The Unforgiven by Alan LeMay Read Free Book Online Page B

but he did not intercede. The door closed softly behind her.
    While she had stood there Ben had noticed again, unhappily, how pretty she had become, still wideeyed and childlike, yet so plainly a woman, even in the shapeless nightdress. A new, fresh little flower of a woman, as he saw her now, such as any Kiowa buck with eyes in his head would surely want to own. How often would unseen eyes be watching her this year? The Kiowas scouted this place all the time, for it lay on the way they took in search of farther, easier kills. This girl whom he had so long thought of as his sister had suddenly turned into murder bait.
    For surely old Kelsey was now preaching to the Kiowas the same story he had started against the Zacharys in Texas, long ago—though to a different purpose. Strange that so cruel a people should set such great store by their own children, their own kin, as the Kiowas did. The deeper the gulch, the higher the hill, it seemed sometimes. So long as that sick-minded old man was trying to cadge favor with the Kiowas, what better way could he find than to lead them to a long-captive Kiowa child? Not that they would ever believe one word the old loony said. But if he kept on dinging the idea into their heads, one of them was sure to see the advantages in it, pretty soon. A Kiowa who wanted to think something generally found a way to prove it to himself.
    Like, some young buck might get a Kiowa warlock to find out from the spirits if, by any chance, the crazy old man had hold of something true. He could hire one of the Owl Prophets, like Sky Walker, or Striking Horse, for a sample, to consult an owl. With a couple of gift horses in the offing for the prophet, it was wonderful how the owl would come up with whichever answer was wanted, about nine times out of ten. And if a single young war leader concluded that his people had a claim on the girl he could very easily find great lashings of fight-loving young bucks eager to take him at his word, and follow him all out in a holy crusade. Then you’d see Kiowas come against walls, and with all they had.
    “There’s another thing,” he began patiently, again. “This is going to be an awful bad Indian year. Maybe the worst Texas has ever seen. You realize more than a dozen people have been killed since the turn of the year, right in the neighborhood of Fort Sill? They even stole a herd of mules out of the fort’s stone corral. And there’s a hundred other warning signs, as well.”
    Matthilda shrugged. Not that she underrated the Indian danger; on the contrary, she feared the Kiowas unreasoningly. This year, as Ben described it, sounded about like any other year, to her. “I’ve never known the time,” she said, “but what an Indian could lie right out there on that ridge, and shoot down any one of us he picked.”
    Actually, a Kiowa out on the ridge was bound to be a scout, alone, or with only two or three others. He wasn’t going to start trouble in decent shooting light unless he caught somebody far from support. Or, if he was from a nearby war party, he wasn’t going to give that show away, either, by poking into the best-forted hornet’s nest on the frontier. Not without even a chance at a scalp. Matthilda would never know things like that. To her the Wild Tribes seemed weird, unearthly, past hope of comprehension; and their cruelties so repelled her that she was forever denied a closer look. Ben was stumped. Nothing he could say seemed to help his case. His mother already held the Kiowas in the greatest fear she was capable of knowing, yet was unswayed by it.
    He now attacked the key point of decision with a reluctance amounting to dread, yet head on, having found no other way to come at it. “Mama,” he asked, “would you be willing—-just for this one year—to take Rachel off to some safe place, like maybe Fort Richardson, or maybe Fort Worth—”
    Matthilda was looking at him as if she couldn’t believe her ears.
    “Or Austin?” he tried again.