The Unforgiven Read Online Free Page A

was that he knew exactly who he was after, and why. He thought of Abe Kelsey as a varmint that had to be killed before a worse thing happened, and he was in a sweat to get it over with. But he didn’t know how much Andy knew. Nothing, he hoped.
    Actually, Abe Kelsey was a most unfortunate man; about as unfortunate as a man can get, perhaps. He was even famous for it, in his own part of the world, which was limited to the prairies south of the Arkansas. Andy and Rachel may have been the only natives of the Texas frontier over ten years old who did not know who he was.
    For his story had a riddle in it, and this kept it alive. He had once had a wife and a young son. But he located at Burnt Tree, a tiny settlement of three or four families thirty miles out of Round Rock; and the Kiowas destroyed it in 1863. Kelsey must have married late, for he had been middle-aged even then, and his little boy was only seven when Abe lost him, along with his mother, in the Burnt Tree Massacre.
    Supposedly. Two years later somebody brought Abe a rumor that his son was alive, a captive in the lodge of a Kiowa named Pacing Wolf. Abe went up there—and swore forever that he found his son. The boy had even answered to his name. And now a queerness came up. That the Kiowas claimed the boy to be neither white nor a captive, but of mixed blood and their own, was surprising to nobody. But men who had known the Kelsey boy came forward to declare that they had seen the boy dead and had helped to bury him. Thus was born an enigma never completely answered.
    But the lower counties were well salted with men who had themselves lost wives or children, or had otherwise been brought too close to the persistent massacres. These were very ready to believe Abe’s story without any special scrutiny at all; they angered, and they were men who acted on their angers. Hell-bent couriers raced out in five directions, carrying Abe’s appeal for help in recovering his little son. And a posse of more than thirty riders swarmed into their saddles in answer to the call.
    William Zachary, then of Round Rock, was one of those who believed Abe because he wanted to believe him. Old Zack, as William was called before he was forty, had ridden with Abe Kelsey in a number of earlier pursuits; he knew Abe as only a so-so Indian-fighter, given to unexpected foolishness and sudden blunders. Yet Zack did not see how even Abe could mistake his own son, only two years gone.
    With Abe to guide him, Zack rode on ahead to scout Pacing Wolf’s village, days before the posse was complete. He hoped to make a deal for the boy without a fight that would put the captive child himself in deadly danger; or failing that, he wanted to form a strategy of attack that would promise success. He named a rendezvous on Cache Creek where Abe and he would meet the posse.
    Abe and Old Zack beat the more unwieldy posse across the Red by more than a week; found Pacing Wolf; and rode openly into his camp. At this point, Zack had already gone to great effort and great risk—and had framed himself into the false position of his life.
    For, the instant Zack laid eyes on the boy he knew they had wasted their time. The Pacing Wolf boy was white, or nearly so, but there all resemblance ended, so far as Zack could see. Young Kelsey would have been only nine, in 1865, and all Abe had hold of was a great lout at least thirteen years old. He had actually been on the war trail already, and had the scalp of a little Negro child, to prove it.
    Zack talked to the boy in two languages, neither of which Abe Kelsey understood. The boy was fluent in Kiowa, and knew a little Spanish, but about the only English word Zack could trap him into recognizing was “squaw.” He said he had always lived in the lodge of Pacing Wolf, his father, and knew nothing at all about Kelsey except that he was a bad nuisance and got him laughed at. He offered Zack a Mexican concho to shoot Kelsey; couldn’t do it himself, for a Kiowa believed that