their money in. It had been empty, or nearly so, most of the time for quite a while. But tonight they filled it up again; and tried to realize that they were rich.

After Rawlins had been paid some thirty thousand dollars for his lesser share of the herd, and they had paid off seventy-five or eighty other brands for nearly a thousand strays they had driven and sold, and when they had paid off twenty-two thousand in debts, they would still have thirty thousand dollars left—a fortune, clear and unencumbered; plus a couple of thousand head of breeders and young stock, not counting calves and yearlings, standing on the range.

They could send Matthilda and Rachel to safety far away, to the east coast, or abroad; they could do anything they wanted to now—if only they could find out what it was. For now Matthilda balked. She feared even to cross Texas with Rachel while Kelsey’s hanging still had the whole doomful dispute over her birth still fresh in everybody’s mind. They were certainly safe here, with a corrida, now with a strength of twelve men plus the Zacharys themselves, right here on the place. She wanted her sons with her, at least as far as the Mississippi, and they certainly could not leave the work now. Wait till the work was done this fall; it all would be easy, then.

She made it sound natural and sensible to delay their departure, for the sake of safety alone. But Ben felt a deep foreboding. Rachel probably came first, in his mother’s heart; he was fairly sure of that. Yet he began to doubt that she would ever leave her sons, of her own will.

After Matthilda went to bed Ben and Cassius still sat up, talking all through most of Cash’s first night home. Andy slept, unbothered, but Rachel lay wakeful in her bed, listening to that ominous-seeming, indistinguishable mumbling, on and on. And though she knew what times they poured themselves fresh coffee, not one word they