The Unforgiven Read Online Free

faltering now, and near to tears. “He—just sat out there and—looked—”
    “How long ago?”
    “Well—I guess—it might have been—”
    “Twenty minutes,” Rachel said clearly.
    Cash shifted as if he would rush outside, but changed his mind without moving a step. “But the light was failing. You couldn’t have told if—Wait. How far out was he?”
    “About seven feet,” Rachel said. “He leaned down close, to look in.”
    “Seven—” He stared at her blankly a moment and his next question fairly crackled. “How come she knew him?” he demanded of his mother. “Did you tell her who—”
    Matthilda shook her head, and her eyes were ominously shiny. “Why, the child can’t have seen Abe since—why, she can’t have been more than ten years old. And not even then, unless—and anyway, he’s so changed, Cash, just dreadfully. It’s uncanny she remembers him now.”
    More uncanny than you think. This man was faceless, for all I saw. Aloud Rachel said, “A man of that name had an ambuscade with Papa, back in the earlies.”
    “Papa had falling-outs with a lot of people.” Cash reached for a towel, wishing he were shed of the whole thing.
    “But Kelsey kept nosing around.”
    “The child’s right, Cassius,” Matthilda murmured.
    “There was something more to it,” Rachel said. “Something queer, that I was never let to know.”
    “All you need to know is I don’t want him around! Let him smell gunpowder—you all hear me?”
    It was as if Ben himself had come into the room. No, more as if Papa had come into the room; Ben was quieter. Andy was sitting there gaping, with no more idea of what was happening than Rachel had. Mama went to the table, so that she was behind Andy and Rachel; but Rachel knew at once that Mama put a finger to her lips. “Don’t talk so much in front of the children,” Rachel put it into words for them.
    They made no answer to that. “Bring your carbine,” Cassius told his brother, making his tone ordinary. “We’ll put the gate poles up.”
    As they let themselves out, the wind whisked at everything in the house, and set the pans to swinging, but perhaps it was less violent than before. The women moved immediately, both at once, to get supper on. The wheels of daily living began to turn again, as they must always turn, no matter what.
    “He’s going back where he came from, now,” Matthilda said, and Rachel knew she meant Abe Kelsey. “Hear how the wind’s dying? Going down more and more, as he gets farther and farther away.”
    It was the kind of sign some of the Indians believed. The Zacharys took no stock in such heathenisms, but out here you could sometimes get mixed up, and confuse the things you really believed with things that just sort of came with the country. But it was true that the wind was abating. This should have made the night a better one for sleep, but it did not. Their bedding was turning clammy again for want of sun, so that they were chilled and sweated, seemingly both at once. Rachel knew she should have baked their blankets before the fire, but had put it off, hoping for a chance to get the outdoor smell of sunshine into them.
    Perhaps it was the very quiet that woke her in the first hour after midnight, so lightly she slept that night. Once she was full awake, she heard her mother crying, two yards away, in the other bed. Matthilda wept so softly, her face pressed so hard into her pillow, Rachel never would have heard her at all if the wind had held.

Chapter Three
    Cassius and Andy had to wait for daylight to pick up Abe Kelsey’s trail. They followed it easily enough, until they had gone about four miles. Then it disappeared.
    They cast some long circles, and found it again around noon. This time the trail led off in a new and unlikely direction; it took them nearer the house than they had been all morning, before they lost it completely. Cassius blew up, and sat cussing so long he turned red in the face.
    The trouble with Cash