The Unforgiven by Alan LeMay Read Free Book Online Page A

Matthilda. He explained that he was sorry about not bringing more. Had to carry everything in his saddlebags with his gear, till be bought the wagon at Fort Griffin. They found he had brought a piece of blue-checked gingham, too short, and a piece of red-checked, extra long—had he thought they could use one to piece the other out? But there was also nine yards of a flower-sprigged muslin that they wanted to hug him for; only he was gone from there, down by the corrals with the rest, by then.
    By ten o’clock, when the boys came in, Matthilda had sent Rachel to bed; and Andy, turning in at once, was soon asleep. After that, as the owls began to fly, Matthilda seemed older than she had before, and Ben let himself go tired. Only Cassius was still crisp as the three of them took a look at the trouble they shared.

Chapter Seven
    “Cash and I talked to the hands,” Ben told their mother. “Didn’t use Kelsey’s name, of course. Just said a horse thief. Told ’em how he looks. And we put up a hundred dollars.”
    “A hundred—?”
    “Those ’ramuses can’t count over a hundred dollars. More would only scare ’em.”
    Matthilda looked strangely vague, so that Ben wondered if she had followed him. These vague-nesses were appearing oftener, as her age advanced. But now she said, “What if they catch him?”
    Ben and Cash exchanged a glance, and Ben said slowly, “Mama, we never told them to catch him.”
    “What?”
    “The hundred,” Cassius said plainly, “is for his scalp.”
    Mama gave a little shuddering gasp. “But Abe couldn’t fight them. He wouldn’t even try. Why, they’d have to shoot him with his hands up!”
    “Yes,” Cassius said.
    The tears that came so easily nowadays sprang to Matthilda’s eyes. She said, “Poor old man,” in a sort of plaintive whimper, and sat staring into space. The boys waited in silence for the moment of emotion to pass.
    “If somehow, in spite of us, he sneaks up near the house again,” Ben said, “I want you to fort up, same as if he had the Kiowa nation behind him. And he’s got to be fired on. If nobody else is here to do it, Rachel has to fire on him. And, Mama—for God’s sake will you believe me?—you mustn’t stop her!”
    Matthilda said nothing, but seemed to accept it.
    “Now,” Ben said to her gravely, “I’m going to ask you to think of something else. I don’t know if Kelsey has been around the Rawlinses, or any neighbor. I’ll warn Zeb, he’s a squaw man and a thief. But Kelsey has friends in Texas, even yet; and the old, black lie he started against us is still alive, just as much as ever it was. If Kelsey gets to the Rawlinses, they may listen to him, Mama—just as likely as not.”
    “That,” Matthilda said, surprisingly matter-of-fact, “is something that will happen, or it won’t.”
    “Maybe it’s bound to happen, someday,” Ben said. “Maybe, if the Rawlinses hadn’t been looked on as no better than damyankees, they’d have been told long ago. Mama, have you thought about what we’d best do, when it does come?”
    “Well, we’ll have to stop seeing them, I suppose.”
    “There’ll be trouble. No way to work the range with those people, once they turn against us. Every county in Texas has had its gun feuds. We can very easy have one of our own, right here.”
    “I know,” Matthilda said.
    “There’s one thing more,” Ben said; but now he was interrupted.
    Rachel had appeared in the bedroom doorway, bare-footed and in her muslin nightie, her hair in long braids. She asked in a plaintive, little-girl fashion, if she couldn’t come out and sit up with the rest of them, for a little while. She kept hearing their voices without being able to make out the words. This was a teasing thing, and kept her from getting to sleep.
    Coaxingly, Matthilda asked her to keep trying, anyway. “The Rawlinses will be over tomorrow, like as not. We don’t want to look just awful.” Rachel’s eyes went to Ben with a quick appeal,