Free The Unforgiven by Alan LeMay

youngsters who had ridden before they could walk, and most of the time since. They would fight anything that wanted to fight, so long as they weren’t crippled up. But the round-corral busters were expected to turn a mustang into a saddle horse without any wasted roughing, and this took a kind of horse-savvy that had to be born in a man.
    Into the round corral, half a dozen at a time, were hazed the horses that had never before felt rope—called “colts,” whatever their ages might be. All were geldings, age-hardened at full growth; the Zacharys rode no mares, no fillies, and no colts under four. Like the longhorns, the Texas mustangs came of Spanish stock, abandoned upon a strange continent long ago. After running wild for three centuries, beset by wolves, drouths, and bitter winters, they had a runty look, but an almost incredible toughness and en-durance.
    With the range-wild colts came the meanest badactors from the rough strings, the ratchet-heads that never knew when they were licked, but had to be fought out all over again every spring. These knew what they were up against, and were not afraid of it; they fought wickedly and cunningly, bucking as they had never bucked when they were fear-crazed colts. You didn’t have to be thrown to get hurt riding horses like that. Rough-string riders were smashed up and through before they were thirty.
    Not every year, but once in every few hundred horses, a killer might turn up. Usually there was nothing about him to warn you. Any colt was likely to strike, or lash out, or try for you with a snap of the teeth fit to take off your arm, as you worked around him. Or he might groan, deep in his chest like an angering bull, as you snubbed him short for saddling. None of this meant anything. A killer almost never charged a man on foot, as a stallion might do; he might even stand quiet, as if earlier handling had cured his fear of men. But when his rider was thrown he turned like a lion, and trampled with whirling, stiff-legged jumps, sometimes savaging with his teeth.
    The rare killers hardly explained why nearly all the young riders wore pistols; and neither did the un-likely chance of a dragging account for it. If a thrown rider’s boot caught in a stirrup, almost any horse would kick him to death in a hurry. But this happened so seldom that few had ever seen it, and it could be made impossible by using tapaderas, such as the brush-country riders always wore on their stirrups. In any case, neither a man slammed hard on the ground nor one stirrup-dragged by a runaway was likely to draw and fire soon enough to do himself any good. Even the bystanders, invariably taken by surprise, generally failed to take effective action in time.
    But the only boy you saw unarmed was one who hadn’t been able to get hold of a gun. They wore them belted snug and high if they were going to ride, with a slitted thong on the hammer to keep the gun in the holster; or slung them low, tied down to the thigh, if they expected to be afoot. They wore guns to break horses or to brand calves, or when they weren’t working at all. Most of them took their guns to bed. A seven-pound gun could develop an almighty heavy drag, in fourteen or sixteen hours of riding, but only a thunderstorm could cause it to be laid away. For gun wearing was a fashion; maybe it was a fashion set by men in trouble with the law—but a fashion just the same.
    So, when a rough-string boy who called himself Johnny Portugal came sidling along the fence to where Rachel was perched, he was armed with a huge hog-leg of a percussion revolver, like most of the rest. He leaned an elbow on the top rail close to Rachel, and crossed his feet in a pose of ease. His mouth seemed uncommonly full of large teeth, and the grin he flashed as he looked up at her showed them all.
    “You been living around here long?” Johnny asked pleasantly; and that was as far as he got.
    Perfect, for Ben’s purpose, because nothing even remotely off-color in