Free The Unforgiven by Alan LeMay Page A

Johnny’s remark confused the issue. Ben had not set out to teach these saddle tramps their manners; he didn’t give a hoot whether they had any or not. What he wanted was to warn them against messing around Rachel at all.
    Ben spun Johnny Portugal by the shoulder with his left hand, and with his right hand swung what could be called a slap. His hand was open, and the blow rang like a slap. But the heel of the hand carried Ben’s full weight from the heels. Johnny’s feet seemed to fly up, his hat sailed off, and his head cracked a five-inch pole as he hit the fence. He ended sitting in the mud against the bottom pole, and in this position grabbed for his gun. His thumb failed to flick the thong from the hammer on the first try, and he had to start the draw again. Ben stood waiting with an appearance of patience while Johnny Portugal fumbled. The gun came out at last; and Ben instantly kicked it over the fence.
    Cassius had come over the fence, and was standing beside his brother, looking happy and interested, as Johnny Portugal looked up. Rachel remembered afterward that Cash had been fooling around nearby, accomplishing nothing, all the time she had been sitting there. One brother on each side of the fence, watching the bait Ben had put out.
    “He gets it from our old man,” Cassius told the seated man. “Old Zack broke a Comanche’s neck with a slap like that, right in the middle of a Kiowa camp. Indians always called him Stone Hand.” Well—that was the way it was told in Texas, though the story had been fixed up a little, by later narrators. Actually, the Comanche had only been knocked out—which the Kiowas had taken as a good joke on the Comanche.
    “I got time coming,” Johnny mumbled, rubbing his head, and then his jaw.
    “We pay off in Wichita,” Cash said.
    “I ain’t fired?”
    “What for? You’re the party done all the sufferin’, so far.”
    “You’re lucky it wasn’t my brother,” Ben told Johnny.
    “Tell me he hits any harder,” Johnny said, “and I walk back to town!”
    “He doesn’t hit at all,” Ben said; and they walked away.
    Matthilda could have found no cause for complaint, after that, in the averted eyes, the ducked hatbrims, or the wary circlings of cowhands who had to pass Rachel. It was as if she had learned to rattle.

Chapter Ten
    While it lasted, the lively horse-handling made every day a fiesta, but it was over in less than a week. The colts would have to learn their work as it went along. The cook wagon and the bed wagon began to roll. From here on the corrida would get home only every third or fourth night, coming in long after dark and pulling out before the first light. A couple of hands were left at the home layout, cleaning out the well, or mending saddles, or burning lime; there were always plenty of odd jobs to keep them busy while they served as a garrison. And one of the brothers always came in overnight when the corrida was out. This seemed all the precaution that was needed, for the moon was at deep wane; and even when it waxed again, the Kiowas would remain pinned for one moon more, while their ponies regained weight.
    Almost every day Rachel rode out to the wagons with whichever brother had slept home. The range hands were rounding up, cutting out the beeves that would make up the first drive, and chousing them into bunches that would finally be thrown into one great herd. The Zachary boys worked cattle in the hell-for-leather way Old Zack had learned in the brush country, where you rode full stretch or lost your cow. Often Zeb Rawlins watched the parting of the cattle from his buggy, and Rachel knew he was sometimes angered by what seemed to him a brutal roughing of the stock. But she wasn’t going to worry about old Zeb’s opinions or anything else, while these treasured days of the green-up lasted, to her the most precious of the year.
    Part of it was the good smells, of cows and horses, and leather, and beans boiling, and salt pork frying,