The Unforgiven

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Cassius raised his carbine to the loophole and put a bullet close past Lost Bird’s ear. The blackpowder smell was plain in the room as he reloaded. Outside, the gray war pony quivered, but did not move its feet. Lost Bird was smiling, and the smile expressed more contempt than he could have shown in any other way.

“You shoot well,” his hands said. “You do not shoot to hit. You hit me, nobody in your house will see the sun again.”

Rachel startled Cash by speaking almost in his ear. “This is no good,” she said.

“You get back where I put you!” he ordered her.

“There isn’t going to be any fight,” she said. “Let me by. I understood what he said, this time.”

“Never mind them damned Indian lies! You’re going to—“

“He’s telling the truth. I’ve known all about it for a long time. I’m going to end all this trouble now…”

Chapter One

Dancing Bird River was the Zachary family’s name for a little run of live water ten miles below the Red, in the unsettled country west of the Wichita. Their soddy was cut into a slope beside it, in the last miles before the deep-grass petered out into the flinty apron of the cap rock. Some sketchy pole corrals marked this place as a cattle stand, but the house itself hardly showed. Its forward walls were built of the same mud and grass-roots into which it was dug, and so was its roof, which had a good stand of feed. It squatted low and lonely, backed like a badger into the hill; and its nearest neighbor was eighteen miles away.

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