The Unforgiven

by Alan Lemay

  “Funny how seldom you ever seen one. An Indian, I mean.” he said, and rambled on as if trying to avoid questions by doing all the talking himself. “Once or twice I’ve seen a little speck, a long piece off, on a ridge, where nobody ought to be, and that’s about all. But there’s lots going through here, just the same. I’ve cut three trails in two days. One of eight-ten horses, ridden in travel file, without any loose stock; and another—”

  “Ben,” Rachel cut in, “is Abe Kelsey dead? Do we know yet if he’s dead or not?”

  He did not look at her, but his hands stopped their work. When he answered his words were toneless, without any ring, or jump. “He’s alive,” Ben said.

  She did not make him go into how he knew. He was lacing leather again and would soon be out of there. “I have to know one thing,” she came straight at it. “What was the great hurt we did Abe Kelsey?”

  “Us? Hurt Kelsey?”

  “He hates us, Ben! Why? Because Papa wouldn’t help him get back his son?”

  “The Kiowas don’t have Kelsey’s son—never did have him. Kelsey’s boy is in his grave at Burnt Tree.”

  “Sure looks like a father would know his own son.”

  “Would, huh? That one damn-fool notion has kept the whole thing a-simmer! I talked to this Seth two years ago. In Kiowa, naturally. He already had two squaws, and three-four kids. All this at sixteen? That buck is twenty-two if he’s a minute!”

  “Ben, you mean to tell me that old man would fetch down a raid on us just because Papa wouldn’t—”

  “A raid? Him? They wouldn’t move an inch for him.”

  “I heard he’s virtually one of ’em!”

  “They’d have killed him long ago if he wasn’t crazy. They bat him around, and misuse him, and take his stuff away from him—you saw the horse they left him with. But let him scout for them? Hell! They’d never believe a word out of him.”

  “Then why are we so set on killing him?”

  He hadn’t seen it coming. He had dug his own trap, and galloped straight into it. He opened his mouth, and closed it, and for a moment wouldn’t look at her.

  I’ve got him, now. I’m within one inch of the truth, right this minute. Ten seconds more, and all this mystery will be over….

  But Ben balked; he could think of no dodge, but he balked anyway. He met her eyes, not with candor, but with plain obstinacy. “Horse thief,” he said shortly, and shut his mouth like a trap. He knotted the stirrup-leather lacing, finished or not, and took his saddle by the fork, to go out.

  She was beaten, and she knew it. Nagging him would serve no purpose. She asked him, “Does Seth ever come here, Ben?”

  He stopped. “Maybe. I don’t know. We find tracks where Indian ponies come and go; sometimes moccasin tracks, close in. He could have been here a lot of times. Why?”

  “Want to see what he looks like.”

  He said with a startling intensity, “I pray God you’ll never see his face! Because if you ever do, there’ll be war paint on it.”

  He left her; and she was disheartened as she thought how near she had come to a glimpse behind a dark veil. They were coming no closer together. He would go on treating her as a sister, even thinking of her as one, probably, until Rachel herself made known to him that she was undeceived. But he was preoccupied and edgy all the time now, so that the time never seemed right.

  Ben had been wrong about one thing. Seth came the next day, without war paint, and in plain light.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Texans always called him Seth. Even when they tried to say Set-Tayhahnna-tay they couldn’t get the singsong gobble to it that a Kiowa would understand. He had been no more than a fable when Abe Kelsey first called him Seth, a riddle, in an old man’s tale. But since then he had become a reality to be dreaded, in his own right. There were other white and nearwhite warriors, such as Red Hair, Kiowa Dutch, and Kiowa Frank, and perhaps many more less widely known. All of these had been captured, enslaved, and finally Indianized, when very young; only one or two of them remembered their native speech. The Kiowas had no chiefs, either hereditary or elected, nor any other constituted authority with powers of discipline. A war chief was any man who could scheme up a raid and persuade others to follow him. The white war chiefs had made their names in open competition, by the boldness, ingenuity, and ruthlessness with which they made war on their own race. Most believed the white warriors more savage than the Kiowas of blood, but this was because of the resentment aroused by their anomaly of race. They could equal the cruelty of their adopted people; they could not hope to exceed it.

  On the day Seth came, Ben left the others hauling water to the house, while he rode circle alone to read what news of the night had been written upon the prairie soil. He was back in twenty minutes, and had the up-horses moved to the corral nearest the house, where they were covered by its guns. Then he brought Andy and the hands into the house and forted up. The battle shutters had been opened to let in the first sun, but now they were barred again. They pried the plugs out of one shutter loophole at each of the two windows facing the Dancing Bird, and opened two loopholes in the door.

  Two cowhands were put up at the window loops. The one called Tip was gangly and hatchet-faced, and in this situation was tense enough to ring like the blade of a knife. His eyes darted about the room, and came to rest on the fireplace. “Ain’t that chimney pretty big?”

  “It’s got iron hooks built into it, big as scythe blades,” Ben told him. “The buck that jumps down it will stay there.”

  Mama was puttering in a cupboard, pretending that nothing was happening; but she was careful to make no noise, except for a soft, almost tuneless humming, that was rapidly working on Rachel’s nerves. She tried to think of some way to tell Mama to stop, but none came to her. She opened the ammunition chest under the rifle rack, got out a handful of rim-fires, and took them to the cowhand called Joey. He was a tow-headed, Dutchy-looking boy, with white eyelashes, and China blue eyes which he was too shy ever to raise to Rachel. He thanked her without looking at her.

  Suddenly everybody was motionless and silent, a man at each loophole, with no places left over from which to see out. Mama stopped her humming and held perfectly still, her hands idle in the cupboard. Ben said, “Ground your carbines, you fellows. I’ll kill the man who shoots before I tell him.” Perhaps they didn’t know him well enough to be sure whether he would do it or not. He seemed so relaxed and easy, even pleased with the whole situation, Rachel was not sure she knew him herself.

  He spoke now in a queer, soft tone. “Sis…Speak of the devil. You want to see what Seth looks like?…Let her look, Andy.”

  What she saw was astonishing. Three Indians sat their ponies on the near bank of the Dancing Bird, in full view of the house at less than fifty yards. They were recognizable at once as Kiowas; their strong, flat-stomached build, prepotent in the Kiowa blood no matter how diluted, could not be mistaken for that of any other Indian. They carried carbines in their hands, but wore no paint, no headdresses. They rode light Indian-made saddles with elkhorn trees or none, and the tails of their ponies were blowing free, instead of clubbed for battle. In all ways, these three were equipped for travel, not for fighting.

  “There’s fifteen or twenty more of ’em around someplace,” Ben believed. Kiowa warriors would take any risk to put you off your guard. “He’s a whopper, isn’t he? Big as Satanta.”

  She knew then, for the first time, which Seth was. You couldn’t tell he was a white man, at the distance. Kiowas came in as many sizes as white men did, but when they were big, they were big all over, heavy-limbed, but never paunched like a Sioux or Comanche.

  “Carbine, Andy,” Ben said, still casual, still as if pleased, but concentrated, now. He reached back without turning from the loophole, and Andy put his own Spencer in Ben’s hand. After working with Andy all his life, Ben did not need to ask if a ball was chambered. “I’m going to waste one,” he said, raising his voice to reach Tip and Joey. “Now don’t be poking you
r muzzle out! I’ll tell you when.”

  Ben took aim unhurriedly, but fired without delay. Rachel saw the Kiowa ponies stutter their feet, yet they were held in place so closely that their riders only swayed lithely at the hips; their heads and shoulders were not displaced an inch. The three remained relaxed, and Rachel saw that they were grinning. They glanced at each other, before their eyes returned to the house. Seth raised his right hand in the peace sign.

  Rachel was awe-struck. “Medicine,” she whispered. “They think they’ve got bullet-proof medicine!”

  “Not them,” Ben said. “I know all three. The one to the left of Seth—there’s a tough one! That’s—that’s—” he tried a Kiowa word—it sounded like G’yee-tau-tay—under his breath. “Wolf Saddle, I guess you’d call him.” Kiowa names were shifty to translate; this one might mean “Rides a Wolf,” or “Wolf on his Back,” for all Ben knew. “And the other—” he hesitated again. Traveling Hawk? Wandering Eagle? “That’s Lost Bird,” he settled for. “Meaner than Seth himself, if that’s possible. Those buggers know what they’re doing.” He handed the carbine back to Andy. “They even know what I’m doing,” he added.

  The used shell went bouncing and twinkling across the floor as Andy ejected it. A thin, sharp smell of black powder came to Rachel’s nose, bringing a nervous sense of urgency, and an impatience with Ben, who could dally over shades of meaning, as if nothing deadly and immediate was hanging over them. Yet he was right. The behavior of these Indians did not explain itself; they had no exact parallel for it in their experience. A thing like this had to be waited out. The worst thing you could do was to let yourself be choused into any kind of move at all before you knew just what was up.

  Outside, Rachel saw Seth speak shortly to the others, then start his horse straight toward the house, at a walk. His right hand was still up, in the sign of peace. Wolf Saddle and Lost Bird followed on either side of him, unevenly, despising any discipline of formation.

  “Uh-huh,” Ben said. “Well, I’m going out there.”

  Mama cried out, “Ben! Please! I won’t let you—”

  Ben was wearing a Colt’s Dragoon revolver, in a holster black with years of saddle-soapings. Both had belonged to his father. He had the weapon closebelted on his left, butt forward, for a cross-draw in the saddle; but now he loosened and turned the belt, so that the gun hung lower, and on his right. He said, conversationally, “I’ll have to ask you to be quiet, Mama. I’d hate to have to shut you in your room.”

  “Why!” Mama gasped. Ben had never spoken to her like that before; but Papa would have said it, and meant it. Matthilda did not speak again.

  Ben took a look at his percussion caps. “Bar the door after me,” he told Andy. “You fellows—Tip and Joey—better poke your front sights out, soon as I’m on the stoop. I won’t shoot unless one of ’em swings gun on me—and don’t you cut loose until I do. All right, lay holt of this bar, here, Andy.”

  He went out on the stoop, hatless, and stood lightly, his hands hanging empty. The three Kiowas stopped in front of him, their ponies spread a little, less than two horse-lengths away. Andy took the loophole Ben had left, and each had his own, now, except Mama, whom Rachel forgot for the next few minutes. When next noticed, Matthilda was at the table, her Bible before her but unopened, her hands folded upon it; she sat staring at nothing, and took no part in what followed.

  Seth took a deliberate look at each of the carbine snouts, where they now poked through the shutter loop-holes, well to the right and left of the door. He smiled a little, faintly contemptuous, mildly entertained. Andy had not brought up his weapon, but Seth let them see that he noticed the loopholes in the door, behind Ben, too. Rachel studied him with the fixity of apprehension. His hair hung in two braids in front of his shoulders, and looked to be a rusty red, in spite of its shine of grease, which must have darkened it. A mixed-blood Kiowa might have had hair that color.

  But the low-bred face, punkin-rounded, and what they called owl-nosed, showed an uneven splotching, as if it wanted to freckle. And the narrow-set eyes were wrong. They were muddy blue, bloodshot by wind and sun. The lashes were invisible, giving the eyes a baldish, lizardy look. His shirt and leggings were of fringed buckskin, almost new, and his moccasins were heavily decorated. It had cost a lot of Texan horses—some of them doubtless Dancing Bird horses—to buy the squaws who made him stuff like that. But the breech clout that converted the leggings to trousers was of the dark blue cloth to be found only in officers’ tunics; and this might or might not have been given to him.

  She was thinking of a story told of this white Indian. A dozen others were told, and a hundred might be someday, without adding anything more. Two years ago, far down near the Rio Grande, a small farmer had come home to find the remains of his wife—or parts of them, for they were not all in one place. Their four-year-old daughter was missing. Pursuit was organized, and recovered what was left of the baby girl a hundred miles away. The stripped and mutilated small body, a pitiful rag, had been left impaled upon a broken post oak. Since then the two scalps had been seen upon Seth’s medicine shield, the wavy light chestnut of the mother’s hair beside a curly soft tuft of fine-spun pale gold. Surely Ben must be wasting his time, trying to talk to Seth; for how could anybody reach a kind of people who found honor and glory in a deed like that?

  Seth’s eyes settled upon Ben, and held steadily, waiting for Ben to speak first. The marauder looked selfsatisfied, insolent and sure of himself; yet Ben outwaited him. Finally Seth grunted, and began to talk in signs, letting his carbine hang in the crook of his arm. The conventionalized signs his hands made ran off smoothly, and very fast; yet the message was simple, and Rachel could understand it well enough. “We come as friends. We came to talk to our friend,” Seth’s hands said; then added, “Sometimes friends are given gifts.”

  Those in the house understood no more, for now Ben did an exasperating thing. He refused the sign language known to everybody on the prairie, and made the Indians speak in their own tongue. To show off? To impress them? Presently Rachel knew he had done it so those within would not know what he said.

  The Kiowa sentences came in slurred bursts, full of clicks, drawn-out nasals, raised and lowered tones. Rachel saw Seth’s companions intensify their concentration as they tried to follow Ben’s Kiowa; it had a right to be pretty bad. At first Rachel tried to guess what was being said in that outlandish tongue. She thought Ben might have told them that in his understanding it was those who came to talk who brought gifts. Seth smirked, and took from round his neck a slender gold chain, with something like a quid of tobacco on it. He tossed this at Ben’s feet, but Ben caught it with the toe of his boot, and flipped it into his hand. He barely glanced at it before putting the chain around his neck. Seth seemed blanked by that. He paused a few moments, looking Ben hard in the eye, which seemed strange in a man like that.

  Now Seth went into a long, unhurried speech, and Rachel took a look at the other two. Wolf Saddie was the chunkiest of the three, with a broad and yellowish face, as if he might have Comanche blood. His brief interjections seemed to be jokes, for whenever he spoke the other two laughed.

  The other Kiowa, called Lost Bird, was in some ways most remarkable of the three. His skin had the dark yet ruddy sun-char of the full-blood Kiowa; but his hair, greased though it was, looked to be auburn. His face was smooth, lineless, placidly at rest. When Rachel had looked at him for a moment, she realized a strange thing. This face was beautiful, and in an odd way, as a girl’s face should be beautiful. She was fascinated, and at the same time repelled.

  As if he felt her gaze, Lost Bird turned his head and looked her straight in the eye; she felt as if the whole door was suddenly open in front of her, and not just the loophole. His eyes were green, now—no, a dark yellow. They darkened as he tried to see into the shadows behind the loophole, until they seemed almost black, and surface-lighted. Yet as he turned his eyes to Seth again they appeared the gray of pale slate. She had a frightened sense of having kn
own eyes like that before, though she was certain she had never seen Lost Bird in her life. A moment of uncertainty weakened her middle, so definite that she felt a touch of nausea.

  But he began to speak, and the illusion was gone. He spoke with broad gestures, flowing or emphatic. His voice rose and fell; his chest puffed, and his head lifted with hauteur. Yet he became smaller as he spoke, until his threat was no more than that of a deadly weapon with the legs of a fast horse, con-trolled by nothing with any depth of mind. He had talked no more than a minute when he ended upon what was obviously both a question and a demand. Ben was standing close enough to the door so that Rachel saw a drop of sweat trickle down behind his ear, only a few inches from her eyes.

  Instead of answering at once, Ben spoke in English to the people behind him. “Andy. I want a few cartridges. But stay where you are. Let Rachel bring them to you.”

  By his softened tone Rachel knew Ben was smiling, and she wondered if the Indians knew by this how angered he was. Did you have to know him to tell that? She became scared again, aware that he was close to an explosion of temper that could bring disaster upon himself and them all. She could not see his right hand, but felt sure it had not moved. Never touch your gun without you draw it, never draw it without you shoot to kill, Papa had taught.

  “I want two fifty-caliber metallic, and one rim-fire forty-four,” Ben said.

  Andy unbarred the door to put the three cartridges in Ben’s hand. “Bar it again,” Ben said and Andy obeyed. They saw Ben toss one cartridge to each Indian. Then he made a brief final statement in the Kiowa tongue.

  The three sat quiet a moment more, their eyes fixed on Ben, faces as expressionless as mud. None threw their cartridges away. Seth kept tossing and catching the gift cartridge without looking at it. He took another slow look at the carbine snouts sticking out of the shutters, on his left and on his right, and he looked at the loophole where he knew Andy must be. Then he spit at Ben’s feet, and unhurriedly turned his horse.