The Unforgiven by Alan LeMay Page B

Those were the same years when she had been most afraid of the dark, and sometimes when she had been sent to bed alone he had come and sung to her while she went to sleep. His songs were the same woebegone, bloody, yet somehow soothing ballads the cowhands sang to the cattle: “Pore young dying cowboy, Never more he’ll roam, Shot right through the chest five times, He ain’t never coming home….” Could it be that Ben had been only eleven years old when she was four? She couldn’t remember when he hadn’t seemed as big and safe as a fort.
    Even before that. When she was three, and had nightmares, she remembered running in her nightie, over floors icy to her bare feet, to jump into Ben’s bunk; for he was the one who never sent her away.
    In a few days she was thinking: All I want is to wait on him, and take care of him. Even if he married somebody else, I’d be happy if I could just work for him all my life. But later she knew it wasn’t so. No—I couldn’t stand for anybody else to have him. I’d rather die.
    She began to light up again; and Matthilda was so relieved to see it that she never dared to ask her what had come over her.
    Rachel sent a note out to Georgia, next time Andy stopped home. “I take pen in hand to say I’m right sorry,” she wrote. “I had no call to act up so. You taken me by surprise, first off. But I see now you told me something I bad needed to know, and I’m right thankful.”
    Georgia’s prompt answer was scrawled on a leaf from a tally book, and appeared to have been written in the saddle. During a fit of pitching , Rachel criticized, but was glad to get it. “Freind Rachel,” it began, and went on to express relief. She hadn’t told anybody what their Donnybrook was about, and hoped Rachel hadn’t. All Ben knew was that she “got run the Hell out with a bucher Nife.” Laughed fit to die every time he throwed it up to her. What she needed was her mouth sewed up, Georgia finished.
    Whatever it was the Rawlins family had gone so sour about seemed either to have been withheld from Georgia, or had not affected her. So they fixed it up, as they thought, and just about in time. For now the moon was coming full again; and this time the Kiowa war ponies would be tough and full of run.

Chapter Seventeen
    During grass season they were under the Kiowa Moon only a few days more than half the time; but the fort-up periods were such a nuisance that they seemed to come directly on top of each other, and to last forever.
    While the moon was full you must never leave the house unarmed, and even in broad daylight you must never go alone beyond gunshot of support. You must fort up every night, battle shutters barred and weapons ready, as if certain of attack while you slept. After dark you could strike no light, and even the ashes on the hearth must be drenched, lest a coal should wake and show a gleam. You must remember where the plaster-covered loopholes were in the walls, and be ready to knock them open with a blow. When a Kiowa scout came feeling out your defenses, you had better whistle a shot or two over his head without hitting him, as a persuasion to look farther. The water barrel must be kept filled from the well by the creek, the homemade ammunition kept in supply, the gunlocks taken down over and over. There was a lot more. The very success of all these precautions made them the more difficult to maintain; for it was pretty hard to keep up to scratch when nothing ever actually happened.
    Ben had been saving the work near home for the Kiowa Moon. Of the six hired hands held back from the drive, he had meant to give half to Zeb, for the Rawlins defense, but Zeb, perhaps in a spasm of thrift, had accepted only two. Ben could only hope that the Rawlinses were getting a little something done, now and then, over at their end of the range; for though the Rawlinses were maintaining a taciturn truce, they could not now join forces in a single range crew every day. Of his remaining four