The Unforgiven

by Alan Lemay

  Andy, at the end, complained, “I can’t line up on nothing from here!”

  “Stay there anyway.” Cash turned away from his door loop, and leaned against the plastered sod wall, at rest. A buffalo slug broke through a shutter, and rattled, spent, across the floor. A little after that a bullet nicked a splinter out of the side of the door loop where Cash had stood, and lodged above the fireplace.

  “They’ll quit this, in a minute,” Cash said.

  He was right. The Kiowas were firing at the house in an expression of anger; they had no plan to fit what had happened. The guns in the creek bed fell silent, and Cash looked out again.

  “Two-three of ’em have gone to popping up and down,” Cash said, puzzling everybody. “Guess they want to see what we’ll do.”

  “What will we do?” Andy asked him.

  “Nothing,” Cash said, but kept his carbine ready. He watched an Indian leap straight up to expose half of his painted body, then drop from sight again. Another tried it in a different place. Then a single white-streaked warrior sprang out of the creek bed, and stood in the open upon the bank. Cash fired, and the Kiowa came down in a heap. The lip of the bank crumbled, and the body began to slide over the edge. Cash fired again, and hit, he thought, before the body disappeared from view.

  That was the end of that experiment. The Kiowas could not be heard withdrawing, but they could be expected to take council now. Ten minutes passed without event.

  “This might be a good chance to eat,” Cash said. “They’re not liable to give us too many good ones, from here on in. Not for a while.” He looked for the Kiowas to try a jump at them in about the last of the dusk. He believed they’d want to make use of poor light, on account of he’d bothered them a little bit, he thought. They had had him all figured out, just how he would act, only he hadn’t acted that way. Still…all he could say for certain was that no Kiowa was going to leave here yet, unless to bring more. They would never leave the body of Lost Bird lying out there in front, where it was.

  Rachel accepted that the body out there was that of her brother, or perhaps a half brother—incredibly of her own flesh and blood. Yet she felt nothing toward him, or toward any of the Kiowas, other than the bitter enmity you feel for halfhumans who have come to destroy everything you love.

  Georgia helped her push furniture around, and make a tent of blankets in front of the fireplace, so that no gleam would show outside the ports. They heated nothing but coffee. The boys had to stay on watch, and wanted only cold meat and bread, such as could be eaten with one hand. When each had coffee and a sandwich, Rachel remembered grace. Once, long ago, when Andy was too little to be still when Papa bowed his head, she had said a stupid thing in trying to quiet him, for she was little, too. Her words came back to her now.

  “Wait, Andy—Papa has to read his plate.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to say grace.” The locusts were going again, out in the limpid twilight, but her low words came clearly through the quiet of the room. “Dear Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for these vittles, the—the gifts of—” She faltered. Remembering the long ago had made her remember Ben, too, and what this prayer had made her think when she was halfgrown. She had almost said, these vittles, the gifts of Ben’s hard work…. She recovered herself. “The gifts of Thy love,” she finished steadily. “Now guide us, and guard us, and keep us from evil…”

  Cassius’ horse began to paw again, making a thunderous noise on the wooden floor, so that the rest was lost. The horse was trying to fudge around toward the smell of water, in the barrel by the door. Rachel got him a bucket, unbridled, and fed him a loaf of bread; then put the bridle back on. The animal drowsed after that, well-practiced in going un-satisfied.

  After that, Rachel chewed her bread and meat methodically. It seemed dry, and sticky in the throat, all but impossible to wash down. But—No feed, no distance, she was remembering; she made herself get through it all. The motions of feeding people brought a hard ache into her, sometimes in her middle and sometimes in her throat; too many memories went with these people, and this room. The uneasy quiet left time to think, which was the last thing she wanted to do; and she became more miserable the longer the silence held. If she had not worked in a daze, as if hit in the head, she might never have got through it at all.

  They damped out the coffee fire, and folded the blankets, so that the chimney could help keep the place aired. Cash and Andy opened more loopholes, including two near the floor, at the ends of the front wall. These were intended to surprise hostiles who crawled along the foot of the wall, under the other gun ports. Cassius talked over with them how they must fight. He and Andy would defend the battle shutters because, though he did not say so, these were an incomplete protection. No one must fire from the same loop twice in a row. They must put backs to the wall to load. When they moved about, they must duck under or step over the lines of fire radiating inward from every port. Each must pocket the cartridges he would need. A lot of their ammunition was out on the range with the wagon, but Cash judged their supply would last the night.

  When they were as ready as they were going to be, Rachel and Georgia looked at Matthilda again. She slept so quietly now that they had to bend low to hear her breath. They both felt her pulse. At first Rachel could not find it at all.

  “It’s so weak,” she whispered. “Just a cobweb.”

  Georgia didn’t say anything. Something about Matthilda’s pulse bothered her more than its lack of strength. Seemed more of a quiver, than a beat. But she was unsure what this meant.

  After that there was nothing to do but wait. The last of the twilight was falling very fast. Andy said, “Maybe they’ll wait for the moon.” Nobody answered.

  Suddenly Georgia moved. She was sitting against the dug-in back wall, and now she put her ear to it. She tried to say something, but the words only caught and whispered in her throat. On her next try the words came louder than she meant, so that she startled herself, and them all. “They’re comin’!”

  In another moment they heard the hoof-murmur coming into the room through the earth of the hill into which they were dug; and soon after they could hear the horses outside, all around them.

  “Well, I’ll be a son of a buck,” Cassius said, nonplused.

  Rachel ran toward Matthilda’s room; Georgia went to the north lookout slide.

  “Leave that shut!” Cash said suddenly. “Rachel—plug the loops in there, and come here! Andy—block the ports at that end! I see this now!”

  They obeyed him, closing the ports by knocking home wooden plugs, fitted long ago. Outside, the hoof-rumble rose and rose—an approach so unquiet that it must certainly have been meant to be heard.

  “Damn fool that I am!” Cash blamed himself. Ought to have guessed the hostiles would try to come in here the quickest way. Only the door and the two windows overlooking the Dancing Bird offered openings big enough to admit a man. Except for gunports, the bedroom where Matthilda lay had only some slits near the roof, to give air. Neither these nor the north lookout were big enough to get in through. What Cash had imagined was a crawling, swarming attack—Indians along the walls where the guns could not reach, Indians digging under, Indians all over the roof, like ants trying to get into an egg. The Kiowas could dig through the thick turf with hatchet and ironwood lance, making their own gun ports, until the place bristled with guns pointed inward. They could breach the walls and come pouring in; they could level the house to the ground, if they had to.

  First defense against this kind of an attack was to pick off the Kiowas as they rushed, before they got tight to the walls. If Cassius’ cowhands had been here, instead of bumbling around somewhere with a bunch of wet cows, they might have fought off the whole Kiowa nation. Even loopholes made by an enemy work two ways—until they become too many. As it was, with only one gun to the side, their chief hope was to hurt enough Kiowas to destroy faith in their medicine, so that maybe they would quit.

  But Cash now saw that he had wrongl
y imagined the whole thing. Mounted warriors could do nothing against walls; they could only create diversion and confusion, while delivering a badly aimed covering fire for a dismounted attack. They would not bother with that against so few, if they were coming from all sides. The attack would be frontal, against the shutters, and perhaps the door.

  He now posted Georgia and Rachel belly-down with cocked carbines at the low ports in the front walls, near the ends. If their ports darkened, they must fire, for Kiowas crawling along the base of the wall must pass these ports to get to the shutters. Beyond this, they would play no other part, until knifemen got into the room.

  They were barely in position when the war cries broke the night wide open, very near and all at once, an incredibly loud and inhuman yammering. A file of mounted warriors streamed across the front of the house, firing raggedly but continuously. Except for an occasional slug that splintered through a shutter, little was to be feared from this kind of fire. Andy and Cash several times raised their carbines, but lowered without firing. The Kiowas were riding close, too close. Some hung on the far sides of their saddle-less ponies, but even those who sat straight up, firing coolly, whipped past the ports too fast for a decent shot. What Cash did not want was to bring down a horse. A dead horse would make a redoubt at too close a range.

  The riders were circling the house now, reloading as they passed behind, and the war cries never ceased. A warrior wearing a buffalo-horn headdress pulled out of the circle and stopped his pony in the open, signaling to the racing circle with his shield. Cash and Andy fired together, and a scalp flew off the Kiowa’s shield. The rider seemed to fall on the far side of his bolting pony, but he never hit the ground.

  “No good,” Cash said. “He took cover, that’s all. He was sitting up again, going around the corner.”

  “Those black and yellow bands,” Andy said. “In his warpaint, and on his shield—”

  “That was Seth,” Cash confirmed. “Wolf Saddle is the one painted up with black and red snakes. Seems like he dropped out of this last round. That one I put a crimp in, down by the creek, was Fast Otter, I think…. Look sharp, now, Rachel, Georgia!”

  The circle of racing ponies went on unbroken, and the war cries screamed continuously all round the house. Bullets still slammed into door timbers, and the gunfire out there made the ears ring. But nothing was hitting the shutters now. Cash went to stand by one window, and Andy by the other. And now Rachel’s carbine crashed.

  “Get him?”

  “My loop’s still blocked,” she fired again into whatever lay against it. Then they heard Georgia’s carbine go, at her port near the other end.

  “Good girl,” Cash said. For moment, then, Georgia let her carbine fall. She rolled away from her gun port, sat up, and what sounded half like sobs and half like laughter came through her fingers.

  Rachel cried out, “She’s hurt—she’s shot in the mouth!” She ran to Georgia, but attempted no aid. She threw herself upon her stomach across Georgia’s legs, and got her carbine muzzle to the loop Georgia had abandoned. For a split moment she saw what she took for a leg outside the port; she fired, and believed she hit it, but it was snatched away.

  Georgia pushed her aside. She was breathing hard, and her voice shook, but, “Nothing hit me,” she said, and she took her porthole back.

  An ax, swung by an enemy who stood in the protection of the wall, was splintering into the shutter where Cash waited. He had an answer to that. He coolly studied the angle of the axblows, then struck the wall nearby with the butt of his Colt. A shard of plaster fell, revealing an opening the size of a half dollar. It showed no light, but as he fired through it, the mud that plugged it went to dust and the ax blows ceased.

  At the other window the whole frame loosened, and the shutters cracked and bowed inward, under the impact of a boulder no man should have been able to lift. A split opened down the middle, and Andy fired through the crack at a shadow beyond.

  And suddenly that was all. The mounted Kiowas circled a few times more, but their fire was thinning. Then both gunfire and war cries stopped altogether, and the rear wall brought them the sound of horses going away.

  Matthilda had slept through it all, and still slept; making them believe now that she might never wake.

  Lost Bird’s body was gone, when the three-quarter moon came up, but they could see no other dead. Scoring up, they believed that three more Kiowas had been hit, one of them hard. Andy still believed he had touched up Seth, a little bit. Cash didn’t think so. They feverishly carpentered the broken shutters, finding out how hard it is to get anything done right in the total dark.

  When that was done, not much was left to do but wait.

  “I guess I kind of slipped a stirrup, there for a minute,” Georgia said sheepishly.

  “You did fine,” they all assured her. And that was all that ever was said about that.

  Cash was encouraged, cocky, even, because they had come through a full-out assault without any hurt. “See how easy? I misdoubt if there’s a Horse Indian alive knows how to fight against walls. If they can stand getting shot, we can sure stand pulling the triggers. Just as long as they want to keep up!”

  He told them a story he had picked up from a cow hunter, way over to the east of their range. There had been a big fight, up on the Staked Plains—just lately, too. No more than three—four weeks ago—seemingly about the middle of June. Twelve or fourteen buffalo hunters—Billy Gibson was their ringleader—had moved into an old deserted place up there, called Adobe Walls. And here they had been set upon by the biggest passel of Comanches, along with a fair sprinkle of Kiowas, that anybody had heard of in years. The story had it that there were sixteen hundred Indians in it. “So, let’s say, there maybe was about four hundred Indians,” Cassius trimmed it down. He didn’t know who the war chiefs had been, except that Quanah had been seen there.

  Quanah had struck in the dark before sunup, and might have carried the place, too; only some old dry-rotted roof timbers had happened to fall in, and had got two-three of the hunters up, spoiling the surprise.

  A couple of fellows sleeping outside in a wagon had got killed. But once the twelve inside started firing, the savages never got any farther. The fight went on about a day and a half, and the hunters believed they had killed about fifty Indians. “Let’s make that about ten Indians, more likely,” Cash pruned down the story again. One buffalo hunter had got a slug in the arm, and that was all the damage inside.

  “And there you have it: Walls is what you need! Nothing but walls. I bet that us four, in this house, could whup a thousand of ’em with these walls right here. If a thing can’t be done ahorseback, why, they just don’t know how to do it at all. We’ve got those fools helpless out there!”

  None of them really believed their position was as good as that. But they did begin to feel that maybe they had some sort of chance.

  They talked about whether Cash’s cowhands would hear the firing, far off where they were. Cash had left them moving a herd southward from the extreme notheast corner of their range, and the wind was from that way, what little there was. He didn’t believe they could hear. Not at worse than twenty miles away. Besides, wet cows are always losing their calves, when you chouse them around in bunches; nothing else could bawl so much. Cash doubted if you could hear the world fall down, through all that bedlam. If ever they got the idea he needed them, they’d come, all right.

  “There’s about four of the hands call him ‘Padre,’ ” Andy said, as if that clinched it.

  “Padre? Who, Cash? You mean like a priest?” Georgia looked blank. “Now don’t tell me he preaches to ’em!”

  “It generally means they got crazy-helpless on snake-head,” Andy explained, “and their boss saved ’em from jail. Or maybe something worse.”

  “Like what kind of worse?”

  “Like being dead is worse.”

  “Well, they’re sure missing a real meaty chance to return the favor.”

  Cassius made no comment on all
that. He wondered out loud if the Rawlins boys were liable to come looking for their sister. Georgia thought they might. “Along about late tomorrow afternoon.”

  Rachel didn’t speak his name, but Ben was the one she hoped would come. He could have been back by now. He ought to have been back. Ben, Ben, aren’t you ever coming home?…Maybe he wasn’t. Papa had proved to them, four years ago at Witch River, that the Zachary men didn’t always come back.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  For three hours the people in the Zachary soddy waited, ready to fight again, but no more attacks came on. Cash concluded that the enemy would hold off, now, until the last darkness before dawn. He tried to make the others get some rest. They remained fully dressed, their carbines in their hands, and either Cash or Andy prowled the ports by turns, watching the prairie by the light of the young moon. No one could more than doze. They knew the Kiowas wanted them wakeful through this part of the night, so that morning would find them fumble-handed, but they couldn’t help it. They stayed strung-up anyway, just as the enemy wanted them to.

  A little after midnight a bullet came wowling from the north ridge, and broke a little pane in the blocked north lookout. Ten minutes later a rifle whanged from the creek, chugging a ball into the door. During the next couple of hours seven or eight more shots were fired, at irregular intervals, and from various directions. It was the same game, to keep them from resting when they ought to rest. Two hours after midnight, all action ceased, and the night was still. Now the Kiowas would give them every chance to go sound asleep, in time for the next assault.

  Cash had them all up at their loopholes long before the first graying of the sky. And now the Kiowas fooled him again. Daylight came clear and strong. The sun came up, and the locusts began winding up again, after sleeping out the cooling of the dry land between midnight and morning. And no attack came at all.

  Matthilda waked, and, though she was very weak, she seemed immeasurably improved. Georgia made her a few spoonfuls of gruel, and it stayed down. In their unbounded relief they let Matthilda lead them back to the theory that she had suffered nothing worse than a severe siege of indigestion, after all. Intent upon keeping his people up to scratch, Cassius allowed them only a cold breakfast; but the sunlight outside, and the increasing warmth of the summer morning, were favorable to the illusion that the worst was over.