Chapter 4

would make him feel whole.

But it had been six years since he had seen Redbird, and no woman of the Sauk would go without a man for that long.

_My mother did_, he reminded himself.

But Redbird had probably given in to Wolf Paw and married him. After all, she hadn't had a word from White Bear in all that time.

Marchette's urgent tone refocused his thoughts. "Monsieur Raoul, he stood up on the table and held up a bag full of Spanish dollars--he said there were fifty--and said he would give it to the man who shoots you. And there were many men who cheered at that and boasted they would be the one to win the silver."

Auguste pictured men scattering out all over Smith County, hunting for him. He could almost feel the rifle ball shattering his skull.

"I can't hide in your house forever, Nancy. Sooner or later they'll come looking for me, and I don't want to bring that down on your heads."

Reverend Hale said nothing, but Auguste saw relief in his square face--and grudging respect. But Hale's respect, he thought, would do him little good when he lay dead on the prairie.

Nancy's full lips quivered as she said, "You'll go to the château and let them shoot you?"

Auguste realized that his hands were cold with fear, and he rubbed them together to warm them. Hale's house was about ten miles across the prairie from the Mississippi. Could he cover all that distance without being seen and shot?

"I'm not going to the château. I'll just see that Marchette gets there safely. Traveling at night, she should have someone go back with her. Then I'll go on to town. To Nicole and Frank's house. To Grandpapa. I must see him." He turned toward the cook and felt a stabbing in his gut at the sight of her bruised face. She'd suffered that out of love for his father, he thought, and for his sake too.

"If you're seen you'll be shot," said Hale.

_Don't you think I know that?_ he wanted to scream at the minister. What choice did he have? He was like a rabbit surrounded by wolves. He forced calm on himself and spoke with sarcasm.

"Surely you know, Reverend, that Indians are good at getting about unnoticed."

He felt his fear turning to a rising excitement as he recalled the lessons of stealth and cunning he'd learned as a child of the Sauk.

"But what will you do then?" Nancy asked. "How will you get back here?"

Auguste hesitated. Remembering that he was a Sauk had moved his thoughts in a new direction.

_I have been dispossessed. Just as my people have been dispossessed._

Nancy was waiting for him to speak.

"Raoul told me to go back to the woods with the other Indians. Even though the advice came from him, I think that is just what I should do."

Nancy gasped as if he had struck her. There was silence in the cottage for a moment.

"How will you get back to your people?" she said. "How will you find them?"

He smiled, trying to get her to smile back at him. "I know exactly where they are. They've crossed the Mississippi to their hunting grounds in the Ioway Territory. I spent the first fifteen winters of my life there with the British Band."

Auguste remembered his dream of becoming a shaman. It had come back to life a bit with his effort to heal Pierre. Among the pale eyes there was no room for magic. But now he felt he could go back to his own people and find magic again.

Hale said, "An unwise decision, it seems to me. You've been educated. You've had an opportunity to learn about white Christian civilization. Your uncle can't take that away from you, and you should not throw it away."

Auguste said, "Reverend, you know what I'm leaving behind. But you don't know what I'm going back to."

Nancy started speaking rapidly, as if she was trying to hold back tears. "Well, what about these things of yours that Marchette brought here? There's no way you can carry a trunk on foot even as far as Nicole and Frank's house. Would you like us to keep your things here for you? Perhaps someday, after you've settled with your tribe"--she swallowed hard--"you could send for them."

Auguste heard the anguish in her voice but decided to take her words at only face value. "Yes, I'd be truly grateful if you'd keep them for me. The only thing I want to take now is my medicine bundle."

Reverend Hale pursed his lips and snorted, but Auguste ignored him.

Auguste thought a moment. "And I can use the surgical instruments. And at least one book."

"Let it be a Bible," said Hale. Auguste made no answer to that.

As Eli Greenglove struck him down, Auguste remembered, he had been charging at Raoul with his knife in his hand.

"What happened to my knife?"

"I picked it up," said Nancy in a clipped tone. She stood up and went over to an elaborately carved oak sideboard, a handsome piece of furniture that seemed out of place in this simple cabin, and took Auguste's knife out of a drawer. She handed it to him and he slipped it into the leather sheath at his belt.

"Thank you, Nancy. My father gave that to me a long time ago." Their eyes met, and he felt a warmth spread through him. It was going to be hard to leave her.

Nancy remained standing. "Let's go out to the wagon and see what Marchette has brought. I can help you carry your trunk in."

Marchette and Reverend Hale both said at the same time, "I can do that!" The coincidence made everyone laugh nervously.

"No," said Nancy firmly. "Marchette, you're hurt and tired. Father, why don't you see what consolation you can offer this poor, mistreated woman. Auguste's trunk can't be that heavy. Come on, Auguste."

Before either Hale or Marchette could answer, Nancy had Auguste out the door. He glanced back into the room just before the door closed and saw Hale's fists clenched on either side of his open Bible.

Auguste stood for a moment, letting his eyes adjust from the lamplight inside to the darkness out here. A fat moon hung overhead; he judged it would be full in two nights. With this much light he'd be in even more danger tonight. The white-painted steeple of Reverend Hale's little church, next to the cottage where he and Nancy lived, gleamed in the moonlight.

Beside him in the dark Nancy whispered fiercely, "I don't _want_ you to go."

Sadly he said, "I know." He took her hand and squeezed it. Perhaps it was a mistake to do that, but he could not stop himself.

"Come away from the house," she said.

Now he could see the wagon Marchette had come in, the horse tied to a fence post beside the Hales' garden on the south side of the house. The horse shifted from foot to foot and burbled its breath out through its lips.

Holding tight to his hand, Nancy led him around to the rear of the house, beyond which rows of corn stood, their tassels silvery in the moonlight.

"You and your father grow all this corn?" Auguste asked.

"It's our land, but a neighbor does the work. He sells it in Victor and we share the proceeds." She led him into the corn, brushing past the crackling leaves. The concealment of the leaves and stalks made him feel closer to her than ever. He wanted to reach out to her.

But the corn evoked another feeling, as well.

_She can't know it, but this field reminds me of the corn bottoms around Saukenuk. It makes me want to go back all the more._

When there were leafy stalks all around them, hiding them from the house, she turned to him again and said, "Please, Auguste, I don't want you to go away for good." Her eyes were bright in the moonlight.

Her nearness was thrilling. He wanted to forget the worries that made him hesitate, and take her in his arms.

"You don't want me to stay here and risk getting killed," he said.

"You could go to Vandalia," she said. "Tell Governor Reynolds what happened. If he can't do anything for you himself, maybe he can help you find a lawyer who will fight Raoul for you in the courts."

How innocent she was, he thought bitterly. "It was Governor Reynolds who called out the militia to drive my people from Saukenuk. It's just as Raoul said, he would be the last man to want to help an Indian fight for land with a white man."

"Your father sent you to school in the East because he wanted a different future for you than just spending your life hunting and living in a wigwam. You'll be throwing all that away."

He felt a flash of anger at her. She did not understand the Sauk way of life at all. She was just repeating what her father had said.

He remembered the way Nancy's eyes had shone each time they met on the prairie last summer. He had known then that if he spoke to Nancy of marriage, she would want it no matter how much it enraged her father. But marriage with Nancy would be a coming together of two strangers, of people whose worlds were utterly different. In the past six years he had learned much about her world, but that did not mean he belonged in it. And she knew next to nothing of his.

It hurt to hold himself back; he felt powerfully drawn to her. But what he was feeling was impossible. Impossible to fulfill.

"I can use my schooling to help my people make a better life for themselves. The gift my father gave me is a gift I will give to the Sauk. And it may be worth more than the land Raoul has stolen from me."

"I don't want to lose you," she sobbed. She threw herself against him and wrapped her arms around him. Her tear-wet cheek pressed against his. Her face was hot, as though she had a fever. She wanted him; he felt it now, just as he had seen it hours ago in her unguarded eyes.

"I've never cared for a man as I care for you, Auguste," she said. "Everything you say may be true, but if you go back to your tribe I'll never see you again."

It hurt Auguste to admit it, but it was almost certain that they would never meet again.

"If you want to--you could come with me." Even as he spoke, he was sure it would never work. Did she not dismiss the way of the Sauk as "hunting and living in a wigwam"?

And suppose Redbird _had_ waited for him? What would he do with Nancy then?

"No," she said. "If I went with you my father would hunt us down and Raoul would help him. And besides--" She hesitated.

"What else?"

She shook her head. "I'm too afraid. Indians frighten me. Not you. Real Indians."

_Real Indians?_

Anger pulsed in his head. He wanted to pull away from her then, but she wouldn't let him go. Her arms tightened around him, and her body moved against him.

"Auguste, do you know where it says in the Bible, 'Adam knew Eve, his wife'? I want to know you--that way."

Her soft words thrilled him, and he forgot his anger. He felt exalted, and he held her tightly. He had wanted Nancy ever since he met her last June. All summer long, desiring her, he had fought his desire.

He pressed his mouth on hers, crushing her soft, full lips. She was pulling at him now, pulling him down. Pulling him to lie with her between the rows of corn.

_I must not do this._

Abruptly he steadied his feet and drew his face away from hers.

The vague shape of a future different from the one he planned shimmered in his mind. They could have each other here and now, and he could give up his decision to return to the Sauk. He might flee temporarily to some nearby county, find work, study until he could begin practicing medicine, marry Nancy, perhaps even try to win back the estate in the pale eyes' courts.

He would become, more or less, a pale eyes. It would be the end of him as a Sauk.

And the White Bear arose in his mind, as clearly as if he had suddenly stood up here among the corn stalks.

The White Bear said, _Your people need you_.

"Auguste, please, _please_," Nancy whispered. "It isn't wrong. It's right for us. There's no other man but you who's right for me. I don't want to end up a dried-up old spinster who never knew the man she truly loved."

She slid down the length of him, falling to her knees in the furrow. She pressed her cheek against the hard bulge in his trousers, sending a thrill through his whole body.

"Please."

He wanted to let himself sink to the ground with her. He shut his eyes and saw the White Bear more vividly in his mind. It seemed to glow.

He held himself rigid, fighting the pressure inside him that made him want to give in to her. He told himself he could give Nancy this moment of love she wanted and still go back to the Sauk. If he did not take her now as she wanted to be taken, he would regret it bitterly later.

But if he did this with her it would tie them in a bond that would be wrong to break. If he gave her what she wanted and then left, it would hurt her, might even kill her.

He took a step backward, then another. His legs felt as if they were made of wood; he could barely move them.

Nancy let him go, put her hands to her face and sobbed, kneeling between the rows of corn.

He stood there a moment, feeling helpless. Then he went to her, took her arms and helped her to stand up.

"I do love you, Nancy," he said. "But if I knew you as Adam knew Eve, I would still have to leave you. And it would hurt both of us much more."

Sobs still shook her body. He did not even know if she heard him. But she let him lead her out of the cornfield, around the locked and silent church, and back to the wagon where his trunk lay. As they walked she pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve, wiped her face and blew her nose.

His heart felt heavy as lead. Sure as he was that this was the right thing to do, he was almost as sure it was wrong.

When they got to the wagon, he was still holding her arm. Gently she pulled free of him.

"You're a good man, Auguste. I'm afraid I'll always love you. Whether you want me to or not."

"Are you all right?" he asked. He wanted to make her happy, and he felt terribly helpless.

"I will be," she said.

* * * * *

As he rode in the wagon back to the château with Marchette, the back of Auguste's neck tingled. He pictured silent hunters crouched out in the prairie, their Kentucky long rifles ready, their thoughts fixed on fifty pieces of silver. His eyes moved restlessly over the low hills around them. The nearly full moon was sinking before them in the west, a lantern at the end of their trail. In some places the prairie grass closed in around the horse and wagon, high as the horse's rump and the wagon's wheels, and it looked to Auguste as if they were pushing their way through a moonlit lake.

The loudest sound he heard was the steady singing of choruses of crickets more numerous than all the tribes of man. Somehow it seemed they always sang louder this time of year, as if they knew that frost and snow were coming soon to silence their song.

The château's peaked roof rose black against the stars. Before they reached the orchards, Auguste put his arm around Marchette and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Jumping down from the wagon, he tied to his shoulders with rawhide thongs the pack that held his medicine bundle, his instruments and his book.

"Good-bye and thank you, Marchette," he whispered, and darted off into the tall grass.

"God keep His eye upon you," she called softly after him.

Watching for Raoul's lurking hunters, he was soon past the château and slipping along the edge of the road that led through the hills to town.

He froze. He saw a light ahead of him, a swinging lantern moving away from him. Loud voices carried to him on the still night air.

Those must be some of Raoul's men. He was frightened, but he needed to know what Raoul was doing. Staying well in the shadows of the trees that grew along the edge of the road, he moved quickly and silently until he was close enough to make out words.

They staggered along, praising Raoul's generosity with Old Kaintuck. Auguste saw three of them in the lantern's yellow glow, each carrying a rifle.

He bit his lower lip, and fear formed a cold hollow in his chest. If these men saw him they would shoot him on the spot.

Or try to. He doubted they could hit anything, drunk as they looked. With that thought, his tense muscles eased a little.

The men crossed a narrow ridge that connected a hill with the bluff on which the trading post stood. Auguste flinched, startled by a whoop and a wail, followed by the crash of a body falling through shrubbery and a heavy clattering--probably a rifle--against rocks.

From the ridge came a burst of drunken laughter. Two of the men mocked their comrade who had rolled to the bottom of the hill. They wouldn't help him climb back up. Sleep it off down there, they told him. Curses floated faintly from below, then there was silence.

"What if that Indian is lurking around here?" said the man carrying the lantern. "He might come upon Hodge in the dark and scalp him or something."

Auguste thought, _How I would love to_. He recognized the Prussian accent of the man speaking. It was Otto Wegner, one of the men who worked at Raoul's trading post.

The other man said, "Hell, if the Injun ain't dead from the way Eli conked him with that rifle butt, he's halfway to Canada. He knows he'll get his red hide full of holes if he stays around Smith County."

"As for me, I do not shoot unarmed Indians," said Wegner. "Fifty Spanish dollars or not. I have my pride. I served under von Blücher at Waterloo."

"Waterloo, hah? Well, ain't you a hell of a fella! Raoul'd skin you alive and wear you for a hat if he heard you talking like that."

"He would not. I am his best rifleman--after Eli Greenglove. He knows my value. And my honor as a soldier is worth more to me than fifty pieces of eight."

Crouching in the shrubbery, Auguste shook his head in wonder. There was some sense of right and wrong even among Raoul's rogues.

But that hadn't stopped Wegner from being one of the men who backed Raoul with his rifle this morning.

He waited for the men to cross the ridge. He heard no sound from the one who had fallen; he had probably taken his comrades' advice and gone to sleep.

When the lantern swung out of sight around a corner of the trading post palisade, Auguste darted forward. Keeping low, he made a wide circle through the wooded slope above Victor. He scrambled down to the road where the Hopkins house stood. A long-eared black dog barked and ran at him when he passed one of the houses along the road. His heart stopped as he waited for doors to fly open and rifles to fire at him. But he kept walking, and the dog stopped barking when he was beyond the house it was guarding.

Hoping none of the neighbors would hear him, he knocked loudly at the Hopkins door to wake them up.

Frank Hopkins, holding a candle in his hand, stood in the doorway in a long nightshirt. "What the devil is it? We've got a sick man in here--" He peered closer. "My God, Auguste! Get inside, quick."

He reached out, dragged Auguste through the door and shut it quickly behind him.

"I thought you were out at the Hales'." They stood in Frank's ground-floor workshop. The iron printing press towered shadowy in the candle's glow.

"I came to see Grandpapa. And--Frank, I'm going back to my people. I need your help."

"Come upstairs." Frank helped Auguste untie his backpack.

The stairs led to a second-floor corridor, and Frank drew Auguste into a room where an oil lamp with a tall glass chimney burned next to a large bed. Nicole sat there. The lamplight revealed Elysée's sharp profile against the white of the pillow.

Nicole jumped to her feet. "Oh, Auguste! Are you all right?"

"I'm getting better. How is Grandpapa?"

"He's only been awake half the time. Gram Medill looked in on him. She said he wrenched his hip when he fell and had bad bruises, but he hadn't broken any bones. I've been sitting up with him. What about you--how is your head?"

Auguste felt as if chains had fallen away from his chest at the news that Grandpapa was not dying. Then his head started to hurt. In the excitement of slipping past his enemies, Auguste had forgotten his pain. Now he rubbed the spot above his right ear where Greenglove's rifle had hit him. He felt a lump that was sore to the touch. But he was able to smile reassuringly at Nicole.

He spoke in a low voice so as not to disturb Elysée. "I won't be able to put my fine beaver hat on over this bump. But I won't be taking my fine beaver hat where I'm going."

"I'll get some more chairs," Frank said. "We can talk in here. The old gentleman is sound asleep now. Could you use a drop of brandy, Auguste?"

Auguste nodded. "That might ease the pain." He thought not only of the pain from the rifle blow, but of the pain in his heart from having lost Victoire despite his promise to his father. And the pain of tearing himself away from Nancy.

He and Frank quietly removed chairs from the other upstairs rooms where the Hopkins children were sleeping. Frank went down to the kitchen and came back with a tray bearing three small bowl-shaped crystal glasses and a cut-glass decanter that twinkled in the lamplight.

"Handsome glassware," Auguste said, seating himself and carefully setting his backpack between his feet.

"From the time of Louis the Fifteenth," Nicole said. "One of the things Papa brought over from the old château in France. And he gave it to Frank and me as a wedding present. At least Raoul won't get his hands on this."

Auguste said, "But Raoul has everything else, because father left it all to me. I told him he should will it to you; I should have insisted." His face burned with shame.

Frank said, "I doubt we'd have held onto the estate any longer than you did. And, frankly, I don't want it any more than you do. I don't know how Nicole feels."

Now that the land was irrevocably lost to him, Auguste was no longer so sure that he did not want it. He twisted in his chair, angry at himself for his uncertainty.

Nicole shook her head. "I'm a wife and mother. I'm not prepared to be a châtelaine. Especially when I'd have to fight that--that beast."

As Frank poured an inch of the warm amber liquid into each of their glasses, Auguste noticed that his fingers were, as always, blackened. He must never get the stains of his trade off his hands.

Frank said, "I'm going to write in the _Visitor_ about what happened today, tell what I saw, so the whole county will know what happened."

Auguste looked at Nicole. He saw fear in her eyes, but she said nothing.

"Why write about it?" Auguste said. "Raoul would do some harm to you. And it would change nothing. I won't even be here to read it." The last thing he wanted was these people, whom he cared about, getting into trouble because of him.

Frank smiled faintly. "You know that unlike just about every other man in Smith County, I don't carry a gun." He pointed downward, in the direction of the press on the floor below them. "That's my way of fighting."

For a moment Auguste felt ashamed that he was running away from that same fight.

"Because you stood by me today my heart will always sing your praises. Do you think my father's spirit will be sad if I do not stay and fight for the land until I die?"

"You almost did die, Auguste," Nicole said.

_And I might yet, before I get away from here._

He sipped the brandy. It burned his tongue and his throat and lit a fire in his belly. It made him feel stronger.

Frank said, "Nobody's saying you should stay. I don't want to see you killed."

Nicole said, "Neither would your father. Pierre wanted you to have the estate, but he didn't want you dead on account of it."

"Amen to that," said Frank.

_Yes_, Auguste thought, despising himself, _but I think he expected me to keep the land for more than a day_.

Frank went on, "But if you go back to your people, you've got to tell them--they can no more fight the United States for their land than you could fight Raoul."

A fierce heat rose in Auguste as he took another sip of brandy. "At St. George's School I read that the Indian does not make good use of the land. The whites need the land. Therefore the Indian must yield." He clenched his fist around the glass in his hand. "We were living on this land! Doesn't that mean anything?"

Frank said, "Auguste, you know better than any of your people how much power the United States have. You've got to tell them."

Auguste was silent for a moment.

_The long knives_, he thought. That was what his people called the American soldiers. But the British Band had no idea how very many long knives there were. He must make Black Hawk understand.

He sipped a little more of the brandy, and its fire flowed through his blood.

He sighed and nodded. "I will tell them. Frank, I need a boat."

Nicole said, "Your eyelids are drooping, Auguste. You're tired and you're still hurt. You can't go tonight."

True. And he wanted to stay long enough to see Grandpapa when he was awake.

Auguste's last memory that night was of letting Frank lead him across the corridor into a darkened bedroom, where he fell face down on an empty bed.

When he came to himself again, he was lying on the same bed, still fully clothed except for his boots. The room was not as dark as he remembered; it was in a sort of twilight. The one window was shuttered. A curtain covered the doorway. He looked around the room, saw boys' clothing hanging on pegs and piled on the floor, another bed, covered with rumpled sheets, empty. His own boots and his pack were set neatly at the foot of his bed.

An urgent pressure inside told him he had been sleeping a long time. He saw a chamber pot in one corner. Smart of them to leave the pot here, he thought as he filled it. He didn't dare to go to their outhouse during daylight.

He went to the window and cautiously looked through the shutter. The window looked south, and he could not see the sun, only the black shadows it painted in the ruts of the road that slanted up the hill past the Hopkins house. It must be late afternoon.

He wondered, were Raoul and his men out there somewhere, looking for him? Would he live to see another nightfall?

His head ached less than it had last night--until he touched it. Then the pain was like someone pounding a nail into his brain. The bump felt as big as a hen's egg.

Opening his backpack, he took out his leather medicine bag and drew out the stones one by one, rubbing his fingers over each. He opened his shirt and touched the tip of the bear's claw to the five scars on his chest.

Then, on impulse, he touched it to the old scar on his cheek.

A black leather bag contained his surgical instruments--two saws, a big one for legs and a smaller one for arms; four scalpels; lancets for bleeding; a turnkey for pulling teeth; a probe and tongs for removing bullets; a small jar of opium. Any of those things might be needed, where he was going.

Last, he took out a book, chosen almost at random from his small collection. On the spine of its brown leather cover was stamped in gold: "J. Milton. _Paradise Lost_."

Reverend Hale had recommended that he take a Bible. This long poem giving the Christian account of creation was the next thing to a Bible. But he had read it at St. George's and enjoyed it. And its title and its story of Adam and Eve being driven out of the Garden of Eden made him think of how he was dispossessed. Perhaps he would find some wisdom or guidance in the book.

Today he thought, _Paradise lost? It may be that I'm returning to paradise._

But then he remembered how Nancy had wanted to "know" him as Adam knew Eve. He _was_ leaving behind what might have been a great happiness.

He opened the book and read the first verse his eye fell upon:

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far Outshone the wealth of _Ormus_ and of _Ind_, Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Show'rs on her Kings _Barbaric_ Pearl and Gold, Satan exalted sat ...

Sounded like Raoul, with his fifty Spanish dollars and his steamboat and lead mine and trading post. Raoul was better fitted to be Satan than to be the angel at the gates of Eden keeping sinners away.

He heard voices nearby. One, faint but unmistakable, was Grandpapa's. His heart leaped. He quickly repacked his treasures.

He pushed the curtain aside and hurried across the hall. It was a joy to see Elysée's eyes looking at him, open and bright.

"I do not as a rule believe in miracles," Elysée said, smiling at Auguste, "but it's certainly a miracle that you could charge a man pointing a pistol at your chest and come out with nothing but a bump on your head."

"It's a bad enough bump, Grandpapa," said Auguste, dragging over the chair he had sat in last night and pulling it close to the side of the bed. "I wish I could stay and doctor you."

"Our local midwife says I too will heal," said Elysée. "I can move all my arms and legs without extreme pain. I think the worst injury was to my hip." He touched his right side gently. "I bruised it when I fell. There's swelling there, but I can move my leg. The hip is not broken." He closed his eyes, and Auguste knew that the old man was feeling a sharper pain in his heart than in his bones. "You must not think of staying here. I am afraid Raoul is perfectly capable of murdering you."

_One son dead, the other an enemy. And now I must leave him. How much more can he stand?_

Nicole was sitting beside Elysée's bed, just as she had been last night when Auguste arrived. He wondered whether she had slept.

Nicole smiled at him. "I sent the children down to play by the river. Having two injured adults to care for has been very restful for me."

Elysée sat up a little straighter, Nicole quickly plumping the pillows behind him, and turned a sharp, blue-eyed stare at Auguste.

"Nicole and Frank told me about your plan to go back to the Sauk. I can understand why you would wish to do so, but that is not the only choice open to you. You might consider going where people are much more civilized than they are around here--back East, where you were educated. Emilie and Charles would be happy, I am sure, to take you in again for a time. And I could help you. I have money banked with Irving and Sons on Wall Street. You could continue your education and follow the medical profession in New York."

Wishing he did not have to refuse the old man, Auguste said, "Grandpapa, I must go to the only other people I love in the world as much as I love you and Aunt Nicole."

Elysée uttered a little sigh. "I understand. Loyalty pulls you back to your mother's people. It is a family trait. I suppose your father must have told you about the mystery around the origin of our family name."

"Yes, Grandpapa." Wanting him to know his French forebears, Pierre had spent hours with Auguste recounting their names and deeds. And he had told him that, strangely, the de Marion records extended back only to the late thirteenth century, though the family was wealthy and powerful even then. According to a murky legend, one ancestor had committed treason against the King, and that one's son had deserted his wife and children, simply disappeared. Feeling the original name, whatever it had been, irreparably tarnished, the first recorded Count de Marion had destroyed all record of it--apparently with the approval and help of the royal authorities--and had taken his mother's family's name instead. The story had left Auguste wishing he could use his shaman's powers to learn more, but he doubted that the Sauk spirits could see clear across the ocean.

Elysée said, "We de Marions sometimes display an overabundance of loyalty, as if we were still trying to expiate that ancient guilt."

Puzzled, Auguste said, "There's nothing wrong with loyalty, is there?"

"Certainly not. But remember this--if I had let loyalty keep me in France, we would not be here in this primeval paradise."

_He sees this land as a paradise too. But it has not been kind to him._

"Looking back, Grandpapa, do you think you would have done better to have stayed in France?"

Elysée laughed, a short, humorless bark. "Not at all. I would almost certainly have lost my head to Dr. Guillotine's wonderful invention. Our lands would have been confiscated, and that would have been the end of the family."

"But now, with most of the wealth in Raoul's hands--"

Elysée raised a hand and shook his head. "This is not the end. I do not believe in divine intervention, but I do believe there is a law of nature that says a bad man will do badly in the end."

Auguste was about to reply when he heard footsteps coming down the road toward the house, reminding him of how quiet it had been ever since he awakened. A good part of the town was sleeping off Raoul's Old Kaintuck, he suspected.

He heard the door open and close below. A moment later Frank came into the room carrying a long rifle, with an ammunition bag and a powder horn slung over his shoulder.

"Well, I bought you a little bateau that will get you across the Mississippi," he said, "for five dollars, from an old trapper who doesn't feel up to going out this winter. And for another twenty dollars I got him to throw in his second best rifle and a good supply of ammunition." He smiled grimly at Auguste. "I expect you'll find this useful over in Ioway."

Auguste nodded. "I'll eat better. But--twenty-five dollars. Frank, that's too much for you to spend on me." He felt a warm gratitude toward the plump, sandy-haired man who was risking so much to help him. Frank's newspaper, his printing business and his carpentry all together could hardly bring in twenty-five dollars in a month, little enough to feed a family of ten.

Elysée said, "I told you I had some money salted away, Auguste. Let the boat and the rifle be my gift to you."

Auguste reached out and squeezed his grandfather's bony hand.

Frank said, "I've moved the boat about half a mile below town and hidden it. We should be able to get down there unseen after dark."

Nicole said, "If Auguste is leaving as Raoul wants him to, why wouldn't Raoul just let him go?"

Frank said, "We can't take that chance. I believe Raoul won't be content unless he kills Auguste."

Auguste shuddered inwardly at the thought that there was in the world a man who would not be satisfied until he was dead. He could not live with that kind of fear. He asked the White Bear, his spirit guide, to give him courage.

He tried to push the fear out of his mind. He stood up to go back to the room where he had slept. He would clean and repack the things he was taking, he decided. He would get busy getting ready and not give himself time to think about being afraid.

But nightfall seemed a long way off.

At nine o'clock in the evening by the Seth Thomas clock in Frank's printing shop, which he reset every day at sunset, it was dark enough and the town was quiet enough for Auguste to leave. He held Nicole's ample body tight and kissed her, shook hands with the boys and kissed the girls. His grandfather had drifted off to sleep again, but the old man had kissed him on both cheeks, and they had said their good-byes in the afternoon.

The road down the bluff from the town to the bottomland was empty. Most people in Victor went to bed soon after sunset, and those who didn't would be up in the taproom of the trading post inn.

Auguste did see candlelight flickering in a one-room log cabin they passed. A silhouette appeared in the window just as he looked in. A man reached out and slammed the shutters closed.

"Bad luck we should pass that house just as he came to the window," Frank said. "One of Raoul's men. But he's more than likely still half drunk."

Frank and Auguste followed the road past fields of corn ready for harvesting, their way lighted by the nearly full moon.

Up ahead the wooded sides of the bluff came down to the water's edge. Frank led Auguste out on a shrub-covered spit.

Not until he was nearly on top of the bateau did Auguste see it. Frank had pulled it up out of the water, covered it with branches, and tied it to the roots of a tree that had toppled into the water, undercut by the river.

With sinking heart Auguste saw that though the riverboat was small, it would be heavier and harder to row than a canoe. Well, Frank had done his best, and now he would have to do _his_ best.

His heart leaped with fear as he heard hoofbeats.

Horsemen, coming down the road from Victor.

Frank stopped working on the boat and lifted his head. "Damn! That skunk must have seen you after all."

The pounding was coming rapidly closer. Auguste's heart was beating as fast as the oncoming hooves. He saw the horsemen by moonlight--_five_ of them, racing through the high corn.

Frank and Auguste pushed the little boat into the water bow first, pointed stern resting on the shore. Auguste put his pack in the stern and the rifle and ammunition in the bow, where they were more likely to stay dry. The current pulled the bow downstream, the flat bottom grinding in the mud.

Auguste saw a flash and heard a loud boom. Something whistled through the bare branches of a bush beside him.

He leaped into the boat.

"Here. Beef and biscuit." Frank tossed a bag to Auguste, who set it on the seat beside him. Frank pushed the bateau's stern free.

"Now row for your life!"

Pulling as hard and fast as he could, Auguste steered diagonally into the Mississippi, trying to get beyond pistol range without spending all his strength fighting the current.

"Hopkins, goddamn it, I'll kill _you_ if he gets away!"

Raoul's voice. Auguste wished he had time to load his rifle and shoot back, but if he stopped rowing they were sure to get him.

Five bright red flashes and five shots roared out one after the other from shore.

_If one of those men is Eli Greenglove I'm dead for sure._

Auguste heard a sharp rap on the side of the boat and splashes in the water on his left. He felt naked sitting up in the boat pulling frantically on the oars. He could stop rowing and lie down using the side of the boat as a shield, but then he would remain within range, drifting south along the riverbank, and Raoul and his men could follow him and shoot at him at their leisure. He gritted his teeth and kept rowing, his shoulder muscles feeling as if they were about to tear loose from his bones.

He heard a ball whiz past his head. They must have stopped riding to reload and take better aim.

Another ball smashed into the boat just ahead of the wooden oarlock.

His body was coated with the cold sweat of fear. There was nothing he could do but sit here, a target in the moonlight, and pull on the oars with all his strength. If he missed one stroke it might be his death.

_Earthmaker, do not let Raoul take revenge on Frank._

Pistol balls splashed water into the boat.

11

Redbird's Wickiup

White Bear rowed upstream on the Ioway River past stands of weeping willow whose yellowing fronds drooped into the dark green water. Even though the current was at its weakest now, his arms and shoulders felt as if they'd been beaten with clubs. If only Frank had been able to find a canoe for him instead of this heavy bateau that he'd had to push across the Great River and now up the Ioway.

His heart fluttered in his chest like a trapped bird as he sensed himself coming closer to the British Band's winter hunting camp. He had thought he would be happy at this homecoming, but he was terrified.

How would they receive him? After six years they must think he had forgotten all about them. Would they despise him? Maybe they would just make fun of him.

And in what state would he find the British Band? They'd had to get through the summer without the crops they always raised. Had any friends been shot by white snipers during the siege of Saukenuk? How many, weakened by hunger, might be ill or dead? Would his mother be alive?

And what of Redbird?

He had already met, just by chance, one member of the band, Three Horses, who had been fishing in the shallows on the Ioway shore of the Great River. And Three Horses had certainly been happy to see him. He'd jumped on his pony and had said he would ride back to the camp with the news that White Bear was back. He was so excited that he did not wait for White Bear to ask any questions about how his people had fared.

So they would all be waiting for him by the time he got there. The thought frightened him all the more.

Ahead, a row of bark and dugout canoes lay bottoms up on a dirt embankment.

He saw a flash of red in the trees near the canoes. For a moment he thought, with a joyous leap of his heart, that it might be Redbird. Then a man wearing a deep red blanket stepped out of the woods. He stood over the beached canoes with his arms folded.

Wolf Paw.

His eyes were like splinters of coal, and the black circles he had painted around them gave him a terrifying aspect. The crest of red-dyed deer hair that sprouted from his shaven skull seemed strange and savage to White Bear after six years away from the Sauk.

White Bear rowed in close to the riverbank, uncertain how to greet Wolf Paw. The brave said nothing, did nothing. A maple branch swayed in the wind. Red leaves fell, and sunlight flashed from a steel-headed tomahawk that Wolf Paw was holding.

White Bear's belly knotted.

He skidded the boat to a halt on the bank a short distance downriver from Wolf Paw. He climbed out the front end, pulled the boat up on the bank, unloaded it and turned it over.

Wolf Paw watched in silence as White Bear slung his pack and bags on his back, picked up his rifle and rested it on his shoulder. Looking at Wolf Paw's red crest and blanket and buckskin trousers, White Bear realized how strange he himself must seem to Wolf Paw in the green clawhammer jacket he had worn to his father's funeral.

Now they were face to face.

_I will wait for him to move, if I have to stand here till sunset and all through the night. He chose this strange way of meeting me. Let him show me what is in his mind._

He heard the boughs creaking in the wind around him. River water rippled over the stones along the bank. He heard a redbird whistling in the distance.

Wolf Paw drew a deep breath, opened his mouth and let out a war whoop.

"_Whoowhoowhoowhoo!_"

White Bear's heart gave a great thump, and he fell back a step. He heard rage in the whoop, and the frustration. Wolf Paw was angry at him. Why? Maybe just for coming back.

Wolf Paw held the tomahawk high. Corded muscles and dark veins stood out in his rigid arm. Two feathers dyed red danced just under the steel head. He repeated his war whoop, and then his lips drew back from clenched white teeth.

He whirled and plunged into the woods, leaving White Bear shaken and open-mouthed. He stood still, listening to Wolf Paw crashing through the trees and shrubs, kicking piles of leaves, until the noise died away in the distance. No Sauk ran noisily through the woods like that, unless driven by some madness.

White Bear sighed. Oddly, he felt less frightened than he had before he met Wolf Paw. Before, he had not known what to expect. Now he felt ready for anything.

He strode into the woods following Three Horses' directions. As he walked he began to hear the sounds of people's voices and dogs barking. Gradually they drew nearer, until at last he broke through the trees into a clearing.

The sight made his eyes brim with tears.

A hundred or more women in brown, fringed skirts were facing him, and as he came forward they rushed to form a ring around him. His vision blurred as he recognized faces he had not seen in six years.

Beyond the women he could see the camp of the British Band. In his joy it seemed to him that the wickiups were bathed in a golden light. Rings of gray domes began near the trees where he stood and spread into the tall yellow prairie grass. Before the wickiups he could see what the women had been working at, tasks abandoned for the moment, clothing being mended, skins stretched, meat and fish cleaned and set on frames to dry.

"White Bear is here!" cried one woman, and he recognized Water Flows Fast, plump wife of Three Horses.

Three Horses, a short man with broad shoulders, stood beside his wife. His nose was flat and spread out. White Bear did not remember it that way. Something must have happened to Three Horses while he was gone.

_Much has happened to them while I was gone._

"I told you White Bear had come back," Three Horses said over and over again.

White Bear breathed in the familiar smells of campfire smoke and roasting meat, of leather and freshly cut wood and tobacco smoke. His delighted eyes took in quillwork and beadwork and paint, blankets and ribbons, bodies clad in fringed buckskin, warm brown faces, dark, friendly eyes.

Murmuring greetings, he searched the crowd for specially loved faces.

"Where is Owl Carver?" he asked. After such a long time the Sauk language came awkwardly to his lips.

Three Horses said, "Owl Carver visits the camps of the Fox and the Kickapoo, to invite them to Black Hawk's council."

_What is Black Hawk planning now?_

White Bear did not like the sound of the news, but there would be time to think about it later.

"Where is Sun Woman, my mother?"

Water Flows Fast spoke up. "She has gone to gather medicine plants." She looked as cheerful as, he remembered, she always had, but her eyes penetrated him.

"Will no one find her and tell her that I am here?"

Water Flows Fast said, "Redbird should go and tell Sun Woman. Redbird lives with Sun Woman now."

_Redbird!_

He felt almost dizzy at the sound of her name, a name he had not heard spoken aloud in six years.

As soon as Water Flows Fast spoke, she started to giggle, putting her hands over her mouth. Many of the other women in the group giggled too. White Bear wanted to hide his burning face. He had forgotten how painful it could be to be made fun of by those who knew him so well.

But joy blazed up in his chest. Redbird living with Sun Woman? He wanted to whoop with happiness, even as Wolf Paw had whooped with rage. That could only mean that she had not taken a husband.

Then he took a deep breath and stiffened his body to hide his feelings. He looked at the laughing faces all around him, especially the bright, curious eyes of Water Flows Fast. If they saw how excited he was, they would laugh at him all the more.

Trying to keep his voice steady, he asked, "Where is my mother's wickiup?"

With a knowing smile--but what was it that she knew?--Water Flows Fast beckoned to the wickiup of Sun Woman--and Redbird. "Come. I will take you."

She turned, her fringed skirt swinging. The women parted to make way for her. Shouldering his rifle, White Bear followed. Three Horses walked beside him. White Bear heard the whisper of many moccasins and the murmur of many voices behind him.

Water Flows Fast marched up to a wickiup near the center of the camp. The dark, rounded shelter of sheets of elm bark and tree limbs was small, just big enough for two people, three at the most.

White Bear's heart was beating like a dance drum. The buffalo-hide flap was pulled down over the door, showing that if anyone was within they wanted privacy.

"The wickiup of Sun Woman," said Water Flows Fast. "And of Redbird." She looked at him expectantly.

"There is no one here," said White Bear.

This brought shouts of laughter from the women around him. He wished they would all go away.

"I saw Redbird go in there," said Water Flows Fast, "and I did not see her come out."

White Bear's discomfort increased as he watched her face redden and her cheeks puff out. It seemed that mirth would make her burst.

Every beat of his heart seemed to shake his whole body. He looked around slowly, trying to calm himself. Even if Redbird had waited for him, his sudden return must have shocked her. She needed time to prepare herself to meet him. And, like him, she did not want all these women watching their meeting and laughing. He would simply have to wait until Redbird was ready to greet him.

A rack of crisscrossed wooden sticks for drying skins stood by the closed doorway. Slowly, deliberately, he walked over to the rack, leaned his rifle against it, and laid down his pack and bags.

Then, turning his back on the wickiup, he sat down cross-legged on the ground.

Water Flows Fast looked at him, open-mouthed.

"Thank you for showing me the way," he said. Hiding his embarrassment, he made himself smile at the hundred or more women gathered to watch him.

"What are you going to do?" Water Flows Fast asked.

"I am going to rest and thank Earthmaker for seeing me here safely."

"White Bear is a man of sense," said Three Horses, smiling his approval.

"Is that all?" Water Flows Fast asked.

"I am going to wait for Sun Woman, my mother."

"Is _that_ all?"

"That _is_ all," said White Bear.

Three Horses, who was no taller than his wife, gripped her plump upper arm firmly. "Let White Bear alone."

"But--" Water Flows Fast started to protest, and her husband jerked her arm.

"We will leave this man in peace," he said.

Her lower lip jutting out, Water Flows Fast let Three Horses pull her away through the crowd.

White Bear sat with his eyes downcast to discourage people from talking to him. Gradually the rest of the crowd dispersed.

The back of his neck bristled. He knew Redbird was in the wickiup behind him. Sooner or later she must come out.

To have her so close after all this time, to know she was there and to hear nothing but that terrible silence, and yet to sit with his back to that buffalo-hide curtain, all this was a torment for him. The urge to jump up and tear the curtain away pressed against his resolve to hold himself still. He thought he might explode like a barrel of gunpowder.

He forced himself to breathe slowly and pretend that he was hidden in shrubbery with a bow and arrow, watching for a deer.

After a time--he could not tell how much time--a face was peering into his. Dark and square. The brown eyes brimmed with tears.

His eyes opened wider. Sun Woman was kneeling before him.

"My son." She reached out to him, and he scrambled to embrace her. When her strong arms held him he felt like a little boy again.

He sat back to look at her dear face, wet with tears. Resting beside her on the ground was the familiar basket with blue cloth cover that she used to gather herbs.

He looked around for the sun. It was low and red on the western horizon. It had been high when he sat down here. He must have gone on a spirit walk.

"I knew it would be like this," Sun Woman said. "It would come one day when I least expected it--my son would be back again."

He sighed deeply. "To see my mother makes my heart as big as the prairie."

They sat facing each other and she gripped his shoulders. "You are a man now, a very handsome man." She ran her hand along his cheek, and his whole face felt warm. He kept his gaze fixed on her eyes.

She said, "You have learned much. You have been hurt. Your face is scarred." She followed the line of the scar with her thumb, leaning forward to peer still more closely at him. "I see sadness in you. Your father is dead. That is why you have come back."

She sat back and closed her eyes for a silent moment. Then she began a song for the dead.

"Earthmaker, show him the way. Lead him over the bridge of stars and sunbeams, Along the westward Trail of Souls. Take his soul into your heart."

After she had finished the song, Sun Woman wiped the tears from her face with her blunt fingers. She reached out and stroked his cheeks as well. He had not realized that he was crying.

But grieving for Pierre reminded him to reach into his medicine bag.

"I have a gift for you, Mother." He took out the flat silver case with its velvet neck cord, opened it and showed her the pair of spectacles Marchette had brought to him from Victoire. "Do you know these?"

"Your father wore circles of glass like these. To see the marks on the talking paper."

"Yes. These are the same ones." He closed the case and pressed it into her hand. "Now you have something that was close to Star Arrow."

She said, "He was with me for five summers only, but in spirit, ever since. Now I will feel even closer to him." She slipped the ribbon over her head and dropped the case down the front of her doeskin dress.

He saw the tracks of more tears on her smooth brown cheeks in the fading light. This time she did not wipe them away.

"Tell me all that has happened to you," she said.

As White Bear talked, he deliberately made his voice loud enough to carry, so that Redbird, in the wickiup, might hear.

When he was through telling his story, he felt weighed down by guilt.

"I fled, Mother, even though I promised my father I would care for the land. And smoked tobacco with him to seal the promise. Should I have stayed?"

She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. "You kept your promise as far as you were able. That is all the calumet requires. Your father would not want you to die fighting for that land. It is better that you come back here and be a Sauk again."

White Bear looked down, unable to meet Sun Woman's eyes. Feeling an ache deep in the center of his body, remembering the great stone and log house, the blizzard of blossoms in the orchards, the fields of green corn and golden wheat, the herds that darkened the hillsides, he wanted to clutch his chest where it felt as if it had been torn open. He could not so easily forget Victoire.

_When I was at Victoire I yearned to go back to my people. Now I am with my people and I miss Victoire. Will my heart never be at peace?_

Nancy had wanted him so desperately before they parted; Redbird would not even let him see her.

White Bear saw that once again women had started to gather nearby, among them the round-faced Water Flows Fast. And now White Bear saw another familiar face he had not seen earlier, Redbird's mother, Wind Bends Grass. She glowered at him as she always had, her fists on her broad hips.

_O Earthmaker! Why would Redbird not come out and speak to him?_

A dozen cawing crows flew over the camp. Laughing at him.

He heard a movement behind him, a rustling of the buffalo-hide curtain. He dared not look around.

A voice at his back said, "Go away, White Bear!"

A cool, sweet flow poured from his heart like a mountain spring at the sound of Redbird's voice. He unfolded his legs, stiff from hours of sitting, and pushed himself to his feet. He turned.

Weakness washed over him; he thought he might fall to the ground. Redbird stood before him, her cheeks flushed, her slanting eyes sparkling with anger. Her face was thinner than he remembered, her lips fuller. She still wore a fringe of her hair over her forehead.

Standing silent and open-mouthed, he felt he must look utterly foolish.

"Go away," Redbird said again. "We do not want you here."

"To see you is a sunrise in my heart, Redbird."

"To see you is a foul day in my stomach!"

Reeling back from her anger, White Bear saw a little boy standing in the doorway behind her.

He was bare-chested, brown-skinned. He wore a loincloth of red flannel and fringed buckskin leggings. He was shifting uncomfortably from one moccasined foot to the other and clutching at himself under the loincloth.

Now White Bear understood why Redbird had finally come out. She and the boy must have been inside the wickiup all the time he was sitting out here, and the boy was about to burst.

It would have been funny, except that a much more important discovery struck White Bear.

He looked closer at the boy's urgent eyes. Blue eyes.

White Bear's own eyes were brown, but Pierre's were blue. Could eye color be passed in the blood from grandfather to grandson? Around his eyes, in the narrow shape of his head, his long chin coming to a sharp point, White Bear could see that this boy was a de Marion.

_This is our son! Redbird's and mine!_

Joy blazed up in his body like a fire that warms but does not hurt.

He asked, "What is his name, Redbird?"

She glanced over her shoulder at the boy. "What are you standing there for? You have to go. Go!" The boy ran off toward the woods. White Bear watched him. He ran well, even though he was very young and most uncomfortable.

White Bear wanted to reach out and take Redbird into his arms.

She turned back to him, her fists clenched at her sides, her nostrils flaring in fury.

"_Now_ you want to know what his name is. Now, five winters after he was born."

He turned to Sun Woman. "Does she have a husband?"

Sun Woman raised her eyebrows. "There were many braves who wished to marry her. Wolf Paw was most insistent. He offered Owl Carver ten horses. Little Stabbing Chief of the Fox sought her. There were others, besides."

Wolf Paw had wanted to marry her. That must have been the meaning of that strange encounter outside the camp. Wolf Paw probably wanted to kill him.

"Please, Sun Woman, do not talk to this man about me," Redbird said. "You are his mother, and a mother to me. But you cannot make peace between us."

"True," said Sun Woman, picking up her basket of herbs and bark. "Only you can do that, daughter."

She turned to White Bear. "If Redbird does not welcome you into this wickiup I share with her and Eagle Feather, I cannot invite you inside."

With that Sun Woman turned abruptly and trudged off toward the river.

_Eagle Feather!_

Redbird threw an exasperated look after Sun Woman.

Redbird's anger made White Bear feel as if one of the long knives' cannonballs had crushed his chest. Perhaps if he could put his arms around her she would remember how she had loved him. He took a step toward her, reaching for her.

She stepped back quickly, bent down and picked up a rock. "Go away. Now!"

_How graceful all her movements are._

The rock was gray and somewhat larger than her fist. It had sharp, irregular edges and looked as if it had been used to chip arrowheads.

He said, "You would not be this angry at me if you did not want me back. Why did you refuse every man who asked for you?"

Her face twisted with rage, she threw the rock.

For an instant he was blinded as it hit his cheek, stunning him, and his head snapped back.

He felt a pounding pain in the back of his skull as his vision cleared. The ache from being hit with a rifle butt had come back.

He heard gasps of dismay from some of the watching women, laughter from others.

Wind Bends Grass called out scornfully, "I am ashamed to call this fool my daughter. I cast her out of my lodge because she would accept no suitors. At last comes the one who ruined her for all the others, and she drives him away with a rock. I think we should throw rocks at her."

The crowd's laughter was louder, although White Bear saw that Wind Bends Grass did not mean to be funny.

His left cheekbone throbbed, the cheek Raoul's knife had scarred, and he felt a trickle of blood. But he would not let himself lift his hand to wipe it away.

Redbird's hand went up to her own face, as if the rock had hit her. Her slanting eyes widened with a look of horror.

She whirled and ducked through her dark doorway.

"Go in there after her, White Bear!" one of the women called.

He would not do that. He would not go into her wickiup until she invited him. And in spite of the heaviness in his heart, in spite of the ache in his cheekbone and the pounding in his head, he believed that sooner or later invite him she would.

He turned his back on the empty doorway and sat down again.

The blue-eyed, brown-skinned boy was standing before him. A golden glow filled White Bear's chest.

"You are hurt," said the boy.

"It is nothing, Eagle Feather. A man must endure pain without complaint."

"Did my mother do that to you?"

"She wanted to punish me for staying away from you and her for so long. My name is White Bear."

"I know what your name is."

When he heard that, he was sure that he would win her back.

The boy darted around him.

Resting his hands on his knees, White Bear closed his eyes and let his mind dwell on a vast white-furred shape. Owl Carver had said that when a man wished to send his spirit on a journey in the other world, he need only think of his other self.

He saw the huge golden eyes, the massive, long-muzzled head, the towering body.

Soon he and the Bear spirit were walking together toward the sun.

* * * * *

Redbird did not understand herself. She hated White Bear, but when she saw blood running down his face, she had hated herself. She sat in darkness, biting her lips to keep from screaming.

She crept to the doorway and pushed the curtain open a crack. She could see him sitting again with his back to her, his shoulders broad in his green pale eyes' coat.

She drew back into the wickiup and saw the small steel knife she used to cut up food gleaming near the embers of her fire. She picked it up and held its edge against her feverish cheek.

The last light of day fell on her as the doorway curtain rose. Startled, she almost cut herself. She whirled to see Eagle Feather staring at her. She threw the knife down on the straw-covered floor.

Eagle Feather gave her a questioning look but said nothing.

She drew him down beside her and started telling him the story of why the leaves change colors and fall to the ground in autumn.

It was dark outside when Sun Woman came back from the river, where she had been washing the plants she had gathered. Redbird was afraid Sun Woman would ask her to forgive White Bear, but the older woman said nothing.

They passed what seemed like an ordinary evening, talking and telling stories and singing. But Redbird could not forget that figure sitting like a tree stump just beyond the buffalo-hide curtain.

Much later she went out, and by the light from tonight's full Moon of Falling Leaves, looked into White Bear's face. It was motionless, as if carved from wood.

He did not seem to see her. He must be on a spirit journey. Hot with rage, she kicked at his knee. What right had he to go on a spirit journey leaving his body to haunt her wickiup?

The impact of her moccasined foot shook him slightly, but it was like kicking a bundle of pelts.

Redbird's breath came out in a cloud, lit by the full moon. She gathered up some twigs, brought them into the wickiup and added them to the fire. Sun Woman went out carrying a blanket. Redbird saw her draping it over her son's shoulders.

_He does not need that_, Redbird thought, remembering how White Bear had come back, seemingly frozen, from his vision quest in the Moon of Ice.

Tightly wrapped in her own blankets with Eagle Feather curled up in the shelter of her body, Redbird lay awake, thinking that she had never in her life slept with a man. That was White Bear's fault, and she ground her teeth in the dark as she thought of the wrongs he had done her.

_He left me in the Moon of First Buds, and he returns in the Moon of Falling Leaves--six summers later._

One afternoon they had been lovers. And then he had gone to live with the pale eyes. For nine moons she had carried his son and then given birth to him. He had not been here to give the baby a birth name. Owl Carver, the baby's grandfather, had to do that, embarrassed at the necessity, complaining that the people were laughing at their family. She knew Star Arrow had required that no messages pass between White Bear and the tribe. But if White Bear really loved her, could he not have broken that rule--even if he had smoked the calumet with Star Arrow--at least once? For six summers White Bear had been as silent, as absent, as if he were dead.

_Even the dead sometimes send a sign._

The next day the sky was cloudy, and the air warmer than last night. All morning long women walked past Redbird's wickiup, looking curiously at the man who sat there motionless. Like Redbird herself, they had never before seen a man while his spirit had gone to walk the bridge of stars. When men went on spirit journeys they always retired to the forest or to caves.

In the afternoon He Who Sits in Grease, a Fox brave, came to Redbird as she and Sun Woman sat before their doorway plaiting baskets, a short distance from White Bear. The brave was carrying a stout bustard with feathers striped brown, black and white. He hunkered down facing her and laid the bird before her.

His thick lips worked nervously. "This is for White Bear," he said. "When he wakes up. It is the fattest of the three that I killed this morning. Tell him that He Who Sits in Grease gives him this gift. I want him to ask Earthmaker to make the animals come to me more willingly when I hunt them."

Before Redbird could protest, the brave stood up and backed away, his eyes timidly averted from the figure outside the doorway.

_He thinks White Bear is holy!_ The thought made her more angry at White Bear than ever. She wanted to kick him again, but women were watching from a distance, and she knew they would make fun of her.

"Get _up_," she said softly to White Bear. "Go _away_," she said, grinding her teeth.

She wished Owl Carver would come back from visiting the other camps to put a stop to White Bear's torturing her like this.

_But he might force me to accept White Bear as my man._

Amazingly, she felt a lift in her heart at this thought. She herself could never forgive White Bear, but if Owl Carver, her father and the shaman of the British Band, ordered her to, the decision would be made for her.

Then, at least, this torment would end.

Sun Woman silently picked up the bustard, sat down and began plucking the feathers, piling them in a basket to use for adornments and bedding.

To escape from being rubbed raw by White Bear's presence, Redbird went out into the woods along the Ioway River, as Sun Woman had done yesterday, to gather herbs. The medicine plants were at their most powerful now, because they had been gaining strength all summer long.

Late in the day the sky darkened rapidly. The purple-gray clouds seemed to hang so low that she could reach up and touch them. She heard the first drops pattering on the branches above her. As the rain started to fall faster, it drummed on her head and shoulders. Sighing at having to give up this comforting work, she put a lid on her basket, stood up and started back for the camp.

Her doeskin shirt and skirt kept the rain off her body, but her hair was soaked and her face was streaming by the time she got back to the wickiup. She would build up the fire and dry herself off. Its heat would feel so good. She hoped Eagle Feather and Sun Woman were already inside.

She stopped before the silent, sitting figure outside the wickiup. The brown blanket was pulled up over his head. Sun Woman must have done that. The blanket was sodden with rain, and he looked like a rock growing out of the ground.

The beating of rain filled her ears.

She squatted down and looked into his face. Water ran in rivulets down from the blanket into his half-closed eyes. He did not even blink.

She shivered. The cold rain was coming down so hard she could not see most of the camp. A lump blocked her throat.

"Come inside," she said. She had to raise her voice to hear it over the drumming of the rain.

White Bear neither spoke nor moved.

"Come in. It is raining. It is cold. You will die out here." She realized she was screaming at him.

"Oh!" she cried helplessly.

She sat on the ground, looking into the rain-slick, light-complexioned face with the strong nose and the long jaw that she had loved long ago, the face she had thought about so many times and had seen so often in dreams. A black crust of blood had dried over the place where her rock had gashed his cheek. On the same cheek a raised white line ran from just under his eye to the corner of his mouth.

To try to wake a man on a spirit journey could be dangerous for him.

But her hands seemed to have a will of their own. She had to touch him. She reached out, clutching his shoulders through the sopping blanket, heedless of the rain pouring down her own face, running under the collar of her doeskin shirt down her back and chest. She shook him.

"Get up! Come in out of the rain!"

His body felt lifeless when she shook him. But did she see a flicker in his eyes?

"Please, White Bear, please!"

He blinked.

She threw her arms around him.

"Oh, White Bear! I do want you back."

She crawled closer to him, pushing her body against his rigid form.

She felt pressure against her back, pulling her closer to him. His hand.

Then his other hand.

She felt his chest rising and falling against hers.

Strong arms were holding her.

She looked up into his face, and color had come into the pale cheeks. The brown eyes were looking down at her, warm with love. She forgot the rain and the cold, and nestled in his arms.

She saw tears spill out of his eyes, mingling with the rain on his face. She, too, was crying. She had been crying ever since she sat down with him. She held him tight.

Looking past him, she saw in the doorway of the wickiup the small form of Eagle Feather, staring at them.

12

The War Whoop

Owl Carver held the watch up by its chain; his smile of approval showed he'd lost a tooth in front since White Bear left with Star Arrow.

"A handsome gift. I thank you for it. But what do you mean by saying it tells us the time? Do we not _know_ the time?"

White Bear scoured his brain for a way to explain.

Sitting close to the old shaman, White Bear saw that age had bent him a bit more and carved deeper lines in his brown face. Besides the megis-shell necklace White Bear remembered, Owl Carver wore a new necklace made of tiny beads forming a red, yellow, blue and white floral design, from which hung a sunburst pendant.

They sat facing each other in front of the shaman's wickiup in the center of the British Band's winter camp. In the fenced-off corral dozens of horses stamped their hooves and blew steamy breath into the gray sky. The hunters had returned with braces of pheasant and geese, with deer slung from poles, with buffalo and elk carcasses mounted on travois dragging behind their horses. White Bear felt his nostrils expand to take in the smells of meats being roasted and stewed. In a few days all the chiefs of the Sauk and Fox, along with representatives of the Winnebago, Potawatomi and Kickapoo, would be gathering here at Black Hawk's invitation.

Even sooner, though, a ceremony would take place that meant much more to White Bear. Tomorrow night he and Redbird would at last be married. And he had come to Redbird's father today to give him the only present he had to offer.

White Bear pointed to the dial of the watch. "Father of my bride, if you want to know when the sun will rise tomorrow, you look at where these two arrows are at sunrise today. When they are in the same place again, it will be half the time till the next sunrise. When they are in the same place after that, it will be sunrise the next day." He faltered. To himself, his explanation sounded at once useless and ridiculously complicated. "... Almost. In truth, the sun does not rise at the same time every day," he finished weakly.

Owl Carver stared at him as if he had uttered nonsense. "The sun rises at sunrise."

He remembered how Frank Hopkins always reset his clock at sunset. "Yes, but in summer the days are long and in winter the days are short. But the arrows on this watch cannot keep pace with the sun."

Owl Carver shook his head. "Many things the pale eyes make are useful, but I do not understand the use of this thing."

_What a struggle!_

White Bear had a sudden inspiration. "It is true, this watch cannot tell you as much as the sun does, but it can tell you one thing."

"What is that?" Owl Carver frowned, weighing the watch in his hand.

"It can tell you when a pale eyes will do something."

Owl Carver grunted. "Well, it is pretty to look at. And it moves and makes sounds."

White Bear snapped open the back of the case, where the key was kept, and showed Owl Carver how to wind the watch, impressing on him the need to handle it very gently. Then the shaman went into his wickiup to put the watch in his medicine bundle.

White Bear sighed. He missed talking with Elysée, missed the library at Victoire, from which he'd managed to take only one book.

_Well, this world of sky and trees and rivers and animals is a library too. Owl Carver knows how to read in it, and he has taught me._

The old shaman came out with a long-stemmed pipe. He filled and lit it with a twig from the fire in his wickiup and smoked thoughtfully for a while before speaking. White Bear, sensing that Owl Carver had something important to say to him, waited quietly.

"We need to know more about the pale eyes than we can learn from that time-teller," Owl Carver said. "We need to know what they will do if we cross the Great River to Saukenuk next spring."

White Bear felt his heartbeat quicken.

"Is that what Black Hawk plans?"

"If he can get enough Sauk and Fox warriors and their families to follow him. At the council all the chiefs will hear Black Hawk. The Winnebago Prophet, Flying Cloud, is coming to the council from his town up the Rock River. He will add his voice to Black Hawk's. But the chiefs will also hear the snake's voice of He Who Moves Alertly." He spat contemptuously.

White Bear knew well why Owl Carver despised He Who Moves Alertly. During what the pale eyes called the War of 1812, while Black Hawk and his warriors were away fighting on the British side, the civil chiefs had appointed He Who Moves Alertly a war chief in case the Americans should attack the Sauk towns on the Great River. Not only had the new war chief never fought, he spoke much of the need to make peace with the Americans. He had about as many followers among the Sauk and Fox as Black Hawk did, people who believed that the tribes would fare best if they did whatever the pale eyes demanded. After the war He Who Moves Alertly was quick to make himself known to the Americans as a friend. In turn the long knives' chiefs showered him with gifts and honors, even taking him and his wives to Washington City to visit the Great Father, James Monroe. He had, in fact, been in the East when Star Arrow had come to Saukenuk to take White Bear to Victoire.

"Why does He Who Moves Alertly say we should not go back to Saukenuk?" White Bear asked cautiously. He did not want to anger Owl Carver by saying so, but he himself was sure that crossing the Great River could only lead to calamity.

Owl Carver said, "He Who Moves Alertly has always been a friend to the long knives, and they treat him as if he was a great chief and give presents to him. Last summer, when we went to plant corn at Saukenuk, he went among Black Hawk's followers and persuaded many of them to flee back across the river." The old shaman smiled at White Bear. "But now we have you, who have also been East and know the ways of the pale eyes. You will be able to answer him."

_But all I can say is that he speaks the truth._

The words trembled on his lips: _The long knives are more powerful than you can imagine. We cannot stand against them._

And yet he did not want to speak. He feared that Owl Carver would think him a traitor, as he did He Who Moves Alertly. And, in a way, he felt as Owl Carver and Black Hawk did. He became angry every time he thought about how the tribe had been driven from its homeland.

Owl Carver puffed on his pipe. "You will answer He Who Moves Alertly not just as one who has been among the pale eyes. The day after tomorrow, you must go to the cave of the ancestors and seek another vision."

White Bear's heart sank. "But I am to marry Redbird tomorrow night. Would you have me leave her the next day to seek a vision?"

Owl Carver spread his hands. "The council starts in three days." He grinned, showing the space where the tooth had been. "And it is not as if you and Redbird have never known the joy of the marriage bed."

White Bear felt his face grow hot, and he lowered his eyes. Since his return they had tried to crowd into a few nights all the pleasures they had missed over the last six years.

"You will not be gone from her for long," Owl Carver said.

"But why do you not prophesy?" White Bear asked. "You have been the shaman since long before I was born."

Owl Carver nodded sadly. "I have tried. It seems the spirits have nothing to say to me."

_Maybe because you do not want to hear what they say._

As he thought about seeking a vision, White Bear began to feel more hopeful. He might not have to displease Owl Carver and Black Hawk by speaking of the strength of the long knives and sounding like He Who Moves Alertly. Instead, the Turtle, in that sacred cave looking over the river, would tell him what he should say. It was sure to be wiser counsel than anything he could think of himself.

He remembered his boyhood dream of being a prophet for the Sauk. Now he would be able to tell them where their future lay.

But then he remembered words Owl Carver himself had once spoken to him. They had stayed in his memory because they had made him so uneasy.

_Many times the people do not want to listen to the shaman. The truer his words, the less they hear him._

The next night White Bear and Redbird sat facing each other on opposite sides of the wedding fire before Owl Carver's wickiup. White Bear's fringed shirt and trousers of soft doeskin, worked until it was nearly white, were a gift from a brave whose wife Sun Woman had helped with a difficult childbirth.

Redbird's dress was of white doeskin as well. Around her neck hung the necklace of the small, striped megis shells that had belonged to Sun Woman.

White Bear looked beyond the fire. Hundreds of men and women were standing in the shadows watching the ceremony, those of Redbird's Eagle Clan on her side of the fire, the Thunder Clan, kin of Sun Woman and himself, on this side. The daughter of the shaman was marrying the son of a pale eyes father and a medicine woman, and White Bear had returned from a long journey among the pale eyes and was a shaman himself. It was a wedding that people wanted to see.

Wind Bends Grass, standing behind Redbird, spoke of her daughter's character. Even though she had spent all of her life scolding her, tonight she extolled her to the skies. She was beautiful, loving, skilled, obedient. Then Wind Bends Grass instructed Redbird in her wifely duties, making one small change from the usual speech. Instead of telling her to give White Bear sons, she told her to give White Bear _more_ sons.

Strangely, at this moment, White Bear found himself thinking of Nancy Hale. Was she still longing for him somewhere across the Great River?

If Raoul had not driven him out of Victoire, his promise to Pierre might have kept him there. He might never have come back here, not found out till much later that he had a son, never have been united with Redbird as he was tonight. Truly this was coming home. He felt so at peace, he could almost be grateful to Raoul.

White Bear was especially honored to have as his wedding sponsor the Thunder Clan's most prominent member--Black Hawk himself.

Black Hawk addressed Redbird and her relatives in his harsh, sombre voice. "I have known this young man since he was born. His father, Star Arrow, was a pale eyes, but he was a French pale eyes, and the French were always the best friends of the Sauk and Fox, even better than the British. White Bear has been trained in the way of the shaman, and he has lived among the pale eyes and learned their secrets as well."

_What have I learned that my people can really use?_ White Bear wondered ruefully. _All I can tell them is that they cannot win a war with the long knives._

"You must cherish Redbird and protect her," Black Hawk said to White Bear. "You must give her the benefit of your wisdom. Because you yourself are a shaman, your responsibility to her is all the greater."

Then Owl Carver stood before the fire, between the bride and the groom, and raised his arms. "O Earthmaker, bless this man and this woman. May they walk with honor on the path they follow as one."

Redbird sang a wedding song to White Bear. Her voice rose clear and pure into the night air, and it seemed to White Bear that even the crackling fire quieted itself to listen.

"I will build a lodge for you, I will grind the corn for you. I have no home but where you are; The trail you walk is also mine."

Then White Bear got up and went around the fire to Redbird. He handed Redbird a bouquet of pink roses that Sun Woman had carefully collected, dried and preserved. The orange glow of the fire danced in her black eyes, and White Bear felt an answering love blaze up within himself.

He was so much taller than Redbird that he had to bend his knees deeply so that Redbird could throw her braids over his shoulders, and he heard some chuckles and giggles from the watching people. But as her braids fell lightly on him he thought that he had never in his life been happier than at this moment.

Together they walked sunwise around the marriage fire, keeping it on their right: and on the east, south, west and north sides White Bear said loudly, "Redbird is now my wife!"

Eyes gleamed at him out of the darkness when he came back to the east side. Standing to the side and just a little behind Black Hawk was Wolf Paw. White Bear could not resist feeling a little thrill of triumph at the realization that he had won Redbird despite the best efforts of this mighty warrior, this chief's son, this man who owned many horses.

_Not because I deserve it_, he reminded himself. _Only because Redbird would have it so._

_And now, because she would have it so, we will be together forever._

Owl Carver bade them depart with the good wishes of the tribe, and White Bear and Redbird walked to the new wickiup they had built on the edge of the camp. Eagle Feather would live there with them, but tonight Eagle Feather would stay with his grandmother, Sun Woman.

Tonight they would have it to themselves.

* * * * *

Next day, in mid-afternoon, White Bear stood again in the center of the camp wearing the same black bearskin he had worn six years ago. Owl Carver did a shuffling sunwise dance around him, shaking a gourd rattle and chanting:

"Go forth and dance with the spirits, Become a spirit yourself. Bring back a gift for the people, Bring back the words of the spirits."

Black Hawk, standing in the circle that had gathered to watch, stared at him with an intensity that frightened him. Sun Woman and Redbird stood with smiles of quiet pride. This time Redbird need not fear that he would freeze to death on his spirit journey.

It would be painful to be away from Redbird, he thought, as he looked into her eyes, saying a silent good-bye. Now, after a brief feast of love, they must go hungry again. But only for a night or two.

White Bear turned his back on the declining sun. The ceremonial bearskin swung heavily on his head and shoulders as he trotted out of the camp toward the trail that ran along the river's edge. As he entered the woods, another pair of eyes, hostile, suspicious, caught his. Wolf Paw again, standing with folded arms.

_Wolf Paw still loves Redbird. And hates me._

He felt much stronger than he had when he arrived at the camp. Alternately walking and running, he moved quickly and surely down the Ioway River, and he remembered the way to the bluff of the sacred cave. Several times along the way he met Sauk and Fox warriors. They recognized the sacred bearskin, with the bear's skull covering his own as a partial mask, and stepped aside with eyes averted as he passed them.

The sun had sunk behind him by the time he had come to the end of the almost-imperceptible trail to the top of the bluff. He stood there a moment, looking out across the clear blue sheet of water that was the Great River. He stared at the Illinois shore, the rich, flat bottomland at the river's edge, the wooded bluffs, much like the one he was standing on, forming a wall, beyond which rolled the autumn-tan, endless prairie.

A beautiful and fertile land, from which his people--and he himself--had been exiled. Would his vision show them a way back?

He scrambled down the face of the bluff to the cave and swung into the entrance.

In the shadows he could barely make out Owl Carver's wooden owl standing over the row of skulls with their stone necklaces; or the white bear statue guarding the unknown depths of the cave.

He settled himself facing the entrance and chewed some scraps of sacred mushroom Owl Carver had given him. Nothing to do now but sit and wait. Surely no watch made by pale eyes could measure the passage of this kind of time.

He heard a scraping and a grumbling from deep in the cave. He felt no fear now, only a warmth, as at the approach of an old friend. The White Bear, he now understood, was himself in a spirit form.

The huge snuffling Bear was at his side, and confidently he rose to step out of the cave, the Bear accompanying him with its rolling walk. He stepped on clouds, violet and gold and white and soft as snow under his feet.

The pathway through the sky turned northward. Through breaks in the clouds he looked down and caught glimpses of the river, a glistening blue snake. Ahead he could see clouds piling up on clouds, shot through with pale, blended rainbow colors, like the ornaments carved from shells gathered along the eastern sea.

Then he was inside the cloud tower, peering beyond the Tree of Life at the Turtle on his crystal perch. Drop by drop from the Turtle's heart flowed the waters of the Great River.

"What would you ask me, White Bear?" said the ancient voice like distant thunder.

"Is my father with you?"

"Your father walks the Trail of Souls far in the West," said the Turtle. "He will come back to earth soon, and he will be a great teacher of the people."

"Owl Carver and Black Hawk have sent me to ask, should the British Band go back to Saukenuk?"

The wrinkled voice said, "Behold."

The clouds changed to the walls of a room big enough to hold a Sauk camp, where curtained windows alternated with mirrors in gilded frames. Under each mirror was a fireplace. Three glittering chandeliers hung from the high ceiling. In the center of a vast flower-patterned carpet stood Black Hawk.

To White Bear's astonishment, Black Hawk was wearing the blue uniform of a long knife, with ropes of gold on his arms and fringes of gold on his sleeves and shoulders. But he carried no weapons. His face as usual was gloomy.

There were other men in the room, but White Bear could only clearly see one. A pale eyes.

He was exceedingly tall and thin; his hair was white, and his bright blue eyes stared piercingly at Black Hawk. He wore a black cutaway jacket and tight black trousers with shiny black leather shoes; and a white stock, a strip of silk, wound around his throat.

White Bear had seen this man before and recognized him at once.

He was known to red men as Sharp Knife--Andrew Jackson, President of the United States.

The man Raoul had called "a good old Indian killer."

Black Hawk was talking, and Sharp Knife was listening. But White Bear could not hear what Black Hawk was saying.

The room seemed to change. Black Hawk and Sharp Knife disappeared, and where Sharp Knife had been standing there was now another tall, thin man. He also wore black, but he had a black ribbon at his neck. A black beard covered his chin, and the expression on his sun-browned face was one of inconsolable grief. His sadness reminded White Bear of Black Hawk's.

All at once White Bear was on a broad field covered with short grass, divided by stone walls and wooden fences, with clumps of trees growing here and there. Terror clutched his belly as he saw coming at him thousands of long knives in blue uniforms with rifles and bayonets. He looked about frantically for a place to hide, but there was none. He was caught in the open.

But before the men could reach him they began to die.

Blood spurted from their blue tunics. They stopped running, staggered and fell to the ground, dropping their rifles. Faces vanished in bursts of red vapor. Arms and legs and heads flew through the air. Flashes of flame and smoke and flying shards of iron tore bodies to bits.

But no matter how many of them died, more and more of the white men in their blue jackets and trousers came marching over the horizon holding their bayonets before them. There was no end to them.

White Bear felt as if his heart might stop. He put his hands over his eyes.

And when he looked again he was back in the cloudy hall of the Turtle.

"What have you shown me?" he asked.

"I have shown you the future of both the red people and the white people on this island between two oceans," the Turtle rumbled. "It is given to you to know two futures because two streams of blood flow in you. You belong to both, and to neither."

It was painful to hear this. The Turtle was uttering thoughts that had occurred to White Bear many times; he had always tried to put them out of his mind. Could he not forget his years among the pale eyes and become entirely a Sauk?

Wisps of cloud drifted around the Turtle's scaly body. White Bear heard the drip-drip of water from the Turtle's heart into the blue-black, fish-crowded pool that fed the Great River. The sound was like the ringing of a hammer on an anvil, reverberating through the vast space in which they stood.

The Turtle spoke again. "Earthmaker has willed that the pale eyes shall fill this world of ours from the eastern sea to the western sea."

"_Why?_" cried White Bear in anguish.

"Earthmaker bestows evil as well as good on his children. Sickness and hunger and death come from Earthmaker, just as strong bodies, and good things to eat, and love."

"Will all Earthmaker's red children die?"

"Great numbers will die, and those who remain will be driven to unkind lands."

"What of the Sauk?" White Bear asked, trembling.

"The many who follow Black Hawk across the Great River will be few when they cross back."

_Oh, no!_

This was what he had come here to learn, but hearing it was like being cast down from this lodge in the clouds to crash to the earth.

"Then the British Band should not go back to Saukenuk?"

"You cannot stop them. For you as for all of my people, this is to be a time of testing and pain. I charge you to see that those who hurt my children do not gain from it. You will be the guardian of the land that has been placed in your keeping."

"But I have already lost that land," White Bear cried.

As if he had not heard White Bear, the Turtle said, "Know that long after all who live now have walked the Trail of Souls, my children will be many again, and let the knowing lift up your heart." The Turtle touched his own claws to the deep crevice in his under-shell from which the water perpetually dripped.

White Bear knew it was time to go.

When he awoke in his body he would grieve. He saw nothing but heavy, unending sorrow ahead for him and for those he loved.

* * * * *

Black Hawk slowly stood up. A mantle of buffalo fur draped over his shoulders and a crown of red and black feathers woven into his scalplock made him look even bigger and taller than he was.

White Bear sat close to the fire for its heat. The day was cold and overcast, and the damp air around him and the chill ground under him made him shiver in the white doeskin shirt he had worn for his wedding. Because Owl Carver had asked him, on the band's behalf, to seek a vision, he could now consider himself fully a shaman. He had costumed himself accordingly--three red streaks painted across his forehead, three more on each cheekbone, silver disks hanging from his ears, a three-strand necklace of megis shells around his neck. Silver clasps on his arms and silver bracelets around his wrists. All these things had been supplied by Owl Carver or traded for by Sun Woman. If he had to speak he might at least hope his words would be greeted with respect.

Redbird pressed against him, and her nearness warmed him. Flames danced over the pile of blackened logs in the center of the British Band's winter camp. Light gray smoke rose from the fire, the same color as the blanket of cloud that hid the afternoon sun.

Fear twisted its knife in White Bear's stomach. He did not want to tell this assembly what he knew. Most of them would hate him. The chiefs and braves and warriors of the British Band, Black Hawk and all the rest, would never forgive him. Owl Carver would feel betrayed.

_Let them settle this without me._

But he knew it was a forlorn hope. When Owl Carver had asked him what he learned in his vision, he had answered evasively. And now Owl Carver was counting on him.

Around the fire sat the council of seven chiefs who governed the Sauk and Fox tribes, including Jumping Fish, Broth and Little Stabbing Chief. Beside them sat He Who Moves Alertly, the friend of the long knives, the war chief who had never made war. Prominent braves like Wolf Paw sat with them. The older and the younger shamans of the British Band sat there, Owl Carver and White Bear.

And there was another shaman at the fire as well, Flying Cloud, better known as the Winnebago Prophet. He was a broad man with a wolfskin thrown over his shoulders. Unlike nearly all the men of the tribes that lived along the Great River, he had a thick black mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. A silver nose ring rested on the mustache. He was head man of a Winnebago village called Prophet's Town, a day's journey up the Rock River from Saukenuk.

In the quiet that greeted Black Hawk, White Bear heard, over the crackle of the fire, the rattle of the war chief's bone bracelets as he held out his hand.

"I only want to go back to the land that belongs to me and dwell there and raise corn there. I will not be cheated. I will not be driven out."

Black Hawk did not have a pleasing speaking voice; it was hoarse and grating. But the assembly listened intently, because for over twenty summers there had been no greater warrior among the Sauk and Fox.

"With this hand I have killed seventy and three of the long knives. Every Sauk and Fox brave, every Winnebago and Potawatomi and Kickapoo, can do as much. Yes, we know the long knives outnumber us. But we can show them that if they want to steal Saukenuk from us, they will have to trade too many of their young men's lives for it.

"Last summer the long knives surrounded us and drove us out of Saukenuk. But that was because we were not ready to fight, and some of us were not _willing_ to fight."

Black Hawk looked pointedly at He Who Moves Alertly, who sat expressionless, as if unaware of Black Hawk's disapproving gaze. His face was round and ruddy, like the full moon when it first appears above the horizon. He wore his glossy black hair long under an impressive buffalo headdress with gleaming horns, and had wrapped himself in a buffalo-hide robe painted with sunbursts.

Black Hawk said, "Next summer, it will be different. I have had messages from the Winnebago and the Potawatomi promising to help us if the long knives attack us. The Chippewa, up in the north, say they want to help us."

A burning log split in two with a noise like a gunshot, and the halves fell deeper into the fire with a shower of sparks.

Looking over the heads of those seated near him, White Bear saw columns of smoke from a dozen or more other campfires rising into the late afternoon sky. Around those campfires, feasting and gossiping, sat most of the people of the British Band and their guests from other Sauk and Fox bands, as well as some Winnebago, Potawatomi and Kickapoo braves. What was being decided here now would mean life or death to all who chose to follow these leaders.

Black Hawk said, "The pale eyes say we sold our land. I say that land cannot be sold. Earthmaker gives land to those who need it to live on, to grow food on, to hunt on, as he gives us air and water.

"The land has been good to us. It has given us game and fish, fruit and berries. It has let us grow our squash, beans, pumpkins and corn on it, and bury our mothers and fathers in it. The pale eyes are destroying the land, cutting down the trees, fencing off the prairie and plowing it up. The land is the mother of us all. When a man's mother is dishonored, he must fight. Earthmaker will give us this victory, because he is our father and he loves us."

With a chill that did not come from the air, White Bear remembered the words of the Turtle: _Earthmaker bestows evil as well as good on his children._

White Bear prayed his own prayer to Earthmaker: that he not be asked to speak to this gathering.

Black Hawk lifted his rasping voice in a shout. "I, Black Hawk, raise the war whoop!"

He threw out his chest, lifted his head, and let loose an ululating cry that seemed to pierce the very clouds that hung over the camp. Wolf Paw, Iron Knife, Little Crow, Three Horses and a dozen other Sauk and Fox braves leaped up, waving rifles, tomahawks, bows and arrows, scalping knives, screaming their battle cries. Owl Carver beat furiously on a drum painted with a picture of the Hawk spirit.

The Winnebago Prophet lunged to his feet and joined the outcry, his gestures so wild and his shouts so loud that he almost seemed to be competing with Black Hawk.

Redbird spoke softly, close by White Bear's ear. "They are drunk on war."

The outcry died down. Black Hawk crossed his arms over his chest to show that he had finished speaking. The Winnebago Prophet remained standing and raised his arms.

"I have come to promise Black Hawk and his braves that if he goes to Saukenuk and the long knives attack him, the warriors of Prophet's Town will help them to fight back."

The chiefs and braves seated around the fire greeted this with much stamping and clapping. White Bear glanced at He Who Moves Alertly, who sat a quarter of the way around the circle from him. The face under the buffalo headdress was as still as if carved from wood.

Flying Cloud said, "I have sent messages to all the tribes that live near the Great River--Winnebago, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Piankeshaw, Chippewa. When Black Hawk raises the tomahawk, they will raise the tomahawk too. And I have had a message from our allies of old, the British in Canada, who say the Americans have done us a great wrong, and we should not give up any more land to them. If American long knives attack us, the British long knives will come to our aid. With ships, with big guns, with rifles, powder and shot and food for us, with hundreds of red-coat soldiers. Now is the best of times to tell the long knives they cannot push us any further. Let all who are truly men take to the trail of war with Black Hawk!"

White Bear sensed deadly falsehood in the words of the Winnebago Prophet. When White Bear was in New York City he had heard many times that the enmity between Americans and British was a thing of the past. White Bear did not believe that the British up there in Canada had any intention of getting into a war between whites and Indians in Illinois. But how could he prove that what Flying Cloud said was untrue?

With a cry of "Ei! Ei!" Wolf Paw shook his rifle over his head. He snapped it to his shoulder and fired it with a deafening boom and a red flash and a big cloud of white smoke.

_Someday he may wish he had not wasted that powder._

As White Bear and Redbird sat silently, braves all around them were up and shrieking, waving rifles and tomahawks, thrusting out arms and legs in the movements of a war dance. Owl Carver and some of the chiefs slapped the palms of their hands against the taut, painted deerskin of their drumheads.

A few other men did not join the shouts of approval, among them the round-faced He Who Moves Alertly.

White Bear sat with his fists clenched in his lap, wondering whether anyone would notice that the youngest of the three shamans among them was not shouting for war. He felt Redbird's hand grip his arm tightly, helping him to feel stronger.

Only to Redbird had White Bear told all of his vision. She shared his fear that if the British Band followed Black Hawk to war they would be destroyed, and she had insisted on sitting with him at the council fire. White Bear knew it was not the custom for a wife to sit with her husband at a council, but she had argued and pleaded until he had given in and brought her with him.

Her presence beside him both comforted him and made him uneasy. Owl Carver, when he came to the fire, had stared at his daughter, frowned and looked away. Wolf Paw had eyed them and smiled scornfully.

As the tumult inspired by the Winnebago Prophet quieted down, He Who Moves Alertly looked around the circle of chiefs and braves, his eyes pausing at anyone who had not joined the outcry for war. His gaze met White Bear's for an instant, and he nodded almost imperceptibly. White Bear had an eerie feeling that He Who Moves Alertly knew what was in his mind.

The chief who favored the long knives stood up.

A sullen muttering spread through the men around the council fire. Most of those who agreed with He Who Moves Alertly had stayed away from this council. White Bear felt admiration for anyone who could look so confident, standing before a crowd in which so many were against him.

"War is loud, and peace is quiet," He Who Moves Alertly began. "But peace keeps us alive. The real way to defeat the long knives is to stay alive."

His voice was deep and pleasant, and he smiled as if every man there were his friend.

"When is it right for a brave to go to war? When he must avenge himself on those who have done wrong to him. Black Hawk says we should fight the pale eyes because they have stolen land from us. But I have seen the papers with the marks of our chiefs on them. Seven different times Sauk and Fox chiefs have made their marks on papers agreeing to give up all claim to the land east of the Great River. The long knives say our chiefs were paid in gold for the land."

As his benign gaze swept the assembly, he said, "It is right for a brave to go to war when he is strong enough to make war. He does not go because he wants to be killed, because he wants to leave his women and children unprotected. He knows he may die, but he does not look for death."

He Who Moves Alertly was no longer smiling. He touched his fingertips to his eyes, then raised his arms to the sky. "May Earthmaker strike me blind if I do not speak the truth.

"We are not strong enough to make war on the long knives. I have traveled in the lands of the Americans, all the way to the eastern sea. I have seen so many long knives that I could not count them all."

White Bear felt more and more uneasy as he listened. Black Hawk and all the other braves of the British Band looked on He Who Moves Alertly as an enemy. But White Bear knew that the chief in the buffalo headdress was speaking the truth. Perhaps not about the treaties, but surely about the vast numbers of long knives.

White Bear saw again the thousands of blue-uniformed soldiers he had seen marching in New York on the Fourth of July a year ago, and the other thousands he had seen in his vision, fighting and dying but still advancing on some strange battlefield.

He Who Moves Alertly said, "Owl Carver and Black Hawk say the Potawatomi and Winnebago will aid the British Band, and other tribes from farther away. I say none of them will help. This quarrel over Saukenuk is not their quarrel, and they have made their own peace with the long knives.

"The Winnebago Prophet says the British will send us guns and ammunition, even men. I say this is foolish talk. You call yourselves the British Band, and think the British are your great friends. Many summers ago, yes, the British were at war with the Americans and got Sauk and Fox and many other tribes to help them. But when that war was over, our people gained nothing and lost much. Many tribes had to give up land to pay for fighting on the British side. Now the British do not care about us. The British pale eyes and the American pale eyes are at peace.

"I say to those who will listen to me--come with me. I will lead you deep into this Ioway country, where there will be no pale eyes farmers to bother us. Their Great Father will show his gratitude to those who do not fight them. He will give us money and food and help us find good land. We will live!

"For those who follow Black Hawk, I grieve. They will not live."

He Who Moves Alertly's closing words rang. He crossed his hands over his chest and sat down amidst a silence touched by the crackling of the fire.

White Bear heard in his mind the rumbling voice: _The many who follow Black Hawk across the Great River will be few when they cross back._ He trembled inwardly.

The clouds overhead had broken up, and the rays of the sun, about to set, fell upon many faces full of anger and contempt. But White Bear also saw lips pursed in thought, eyes lowered.

White Bear could find little wrong with what He Who Moves Alertly said, but he did not like the way it pointed. To admit that the long knives could do whatever they wanted to the Sauk, to hope like little children that if they obeyed the Great Father in Washington City he would be kind to the Sauk and give gifts of food, clothing and shelter--was that not merely a slower kind of death?

He Who Moves Alertly did not seem to see that if the Sauk let the whites push them westward, there would be no end to it. Eventually the pale eyes would take all the land there was.

_To drive a people from their home is to make them prey to hunger, disease, enemy tribes. It is to destroy them, even if not a single shot is fired._

_If we must die, would it not be better to avenge ourselves on the pale eyes for their cruelty to us? Is it not better to die with pride than to just give up our good hunting and farming lands and go meekly into the desert?_

He felt Redbird press against him. He had a sudden, strong feeling that they should follow He Who Moves Alertly farther into the Ioway country. That way they would surely live. How could he, White Bear, demand or permit that his wife and son endure the sufferings and the danger those who followed Black Hawk would face?

But at the thought of deserting the British Band he felt an unbearable anguish. One winter long ago he had found a trap that had been sprung. In the trap was the rear paw and part of the leg of a raccoon, ending in a bloody mass. The animal had chewed its own leg off to escape. He had seen a trail of blood leading into the woods. The raccoon had limped off to die, but to die free.

What He Who Moves Alertly offered was a trap. What Black Hawk offered was freedom, but with it the prospect of death.

He and Redbird could pack their belongings and leave after this council was over. White Bear was sure other families would be doing that.

But could he turn his back on Black Hawk, who had just spoken for him at his marriage, on Owl Carver, the father of his wife? On Sun Woman, who he was sure would stay with the British Band? On the people who had been part of his life as far back as he could remember?

Staying meant facing the long knives' guns. It meant starvation. It meant pain. Those who whooped for Black Hawk tonight did not see that. Or maybe they did see it but still embraced it. To see it clearly and accept it, not only for himself but for Redbird and Eagle Feather, hurt like biting off one of his own limbs. But he would not abandon his people. He had run away from his last fight over land. He would not run away from this one.

Owl Carver, holding up his owl-headed medicine stick with its red feathers, stood before the council fire. "He Who Moves Alertly thinks he is the only one who knows the Americans. But one of our own British Band has been to the big towns in the East. And he is a shaman to whom the Turtle has given special visions. I ask White Bear to tell us what he has seen."

At the sound of his name, White Bear felt a coldness spread upward from the base of his spine. He saw the look of earnest invitation on Owl Carver's face, he saw Black Hawk's expectancy. He would as soon spit at these two men he respected so much as disappoint them deeply. But now he must.

Redbird's fingers dug into his arm. Her slanting eyes were wide.

"Speak truly," she whispered.

Slowly he stood up. It hurt to pull his arm from Redbird's grip, as if he was stripping his own skin from his arm. His eyes momentarily met those of He Who Moves Alertly, who stared at him intently.

As Owl Carver had, he raised the medicine stick he had cut for himself after his first vision, decorated with a single string of red and white beads. He held it up uncertainly. He hoped his shaman's adornments, the paint, the earrings, necklaces and bracelets, would impress them.

He was prepared in another way, as well. He had never spoken before the leaders of his band; but at St. George's School each boy was required to give a short speech to the members of his class once a week and a longer one before the whole school twice a year. Those speeches had to be written and memorized, and now White Bear must speak as the spirit moved him. But he knew how to stand, how to project his voice, how to measure his words. In his heart he thanked Mr. Winans for teaching him all that.

"The big American towns in the East are bigger than the biggest towns ever built by any red men," he began. "In those villages the pale eyes swarm like bees in a honey tree.

"Every summer the Americans have a great feast to celebrate the day they told the Great Father of the British that they would no longer be his children. One summer in a big town called New York I saw long knives walk in long lines to honor this big day. Each man had a new rifle. Eight at a time walked side by side, and it would take half a day to go from one end of their line to the other. Then came more long knives on horseback, as many as a herd of buffalo. And after them horses pulled big thunder guns on wheels that shoot iron balls the size of a man's head.

"The long knives were led by their Great Father, Sharp Knife, who was visiting New York. He is very thin, with a cruel face and white hair. He sits straight on his horse and wears a long knife at his belt.

"After all those long knives had walked through the town they came to an open field, where they fired off all their thunder guns. The noise made the earth tremble."

Allowing his legs and hands to shake also, as they demanded to do, White Bear paused and let his gaze travel over the faces in the big circle around the fire.

The red glow of the setting sun fell on the faintly smiling He Who Moves Alertly. Black Hawk's back was to the sun, his face in shadow. Redbird looked up at White Bear, eyes bright and full of love. Others might hate what he said, but he was glad that Redbird heard how well and truly he spoke.

Angry words hissed and sputtered like the burning logs. White Bear saw Wolf Paw poke Little Crow, one of the leading braves, who was seated beside him, and speak to him with muted voice but urgent gestures. The brave got up and left the fire.

Owl Carver, seated beside Black Hawk, lifted his head. White Bear saw bewilderment on his teacher's face, and shrank within himself at the sight.

Owl Carver said, "White Bear is both pale eyes and Sauk. So far he speaks to us only with the pale eyes half of his head. Let White Bear tell us what vision the Turtle has given him."

White Bear felt a small surge of hope. What he had seen as a traveler among the pale eyes might not discourage the British Band from making war, but his vision might move them more.

"The Turtle showed me Black Hawk talking to Sharp Knife," he said, pointing to the war chief, who lifted his feather-crowned head at the sound of his name. "They were in the house of the Great Father of the Americans in the village called Washington City."

He heard amazed murmurings all around him. Encouraged, he went on.

"Then I saw great numbers of long knives running toward me over a field. They were shooting and being shot at. I saw many of them hit, and they fell and died, but they kept coming on. I saw a tall, thin man with a beard, a sad man whom I have never seen before, mourning over the fallen long knives."

The sun had gone down. Now he could see the dark listening faces only by the yellow glow of the fire.

Owl Carver said, "White Bear's vision brings us hope. He sees our own Black Hawk meeting with Sharp Knife in Sharp Knife's house. Black Hawk will go to Sharp Knife's very house to lay down peace terms to the Americans."

_That is not what it means!_ White Bear thought, shocked.

Owl Carver went on. "White Bear saw long knives dying. White Bear's vision foretells victory for the British Band."

From all around the campfire he heard grunts of approval at Owl Carver's words. White Bear's heart felt lost and sinking, like a stone thrown into the Great River.

"Listen!" he cried. "Owl Carver is my father in spirit, but he did not see this vision or feel its sadness. I did. I stood there before the Turtle, and I know that what he showed me was a warning. If the British Band takes to the path of war, Black Hawk will be Sharp Knife's prisoner."

Shouts of protest erupted around him. He saw Little Crow come back to the fire with a bundle of bright red and blue cloth in his hands.

White Bear spoke on over the outcry. "Listen! When I saw the long knives dying, more and more of them came forward, and their numbers were endless. They were not fighting our warriors. They were fighting other long knives. The vision said that there would be many, many long knives in summers and winters to come, so many that they would fight each other."

Owl Carver said in a voice just loud enough for White Bear to hear, "Say no more. You do great harm."

"I must say more. You have asked me to speak. Now I must tell what I know. You must listen. The Turtle also spoke to me. He said, 'The many who follow Black Hawk across the Great River will be few when they cross back.'"

After a moment's hesitation Owl Carver lifted his hands. "They will be few because we will win back our land on the other side and stay there."

Before White Bear could answer, Black Hawk stood up, his face in the firelight a mask of wrath. White Bear trembled.

"Black Hawk will never be Sharp Knife's prisoner!" the war chief roared. "Black Hawk will die first."

Someone else was standing up before the fire. A woman.

Redbird.

White Bear felt himself trapped in a nightmare. Had his wife gone mad? She could not speak to a council of chiefs and braves. His heart beating furiously, he reached out to silence her. But she was already speaking.

"You are fools if you do not listen to White Bear," she cried. "He is gifted with the power of prophecy." She turned to Owl Carver. "My father, you know that the whole tribe crosses the river from east to west every year for the winter hunt. If the Turtle says few will cross back over the Great River, he means the rest of us will be dead."

Her words were greeted not with anger but with shouts of scornful laughter. White Bear knew that the chiefs and braves did not care what she said; they were merely amused that a woman dared try to speak to them at all. He burned with shame for himself and Redbird.

Beyond the circle of firelight he saw the shadows of men and women standing in the twilight. Word of the dispute at the council fire must be spreading through the camp and drawing more people to hear, perhaps to speak their own minds, as was their right. He glimpsed Sun Woman hurrying toward him, picking her way through the seated men.

Wolf Paw strode toward White Bear, holding in his hands the bundle of red and blue cloth Little Crow had brought him. He glared at Redbird.

"It is bad medicine for women to speak to the council."

Redbird stepped in front of White Bear to face Wolf Paw. "A medicine woman tells you: the words of White Bear are _good_ medicine."

"How can White Bear tell the British Band what to do when he cannot make his wife behave as a woman should?" Wolf Paw said. "Sit down, Redbird." And he pushed her aside.

Rage shot White Bear forward like an arrow from a bow, arms outstretched to grapple with Wolf Paw. He lifted his medicine stick as if to strike at the red-crested brave.

Hands gripped his arms. He struggled, blind with fury, flailing his arms and kicking. Wolf Paw, his teeth bared, wrenched the medicine stick from White Bear's hand.

"Do not harm the medicine stick!" shouted Owl Carver.

Without looking at the old shaman, Wolf Paw handed him White Bear's medicine stick. Two big warriors held White Bear as Wolf Paw approached him, stretching his lips in a grin.

"A woman speaks for peace with the pale eyes," Wolf Paw said, "because peace is women's way. I once saw Redbird going to White Bear when he was on his vision quest. Maybe he gets his visions from her."

More and more men were on their feet, and they roared with laughter at Wolf Paw's gibe.

Sun Woman had made her way into the inner ring around the fire and now held Redbird.

"Come away, daughter," she said in a strong but soothing voice. "This does not help White Bear."

"Look!" shouted Wolf Paw. "Now he has both his wife and his mother at the council fire."

He shook out the red and blue cloth. It was a woman's dress.

"He speaks like a woman," Wolf Paw said. "He says what women tell him to say. Women speak for him. Let him dress like a woman. A pale eyes woman."

Wolf Paw flung the dress over White Bear's head, and the two men who held him pulled it down around him. White Bear felt wrapped in hopelessness as the cloth covered his head.

And he had wanted to be a prophet for the Sauk.

_The truer his words, the less they hear him._

He struggled halfheartedly. He no longer cared what they did to him. His own failure and the sure destruction of his people chained him so that he could barely move. The warriors pulled the dress straight down over his arms, pinioning them to his sides. As his head emerged through the collar, laughter battered at him. Teeth gleamed in the firelight.

He saw Sun Woman holding Redbird. Tears squeezed through his wife's tightly shut eyelids. The face of his mother was heavy with woe.

Too despairing to resist, he let Wolf Paw and his men push and drag him away from the council fire and run him through the camp. He was blind to the laughing faces around him, deaf to the mocking cries.

But he saw one sight that all but killed him--looking up at him from somewhere in the crowd, the hurt, bewildered eyes of his son, Eagle Feather.

13

The Volunteers

Nicole and Frank had walked halfway across the main room of the trading post blockhouse when Nicole heard Raoul's voice thundering from the stone-walled counting office in the far corner.

"You and the boys will stay at Victoire!"

Nicole touched Frank's arm, and they stopped and drew back a little, standing beside the long black barrel of the six-pounder naval cannon Raoul had set up in the blockhouse. It would be best not to intrude on Raoul when he was in the midst of a quarrel.

"But none of them French people there like me," a woman answered, high, nasal, with a Missouri twang. "It's downright lonesome." Nicole recognized Clarissa Greenglove's voice.

"I'm going to be gone and your father's coming with me. Where the hell else would you stay?"

"With my Aunt Melinda in St. Louis. That'd be a perfect place. You could send me down on the _Victory_.'"

"Of course I could." Raoul's voice was creamy with sarcasm. "And then do you know what would happen? Half those men who are out in the courtyard now volunteering for my militia company would quit. Because if I send you and Phil and Andy away, it means _their_ families aren't safe. And so they'd insist on staying home to protect them."

His voice rose to a shout. "Do you understand now, goddamn it? Then get the hell out of here."

A moment later Clarissa scurried out past the iron-reinforced door of Raoul's counting room. The two small boys she'd borne to Raoul ran beside her floor-length calico skirt. She'd gotten to be round-shouldered, Nicole saw.

Clarissa nodded. "Mister, Miz Hopkins."

"Morning, Clarissa," said Nicole. To call her by her first name felt not quite respectful, but to call her "Miss Greenglove," especially with her two sons right there with her, seemed cruel.

Clarissa gave Nicole a woebegone look that seemed to be asking for something--Nicole wasn't quite sure what. Then she ducked her head, and her bonnet hid her eyes.

Phil, the five-year-old, looked up at Nicole. He had very light blond hair, almost silver, and large eyes that seemed set deep in his pale, thin face. A little ghost.

"My dad's gonna fight Injuns."

"That's fine." Nicole didn't know what else to say. Clarissa, who had taken a few steps ahead, reached back and jerked Phil's arm so hard that he hollered.

Raoul, when they entered his office, seemed unperturbed by his argument with Clarissa. But his eyes widened and flashed with momentary anger when he saw Nicole. Then he grinned, teeth white under his black mustache.

"Well, Nicole and Frank. Come to lay your hatchets to rest? Now that the Indians are waving theirs around?"

"That's why we're here, Raoul," said Frank.

"Yeah, I've read your paragraphs in the _Visitor_," said Raoul, one side of his mouth twisted up in a contemptuous smile. "Seems you'd just love to give Illinois back to the Indians."

"Nothing of the kind," Frank said gruffly.

How unfair, Nicole thought. Frank had written only that if the 1804 land agreement had been obtained through fraud, it would be better to negotiate a new treaty with the Sauk and Fox rather than meet them with armed force.

Raoul's tanned face reddened and his nostrils flared. "Give back Illinois," he persisted, "just like you wanted to give Victoire to Pierre's mongrel bastard."

Nicole saw not a trace of guilt on that broad, hard face over what he had done to Auguste. She clenched her fists. She must try to contain her anger.

Frank spoke. "Don't bring up Auguste now, Raoul. He's what divides us, and we oughtn't to be divided now. We want to talk to you about protecting Victor."

Heat lightning flickered in Raoul's eyes, shifting quickly to a derisive gleam. "Well, that should be easy, Frank, with your attitude. You can make a white flag out of any bedsheet."

Nicole thought, _He's just using our coming here as an opportunity to rub our faces in the dirt_.

"Don't make this so hard for us, Raoul," she said. "We need each other."

"Really? What do I need you for?" His eyes were cold.

Many answers crowded Nicole's mind, but she thought for a moment before speaking.

"You need the people of this town to make a success of the estate, now you've taken it over, your orchards and farms, your shipping line, your trading ventures. Most of the people who live in Victor work for you, directly or indirectly. And you're leaving them unprotected."

Before Raoul could answer, Frank joined in. "From what I've seen, you plan to march every man who knows how to shoot a rifle away from here to fight the Indians down by the Rock River. If you take all the fighting men away, who's going to defend Victor and Victoire?"

Raoul threw back his head and roared with laughter. "God, I can't believe I'm hearing you right. Ever since last fall you've wished I would disappear from the face of the earth. Now you come to me begging for protection."

"It's not for ourselves that we're asking," said Nicole. "We just want you to leave enough men behind to defend the women and children and noncombatants who stay here."

Raoul's eyes narrowed and fixed on Frank. "Noncombatants like you, Frank? You won't pick up a rifle yourself, but you want some of my men to stay and guard you."

Frank looked back steadily. "I'm learning to shoot. Your father is teaching me." Nicole felt a rush of love for Frank, and pride in his willingness to learn to do something he hated, because he had to.

Raoul spread his hands. "Good for you, and good for Papa." He looked down, and his face reddened slightly. When he looked up, his dark eyes met Nicole's.

"How is Papa?"

Nicole checked the urge to remind him that he had nearly killed their father, and said, "He's tolerably well. The little house Frank has been building for him is finished. And he's able to walk. Guichard takes care of him."

Raoul clapped his hands together. "Good, good! Then that's two riflemen you've got right there. And I'll bet old Guichard could even shoot if it came to that. And you'll have David Cooper, he's a veteran of 'Twelve. He's going to keep an eye on the trading post for me, along with Burke Russell. I'm sure there'll be a few others. As for the rest of the men, if I didn't lead them down to the Rock River, they'd go anyway. They're raring to hunt redskins."

Nicole recalled the line of men she had seen just now in the trading post courtyard signing up for the Smith County volunteer militia. There must have been over a hundred of them, some wearing coonskin caps and fringed buckskins, others with straw hats, calico shirts and tow-linen pantaloons, two dozen or so sporting the head kerchiefs favored by men of French descent. They'd been in high spirits, laughing and talking about bringing back scalps.

Frank said, "Of course you don't _want_ to think there'll be an Indian attack on Victor while you're gone. What you want is to go down to the Rock River country with the militia and win a great victory over the Indians. Or something you can call a great victory."

Raoul held out his hands. "Frank, you printed Reynolds's proclamation in your damned paper."

He pointed over his shoulder, where a copy of the Illinois governor's call to arms, cut from the _Victor Visitor_ for April 17, 1832, was nailed to the wall. Nicole's eyes traveled over the opening lines.

FELLOW CITIZENS

Your country requires your services. The Indians have assumed a hostile attitude and have invaded the State in violation of the treaty of last summer.

The British Band of Sauks and other hostile Indians, headed by Black Hawk, are in possession of the Rock River country, to the great terror of the frontier inhabitants. I consider the settlers on the frontiers to be in imminent danger ...

Raoul said, "He doesn't say stay home and defend your town. He says rendezvous at Beardstown. That is a lot closer to Black Hawk than it is to Victor."

Frank said, "That proclamation is for towns that are in safe territory. We're the settlers _on_ the frontier, the ones Reynolds says are in danger. I was talking yesterday to a man from Galena, Raoul. Up there, the volunteers have formed a militia company, but they're going to stay right where they are, in case of Indian attack. We aren't _expected_ to supply troops to chase Black Hawk."

Raoul shook his head. "We've got to hit Black Hawk hard and fast with all the men we can muster. Once we do, there'll be no danger to Victor."

Frank said, "If something like what happened at Fort Dearborn happens here at Victor, innocent people will pay for your decision. You want that on your conscience?"

At the mention of Fort Dearborn, Raoul's face had gone expressionless. He sat there and stared at Frank for a moment, then stood up abruptly.

"My conscience is clear," he said.

_You have no conscience_, Nicole thought. She stared sadly into the bright blue eyes that looked so blankly at her now, and wondered where her smiling little brother had gone, so many years ago. The smile still came readily to his face; but now it only mocked and taunted. Did those years of captivity with the Indians fully explain Raoul, or was he a throwback to some robber-baron ancestor whose only law was the sword?

* * * * *

"When a man goes off to war, Miss Nancy, it means the world to him to know he has someone to come home to."

Raoul smiled down from his chestnut stallion, Banner, at Nancy Hale in the driver's seat of her black buggy. At nineteen, she was a woman in full bloom. She'd probably have married a long time ago if she'd stayed back East. There were a lot of men out here on the frontier, but few good enough to court a woman like her.

_She'd be a fool not to take my offer seriously. It's the best one she'll ever get._

Nancy looked first at the dusty road over the grass-covered hills between Victoire and Victor, the morning sun beating down on it, then up at him. The deep blue of her eyes was a marvel.

"You already have someone to come home to, Mr. de Marion. And children."

Children, yes, but the mingling of his de Marion blood with the nondescript Greenglove line could hardly produce the children he wanted. Nancy, on the other hand, from an old New England family that probably went back to even better English stock, was just the sort of woman he wanted to breed with.

"Clarissa and I have never stood up before a priest or a minister, Miss Hale. I've just been passing my time with her until the right lady came along."

Her gaze was cool and level. "As far as I'm concerned you're as good as married, and you have no right to be talking to me this way."

"Necessity makes your bedfellows out here on the frontier."

"Not mine." She shook her head, blond braids swinging. He could picture all that honey-gold hair spread out on a pillow, and he felt a pulse beat in his throat.

Nancy went on, "You must know how wrong it is for you to speak to me this way. Otherwise you wouldn't have ambushed me out here."

"I've waited days for a chance to speak to you in private."

Josiah Hode, Hodge Hode's boy, had ridden fast to the trading post this morning to tell Raoul that Miss Hale was driving her buggy into town and was traveling, for once, without her father. It was the news Raoul had been hoping for ever since the governor's proclamation had arrived in Victor. Knowing Miss Nancy was indignant over his treatment of the mongrel, Raoul had delayed approaching her. Now he could delay no longer.

"I leave with the militia next Monday," he said. "That gives you three days to think it over. I hope to carry your favorable answer with me when I ride off to defend you from the savages."

She smiled, but the smile was without humor or warmth. "Carry this answer with you if you wish: No." She flicked the reins, and her dappled gray horse speeded up to a trot.

Raoul spurred his own horse to keep pace with her. "Take time to consider."

"The answer will always be no."

White-hot anger exploded within him. His fists clenched on Banner's reins.

"You'll end up an old maid schoolmarm!" he shouted. "You'll never know what it is to have a man between your legs."

Her face went white. He had hurt her, and that made him feel better.

He kicked his heels hard into Banner's sides and the stallion uttered an angry whicker and broke into a gallop, leaving Nancy Hale and her buggy enveloped in dust.

He wished the country around here weren't so damned open. If he could have dragged her out of that buggy and into the woods, given her a taste of the real thing, she'd have changed her mind about him.

_Is she still pining for the mongrel?_

Well, he thought, as the gray log walls of the trading post came into sight around a bend in the ridge road, he _would_ carry her answer to the war. And the Indians would suffer the more for it.

* * * * *

Prophet's Town was deserted. Black Hawk and his allies had fled.

Raoul reined up Banner in the very center of the rings of dark, silent Indian houses. Armand Perrault, Levi Pope, Hodge Hode and Otto Wegner stopped beside him. He did not know whether he was relieved or disappointed. His cap-and-ball pistol drawn, the hammer pulled back, he drew angry breaths and glared about him. He felt exposed, realizing that at any time an arrow aimed at his heart could come winging out of one of those long loaf-shaped bark and frame Winnebago lodges.

Because of Raoul's experience in the skirmishing around Saukenuk last year, General Henry Atkinson had commissioned him a colonel and put him in command of the advance guard, known as the spy battalion. He enjoyed the prestige of leading the spies, but he felt a constant tightness in his belly.

He reached down for the canteen in the Indian blanketwork bag strapped to his saddle, uncorked it and took a quick swallow of Old Kaintuck. It went down hot and spread warmth from his stomach through his whole body. He cooled his throat with water from a second canteen.

For three weeks now, slowed by heavy spring rains that swelled creeks to nearly impassable torrents, the militia had followed Black Hawk's trail up the Rock River. To the whites' disappointment, the Indians had bypassed Saukenuk, doubtless aware that the militia had come out against them. Instead, Black Hawk's band had trekked twenty-five miles upriver, reportedly stopping at Prophet's Town. Now, they were not here either.

Raoul hated the Indian village on sight. Built on land that sloped gently down to the south bank of the Rock River, it surrounded him, threatened him, lay dark, sullen and sinister under a gray sky heavy with rain. It reminded him too vividly of the redskin villages where he'd spent those two worst years of his life.

He saw no cooking fires, no drying meat or stacks of vegetables by the dark doorways, no poles flaunting feathers, ribbons and enemy scalps. That characteristic odor of Indian towns, a mixture of tobacco smoke and cooking hominy, hung in the air but was very faint. He figured the Indians had left here days ago.

"Otto," Raoul said, "ride back to General Atkinson and report the enemy has abandoned Prophet's Town."

Wegner gave Raoul a strenuous Prussian salute, pulled his spotted gray horse's head around and rode off.

The two hundred men of the spy battalion were trickling in behind Raoul, hoofs pattering on the bare earth. In their coonskin caps and dusty gray shirts and buckskin jackets, the men didn't look like soldiers, but they had taken the oath and were under military discipline till their term of enlistment was up at the end of May.

The men called to one another and laughed as they gazed around at the empty lodges. They were enjoying themselves immensely, Raoul thought. This time of year most of them would be breaking their backs doing spring plowing and planting. Now they could earn twenty-one cents a day while going on something like an extended hunting trip.

_Most men would rather fight than work any day._

Eli Greenglove, on a brown and white pony, trotted up beside Raoul. His silver lace captain's stripes glittered on the upper arms of the blue tunic Raoul had bought for him. A long cavalry saber hung from his white leather belt.

Eli grinned, and Raoul had to look away. It seemed that every other tooth in Eli's head was missing, and the ones that were left were stained brown from years of chewing tobacco.

And now Clarissa had taken up pipe smoking, making it even harder for Raoul to enjoy bedding down with her.

_If only Nancy--_

But Nancy had made it plain that she despised him.

Damn shame. Of course, old Eli here would slit his throat if he had any idea what Raoul was thinking.

Eli said, "You figger the Prophet's Town Injuns have joined up with Black Hawk's bunch?"

"Of course," said Raoul. "And that means Black Hawk now has about a thousand warriors behind him."

A movement on the south edge of the village in the surrounding woods caught Raoul's eyes. He swung around in that direction, pointing his pistol.

"Eli, get your rifle ready," he said.

"Loaded 'n' primed," said Greenglove, pulling his bright new Cramer percussion lock rifle--another present from Raoul--from its saddle sling, controlling his pony easily with his knees alone.

Indians walked out of the woods, four men. They held their empty hands high over their heads and shuffled forward slowly.

"Watch 'em," said Eli. "They may just be trying to get close enough to jump us."

Raoul studied the four advancing men. Two had their heads wrapped in turbans, one red, one blue. All four wore fringed buckskin leggings and gray flannel shirts. He saw no weapons.

Then he caught sight of more shadowy figures in the trees beyond the Indians. Instantly, he straighted his arm in that direction and pulled the trigger. His pistol went off with a boom, puffing out a cloud of gray smoke. He handed it to Armand to reload it while he reached for his own new rifle, a breech-loading Hall.

The Indian with the red turban was shouting something. Raoul recognized the language--Potawatomi. The sound of it made the blood pound in his temples.

"Those are only squaws and papooses," the Indian called in Potawatomi. "Please do not shoot them."

Raoul felt like shooting them all, just for being Potawatomi, but he held the impulse in check. He had to find out whatever they could tell him.

He addressed the Indians in their language, indelibly engraved in his mind by the acids of fear and hatred. "Tell them all to come out. We will kill anyone who hides from us."

The red-turbaned Indian called over his shoulder, and slowly a group of women and small children came out of the woods.

Raoul took his reloaded pistol back from Armand and walked Banner over to the little group. They started to lower their hands.

"Keep them up." He gestured with the pistol. Slowly the copper-skinned men straightened their raised arms again, looking at one another unhappily.

_Probably thought we'd welcome them with kind words and gifts._ The muscles in his neck and shoulders were so rigid they ached, and his stomach was boiling. In his mind he saw again the scarred face of Black Salmon, the brown fist raised, holding a horsewhip to beat him. The sounds of Potawatomi speech brought it all back.

He handed his horse's reins to Armand, who tied Banner to an upright post in front of a nearby lodge.

"Who are you?" Raoul demanded.

"I am Little Foot," said the Indian wearing the red turban. "I am head of the Deer Clan. We live here in the town of the Winnebago Prophet."

Little Foot's skin was dark, and he had a wide, flat nose. He wore no feathers on his head, probably not wanting to look warlike. Black hair streaked here and there with white hung down from under his turban in two braids to his shoulders. Raoul judged him to be in his fifties.

_He could have been at Fort Dearborn twenty years ago._

One thing was certain. Little Foot was Potawatomi. Raoul felt his fingers tightening on his pistol as he held it at waist level.

Raoul turned to Levi Pope and some of his other Smith County boys who were seated on horses nearby. "Tie them up."

Levi, who wore six pistols at his belt, all primed and loaded, got down from his horse and unhooked a coiled rope from his saddle. "The squaws and little ones too?"

"Put their families in one of the lodges and keep a guard on them." Another thought occurred to him. "Eli, take some men and search these huts. Make sure there aren't any more Indians hiding out somewhere in this town."

Levi went to the red-turbaned Indian and pulled his arms down roughly to his sides. In a moment he had Little Foot's hands securely tied behind his back, while other grinning Smith County boys had done the same to the other three Indian men.

"Ankles too," said Raoul, and Levi and his men cut lengths of rope and knelt to hobble the Indians.

With his free hand Raoul took another long drink from the whiskey canteen hanging from his saddle.

He walked close to Little Foot and looked him in the eye. He did not like the way the Indian looked back at him. He saw no fear.

With a sudden movement he hooked his boot behind the Indian's hobbled ankles and pushed him hard. Little Foot fell heavily to the ground on his back, wincing with the unexpected pain.

As he pushed himself awkwardly into a sitting position, there was no mistaking the hatred in the way he looked up at Raoul.

"Why did you stay here?" Raoul asked.

"We do not think Black Hawk can win. We hope the long knives will treat kindly those who do not make war on them."

Raoul said, "Where has Black Hawk gone? What is he planning? Where are the people who were living in this town?"

"I promised the Winnebago Prophet I would say nothing about where they went. I will be accursed if I break my promise."

"The Winnebago Prophet's curse is nothing. You should be more afraid of me."

Little Foot remained stone-faced and silent.

What a pleasure to have a bunch of Potawatomi right where he could do anything he wanted to them.

A light rain started to patter down on the bark roofs and the hard-packed earth.

While Raoul had been talking with the Indians, more militiamen had reached Prophet's Town. Columns of men on horseback, four abreast, came to a halt in the grassland to the south of the village and fell out at their officers' commands. They climbed off their horses and walked them.

Otto Wegner rode up and dismounted.

"General Atkinson is going to encamp the rest of the army outside Prophet's Town, sir," he said, giving Raoul his usual vigorous salute, nearly dislodging the big hunting knife sheathed in a pocket of his leather shirt.

Raoul returned the salute carelessly, went back to Banner and took another swallow from the whiskey canteen.

Surprising that Atkinson should decide to set up camp here, when the day was only half over. Well, Henry Atkinson had a reputation for going slowly. Raoul had heard from friends among the regular officers that Atkinson had already received a sharply worded letter from the Secretary of War in Washington City reprimanding him for not moving fast enough to crush the Indians.

_If I get a chance to take a crack at them I sure as hell won't be slow._

The early arrivals already had their tents up. Officers' tents were of white canvas, six feet from the ground to their peaked tops. Enlisted men set up pup tents just large enough to cover two men lying down. Most men didn't bother to carry tents and slept out in the open, rolled up in the coarse blankets they all carried.

Men were wandering through Prophet's Town peering into the lodges. They walked with slow caution, rifles ready.

Raoul watched Justus Bennett, in civilian life Smith County's land commissioner, ordering two privates in buckskins and coonskin caps to put up a tent for him. Bennett was always trying to make himself as comfortable as possible. His packhorse carried his tenting, a big bag full of fancy clothes, and a couple of heavy law books. Why on earth a man would think he needed such things in the wilderness, Raoul had no idea.

"Bennett!" Raoul called. "Take charge of the guard on those Indians."

Bennett looked annoyed, but gave some final instructions to the men putting up his tent and slouched over to the four Indians. A round-shouldered man of slight build, he looked decidedly unmilitary, but he'd explained to Raoul that for anyone who wanted to get ahead in politics, a war record would be a godsend.

Raoul called out, "Levi, you leave off guarding the Indians and get my tent up."

A crowd of men had gathered in a circle around the Indians. Maybe they wanted to give the redskins a few licks of their own.

"Afternoon, Colonel."

Raoul was used to looking down at other men, but he had to look up, a little, at the man who addressed him. His skinniness was like Pierre's in a way, but this man was a heap uglier than Raoul's brother had been. He looked like a half-starved nag.

_I'll bet he trips all over himself when he walks, and when he rides he drags his feet on the ground._

Raoul gestured to the seated Potawatomi. "You boys ever see Indians up close before?"

"The way you've got them trussed up and guarded, Colonel," said the tall man, "I'd say they must be pretty desperate characters."

Raoul heard the smile in the drawling voice and felt heat rising up the back of his neck. He took a closer look at the man. He couldn't be much over twenty, but he looked a well-worn twenty. A farmer's face, darkened by the sun. The gray eyes, set in deep hollows under heavy black brows, crinkled humorously. But Raoul saw cold judgment deeper in those eyes.

Like most of the volunteers, the tall man wore civilian clothes. His were gray trousers tucked into farmer's boots and a gray jacket over a blue calico shirt printed with white flowers. An officer's saber hung from a belt around his waist.

Raoul said, "Well, I reckon you signed up with the militia to fight Indians, so take a good look at your enemy."

The tall man walked around to stand in front of Little Foot, hunkered down and said, "Howdy."

Little Foot did not look back but gazed ahead with a blank face.

The lean man straightened up. "A mighty mean customer, sir."

Some of the other men in the ring around the Indians chuckled at this. Even Justus Bennett snickered.

Raoul was feeling angrier and angrier. He had looked forward to questioning Little Foot and the other Potawatomi, looked forward to having them resist and to breaking their resistance down with fear and pain. He'd even hoped they might give him reason to shoot them. These strange militiamen were becoming a nuisance.

"You seem to think this is pretty funny. Who the hell are you?" Raoul put a threat into his voice.

"I'm Captain Lincoln of the Sangamon County company, sir. We're with the Second Battalion."

Raoul let his gaze travel over the other Sangamon County men.

"Any of the rest of you able to talk?"

One man laughed. "When Abe's around we mostly let him do the talking."

"That so? If you let somebody else do your talking for you, he may talk you into a spot you won't like."

Abe said, "Oh, I always make sure I say what the men want said, sir." That brought another laugh.

Raoul's anger at the Potawatomi found a new target in this bony volunteer. The heat of the whiskey raced through his bloodstream.

There was one simple way to show this upstart who was master here, and at the same time have his way with the redskins.

Raoul drew his pistol and hefted it in his hand.

The tall captain eyed Raoul warily and said nothing.

Raoul said, "I'm going to give this Potawatomi one more chance to tell me now where Black Hawk went, and if he disobeys me again I'm going to shoot him dead."

He stood before Little Foot and pointed the pistol at his head.

In Potawatomi he said, "Tell me what Black Hawk plans to do. Is he lying in ambush farther up the trail? Does he have a secret camp for his squaws and papooses? Tell me, or I will shoot you." Swinging the muzzle of the pistol to the man in the blue turban beside Little Foot, he said, "And then I will ask this man, and if he does not tell me, I will kill him too."

The bony young man said, "With all due respect to your rank and experience, sir, I must say that what you propose to do is wrong."

Raoul's rage threatened to boil over. Tension jerked his right arm. So as not to risk wasting a shot, he took his finger off the trigger.

In a mild but somehow penetrating voice the Sangamon man said, "I'll tell you why this is wrong, sir, if you'll allow me."

The man's politeness was infuriating. Raoul turned to him, letting the pistol fall to his side.

"Go on, Captain. Preach to me."

"If you had a white prisoner at your mercy, you would not shoot him because he refused to betray his comrades. You would think it honorable in him to answer your questions with silence. But this red man is a human being with the same God-given right to his life that you and I have."

Raoul realized all at once that the lean captain's backwoods manner of speaking had fallen away like an unneeded cloak. He sounded like a lawyer or a minister.

"I was a prisoner of the Potawatomi for two years. I can tell you from experience they're not human at all."

How angry Pierre had been when Raoul had said Indians were animals. But it was true.

"They treated you badly? Made a slave of you?"

"Damned right."

The young captain looked calmly at Raoul. "If to hold slaves and treat them badly marks a man as less than human, then you must so brand every wealthy white man in the Southern states."

A few of the men standing around laughed. "That Abe! Got an answer for everything."

Again Raoul's hand tightened convulsively on the pistol grip. He'd wasted enough words on this walking skeleton from Sangamon County. He was quivering with rage.

There was one quick way to put an end to the arguing.

He swung around and stepped close to Little Foot, holding his pistol less than a foot from the red-turbaned head. With his left hand he pulled the hammer back to half-cock, then full. The double click sounded loud in a sudden, astonished silence.

And Little Foot's arms, unbound, shot up. Both his hands gripped the barrel of the pistol and yanked it to one side. About to pull the trigger, Raoul froze his finger as the muzzle was pulled aside from its target.

--And knew with a sudden sinking of his heart what a deadly mistake he had made in that instant.

The Potawatomi's powerful two-handed grip tore the pistol from his fingers.

_I should have fired. Now I am a dead man._

Raoul saw a coil of rope lying on the ground beside Little Foot. The Indian must have been working his wrists loose while everyone's attention was on the argument.

Little Foot had already turned the loaded and cocked pistol around in his hands and pointed it at Raoul's heart. Raoul stared into black eyes that had no mercy for him.

A blurred figure seemed to fly across Raoul's vision.

The pistol went off with a boom.

Coughing, blinded, Raoul saw dimly through the gunsmoke that the skinny captain had thrown himself at Little Foot and thrust the pistol aside. Now Lincoln and Little Foot were wrestling, thrashing about like two wild animals.

By the time the smoke had cleared, the lean man had full control. Little Foot's ankles, Raoul saw, were still tied, and Lincoln's arms had snaked up under the Indian's. The Sangamon County man's big hands were behind Little Foot's head, pushing his chin down into his chest. His long legs were wrapped around Little Foot's middle, holding him in a crushing scissors grip.

Raoul stood shaking, his eyes watering from the faceful of powder smoke he'd taken. His heart was pounding frantically against his breastbone.

"Nicely done, sir!" Justus Bennett said to Lincoln.

_And what the hell were you doing?_ Raoul thought, furious at Bennett.

With a trembling hand Raoul seized Bennett's pistol.

The four guards had their rifles pointed at Little Foot. Any one of them could have saved Raoul's life by shooting, but none of them had reacted quickly enough.

Only Lincoln had moved in time.

The lanky captain's comrades were cheering him. "Old Abe's the best wrassler in this army, Colonel, and now you've seen it for yourself."

Raoul wiped his eyes and shouted, "Stand aside, Lincoln. Now I'm going to blow this redskin's brains out." The quaver he heard in his own voice made him even angrier.

From behind Little Foot came a calm response. "I'm going to ask you not to do that, sir."

"He tried to kill me. Get up and stand aside, God damn you!"

"No, sir."

Lincoln did unwrap his arms from Little Foot's head and shoulders, but still held him with his legs. The Indian sat motionless, as if his effort to kill Raoul had taken the last of his strength. He muttered under his breath. Probably his death song, Raoul thought.

Lincoln quickly retied the Indian, then stood up, placing himself between Raoul and Little Foot. He held Raoul's empty pistol out to him, butt first.

"Colonel, I believe you're a fair man, and you'll agree that I just saved your life."

Raoul took his pistol and handed it to Armand, realizing that the tall man was maneuvering him into a difficult position. Too many men had seen what happened.

"Yes, you did save my life." The words hurt his throat, same as if that pistol ball had hit him and lodged there. "And I thank you. You have my most profound gratitude."

"That being so, and since I have done you what you might think a favor, will you grant me a life for a life?"

For a moment Raoul could not think of anything to say or do.

All he had to do was shove this Lincoln aside, put the muzzle of his pistol to Little Foot's head and pull the trigger.

He realized, too, that the longer he hesitated the more a fool he looked.

What right did the skinny captain have to demand that he spare Little Foot?

Raoul became aware that the crowd around them had grown to perhaps a couple of hundred men. The ones he could see wore little half smiles. Whoever came out the winner, they were having a fine old time watching.

Raoul was broader and maybe stronger than Lincoln. But how ridiculous he would look if he had to fight the man to get past him to shoot Little Foot.

And what if this bag of bones beat him?

_Old Abe's the best wrassler in this army, Colonel._

The truth was bitter as vinegar, but the only course that would preserve his dignity would be to let Lincoln have his way.

"Ah, hell," he said loudly, and was pleased to hear that while he'd stood silently thinking, his voice had regained its strength. "Sure, I'll let the Indian live. He's nothing to me."

He noticed that his hand still shook a little as he gave Bennett's pistol back to him. He took his own, reloaded, from Armand and holstered it, hoping no one could see his tremor.

"My hand on it," he said, holding out his right hand, willing it to be steady.

The grip that met his was crushing. Even though he'd seen the bony young man immobilize Little Foot, Raoul was surprised.

He felt the men would expect him to do more to show his gratitude.

"Come and have a drink with me, Abe."

"My pleasure, sir."

Armand had finished putting Raoul's tent up. In the tent Armand uncorked a jug and handed it to Raoul, who offered it to Lincoln. The young man hooked his finger in the ring at the neck of the jug and raised it to his mouth. Raoul watched the prominent Adam's apple rise and fall as he took a long swallow.

"I normally don't touch whiskey, sir," Lincoln said, handing the jug back to Raoul. "I've seen it ruin too many good men. But I do appreciate this. It's not every day I grab a pistol as it goes off, wrestle an Indian and disobey a colonel."

"Well, that's the best whiskey there is. Old Kaintuck--O.K."

"Three things Kentucky makes better than anyplace else," said Lincoln. "Quilts, rifles and whiskey. I should know. That's where I hail from."

It was because of men like this, Raoul thought with some disdain, that Illinoisians got their nickname, "Suckers." The weak shoots of the tobacco plant that had to be stripped off and thrown away were called suckers, and Illinois was said to be largely populated by ne'er-do-well emigrants from tobacco-growing states like Kentucky.

"Then here's to Kentucky," said Raoul, loathing the tall, ugly man for spoiling his revenge.

He lifted the jug to his lips and let the burning liquid roll over his tongue and slide down his throat, grateful to it for the warmth that would melt away the chill of death he still felt around his heart.

A few more swigs and Raoul found himself wanting to bring Lincoln around to his way of thinking. The man, after all, _had_ saved his life.

"You know, you went to a whole lot of bother over that Indian now," he said. "It's a waste of time. We're only going to have to kill them all later anyway."

Lincoln winced, as if Raoul's words had hurt him. "Why do you say that, sir?"

"I've got a big estate in Smith County, beside the Mississippi, miles and miles of wonderful fertile land just begging for the plow. And too much of it is growing nothing but prairie flowers, because I can't get enough people to come and work it for me. They're afraid of Indians!"

"Treat the Indians fairly and there would be nothing to fear," said Lincoln.

"Treat them fairly and they'll just continue to attack our settlements."

"I'd like to think you're wrong, Mr. de Marion."

"Why the hell did you volunteer for the militia, if you don't like killing Indians?"

Lincoln smiled faintly. "Well, a war record won't hurt when I make a run for the legislature."

Just another slimy politician. Same as Bennett.

A bluebelly, a blue-uniformed officer of the Federal army, pushed through the tent flap. He doffed his tall, cylindrical shako.

"General Atkinson's compliments, Colonel de Marion. We're breaking camp and moving on up the Rock River in pursuit of Black Hawk and his band. And he asks you to once again take up the lead position."

"How does the general know where the Sauk are?" he asked irritably.

"A couple of Winnebago known to the general came into camp and offered to guide us, sir. They say Black Hawk and the Winnebago Prophet are leading their people upriver to try to persuade the Potawatomi to join them. Black Hawk's whole band, except for the warriors, are on foot. The general thinks that if we ride hard we can catch them."

Lincoln held out his hand and shook again with Raoul.

"Thank you for the whiskey, sir."

"Thank you for turning that pistol aside."

Lincoln grinned. "Colonel, thank _you_ for sparing that red man. I'll be going now, or by the time we finish thanking each other, Black Hawk will be in Checagou."

When Raoul emerged from his tent he saw that the Potawatomi prisoners were gone. He felt a surge of fury that someone had turned them loose without his permission. He still longed to put a ball into the skull of that sneaking Little Foot.

_The next Indian who falls into my hands won't be so lucky._

By the time the men of his spy battalion had struck their tents and mounted up, he had decided on half a loaf of revenge. Seated on Banner, he held up a burning stick.

"All right, men, the Winnebago who lived here have joined up with Black Hawk. They're running ahead of us. Let's not leave them anything to come back to."

He drew his arm back and snapped it forward. The torch flew end over end and landed on the bark roof of the nearest Winnebago lodge. A circle of orange flame spread out quickly. It was still raining, but not enough to slow the fire down much.

Raoul's men whooped. Eli and Armand led the way in hurling flaming sticks into the dark brown Indian huts.

Armand, grinning, handed Raoul a long pole he'd pulled loose from the wall of a lodge, afire at one end. Waving his broad-brimmed hat, Raoul rode through the town touching the burning pole to the flimsy wall of each lodge he passed. The men of the battalion scattered, setting fires everywhere. Beyond the town the remaining militiamen stopped breaking camp to watch.

Soon, the roar of the burning lodges thundered in Raoul's ears like a big waterfall.

If they could catch Black Hawk, he thought, what glory that would be. No matter how many fighting men Black Hawk had, Raoul felt sure his battalion could crush them. The burning lodges, the whiskey in his blood, the hatred in his heart, all ran together so that Raoul felt like a prairie fire racing after the British Band.

14

First Blood

White Bear tried to think only about guiding his brown-spotted white pony over the grasslands and watching his two companions. He tried to put fear out of his mind.

_I did not even have a chance to say good-bye to Redbird._

Redbird was a day's ride up the Rock River from here, at the camp the Potawatomi had allowed Black Hawk's people to set up. White Bear's body went cold with the thought that he might be killed today, and she be left alone and pursued by enemies.

_I should have asked Wolf Paw to be her protector if I die. He hates me, but he cares for Redbird._

It was for Redbird and Eagle Feather, and for the baby growing inside Redbird, that he was risking his life today. His family was going hungry. It had been over six weeks, by pale eyes reckoning, since Black Hawk had led them across the Great River into Illinois. White Bear and Redbird, like other British Band families, could carry little food with them, and most of that was gone. With the long knives pressing behind them, White Bear had no time to hunt or fish, nor Redbird to gather food from the woodlands.

She must not go without food, especially not while carrying their child. The children of the British Band walked about hollow-eyed; the crying of hungry babies rose from every part of the camp. Old people, looking nearly dead, lay on the ground trying to husband their strength.

At a secret meeting last night the Potawatomi chiefs, despite Flying Cloud's prophecy, had refused to join Black Hawk in fighting the long knives or even to give his people supplies or let them remain long in Potawatomi territory. Black Hawk himself had been forced to admit that the only way to spare the band further hardship would be to go quietly back across the Great River.

To do that, he had to make peace with the long knives. Frightened though he was, White Bear, as the only member of the tribe who spoke fluent English, felt he must go with Black Hawk's emissaries.

White Bear's shoulders slumped in discouragement as he thought how Black Hawk and the rest of the band had been led astray. _No_ other tribes were willing to ally themselves with the British Band. There had been _no_ truth at all to the Winnebago Prophet's talk of aid from the British in Canada.

A delegation headed by Broth, the tribe's best speaker, had gone to the British fort at Malden, near Detroit, to ask for help. They had been sent back with the advice that the Sauk had better learn to live in peace with the Americans.

The people of Prophet's Town had left their homes with Black Hawk's band more out of fear of the oncoming long knives than out of a desire to help Black Hawk fight for Saukenuk. As Black Hawk's prospects worsened, most of them drifted away, even though the Prophet himself remained at Black Hawk's side.

Black Hawk had believed the Prophet because his promises gave the British Band the courage to defy the long knives. To White Bear's disgust, even now, when it was clear that Flying Cloud had simply made it all up, Black Hawk had forgiven the Prophet.

White Bear burned with resentment.

_They mocked me when I told them the truth. That fat, posturing toad lied to them and they still honor him. Surely a false shaman is the worst kind of liar._

White Bear rode on Little Crow's right. As the oldest of the three men, Little Crow carried the white flag. Torn from a sheet the braves had found in a settler's hastily abandoned cabin, the flag was tied to a spear shaft from which the head had been removed. On Little Crow's left rode Three Horses.

Since they were not riding into battle, they had not taken any of the saddles with stirrups from the band's supply but were mounted with only blankets between themselves and the horses' backs. The three of them had painted their faces black, because they might be going to their deaths. But it was hard to believe that men might be killed on this beautiful afternoon in the middle of the Moon of Buds. A warm breeze blew over White Bear's bare chest and arms. Red, blue and yellow prairie flowers scattered over the land, as uncountable as the stars, delighted his eye in spite of his fear. All around him he heard red-winged blackbirds singing their spring challenges.

White Bear had left with Owl Carver everything he valued: his medicine stick, his Sauk medicine bag and his other bag of pale eyes' medical instruments, his megis-shell necklace, his brass and silver ornaments, his _Paradise Lost_, the deerhorn-handled knife his father had long ago given him. He had nothing with him but the clothing he wore, fringed buckskin leggings and a buckskin vest decorated with blue and green quillwork in diamond patterns.

He looked back and saw five mounted braves an arrow flight behind him on the prairie. Even from this distance he could tell that the tall one in the middle was Iron Knife. They would watch from hiding and would report back to Black Hawk how the long knives treated his peace messengers. Black Hawk himself, with Owl Carver, the Winnebago Prophet, Wolf Paw and about forty braves, waited a few miles farther up the Rock River at the place where he had met with the Potawatomi chiefs.

White Bear saw a small stand of woods ahead. Scouts had reported that beyond those woods, across Old Man's Creek, the long knives had set up camp. Glowing from behind young green leaves, set aflutter by the breeze, the setting sun dropped flecks of gold onto the blackened faces of White Bear's two companions. It would be almost nightfall by the time they encountered the long knives.

Three Horses said, "A man must be more brave, I think, to do this than to ride up to an enemy in battle and strike the first blow at him." His nose curved inward where the bridge should have been. White Bear had learned that a Sioux war club had done that to him while Auguste was studying Latin and geometry at St. George's School.

"I would much rather be fighting the long knives than trying to make peace with them," said Little Crow. "I do not trust them."

White Bear tried to reassure them and himself. "We must do this. It is the only way we can get our people safely back across the Great River."

Little Crow said, "It seems you were right and we who wanted to take up the tomahawk were wrong."

In spite of his fear, White Bear felt a satisfied glow at Little Crow's words. Little Crow had been the one who brought the woman's dress that Wolf Paw had put on him that wretched night of the council.

_They did not listen to me that night. The Turtle told me I would not be able to persuade the people not to cross the Great River, but I tried my best._

They entered the wood by way of a narrow trail, riding single file. Little Crow lowered the white flag to keep it from getting caught in the branches.

As they rode among the trees, the tightness of fear in White Bear's chest and stomach grew worse, until he had to struggle for breath. His palms sweat so much, the reins were slippery in his hands.

He turned and waved farewell to Iron Knife and the four other braves following them, who had halted their ponies at the edge of the woods and dismounted. They waved back. A moment more and White Bear looked back and could see them no more.

_At least if I die today Iron Knife can tell Redbird how it came about._

He tried to guess how the long knives would greet them. They might shoot them down in spite of the white flag. He hoped they would be glad to learn that Black Hawk wanted to surrender and return in peace to Ioway. After all, that was what they were trying to force him to do, was it not? But some of the long knives, undoubtedly, wanted to kill "Injuns." Men like Raoul.

When they came out of the south edge of the woods, they found themselves on a grassy rise sloping down to a winding stream called Old Man's Creek. The sun was lower now and directly in White Bear's eyes. Across the creek was a sight that made him want to jerk his pony's head around and ride back into the trees as fast as he could go.

On high ground he saw the silhouettes of peaked tents and many men, some on horseback and some on foot, rifles in hand. The smoke of campfires drifted like gray feathers into the pale blue sky. He heard voices calling to one another in English. One man shouted and pointed in their direction.

White Bear said, "Don't wait here at the edge of the trees, or they will think we are attackers. Ride forward slowly, waving the flag."

The men across the creek were yelling excitedly now. Rifle fire crackled and smoke billowed. A ball whizzed past White Bear and cracked a tree limb behind him. He held himself rigid.

Long knives rode toward them, urging their horses down the far side of the creekbank. White Bear and his companions rode into the creek to meet them.

In a moment bearded white faces, angry eyes, coonskin caps and straw hats were whirling about the three emissaries in the middle of the creek. Rifles and pistols were pointing at them from every side. Little Crow, his face tight, held the white flag high with both hands.

"We surrender!" White Bear shouted. "We are not armed. We have come to talk to General Atkinson."

"Listen to that, he's talking English," a blond boy exclaimed.

Another man yelled, "Shoot 'em. Then let 'em surrender."

White Bear's knees trembled against his horse's flanks. These were not regular U.S. government soldiers, but the volunteers, the armed settlers who had come out in answer to their governor's call. They would not wait for orders from their commanders. They would do whatever they felt like doing.

A red-bearded man stuck his face in White Bear's. "Get down off that horse, Injun! Now!" His shout blew a stink of whiskey into White Bear's face.

Others joined the outcry. "Get off them horses!"

"Ought to put a bullet in them right here in the creek."

"Look at them black faces. I thought they was niggers at first."

"Not even useful like niggers, damn redskins."

The man with the red beard grabbed White Bear's arm and jerked him half out of his saddle. White Bear slid down from his horse.

He stood up to his knees in the cold, rushing water of Old Man's Creek.

"We want to surrender," he said again. "We want to talk to your officers."

"Just shut up!" the red-bearded man roared, eyes rolling drunkenly.

White Bear felt a man grab him from behind. A rope scratched his wrists and tightened around them till the bones were crushed together.

He turned to see whether Little Crow and Three Horses were all right. The militiamen had bound them too. Both braves' black-painted faces were expressionless, but White Bear read fear in their eyes and in the set of their mouths--the same fear he felt, and tried not to show.

The red-bearded man leaned down from his saddle and grabbed a handful of White Bear's long hair. He jerked on it, dragging White Bear toward the bank. White Bear stumbled on the stony creekbed, bruising his feet through his moccasins.

"You wanna see our officers? Then step along!"

What had happened to the white flag? Without it, what did they have to show that they had come in peace?

"Will you bring our white flag?" he called desperately to a clean-shaven man wearing spectacles, who looked a little calmer than the others.

The man's face twisted into a snarl, and White Bear's heart fell.

"You'll get your white flag up your ass, redskin!"

"You sound just like a white man," said another militiaman. "You sure you ain't a white man in paint?"

"Listen to me," White Bear said hopelessly. He wanted to say, _If we don't fight it will save your lives as well as ours._ But how could he talk to these men, maddened by whiskey and war? His eyes met those of Little Crow and Three Horses. Again the red-bearded man jerked his hair, so hard White Bear thought he would pull it out of his scalp. He had to bite his lip to keep from crying out. Worse than the pain was the indignity.

Horses splashing water, mud and pebbles on them, long knives shouting curses and threats, the three Sauk stumbled out of the creek and through shoulder-high prairie grass into the militia camp.

The sun's last rays fell on flushed, sweating white faces, on glistening rifle barrels. To White Bear, most of the men looked younger than he.

"Somebody get the colonel," said the man with the red beard. "Tell him they claim they want to surrender. Might be we could catch old Black Hawk himself."

The three Sauks' only hope, White Bear thought, was that the commanding officer might be more willing to listen to them than his men were.

The Sauk and their captors stood in a circle where the grass had been trampled flat. A short distance away stood supply wagons and tents. The prairie surrounded them.

Some militiamen went to one wagon on which five kegs with spouts stood, filled tin cups from the kegs and drank from them. Whiskey, White Bear thought, seemed to be as important to these men as food.

The sun was down now, and the three stood in twilight, in the midst of the shouting mob.

"Look alive, you men! It's the colonel!"

The crowd opened up, and two men came through.

One of them, short, skinny, wearing a coonskin cap and a blue officer's coat, came up to White Bear and peered at him.

"I know you!"

Half his teeth were rotten and the rest were missing. White Bear knew him too. Eli Greenglove.

"By God, Raoul! I'll be a son of a bitch if it ain't that half-breed nephew of yours."

And there stood Raoul de Marion, gold epaulets glittering on his broad shoulders.

At the sight of that broad face with the black mustache, last seen looking at him over a pistol barrel, White Bear knew his life was about to end.

_Could my luck be any worse?_

All hope vanished as light faded from the sky.

Raoul stood before White Bear with his thumbs hooked into the white leather belt that cinched his blue uniform coat. His huge knife--the one that had cut White Bear's face years ago--hung at his left side, a pistol at his right. He grinned at White Bear.

"Well. I was hoping to meet you. I'd have liked it better on the field of battle, but here you are, in my camp. What were you doing, spying on us?"

White Bear sighed. Something crumbled inside him.

"Do you know this long knife?" Little Crow said in Sauk.

"Yes, he is my father's brother." A glimmer of hope appeared in Little Crow's eyes, but vanished when White Bear added, "And he is my worst enemy."

"Talk English around me!" Raoul shouted. "No Indian jabber."

"Black Hawk sent us," White Bear said. "He doesn't want to fight. We've come to make peace."

"The hell with that!" one of Raoul's men yelled. "We come out to fight Injuns."

"Well, hold on now!" cried another. "If they come peaceable, that means we can all go home and nobody hurt."

Raoul turned on the man. "I'll be the one to decide why they're here."

White Bear realized that the men with Raoul were barely under his control. There was no hope of talking to Raoul, but there might be others in this crowd, like the man who had just spoken, who would listen. He must keep trying.

Raising his voice White Bear said, "Chief Black Hawk knows you militiamen outnumber his warriors. He doesn't want to fight you. All he wants is to be allowed to go back down the Rock River and cross the Mississippi. He will never come back."

"Where'd that black-faced redskin learn to speak English so good?" one of the militiamen said.

"He's a renegade," said Raoul. "A part-white mongrel. He ought to be hanged as a traitor. Don't believe a word he says."

"They did come with a white flag," one of the men said.

"White flag, hell!" Raoul shouted. "They're trying to put us off guard." He swept a pointing finger across a group of men that included brown-bearded Armand Perrault. Among them White Bear recognized Levi Pope and Otto Wegner, the thick-mustached Prussian who worked at the trading post. He remembered Wegner had not wanted to kill him when Raoul offered a reward for his death, and he felt a little tremor of hope.

"Get on your horses," Raoul told his men. "Go out across the creek and look. If you don't find Indians skulking about in those woods, I'll be mighty surprised."

As Raoul's men rode off, White Bear was torn by indecision. Should he tell Raoul that other braves had followed them here, to see how they were treated? Or would that just endanger the lives of Iron Knife and the others?

_He'll use everything I tell him against me._

Raoul's eyes stared death at White Bear. "Black Hawk's a damn liar. He's broken every treaty we ever made with you people. There's only one way to deal with your kind. If you can't be trusted to keep treaties, you have to be exterminated." He drew his pistol.

"Starting here."

_Bear spirit, walk with me on the Trail of Souls._

Little Crow said, "What do they say, White Bear? Are they going to kill us?"

"It is our fate to have fallen into the hands of a bad man," said White Bear. Having to tell them hurt him all the more. It grieved him that these two good men must die along with him, their lives thrown away because of a bit of bad luck.

"We were fools to come here," said Three Horses.

"Not fools--braves," White Bear reassured him. "A man who gives his life to protect his people is never a fool. Whether or not he succeeds."

"You _are_ a prophet, White Bear," said Little Crow.

Raoul was staring at White Bear's chest. White Bear wondered if his heart was beating so hard that Raoul could see it hammering.

"Look at those scars. Looks like a bear tried to get you a long time ago. Too bad he didn't finish you, would have saved me the trouble."

White Bear would not talk about anything sacred with Raoul. He looked back at him silently.

"Guess you don't know all there is to know about your nephew," Eli Greenglove laughed.

"Don't call him my nephew!" Raoul shouted.

White Bear saw some of Raoul's men exchange befuddled glances.

"Well, whatever he is, I kind of think we ought to send him and these others back down the line. Let them palaver with the general. It ain't for us to decide."

"What the hell do you mean?" Raoul thundered.

The popping of rifle fire on the other side of Old Man's Creek cut short the argument. White Bear turned to look.

A moment later Perrault, his horse's legs dripping creek water, came pounding up.

"You were right, mon colonel," he panted. "Those woods are full of Indians. They were sneaking up on the camp."

"These three were supposed to distract us with peace talk while the others snuck up on us," Raoul shouted to his men. "First we'll shoot these Indians. Then we'll hunt down the rest of them."

"It wasn't an ambush!" White Bear cried. "There were only five of them, and they were just there to see what happened to us."

"Well, why didn't you tell us they were out there?" Raoul said, smiling. "We'd have invited them in for a whiskey."

The coonskin-capped men standing near him guffawed.

Raoul's lips stretched in a grimace. "Eli, Armand, let's shoot these three redskins."

Greenglove said, "Raoul--Colonel--I still say you ought to think this over."

"Shut up and do what I say!" Raoul growled. "I want to get this done and ride after those other Indians."

Men were running for their horses and leaping into the saddle brandishing rifles. Without leaders or orders, they rode off across the creek with drunken whoops in the direction Armand had pointed out.

White Bear felt sick as he saw that many of the men who remained were grinning avidly. How, he wondered, could their deaths give such pleasure to these men?

Desperate to find help, he searched the ring of men surrounding him for a face to appeal to. It was already too dark to see expressions clearly. Hopelessness turned his heart to lead as he saw Otto Wegner turn and walk away from the crowd. Even though Wegner had always been Raoul's man and never a friend of his, he felt betrayed.

"All right," said Raoul, staring into White Bear's eyes. "I'll shoot the mongrel. Eli, you shoot the short one with the flat nose. Armand, you take the other one."

"'Vec plaisir," said Armand, his teeth showing white in his brown beard as he brought his rifle up to his shoulder.

White Bear felt the clench of nausea in his middle. Only pride kept him from doubling up and vomiting in his terror.

"Don't do this, please," he cried. "We came to you to make peace."

"They mean to kill us," said Little Crow. "Talk no more to them, White Bear. Do not plead. It is unbecoming a Sauk." White Bear felt a rush of admiration for the strength and calm in Little Crow's voice. Here, truly, was a brave.

Little Crow raised his voice in song.

"In your brown blanket, O Earthmaker, Wrap your son and carry him away. Fold him again in your body. Let his bones turn to rocks, Let his flesh turn to grass. Give his eyes to the birds, Give his ears to the deer. Grow flowers from his heart."

White Bear and Three Horses joined in. There was nothing else to do. White Bear wanted to die singing, not weeping.

What a miserable death this was, even so! And still, he found that the song made his heart feel strong and his terror give way to a stern anger. Murdered because of the simple, stupid bad luck that Raoul's band of militiamen happened to be the advance guard of the long knives. Surrounded by drunken savages--yes, they were the savages, not himself and Three Horses and Little Crow.

Infuriating to think of the love and education his father had lavished on him, all wasted now. All the years of following the shaman's path, ended by a lead ball. Before he had accomplished anything.

And Redbird and Eagle Feather and the baby to come-- If not for them he might accept the inevitable. Step onto the Trail of Souls with grace and dignity. But, even more for their sake than for his own, he did not want to die.

Frantic with fear and anger, he looked for a way of escape. The camp was in the midst of prairie grass almost as high as a man's head. The sun had gone down, and twilight was deepening. But Raoul was walking toward him, holding his pistol high. And beyond him, between White Bear and the grass, was a ring of men with rifles.

All that was left for him was to die with honor.

He raised his voice to sing louder.

_I must put all my strength into this. It is the last song I will sing on earth._

"Stop that goddamned caterwauling!" Raoul shouted.

White Bear watched numbly as Armand Perrault brought his rifle to his shoulder, stepped up to Little Crow, put the muzzle of the rifle to the brave's head and pulled the trigger. The flint clicked down and sparked, and powder sizzled in the pan. The rifle went off with a roar, enveloping the brave's head in a pink cloud of smoke, blood, bits of flesh and bone.

White Bear staggered backward, dizzy with shock and terror.

Three Horses shouted, "I will not die so!" He jerked free from the men who were holding him and plunged into the grass, hands still bound behind him. He ran toward the Rock River.

Rifles boomed.

In his panic, White Bear felt as if all the breath had been knocked out of him. Three Horses might have a chance. He was a short man, and the grass was tall. And light was fading moment by moment.

If White Bear stood where he was an instant longer he would be dead. This was his only chance. No one was holding him. No one was even pointing a gun at him. All of them, even Raoul, were staring after Three Horses. Many of the men had fired and would need time to reload.

Every muscle in his body quivered. He jerked his hands. The rope was still tight around his wrists. Running would be awkward. But Three Horses had shown that it could be done.

_Run!_

White Bear heard the voice in his mind. His own voice or the Bear spirit's? It did not matter.

He ran.

He threw all the strength in his legs into a sudden spring, away from the distracted long knives. He dove into the grass, running away from the river; opposite the way Three Horses had gone. With his arms behind him, he ran with his head and shoulders thrust forward. The grasses and tall plants slapped his face. His feet pounded the earth. His legs pumped furiously. His breath roared in his chest. His heart thundered.

"Hey, the other Injun's gettin' away!"

"Goddamn it, _get_ him!" Raoul's voice, shrill with wild rage.

White Bear's moccasined feet seemed to be flying over the ground. He felt the Bear spirit giving him strength. A curtain of prairie grass fell away ahead of him and swished shut behind him. Even the grass was helping. It was almost high enough to hide him as he ran in a crouch, as his bound wrists forced him to do.

He was already deep into the prairie when he heard the calm voice of Eli Greenglove cutting through the cool, clear air.

"Hold your fire, everybody. He's mine. Got a bead on him."

A moment later lightning struck the side of White Bear's head, sudden and stunning. He heard the rifle's roar just an instant after the bullet hit him. It struck so hard, it left him no strength to scream. His right ear felt as if it had been torn away from his skull. A blaze of agony blinded him. He staggered.

But he was alive.

_Play dead!_

It was the same voice in his mind that had told him to run. Now he was sure it was the Bear spirit.

He shut his eyes, threw himself at once to the ground. The earth came up and hit him in the face as hard as a fist in the jaw. Stunned for a moment, he sucked air into his chest and let it out slowly. He lay perfectly still. His ear felt as if someone had laid a burning torch on it.

"Got the sonofabitch," came Eli Greenglove's flat voice from only a short distance away.

But he was still alive. And no one was shooting at him. His body went limp with relief.

He could not believe that he was still alive and conscious.

_Maybe I am dead. Maybe my spirit will stand up in a moment and start walking west._

Greenglove was supposed to be the best shot in Smith County. Could he really mistakenly think he hit White Bear square in the head? His eyes were better than that.

White Bear heard distant shots.

_Earthmaker, let Three Horses live!_

If Three Horses had not run when he did, White Bear would not be alive now. But White Bear remembered with anguish that he had seen Little Crow die.

_Oh, my brother!_ Even though half dead with pain and terror himself, he mourned the brave who had died before his eyes.

Blood pounded in White Bear's head. Night was growing steadily deeper. By not moving and by taking only the tiniest breaths he might appear to be dead. He lay with his mutilated right ear uppermost. He felt streams of blood running like lines of ants over his scalp and his cheek. They tickled his neck. To lie perfectly still was agony.

White Bear heard Raoul's voice say, "Make sure of him, Eli."

"Damn hellfire nation!" Eli came back. "Don't I know when I've put a man under?"

"It's dark and you've had a lot of whiskey. Make sure of him."

"Pure waste of time," said Greenglove.

White Bear heard footsteps rustling through the grass toward him. The effort of keeping himself from moving threatened to tear his muscles from his bones. His heart beat harder as the steps came closer. Surely Greenglove could hear its thudding. But he froze himself and held his breath as the feet stopped beside him. In stillness was his only hope. The pain throbbed in his ear.

_He'll see that he just hit my ear, and that will be the end._

Should he jump up and run for it? No, Greenglove would not miss a second time. Let the Bear spirit dim Greenglove's sharp eyes. Let him be deceived into thinking White Bear dead. There was no other way he could escape.

He waited for the shot that would smash into his brain.

"Right through the skull," Greenglove called out. "Ain't even enough left to scalp him."

Amazement flooded through White Bear. That couldn't be what Greenglove saw. Unless he was blind drunk. Or blinded by the Bear.

_Or he doesn't want to kill me._

Hadn't he tried to talk Raoul out of shooting the three of them?

White Bear remembered Greenglove swinging the rifle at him the day of his father's funeral. If Greenglove hadn't knocked him out, Raoul would have shot him.

He was too frightened to try to understand it. He was alive, that was all he could be sure of. Alive for a little while longer.

"He's in the happy hunting ground." Greenglove's voice faded a little as he walked away. "Want us to dig a hole for him?"

"We don't bury dead Indians," said Raoul. "Let them rot. Let the buzzards get fat on them." He raised his voice. "Every man mount up and chase the ones there in the woods across the creek. This may be our chance to finish Black Hawk."

"What happened to that other Injun that ran away?" Greenglove asked.

"We got him," a militiaman said. "He made it almost to the river. But he's got enough lead in him now to start his own mine."

Grief filled White Bear's motionless body. Little Crow and Three Horses, both killed. Three Horses' death had given him back his life. Three Horses, the first Sauk to greet him on his return to the tribe. His two comrades surely deserved to escape death as much as he did. Why had he alone been spared? He wanted to cry out, as sorrow for his fallen comrades tore into him, but he drew in his lower lip. He bit down on it hard, clenching his teeth in his flesh until he felt no pain anywhere else, in mind or body.

_Good-bye, Three Horses. Good-bye, Little Crow. I will burn tobacco to the spirits for you._

Boots clumped through the prairie grass all around him. Hoof-beats pounded past him. He feared he would be trampled, and it took back-breaking effort to hold still. But the horses avoided his body.

Gradually the thundering passage of Raoul's men died away to the north.

* * * * *

For a long time White Bear heard nothing but the creek rippling over its bed of stones, the wind in the trees, crickets buzzing on the prairie. Tiny creatures tickled his flesh as they hurried over his face and body. To them he had already become part of the earth.

The burning in his ear settled down to a numb ache.

He heard the crack of rifle shots a long way off. Raoul's men, pursuing Black Hawk's scouts. Must more of his brothers die tonight?

He opened his eyes. It was now very dark; full night had fallen. He was lying on his left side in tall grass. He took a chance and raised his head a little way. Raoul had said he wanted no men to stay behind, but there might be someone about.

He dropped his head and tensed his hands and arms. The rope around his wrists had loosened. He could twist his wrists till the fingers of his right hand reached the knot. Pale eyes knew little about tying secure knots. After working patiently for a long time he freed his hands.

He still felt sick with grief, and did not have the strength to move away from this place where his comrades had died. Why not just lie here and wait for the long knives to come back and kill him?

But he thought of Redbird and Eagle Feather. And the fullness that had appeared in Redbird's belly before they crossed the Great River from Ioway to Illinois. Using his knees and elbows to push himself through the grass, he began to crawl.

Slithering like a snake, his body and limbs flat to the ground, he wriggled along the edge of the creek till he felt sure any men that might be nearby could not see him; then he slid down the embankment. The side of his head throbbed with every movement.

He crossed the creek on all fours, the rocks biting into his palms and knees. Where the swift, cold water was deepest he lowered his head into the water to wash it. Agony exploded in his brain and he came close to fainting. But he forced the muscles of his neck to raise his head, and his arms and legs to push him along, out of the creek.

Soon he was in the shelter of the woods. He stood up and staggered through the shrubbery. Now that he was safer, the pain in his torn right ear pounded harder than ever.

He remembered that Raoul and his hundreds of mounted long knives had ridden toward the place where Black Hawk, with only forty braves, was waiting to learn how his peace emissaries fared.

He had stayed alive so far by luck, but he had no real hope of escaping to his people. Probably some of the long knives who had ridden out with Raoul would come across him, and that would be the end. As he neared the farther edge of the woods, a newly risen half-moon, like a white wickiup in a black field, shone at him through the trees ahead.

He was about to step out on the prairie when he heard the rumble of hooves coming toward him. He stopped in the shelter of the trees. He heard shots, screams of pain and terror.

Against the lighter prairie grass, men on horseback were dark shapes rushing at him from the horizon.

Their voices were high-pitched, fearful. They were crying out in English.

"Make a stand in the woods!"

"No! There's too many of them!"

"Just keep a-running. Follow the river."

White Bear looked about for a hiding place. The moon showed him that he was standing beside a big old oak, with branches low enough for him to jump to.

_Grandfather Oak, will you shelter me?_

Just before he jumped for a branch he noticed that a hollow had rotted out in the base of the tree. It was big enough for him to hide in, but then he would be on the same level as the militiamen. Safer up high.

He forced his tired legs to spring, managed to grip the lowest limb, one hand on each side of it, bark scratching his palms. He pressed the soles of his moccasins flat against the trunk and walked his body up, panting, until he was able to pull himself up over the limb and reach for the next one. The branches were stout and close together, and soon he was high above the floor of the wood.

_You made a ladder for me. Thank you, Grandfather Oak._

Dozens of mounted militiamen were streaming past his tree, galloping right under him. The hoofbeats of the horses and the shouts of the men to one another, pitched high with terror, shattered the night air.

He saw the black shapes of more horses and riders swimming through the prairie grass. Their elated cries were Sauk war whoops.

The braves of his tribe, racing toward him as if to rescue him. A sun rose in his breast.

Rifles boomed and arrows whistled through the air after the fleeing militiamen, and he was thankful that he was up this high. He heard screams. Somewhere nearby a body crashed into shrubbery.

Some long knives, he saw, were trying to go around the woods, but the greater distance they had to travel gave the Sauk riders time to catch up with them. Rifle shots flashed like lightning in the darkness.

Two shadowy figures on foot, so close together they seemed one, stumbled out of the tall grass and pushed their way into the woods, careless of the noise they were making. White Bear held his breath, hoping they would not discover him above them.

A voice below him said, "You got to keep going. They'll catch you and tomahawk you sure."

Now the two men were standing by the tree in which he had taken shelter. He strained his ears to listen.

"Save yourself," said another voice, rasping with pain. "I cannot run. The arrow is under my kneecap. I will stay here and try to hold them off."

_I know that voice, that accent. It is the Prussian, Otto Wegner._

White Bear remembered how Wegner had disappointed him back at Raoul's camp. Now his life was in danger; he deserved that.

"Hold them off? There's hunnerds of them." He'd heard the other man's voice before, but he sounded like so many long knives, White Bear could not be sure that he knew him.

"Well, maybe if I shoot a few of them, you can get away."

At that White Bear felt anger heating up in his chest. So Wegner would like to shoot a few Indians, would he? Being willing to stay and fight while his comrade got away, though--that was worthy of respect.

"Damn! I don't like leaving you, Otto."

"You have a wife and children."

"So do you."

"But you have a chance to get away. I don't. What good is it, two of us dead? Go!"

White Bear heard a sigh. "All right. Here's all my powder and shot. I ain't planning to stop to use them. Remember, keep your head low so you can see them above the horizon. If they ain't wearing hats, you can figger they're Injuns."

"Please, Levi, my wife and my children, tell how I died."

That was who the other man was--Levi Pope, another of Raoul's men.

"I'll tell them you was brave. Make sure they don't catch you alive, Otto. You know what Injuns do to white people. Use your last bullet on yourself."

White Bear felt his cheeks burn with shame. For himself, the idea of torturing a prisoner was unthinkable, and he did not believe Black Hawk would allow it. But he could not be sure. Many men and women of the British Band, he supposed, would enjoy making one of the dreaded long knives suffer.

White Bear heard Pope scurry off through the brush while Wegner, gasping with pain, settled himself in position at the base of the tree.

The boom of Wegner's rifle below him so startled White Bear that he almost fell from his perch. He heard an agonized cry from out on the prairie, saw a brave fall from a horse.

_He killed one of my brothers. I can't let this happen._

He heard quick, metallic sounds of clicking and scraping below him, the sounds of a man loading his rifle.

_In a moment another Sauk warrior will fall._

The racking grief White Bear had felt since the deaths of Little Crow and Three Horses changed all at once into a whirlwind of rage. He remembered Little Crow, bound and helpless, his head blown apart. He pictured Three Horses' body, torn by bullets. In his whole life up to now he had never killed a man, but surely now, after what he had suffered and seen, he had to kill.

_Kill him how? He is armed and I am not._

But Wegner was in dire pain. White Bear could jump out of the tree on the Prussian's back and bring his foot down hard on the knee with the arrow in it. That should hurt Wegner enough to loosen his grip on his rifle, so that White Bear could get it away from him and shoot him with it or smash his skull.

More Sauk braves were riding closer, and Wegner must be taking aim in the darkness down there. White Bear scrambled down the ladder of tree limbs he had climbed.

As he reached the lowest limb, moonlight showed Wegner rolling over, his eyes gleaming. The rifle barrel swung toward him.

_He heard me._

White Bear leaped.

The flash blinded him for an instant. In a suffocating cloud of powder smoke he hit Wegner's chest with knees and hands, an impact that knocked the breath from him. Wegner screamed in pain, a high, womanish sound that made White Bear's ears ring more than the shot had.

The Prussian, under him, battered him with the rifle, trying to turn it so that he could hit him with the butt. White Bear had both hands on the stock, and tried to kick Wegner's knee as their bodies bucked and thrashed at the base of the oak.

White Bear remembered that militiamen often carried hunting knives in shirt pockets. Gripping Wegner's rifle with one hand, he reached down the front of the Prussian's leather jacket. Wegner's eyes widened in fear, and he thrust frantically with his rifle. White Bear felt the handle of a knife and pulled it free. The broad steel blade twinkled, reflecting moon and stars.

Now. One thrust into his enemy's throat.

White Bear slid the point under the bandanna around Wegner's neck and pressed it into the soft place just above the collarbone. The man's eyes seemed about to pop out of his head. His thick, dark mustache was drawn back from his clenched teeth.

Trying to make himself kill the man, White Bear felt as sick in his stomach as he had when he was waiting for Raoul's bullet.

And he remembered again, the night after Raoul had driven him out of Victoire and offered fifty pieces of eight for his death, what he had heard Otto Wegner say.

He did not push the knife any farther. But he realized that Wegner would still kill him, given any chance. He held himself ready to strike.

"Drop your rifle," he whispered. "Slide it away from you. Make a sudden move and I'll cut your throat."

Wegner did as White Bear told him.

He said, "You are keeping me alive to torture me."

If he brought Wegner back to the Sauk, White Bear thought, the warriors would want to kill him slowly. Again he felt that hot shame.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked.

"You are Raoul de Marion's nephew, Auguste. How can you be still alive? I saw Greenglove shoot you."

White Bear ignored the question. "Three of us came to you under a white flag to talk peace, and you shot us."

"It was wrong."

"You say that now, when I hold a knife on you. Why didn't you speak up then?"

"Colonel de Marion is my commanding officer. Kill me, damn you. Is it not your duty?"

"A warrior does as he pleases with his captives."

White Bear heard all around him, on the prairie and in the woods, the war cries and whistle signals of the Sauk braves. It would not be long before someone discovered White Bear crouched on top of this man, holding a knife point to his throat.

Wegner said, "If I could, I would kill you."

"Yet if you had caught me the night my uncle offered fifty Spanish dollars for my death, you would have let me go."

"How do you know that?"

It amused him to answer Wegner's question by saying, "I am a shaman--a medicine man. We know things."

"Dummes Zeug," Wegner muttered. "Rubbish," he said louder, but his eyes wavered.

White Bear said, "I am a healer. That is my work. I will not kill you unless I have to. Give me your word you will not attack me, and I will take the knife from your throat."

Wegner closed his eyes and sighed. "You are civilized. Maybe I can trust you."

White Bear could not help laughing. "You saw today what civilized men do to their prisoners. You can trust me because I am a Sauk."

"And why do you trust me?"

"Because I think you are a man of honor."

"All right. You have my word."

White Bear slowly drew back and stood over Wegner. The Prussian sat up, then groaned. In the moonlight White Bear saw tears streaming uncontrollably from his eyes. White Bear had him sit with his back to the hollow tree. He brought his face close to the knee. With his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the half-moon's rays were enough to show him that Wegner had broken off the end of the arrow, and the rest of it protruded from his kneecap. The arrow had gone into the joint. It hurt White Bear just to look at it.

"I can try to pull this out," White Bear said.

"Go ahead."

"Give me that cloth around your neck."

With Wegner's bandanna White Bear wiped the blood off the arrow to make it less slippery. It would have been easier if Wegner had not broken the arrow. The protruding end was only long enough to let White Bear grip it with one hand. He wrapped his left hand around his right to give him a tighter grip, and pulled with all his strength.

Wegner fell over on his side in a faint.

_Thank Earthmaker he didn't scream._

The arrow had not moved at all.

When Wegner came around, White Bear said, "There is nothing I can do for you. You need to get back to your own people."

Wegner's eyes widened. "You would let me go?"

"I have to. Or else kill you. If our warriors got you I couldn't stop them from killing you. Climb into this hollow in the tree and stay there till morning. By then, I think, our braves will be far from here."

He helped Wegner to stand and boosted him up into his hiding place. Wegner let out a groan as he drew his wounded leg inside the opening.

_Take care of this pale eyes, Grandfather Oak._

"I will never forget this," said Wegner.

"Then remember my people."

He took Wegner's knife and rifle. He might have left the Prussian a weapon to defend himself, but he thought that would be going beyond kindness into foolishness.

He heard Sauk victory shouts coming from the other side of Old Man's Creek, where Raoul's camp had been. Little though he wanted to go back there, it seemed the surest way to safety. Carrying the rifle with one hand, the knife in his belt, he made his way through the woods to the creek.

* * * * *

Soon he was back in the center of what had been the long knives' camp, at the place where he had nearly been killed. A small fire burned here. Near it lay two bodies stretched out. The head of one was covered with a cloth. That, White Bear thought, must be Little Crow. Beside him lay Three Horses, a blanket draped over his short body, his face with its flattened nose uncovered. Standing around the bodies were half a dozen warriors.

By all rights he ought to be lying there too. He put a hand up to his ear, forgotten in the excitement of the encounter with Otto Wegner. The pain had settled to a dull pulsing. Gingerly, he felt the wound. The middle part of the ear was gone. The intact upper and lower parts were covered with crusted blood. He had washed the wound once in the creek. He must wash it again and bandage it.

_Greenglove did that so blood would flow and it would seem to anyone who looked at me in the twilight that I'd been shot in the head. He was trying to save my life. Why?_

One day, White Bear hoped, he would meet Greenglove and find out why he had spared him.

_And that other time--when he hit me with his rifle just as Raoul was about to shoot me--did he do that, too, to save my life?_

A solitary warrior sat before the fire, a long scalplock adorned with feathers hanging down the side of his head. The firelight gleamed on his shaven head and glittered on the beads around the rims of his ears. The bowl of the pipe he smoked was part of a steel tomahawk blade; the stem of the pipe was the tomahawk handle. He looked up, and his eyes widened when White Bear stepped into the firelight.

"White Bear!" came Black Hawk's gravelly voice. "Are you truly alive or do you come back from the Trail of Souls?"

White Bear felt an immense warmth as the firelight showed him Black Hawk's teeth flashing in one of his rare smiles.

"I am alive," said White Bear.

"I am happy! I am surprised!" Black Hawk cried, waving his pipe. "I thought all three of you were dead."

Sudden elation dizzied White Bear, and the flesh of his back prickled as he realized what it meant to see Black Hawk sitting quietly smoking his pipe in the center of Raoul's camp. Victory! The long knives routed. How had it happened? Black Hawk might have made a terrible mistake leading the Sauk across the Great River, but at that moment White Bear loved him.

Owl Carver stepped out of the shadows carrying a bundle of goods he had been gathering from the tents of the long knives. He dropped his bundle to throw his arms around White Bear.

"My son is restored to me."

White Bear sat down at the fire.

"How did you escape?" Black Hawk asked.

White Bear explained how he had played dead when Eli Greenglove claimed to have hit him. He said nothing about meeting Otto Wegner. He felt good about having spared Wegner's life, but he was not sure Black Hawk would understand. In fact, White Bear was not sure he himself understood.

Owl Carver made White Bear hold his head close to the firelight while he examined the wound, muttering.

"Truly, the things the long knives do pass all understanding," he said. "It was dark. You were in grass. Maybe he missed."

"He missed on purpose. He has great fame as a marksman; he sees very well. He came and stood over me, and must have known I was alive."

Owl Carver searched through his bundle of loot and found a Frenchman's kerchief and tied it around White Bear's head to protect the wounded ear.

Chills of exultation rippled up White Bear's spine as he looked around and saw Black Hawk's braves plundering the very camp where Raoul's men had swarmed and had killed his two companions at sunset.

"Earthmaker has given us a mighty victory," he said.

"We never expected it," said Owl Carver. "We were camped on the Rock River north of here when Iron Knife rode in after sunset to say that you three had been killed, and also two of the braves who had gone with him. He told us that a whole army of long knives was riding toward us."

Black Hawk said, "I was angry. They had killed my messengers of peace. I did not care that there were hundreds of them and only forty of us. I wanted vengeance for the blood they had shed."

White Bear laughed. "I heard them crying out as they fled your attack. They thought there were hundreds of _you_."

"The Hawk spirit flew with us, blinding them and striking fear into their hearts," said Black Hawk.

Owl Carver said, "And the spirits in their whiskey befuddled them too."

Black Hawk said, "I was surprised to see them turn tail and run. I thought Americans were better shooters and fiercer fighters than that. They outnumbered us many times over, but they showed no fight at all."

The Winnebago Prophet lumbered out of the darkness and sat down at the fireside opposite Black Hawk. The silver nose-ring lying against his mustache glittered red.

"It is well that you are here, Flying Cloud," said Black Hawk. "We must look along the trails that lie ahead of us."

White Bear turned away in disgust. After the Winnebago Prophet had misled Black Hawk so badly, how could he still rely on him?

A gruff voice said, "See, Father, I have lifted more hair from our enemies." White Bear looked up. Wolf Paw was standing over them, holding up two hanks of hair, each with a bloody, circular patch of flesh attached to it. White Bear hoped that one of those scalps did not belong to Otto Wegner.

Black Hawk stood up and seized Wolf Paw's shoulders. "My heart is big when I see my son is so mighty a warrior."

Sitting down beside his father, Wolf Paw stared at White Bear, and White Bear had to explain all over again how he came to be still alive.

After a moment of silence Black Hawk spoke. "Until tonight, there was no blood spilled between the long knives and us. But when we tried to surrender, they shot our messengers." He gestured to the bodies near the fire and to White Bear. "And now we have killed many of them."

White Bear felt himself trembling with rage. He remembered Raoul coming toward him, grinning, pistol raised--right on this spot--and he prayed that now his uncle might be lying dead somewhere on the prairie. An arrow in his back, killing him as he fled Black Hawk's warriors. A hole in his scalp, and his hair dangling from some brave's belt.

_O Bear spirit, O Turtle, O Earthmaker, let it be so!_

Then his fury faded away and became fear as he realized that he had just done, in his mind, a thing more terrible than murder. A man might call on the spirits for the strength and skill to fight an enemy--but to direct the power of the spirits against another man, no matter how wicked, was forbidden. He prayed no harm would come to him because of it.

Black Hawk said, "We have no choice now. The long knives have forced war upon me."

White Bear spoke up quickly, before Wolf Paw or Flying Cloud could call for war, as they were certain to do.

"It was my uncle, the brother of Star Arrow, who ordered us three to be killed. He has hated our people all of his life. He especially hates me. A different long-knife war chief might have opened his arms to us. Now that Black Hawk has shown the long knives that they will be hurt if they come against us, let us offer peace again. I am ready to go again with a white flag to talk of surrender with other long-knife war chiefs."

Black Hawk made a flat, rejecting hand gesture. "You have seen what happened. Pale eyes warriors would not let you get close enough to talk to their chiefs."

A warrior came over to the fire, holding a tin cup. He offered it to Black Hawk.

"The long knives left five barrels of whiskey, but they are almost empty."

Black Hawk turned the cup over, letting the whiskey soak into the dirt.

"Pour that poison on the ground," he said. "Whiskey made the long knives so foolish that when they looked at one of our braves they saw ten."

Wolf Paw said, "They abandoned wagonloads of food and ammunition. Even some rifles."

"We will need them," said Black Hawk. "Without more provisions we cannot go on."

After the warrior went away, Black Hawk gave his pipe tomahawk to Wolf Paw to smoke. Owl Carver and the Winnebago Prophet brought out pipes of their own. Owl Carver offered his to White Bear, who declined it. Given what he had been through this day, and troubled by the fear that Black Hawk was determined to plunge his people into worse calamities, White Bear felt his stomach could not stand tobacco smoke.

Flying Cloud broke the thoughtful silence. "If forty Sauk warriors could chase away two hundred long knives, then all the Sauk warriors can chase away the long knives' whole army. I say call out the six hundred warriors who wait at our main camp. We will drive the long knives all the way back to the Great River."

White Bear wanted to answer the Winnebago Prophet with angry words, but he felt light-headed and nauseated. He decided to wait and see what the others would say.

"The Prophet of the Winnebago speaks well," said Wolf Paw. "My blade is hungry for more long knives' scalps."

_Of course_, thought White Bear.

Owl Carver said drily, "We routed some drunk pale eyes who hardly deserve to be called long knives. Let us not waste any more of our young men's lives. Let us follow the northward curve of the Rock River to its very headwaters, far beyond any pale eyes' settlements, then travel westward toward the Great River. If we can cross the Great River safely, I do not think the long knives will chase us farther."

The five men sat in silence. A sudden thought struck White Bear. _This_ was why Earthmaker had ordained that he be educated among the pale eyes--so that he could help his band understand how pale eyes thought. If they kept going north along the Rock River they would soon cross the northern border of the state of Illinois. That might seem to them to mean very little, but it could mean much to their pursuers. The country where they were headed did not belong to any state; it was part of a large land of many waters that was called the Michigan Territory.

Eagerly he said, "We may be able to escape the long knives by going north. Most of the long knives who are pursuing us were called out by the Great Father of the Illinois country. Once we are out of Illinois, maybe they will not follow."

Wolf Paw grunted, clearly insulted at the thought of their not being pursued.

The Prophet bestirred himself. "Many of my Winnebago brothers dwell in that country to the north. They will join us in fighting the long knives."

_Like your people from Prophet's Town, who've been deserting us?_ White Bear thought.

A warrior set a long knives' saddlebag before Black Hawk, who opened it. The war chief pulled out an expensive-looking black wool suit and some white silk shirts with ruffles. Finally he took out two books bound in red and white leather. White Bear leaned over for a closer look.

"Bundles of the pale eyes' talking paper," said Black Hawk.

Wolf Paw said, "They are worthless, Father. Keep the clothing and put the talking paper on the fire."

But Black Hawk handed one of the books to White Bear. "What do the talking papers say to you, White Bear?"

White Bear picked up a book and read on the spine, _Chitty's Pleadings, Vol. I_. He opened and saw close-packed type, his eyes skimming over many legal terms in Latin. White Bear wondered whether the lawyer who owned these books was still alive. At the sight of books his heart gave an unexpected lurch. He felt a longing to be not in a plundered enemy camp on the prairie, but in a library, with books, pen and paper. The feeling took him by surprise. It had been many months since he had missed the pale eyes' world. A few pages of _Paradise Lost_ now and then had satisfied any hankering for what they called "civilization."

"These papers tell about the pale eyes' laws," he said. "It is sometimes said that they have no magic. But there is powerful magic in their books and in their laws. It is the magic that binds them together."

The Prophet said, "The pale eyes' paper is bad medicine."

Black Hawk held out his hand, and White Bear gave him the book. It pained White Bear to think Black Hawk might throw it into the fire.

White Bear had seen many white leaders--mayors, congressmen, military officers, once even Sharp Knife himself, Andrew Jackson, the President of the United States. He had learned about them in school and read about them in newspapers. He felt Black Hawk was a match for any of them. More than a match in some ways; he was stronger and healthier than any white man his age that White Bear had known. What pale eyes of nearly seventy years could personally lead a cavalry charge against an enemy outnumbering him by ten to one and rout them? Black Hawk's great weakness was one that he shared with most people, whatever their race or their position in life: if he wanted a thing to be true, he believed it. That was why last winter he had listened to the Winnebago Prophet and not to White Bear.

Now White Bear hoped Black Hawk would show his intelligence by respecting the value of the book. Black Hawk frowned at the leather-bound volume, weighing it in his hand. He picked the other book up with his other hand.

"They are heavy. But since there is magic in them, I will keep these talking-paper bundles by me. And I will bring them with me when I speak in council."

White Bear breathed a small sigh of satisfaction.

Black Hawk laid the books down, one on each side of him, and put one hand on each book. He sat like that for a time, staring into the fire.

"I have done with trying to surrender to the long knives," he said, and it seemed to White Bear that his face became a fearsome mask in the firelight. "They have left me no choice. Yes, we will retreat from them. But we will not run like hunted deer. We will send out war parties, big and small, in every direction. We will lie in ambush on every trail. We will fall upon every settlement. We will attack every traveling party of long knives. No pale eyes north of the Rock River will be safe from us. Until we have crossed the Great River, we will give the pale eyes no peace."

At Black Hawk's words White Bear felt that an ice-cold hand had laid itself flat on his back, between his shoulder blades. With those words Black Hawk was condemning to cruel death hundreds of people--pale eyes and his own.

And one of the largest settlements north of the Rock River was Victor.

"What is the use of more killing?" he said. "It will only madden the long knives. They will come after us till they have destroyed us."

"I have decided," Black Hawk said. "We must fight back. We must be avenged. They stole our land. They burned Saukenuk. They burned Prophet's Town. We asked them for peace, and they killed us. Black Hawk will show them that they cannot do this and go unpunished."

"So it shall be!" the Winnebago Prophet growled.

_And after that the long knives in their turn will have to be avenged._

Hopelessness lay like a heavy sodden blanket on White Bear. He saw the old warrior's determination, and said no more.

He could only pray that Earthmaker spare those he loved. On both sides.

Black Hawk stood up. "Let us go back to our camp."

Wolf Paw said, "Father, I want to stay here till tomorrow with a party of warriors. There are dead long knives scattered all over the prairie, but we cannot find them in the dark. In the morning we can take their scalps and their weapons."

His words stopped White Bear as he was about to turn away from the fire. Otto Wegner might still be hiding in that hollow tree, waiting for dawn.

Hurriedly, White Bear said, "I, too, will stay. I will help Wolf Paw search for the dead."

What could he do if Wolf Paw and his men captured Wegner? Perhaps not save the Prussian's life, but at least persuade the warriors to kill him cleanly and not torture him.

_Haven't I done enough for Wegner? I want to go back to Redbird._

But his impulses were a shaman's impulses, and the harder to explain they were, the more he trusted them. It was important, for some reason, that he stay at Old Man's Creek a while longer.

Owl Carver looked surprised. "After all you have suffered, do you not want to return to your family?"

White Bear thought quickly. "There is a chance that murdering uncle of mine is one of those lying on the ground somewhere around here. It would be good to see him dead."

Owl Carver grunted. "I will tell Redbird that you are safe."

Fear and exertion had exhausted White Bear beyond ordinary fatigue, and he had barely enough energy now to roll himself in a blanket by the small fire. Unconsciousness hit him instantly.

In the morning he watched, sickened, as Wolf Paw not only scalped a long knife who lay dead in the tall grass, but slashed open the man's woollen trousers and sliced off his manly parts. Blood spattered over innocent prairie flowers of violet and yellow, and a swarm of flies buzzed around Wolf Paw, waiting to settle on the dead man when he moved away.

"Why do you do that?" White Bear demanded. "The Sauk have never done such things to a dead enemy before."

"The Winnebago Prophet says that the long knives are planning to kill all Sauk men, and then bring up black men from the country to the south to mate with our women. That way they hope to breed a race of slaves. This is our answer to that."

The story sounded absurd to White Bear. The pale eyes in Illinois didn't even keep black slaves. Just more of the Winnebago Prophet's babblings. But Wolf Paw firmly believed it.

At a sudden drumming of hooves, Wolf Paw and White Bear both looked south at Old Man's Creek. A Sauk warrior splashed through, waving his arm.

"Long knives coming!" he shouted.

Wolf Paw picked up two rifles, his own and the dead man's. They had found eleven bodies scattered along the edge of the Rock River, none of them Raoul's.

White Bear was disappointed, but not surprised, that Raoul had managed to escape. Surely he deserved killing more than any of his followers who did die. But White Bear had not stayed behind just to see Raoul dead.

In fact, it was a relief that the spirits had not answered White Bear's forbidden prayer.

He kept looking for movement out of the corner of his eye, trying to see whether Otto Wegner was anywhere about. But he saw no sign of him.

"How many long knives?" Wolf Paw said to the scout as he rode up. "Can we fight them?"

The scout's hand slashed a no. "Too many. Fifty at least. All on horseback. And they have a wagon with them."

"Coming to collect their dead," said Wolf Paw. "They will not like what they find." He grinned down at the corpse he had just carved.

"Better mount up and ride away from here," said the scout. "If they see us, they will chase us."

"They will not chase us," said Wolf Paw. "They will be afraid of an ambush." His smile broadened. "Maybe we will give them one."

At Wolf Paw's shouted command the six warriors who had remained with him moved into the trees north of Old Man's Creek, the same trees where White Bear had taken refuge last night. White Bear tried to see the tree where he had hidden Wegner, but the woods looked different in daylight.

Wolf Paw ordered his party to mount their horses, tied up amidst the trees, and ride north to Black Hawk's camp. But though he swung into the saddle, he did not ride off with them. He sat on his white-spotted gray pony facing the direction the long knives would be coming from. A screen of low-hanging maple branches and wild grape vines concealed him. White Bear, on a brown mare captured in Raoul's camp last night, drew up beside him.

"Why are you staying?" White Bear asked.

"I counted only eleven dead long knives," said Wolf Paw. "I want to make it twelve." He put the hammer of his flintlock on half-cock, poured fine-grained priming powder on the pan from a small flask, and closed the fizzen over it.

White Bear sensed that something very important was about to happen and that he must wait with Wolf Paw.

"Why do _you_ wait?" Wolf Paw demanded. "You have never killed anyone."

"Here they come," said White Bear, choosing not to answer him.

The two horses pulling the wagon, a flatbed with railed sides, halted at the creek. Most of the long knives dismounted and began to search through the remains of Raoul's camp. A few others rode across the creek. Wolf Paw raised his rifle.

The long knives cried out to one another and cursed as they found the mutilated bodies of their comrades.

_Now they hate us more._

The long knives had rolled-up blankets tied across their horses' backs. They opened the blankets and used them to pick up the dead. One pair of men on foot was already carrying a blanket-wrapped body across the creek to the wagon.

One long knife rode slowly toward them. He was so tall that his legs dangled down from his horse almost to the ground. He came to the body Wolf Paw had just been stripping, and climbed down. He took off his broad-brimmed gray hat and stood holding it in both hands as he looked down at the body.

White Bear heard the click of a flintlock hammer being drawn back to full-cock. Wolf Paw sighted along the barrel.

The militiaman raised his head, and White Bear saw tears glistening in the morning sun as they ran down his cheeks.

White Bear knew this man.

A gaunt brown face with strong bones, deep-set gray eyes, a young face aged by grief. In White Bear's vision of last winter this man had a black beard; now he was clean-shaven. But this was the man the Turtle had shown him.

A sudden shout from the woods made both White Bear and Wolf Paw jump with surprise.

"Help! Help me, please!"

White Bear saw Otto Wegner stagger from the trees about a hundred feet to his right. He was trying to run toward the tall man.

He limped badly and let out an "Oh!" of pain with every step.

The tall man set his hat back on his head and ran toward the Prussian, who fell forward on his face in the grass a short distance from the edge of the woods.

Wolf Paw swung the rifle toward Otto, but before he could fire, Otto fell and was almost obscured by the tall grass. The blue-black rifle barrel lifted toward the man going to his aid. White Bear heard Wolf Paw draw a deep breath through his nostrils and saw his finger tighten on the trigger.

Even as the hammer fell and the spark set the powder sizzling in the pan, White Bear thrust his hand out. In the instant between the pulling of the trigger and the firing of the rifle White Bear pushed the barrel off target.

The rifle went off with a boom and a flash and a puff of blue smoke.

The lanky man jerked his head around and stared into the trees where Wolf Paw and White Bear sat hidden on their horses. He shouted and pointed. The long knives spread out between the creek and the woods brought their rifles to their shoulders. Some of them jumped on their horses.

"_Why did you do that?_" Wolf Paw shouted. It no longer mattered that the long knives could hear him.

He raised his rifle as if to hit White Bear with the butt end, as Eli Greenglove had done many moons ago.

"Come on," said White Bear, ignoring the threat and kicking his horse's sides to start him galloping through the woods. Wolf Paw, who had no time to reload, thundered behind him, uttering shouts of inarticulate rage.

White Bear was certain Wolf Paw would strike at him with rifle butt or tomahawk or knife before they cleared the woods, but Wolf Paw was wholly bent now on escape.

_Now I understand!_

The realization hit White Bear so suddenly and surprisingly that he sat up in his saddle. A tree limb flying toward him nearly hit him in the face. He ducked under it at the last moment.

This was why he had wanted to stay behind with Wolf Paw, even at the cost of delaying his reunion with Redbird, even at the risk of his life. It was not just to protect Otto Wegner. The Turtle--or perhaps even Earthmaker himself--had ordained it. If he had not been there Wolf Paw would have killed that tall, thin man who came to bury his fallen comrades.

White Bear remembered the rest of his vision--hundreds of blue-coated long knives charging and dying. Would this man send those long knives or their enemy into battle?

It was impossible to puzzle out. He might never know the answer.

They rode over the prairie on the other side of the woods, heading for Black Hawk's camp. The long knives following them had dropped away, doubtless afraid, as Wolf Paw had predicted, of an ambush.

Still expecting to feel a tomahawk blade split his spine, White Bear slowed down.

"So!" Wolf Paw shouted. "You are still a pale eyes!"

"No," White Bear tried to explain. "It was a vision I had. I had to save that man."

"A vision," Wolf Paw sneered. "I should kill you. If you were not a shaman-- A warrior needs all his luck. But, since your pale eyes people are so precious to you, I will kill _them_. You heard what my father said. I will lead the war party that goes to your pale eyes' home. And this time you will not be along to save anyone."

They spoke no more. Though the morning sky was bright, a cloud of dread settled over White Bear. What would become of Nicole, Grandpapa, Frank and all the people of Victoire and Victor who had been his friends? At the prompting of some spirit, he had saved the tall, thin man, a stranger to him. And he had saved Otto Wegner, one of Raoul's hired men.

Was there _nothing_ he could do for his own loved ones?

15

The Blockhouse

The devil's reek of gunpowder seared Nicole's nostrils. Arrows flew over the trading post palisade to fall in the courtyard, some quivering upright in the ground. She heard the piercing shrieks of the Indians above the steady crackling of rifle fire.

She stood in the open doorway of the blockhouse, her body tense with fear as she watched Frank, up on the catwalk above the main gate. He crouched behind the pointed logs of the palisade. Frowning with concentration, he was slowly reloading his rifle.

"Look at Frank up there," Nicole said to Pamela Russell, who stood beside her. "Oh, God, I hate to see him out in the open. Frank," she said, though she knew he couldn't hear her, "get into one of the towers!"

"Burke too," Pamela said. "Why do they do it?" She pointed to the east side of the palisade where her husband, a stocky man wearing spectacles, stood on the catwalk. With the Indians attacking the front gate, he was left alone to guard the east parapet. The rest of the men, ten of them, were at the front part of the palisades, banging away.

_Twelve men. Twelve men who know how to use rifles. That's all we've got._

And four were Nicole's husband, two of her sons and her father.

She gasped.

She saw a loop of rope fly through the air above the eastern wall and catch on one of the sharpened logs. A moment later a dark head crowned with feathers appeared above the palisade. And Burke Russell was looking the other way.

"Burke, look out!" Pamela screamed.

Burke heard that. He swung around, raising his rifle to his shoulder.

"Please, God!" Nicole cried.

The Indian leaped over the parapet. He seemed twice as tall as Burke, with bulging muscles that gleamed with oil. He wore only a loincloth, and his walnut-brown body was painted with red, yellow and black stripes. His scalplock flew out behind him as he rushed Burke, swinging a war club with a glittering metal spike protruding from its thick end.

Burke's rifle went off with an orange flash, a boom, a cloud of smoke.

The Indian wasn't stopped. The war club came down on Burke's head. Nicole heard the hollow thud and heard herself cry out.

Pamela screamed. "Oh, no, oh God, no! Burke! Burke!"

Burke's glasses flew from his face, hit the catwalk and caromed off to the ground. With his free hand the Indian giant seized the rifle as Burke crumpled. He raised both arms over his head, rifle in one hand, bloodstained club in the other, and shouted his triumph.

Nicole's stomach heaved.

Pamela fell against her, fainting. She threw an arm around Pamela and eased her to the ground, and she saw half a dozen more Indians waving rifles and tomahawks leap over the eastern parapet and land on the catwalk near Burke Russell's body.

"Frank! Behind you!" she screamed.

Frank turned, took aim and fired at the Indians. He ran for the nearest corner tower.

Nicole didn't see whether he hit any of the Indians. She dragged Pamela out of the doorway with the help of Ellen Slattery, the blacksmith's wife. They got Pamela sitting on a bench by the wall. Her thick chestnut hair tumbled forward as Nicole pushed her head down to revive her.

_I don't know why I'm doing this. It's a mercy she's unconscious._

_Frank!_

Her heart in her throat, Nicole pushed herself to her feet and ran back to the door. An arrow whizzed through the open doorway. It clanged off the iron muzzle of the cannon that stood in the center of the blockhouse hall.

_I'd make a mighty big target for those Indians_, she thought, the wry little joke helping to keep her from crying in her terror.

She peered around the edge of the doorway to see a fury of brown bodies on the southern catwalk where Frank had been standing. In the center of the catwalk, one brave with a rooster's comb of red-dyed hair shouted and brandished a steel-headed tomahawk, sending parties to hammer at the doors of the corner towers with clubs, tomahawks and rifle butts. Black rings painted around his eyes and yellow slashes on his cheekbones gave him a terrifying look.

Even in the midst of her fear and hatred she could see that his body was magnificent. The most beautiful man's body she'd ever seen.

To her relief Nicole saw no dead white men anywhere--except for Burke Russell, who lay still, his head a bright red mess, one arm hanging down over the edge of the eastern catwalk. She looked at him quickly and then looked away, feeling sick again.

What made it even more of a shame that Burke had died on the palisade was that the men never planned to hold it. They just wanted to delay the Indians a bit. Here in the blockhouse was where they hoped to be able to hold out.

With God's help.

"Oh, Burke! Oh, my Burke!" Pamela Russell was awake and screaming. Ellen Slattery looked helplessly at Nicole.

Nicole felt heartbroken for Pamela, but she had to let her be. There was too much to do. She ran through the people crowded into the main room on the ground floor of the blockhouse. There must be four hundred people here, mostly women and children, she thought.

_And Raoul's got over a hundred men from Victor with him. God knows where._

Here they had more rifles than men. Two dozen rifles leaned against the stone wall. Many families owned two or three rifles, and people had grabbed them as they fled to the trading post.

_Well, a woman can ram a ball down a muzzle and pull a trigger too._

And miss, she thought, her heart a ball of ice. She hadn't seen one Indian hit yet.

Nicole spoke loudly to the women around her. "The Indians will be shooting down from the catwalk at our men when they try to get back here to us." She started to load a rifle. "We've got to shoot at the Indians and drive them to cover."

She had not held a rifle in her hands since marrying Frank, who would not have a firearm in the house. But Elysée de Marion had taught his daughter how to shoot, and she had not forgotten.

Piled by the rifles were flannel bags, powder horns and five small barrels, all full of gunpowder. In that frantic dawn, after fleeing here, the men and women had formed a relay line to rush the bags and barrels of gunpowder from Raoul's stone magazine to the blockhouse.

Feeling a bit more hopeful, Nicole noticed lead ingots lying beside the ammunition--probably from the lead mine that Raoul had shut down just before leaving Victor. And she saw scissor-shaped bullet molds. They had some of the things they needed.

If only they knew how to use these things.

"Who knows how to mold bullets?" she asked the group of women who'd been standing silently, watching her.

"I know," Elfrida Wegner said. Of course, thought Nicole. Her husband had been a soldier, over in Europe.

"Take some others and show them how to do it," Nicole said. "We're going to need all the bullets we can make."

Elfrida and two other women carried the lead bars and the molds to the huge fireplace at the rear of the hall.

From the hundred and more women crowded into the hall Nicole collected ten volunteers who knew something about rifles, five to shoot and five to load.

She called two of the bigger boys to carry baskets of shot upstairs. But carrying powder--that was dangerous. She couldn't make herself ask anyone else to do that.

She filled a bushel basket with sacks of cartridges, added a powder horn on top, swung it up to her shoulder and charged up the stairs, terrified all the way.

"Judas Priest, you're _strong_, Missuz Hopkins," said one of the boys carrying shot. It gave her a warm feeling to hear that; she figured most people thought of her as just plain fat.

She still couldn't believe she was going to do this. Going to try to kill people. She picked out a slot in the log wall and pushed her rifle barrel through it. She could see a bit of the courtyard below. White men were falling back from the towers. Indians were coming at them. All of them were moving slowly. White men backing up a step at a time. Indians matching them step for step. A dance. The brave with the red crest was still standing on the catwalk above the front gate, waving his tomahawk and shouting orders. The caller.

Nicole pulled open the drawstring of a bag of cartridges, bit off the end of a paper cartridge and poured the black powder down the muzzle of her rifle. She detached the ramrod from the stock of the rifle and wrapped a bullet in greased cloth, ramming it into place down the tight, rifled barrel. She thanked Heaven she hadn't forgotten how to do this.

She dropped the fine grains of priming powder from the horn into the powder pan, pointed her rifle at the red-crested brave and sighted down the black barrel at the center of his chest.

Her finger quivered on the trigger. She couldn't kill a man. Her eyes blurred.

If she didn't kill him, he might kill Frank. Or Tom or Ben. Or Papa. She remembered Burke Russell's smashed, bloody skull.

She had to do it. Her vision cleared.

She took deep breaths, steadying herself.

She heard the click of the hammer as she pulled back the trigger. The hammer snapped forward, the flint hit the fizzen, the spark struck the powder pan. The rifle went off with a thunderclap that made her ears ring, and her target was obscured by cream-colored smoke in front of the rifle port.

When the smoke cleared, the brave was still standing on the catwalk.

She clenched her fist and whispered, "Damn!"

The red-crested Indian glanced down to his right, as if he had heard a bullet strike the palisade wall there, then looked straight at her. She knew he couldn't really see her. She was hidden behind a log wall, and a hundred feet or more separated them. Even so, it seemed to her that his malevolent stare met her eyes.

She handed her rifle back to Bernadette Bosquet, a cook from the château, who gave her a loaded one.

Down in the yard, the Indians were charging the fur shop and the inn. The white men, retreating, were converging on the front door of the blockhouse.

She saw Elysée and Guichard emerge from behind the inn. The two old men moved slowly, Elysée limping heavily, both walking backward. Guichard fired a shot at the six or more crouching Indians coming at them. Elysée, his walking stick in his left hand, raised his pistol. Guichard worked quickly with powder horn and ramrod to load his rifle. Elysée fired, bringing down one of the Indians. Both men took a few steps backward as powder smoke enveloped their attackers. The Indians darted forward, and Guichard raised his rifle. The Indians hesitated. Elysée stepped behind Guichard and tucked his stick under one arm to reload his pistol. At a word from Elysée, Guichard fired, and a red man with a rifle crumpled. Guichard, reaching for his powder horn, stepped backward behind Elysée, who now kept the Indians covered.

Nicole felt her legs tremble and a lump form in her throat as she watched the fearless precision with which her father and his lifelong servant carried out their retreat. Those two old men shouldn't have to fight at all, but today every man was needed.

She saw Frank and her two oldest sons, Tom and Ben, running across the yard to the front door. They vanished under the overhang of the blockhouse's second story, made of logs. Thank God they'd made it to safety! She felt faint and took a deep breath.

She handed her rifle to Bernadette. "Here, you shoot. I've got to see my husband and sons."

"Merci, madame. I thought you'd never give me a turn."

By the time Nicole got downstairs, Frank and the other men had crowded into the hall. The heavy front door of the blockhouse was shut and barred, throwing the stone-walled lower floor into near-darkness. Two men were shooting through the rifle ports on either side of the door. Women were lighting oil lamps and candles and setting them on shelves around the edges of the room.

Women whose men were here were holding them tight. Nicole threw her arms around Frank, then opened them wider to take in Tom and Ben as they ran to join their mother and father.

She eyed the boys. Their faces were rosy and their eyes bright with excitement. They'd be men in another year or two. And after today, she thought, Frank would have a hard time keeping them away from rifles.

_If we live through this day._

As she felt Frank strong and alive against her, a sudden intense desire to make love to him came over her. She was shocked at herself.

But she'd seen one man struck down already and knew that before sundown she or Frank might be dead. The realization of how precious Frank was to her had brought her body to passionate life.

She heard the shrieks and yips of the Indians in the yard of the trading post.

Hard-eyed David Cooper said, "We can't hold 'em off just shooting from the ground floor. We need shooters at every rifle port upstairs."

He nodded approvingly when he saw Elfrida Wegner and three other women molding bullets by the fire they had just kindled.

He called, "All right, four men and four of you women take rifle ports down here. The rest of you come up to the second story."

Gathering up extra rifles, five men and thirty or more women followed Cooper upstairs, where he organized them to shoot, each shooter to have someone to reload and carry ammunition.

Nicole might herself have volunteered to shoot through one of the upstairs rifle ports, but she chose to load for Frank. She felt it might be important to Frank that he be the one to shoot and she stand by, helping him. She would rather be at his side, anyway, than across the room somewhere shooting.

Frank pushed his octagonal rifle barrel out through his port. The port was only about six inches wide and three inches high, and the log wall was a foot thick or more, but Nicole still trembled at the thought that an Indian might manage to hit Frank with an arrow or a bullet. Working to load his second rifle, she tried not to think about that.

Thank God they had David Cooper here, someone who seemed to know what to do. She remembered how Cooper had spoken up the day Raoul had forced Auguste out of the château-- _Is this how you do things in Smith County?_ It was Cooper who had thrown open the trading post to the first refugees from the Indian raid, people from Victoire, shortly after dawn. He and Burke Russell. Burke. Her heart sank.

Nicole's fears turned to Victoire and to the outlying farms. The Indians had attacked so suddenly, whooping on horseback across the prairie, that there was just time for the people in Victor and some from the château to crowd into the trading post. Many of the children and some of the women gathered into the main room were still in their nightgowns. But missing from the crowd downstairs were people Nicole knew. Reverend Philip Hale and Nancy Hale, Clarissa Greenglove and her two sons by Raoul, Marchette Perrault, many others. Fear twisted her belly as she thought of what the Indians might have done to them.

Cooper had assigned himself to a gunport in the east wall of the blockhouse. Nicole went to him.

"Mr. Cooper, could I have a look out there?"

"Certainly, ma'am." He sighed. "That used to be your home, that mansion on the hill, didn't it?"

Poor Burke Russell, she saw, was still lying on the eastern catwalk. Three dead Indians were sprawled there now to keep him company, though. She was a bit more hardened to such sights than she had been just a short time ago. But what she saw in the cheerful June sky beyond the palisade made her body go clammy-cold with horror.

A rope of thick, black smoke coiled upward, twisting this way and that, spreading till it seemed to stain the entire eastern quarter of the sky. The palisade was too high for her to see the fire itself, though red tongues of flame shot up now and again in the midst of the smoke. But she had no doubt at all about where the fire was.

"They're burning Victoire!" She started to cry.

She felt Frank's hand patting her shoulder, and turned.

"I was hoping the people of Victoire might be able to hold out," she said.

Frank put his arm around her. "Nicole, I'm sorry, it's pretty likely the only people left alive from Victoire are already here. Lucky most of them could outrun the Indians and get here."

"But, Frank, what's happened to the rest of them--Marchette, Clarissa--are they all dead?"

Frank didn't answer. He just stood there holding her.

Grief weighed on her like a cloak of iron. If she hadn't had Frank to lean against, she would surely have fallen to the floor. She looked out again and saw other, more distant columns of smoke. The Indians must have come from the east and struck every farmhouse they came across. They had surely destroyed Philip Hale's church. Poor Nancy!

David Cooper said, "Sometimes people manage to hide. The Indians can't look everywhere."

The weight on her back and shoulders seemed to lighten with that thought.

"Yes, the lead mine, for instance," Frank said. "A perfect place."

"Oh, they can't have killed all those people," Nicole said.

_Please, let Marchette and Clarissa and Nancy and Reverend Hale be alive._

She desperately wanted to pray. She wanted to believe that a loving God was looking down on Victoire and Victor, protecting her friends and the people she had grown up with.

For the next hour or more Nicole thought of nothing and did nothing but bite cartridges and dump powder, ram home bullets, put one rifle into Frank's ink-stained hands, take the other rifle and load it. Her mouth was sore from biting the heavy paper. Her arms and hands ached from making the same movements over and over. The incessant shooting all around her deafened her, the stink--and, worse, the taste--of gunpowder turned her stomach, and her hands were blacker with the stuff than Frank's ever were from his printing press.

Frank was firing less and less often. He leaned against the log wall, wiping his arm across his forehead.

"We've kept pouring lead into the courtyard. That's driven them under cover. But they broke holes in the corner tower walls, and they're shooting back at us from there." An Indian yelp caught his attention, and he peered out again.

"Now, would you look at that!" he said. Nicole put her head next to his at the rifle port.

A blizzard in the trading post courtyard. Flecks of white filled the air between the inn and the blockhouse. She saw brown arms shaking slashed mattresses and pillows out the windows. Feathers floated up to the gunport. More feathers slowly drifted down to dot the fresh June grass with white. She heard yells and laughter from the inn.

_They'd cut me open as soon as they'd cut open a pillow, and think that was just as funny._

"They're getting drunk," Frank said. "On all the liquor in Raoul's tavern. Must be looting the town too."

_They'll burn our home. Everything will be gone, the beds and the dishes, the mirrors, the bureaus, the spinning wheel, the clock, the plates and silverware, our clothes, our books and old letters, children's toys, the spices, the cradle I rocked all our babies in. The machines and carpentry tools, and, oh, please, God, not Frank's printing press!_

_Stop it, Nicole. You're blessed! Blessed that they attacked at dawn when all the children were in the house and not scattered all over the countryside, and now they're safely in here. Blessed that your husband is standing here beside you and not dead on the palisade parapet like Burke Russell._

But even as she thought of things to be thankful for, she remembered what might happen to them in the next few hours.

An Indian charged out of the front door of the inn. He was waving a curving Navy cutlass. He ran at the blockhouse, screaming. His steps wavered, though, and Nicole guessed he must be full of whiskey.

Still she was terrified. What if everyone missed him and he somehow got in and others followed?

"Look out," Frank said, and gently nudged her away from the port. He pushed his rifle out and fired.

"I hit him, but he isn't falling."

Getting back into the routine, Nicole took Frank's rifle and loaded it. Rifles were booming all along the front of the blockhouse as men tried to stop the Indian with the cutlass. Frank's second rifle went off.

"He doesn't want to die," said Frank. "He's full of bullets." She heard pain in his voice, and as she handed him his freshly loaded rifle, Nicole saw that his upper lip was beaded with sweat. She hurt for him. He hated killing, and now he was forced to try again and again to kill this man.

Frank aimed and fired again. "There. I got him. He's down."

Frank pulled his rifle in and handed it to Nicole. As she started to reload it, he leaned against the wall. Slowly his knees bent and he slid down till he was sitting on the floor. She put the rifle down and crouched beside him, stroking his arm, her heart aching.

He covered his mouth with his hand. His body jerked, but he managed to hold in the vomit. After a moment, breathing heavily, he took his hand away from his mouth.

"Oh, Jesus! What am I doing?"

Nicole put her arms around him, and his head fell against her breast.

"Excuse me, Miz Hopkins," said a voice above her. She let go of Frank as David Cooper squatted down beside them and laid his hand on Frank's knee.

"Hopkins, you're all right. I was with Harrison at Tippecanoe Village, and when the Indians came at us out of the woods, I don't believe more than half the men fired their rifles. There's really few men find it easy to kill. There's times we got to."

Frank wiped his eyes and laid a hand on top of Cooper's. "Thanks."

Cooper said, "If you still feel bad, just think about what they'd do to your wife and kids if they got in here."

Frank put a hand on the floor and pushed himself to his feet. "Yes, as long as I think about my family I'll be able to shoot." There was a bitterness in his voice, and Nicole felt she knew what he was thinking. How cruel the irony, that love for his family could make him into a killer.

"Here they come again!" a woman down the line shouted.

Again and again Nicole heard the rapping of bullets into the log wall near Frank's head as he fired steadily at Indians charging from the trading post buildings they had captured.

Frank turned from the rifle port to hand Nicole an empty rifle and take a loaded one. An arrow flashed through the narrow opening, missing his head by inches.

_Thank you, God!_

The defenders kept up a steady fire until the Indians withdrew again into the captured buildings. Nicole and Frank took turns watching through the rifle port. What was happening to their home at this moment?

The lull stretched on. Nicole went downstairs to look for her children, began picking her way through the crowd sitting on the floor of the blockhouse hall.

Stretched out on a bench was a woman whose name she didn't know, a newcomer to the settlement. The right side of her checkered dress was soaked with blood from shoulder to waist. Moaning faintly, the woman seemed half conscious.

"Arrow," said Ellen Slattery, who was pressing a folded cloth against the woman's shoulder.

Nicole shuddered and patted Ellen's back and went on. She saw Tom and Ben manning ground-floor gunports. Abigail, Martha and John were playing around the cannon, pretending to shoot it at the Indians. The three youngest, Rachel, Betsy and Patrick, were with a group gathered in the stone-walled rear room Raoul used as his office. They were singing hymns. Pamela Russell, she saw, was also with the hymn singers, tears running down her face. As Nicole went over to the fireplace to join the women molding bullets, she heard:

"My God, how many are my fears, How fast my foes increase! Their number how it multiplies! How fatal to my peace."

_That must be the first time_ those _walls have ever heard a hymn._

Nicole took a turn at bullet making, ladling the silvery molten lead from a kettle over the fire into the tiny hole in the hollowed-out mold, opening the mold with its scissor handles and dropping the still-warm ball into a big basket. Another woman took each ball and filed away the bit of waste metal formed in the hole through which the lead was poured.

"Injuns!" a man yelled. The women and children crouched down on the floor, and Nicole hurried upstairs to help Frank.

After rifle fire from both levels drove back the latest assault, Frank said, "We get a few each time they attack, but it's not enough. I'm sure I saw over a hundred of them when I was on the parapet."

"We've no food and very little water," said Nicole. "They could just wait us out and we wouldn't last very long." The only water they had was in buckets the townspeople had brought into the blockhouse with them.

David Cooper said, "We've got to be ready for them to make one big rush for the blockhouse. They'll try to set the place on fire, so we better save as much water as we can. Ration it out."

Nicole's body broke out in a cold sweat at the thought of fire; she remembered all the gunpowder they'd relayed into the blockhouse.

_Enough to blow us all up._

And then she remembered too, what had happened to Helene twenty years ago at Fort Dearborn.

_Maybe being blown to bits would be a better way to go._

"And here's just the man to take charge of rationing the water," said Cooper.

Nicole turned to see her father climbing up the stairs, pulling himself along on the banister and leaning on his walking stick. As he reached the top of the stairs Frank took his arm and helped him over to sit on a wooden box near the rifle port.

Elysée said, "One of the women, Mrs. Russell, insisted on taking my rifle and standing guard in my place. I will be just as happy not to have to fire at any red men for a while. I keep thinking I might shoot Auguste."

Nicole gasped. "Auguste! Papa, he would never be out there."

"Perhaps not. Have you spoken to anyone who had news of my grandchildren?" Elysée asked her.

Nicole was about to say "They're all here" when she realized whom he meant.

"Raoul and Clarissa's children?" She shook her head sadly. "No, Papa. Anyone from Victoire who isn't here--we don't know what happened to them."

Elysée sighed. "Poor little things. In all the years since they were born, I got to speak to them only once or twice."

The cry of "Here the Injuns come!" broke in on them again.

David Cooper gave Elysée brief instructions on rationing water, and the old man limped downstairs as the firing began again.

Nicole, loading and reloading Frank's rifles with numb arms and mind, heard firing from all around her. The Indians were coming from every direction. Arrows and an occasional bullet whistled in through the ports, but no one was hit. Smoke drifted through the second story of the blockhouse, making her eyes water.

The Indians withdrew again. As the firing died down, Nicole was thankful to see that the powder smoke that had filled the second floor blew up toward the roof and vanished. Looking up, she saw that there was a space nearly a foot high between the top of the log wall and the roof. The roof rested on big vertical timbers, its overhang covering the opening. Men could climb up there, she supposed, and shoot down; the attackers would have to be standing directly below them to shoot back.

There was a heap she didn't know about this fort. In the years since Raoul had built it she'd hardly ever had reason to set foot inside--the last time was when she and Frank had appealed to him to leave men behind to protect the town. Now her life depended on how well Raoul had built it, and it was bitter medicine to swallow.

David Cooper left his rifle port to talk to Frank.

"It's only a few hours till sunset," Cooper said in a low voice, "and I have a hunch they'll try one big attack to take this place before dark. If they come all at once, we don't have enough rifles to stop them."

His tone was matter-of-fact, but his words struck terror into Nicole's heart. She took Frank's hand and squeezed it. It felt cold as a dead man's.

Cooper went on. "I keep thinking about that cannon downstairs. You know, whatever we might say about Raoul de Marion, he did set this place up to be defended. I figure that cannon must be in working order."

"Do you know how to fire a cannon?" Frank asked.

Cooper shrugged. "I've stood near the artillerymen a time or two and watched them, but never thought to memorize what I saw. I couldn't even say how much gunpowder to use. If we put in too little, we'll waste our chance. If we put in too much, we could blow ourselves all to hell."

Nicole said, "I'd rather that than face whatever hell the Indians have in store for us."

Cooper looked at her with his hard eyes and nodded. "Indians won't get you, Miz Hopkins. I promise you that. Let's go take a look at that thing."

Frank, Cooper and Nicole, chilled but grimly reassured by Cooper's remark, cleared away the children who were straddling the cannon's four-foot-long black barrel, and the women who were sitting against its wooden carriage. Cooper stood frowning at the gun.

He sighed, and it sounded to Nicole like the sigh of a man about to step off a high cliff.

"Well, let's load 'er up."

He went over to the side of the room where the flannel bags of gunpowder were piled up, and he picked one up, holding it at arm's length as if it were a rattlesnake. He carried it back to the cannon and slid it into the muzzle. From the carriage he unstrapped the ramrod, a pole with a wad of cloth wrapped around its end, and used that to push the gunpowder down.

"Let's add another bag of powder," he said to Frank.

Women and children formed a circle to watch. Nicole pictured what the cannon would do to all the people in this room if it blew up, and shut her eyes.

After pushing a second bag of gunpowder down the muzzle, Cooper said, "What we need now is canister shot that'd spread all over the place and puncture a lot of Indians. I remember there was canister shot in the powder magazine, but it didn't seem all that important this morning, and we didn't have time to move it over here. Now we'll have to make do with what we've got. Give me a load of rifle bullets."

Someone handed him a basket full of lead balls, and he poured them into the cannon's throat and pushed them down with the ramrod.

"I don't want to use up all our rifle shot, but seems to me there's room inside this thing for a lot more." He turned to the onlookers. "Everybody spread out and bring me anything made of metal that'll fit in here."

Into the cannon's maw went two chains, a padlock, a handful of knives and forks. And a dozen lead soldiers, sent to war by the small boys who owned them.

"Here, Mr. Cooper, use these." Pamela Russell pushed her way through the crowd holding out a canvas bag. Her eyes were bloodshot, the lids swollen and red.

Cooper frowned. "What's that?"

"A bag of pieces of eight from Raoul de Marion's safe. When Burke knew he was going to be in the fighting, he gave me the trading post keys to hold for him." She stopped, red-faced and choking, then continued. "Burke didn't know anything about fighting Indians. My husband is dead because de Marion left us almost defenseless. He doesn't deserve to have this silver."

Feeling Pamela's agony, Nicole went over to her and put an arm around her back and hugged her. Pamela's body was stiff, unresponsive.

Cooper's gaze traveled over the people gathered around the cannon. "Any of you folks see anything wrong with us doing this?"

"We always use Spanish dollars out here on the frontier," said Elysée with a smile. "The U.S. Government simply didn't mint enough coins. I'm sure the Indians will accept them."

"Well, that defense will do for now," said Cooper, grinning as he slit the bag with his hunting knife and poured the glittering silver disks into the cannon. "Going to make some Indians rich today," he said. "Now, we need something to touch it off with. I don't see any linstock around here."

"A candle?" Frank found a long white candle that would burn for about an hour and lit it from another one mounted on a wall.

"Should work," said Cooper. "Keep a lighted candle by the cannon at all times. We have no way of knowing when they'll decide to make their big attack."

Pamela Russell pulled free of Nicole and gripped Cooper's arm.

"Let me touch off the cannon," she said.

There was something frightening, Nicole thought, in the avid light in her eyes.

_Is that how I'd be if Frank were killed?_ Nicole wondered. _So utterly vengeful?_

Cooper said, "Sure you can do it?"

Pamela whispered through tight lips, "Oh, yes. Yes, I am!"

"All right," said Cooper. "You can touch it off. But look out the Indians don't shoot you when we swing the door open."

Frank, Cooper and two more men kicked the chocks out from under the cannon's four wooden wheels. The men strained against the gun, and for a moment Nicole was afraid they wouldn't be able to move it. Then, grudgingly, it rumbled over the puncheon floor until Cooper set the four chocks back under the wheels. The cannon rested just a few feet back from the front door.

Looking through a port on the west side of the hall, Nicole saw the sun still high in the west. This was the month when days were longest.

_And this has been the longest day of my life_, she thought.

As the afternoon passed with agonizing slowness, Pamela Russell had to light yet a second candle, and then a third. She sat rigid in a chair beside the cannon, holding her candle upright, saying nothing, staring fixedly at the blockhouse door.

Nicole noticed a beam of sunlight from a west-facing rifle port lighting up the smoke and dust that drifted through the main hall of the blockhouse. The shaft of light looked like a solid bar of gold. She looked through the rifle port and was almost blinded by the sun just above the humped silhouettes of hills across the Mississippi.

She heard the Indians screaming, and her stomach turned over.

"Fire arrows!" someone yelled.

Nicole's heart stopped. If the Indians managed to set fire to the blockhouse, the hundreds of people who had taken shelter here would be driven out to be slaughtered.

She ran to the slot in the stone wall where Tom was standing with his rifle ready. Looking past her son's head, she saw an arrow with a cloth-wrapped, burning tip arc up from the courtyard. It disappeared, and she thought it must have hit the second-story log wall somewhere above her.

"Upstairs!" Cooper shouted. "Fill your buckets from the water barrels and come on." His sweeping finger included a bunch of excited smaller boys, who followed him up the stairs. Nicole hurried after them.

Cooper and the other men boosted boys with buckets to the top of the log walls. The boys pulled themselves up to the open space Nicole had noticed before under the overhang of the roof. Leaning out, sheltered, the boys were able to see where the fire arrows had stuck, and dumped water on them.

Cooper grinned. "De Marion built well. The ground floor's stone and the roof is covered with sheet lead. Injuns'll soon tire of this game."

The fire arrows became fewer. They stopped coming, and there was a breathless silence in which time did not seem to pass. Then Cooper led the way back down to the ground floor.

High-pitched Indians whoops sent a new chill through Nicole.

A rifle went off--Tom, at the gunport to the left of the front door.

"Hold your fire, boy!" Cooper called, watching from the other side of the doorway. "Let them come."

Nicole went to stand beside her oldest son again and look out. The front gate of the palisade was open and Indians were streaming in. Brown bodies painted with yellow and red and black slashes, arms waving knives, clubs, tomahawks, bows and arrows, rifles. More were tumbling out the front door of the inn. A flicker of red light caught her eye. Flames shot out the open front door of the fur shop. They were burning all those valuable pelts. Raoul would lose a lot today.

And not just money, she thought, recalling burning Victoire. Money would be the least of Raoul's loss. To her surprise she felt a moment's sorrow for the brother she had come to despise.

Twenty or more Indians came through the gate carrying a huge black log, its front end afire. The rest of the Indians gathered around them. All together they ran at the blockhouse door, the glowing, smoking tip of the log in the forefront.

"Everybody get as far away from this damned cannon as you can!" Frank shouted. People scrambled away, leaving an empty space around the six-pounder in the center of the floor. Some ran into the strong room and some scurried upstairs. Only Cooper, Frank and Pamela Russell stood by the cannon. Nicole stayed where she was, moving her body so that she was between Tom and the cannon.

_Whatever happens will be what God wants to happen._

"Open the door!" Cooper ordered.

Tom Slattery, the blacksmith, swung the door open, and Nicole saw some of the Indians hesitate, then rush forward. She wondered if they could see the cannon in the shadowy interior of the blockhouse.

"Shoot!" yelled Cooper.

Carefully, deliberately, Pamela Russell lowered her candle to the cannon's touchhole.

"Fire in the hole!" Cooper called out.

Nicole heard the sizzle of gunpowder from where she stood.

The boom of the cannon hit Nicole's skull like a mallet. A huge white cloud belched out through the open door, and the sharp reek of burnt powder filled the air. The gun jumped right over the chocks set behind its wheels and flew back about six feet.

In the aftermath of the cannon's roar came whoops of delight from nearly a hundred small boys in the blockhouse.

Then Nicole heard the Indians screaming again, but now they were screams of agony, not war cries. A fierce joy rose in her as she stood in the open doorway and saw the yard of the trading post transformed into a vision of Hell. Through the haze she saw dark bodies sprawling on the ground. Some of the Indians writhed in the dust of the yard, some were motionless. Others were frantically pulling the fallen back, dragging them by the arms or legs. The log they were going to use to batter down the door lay smouldering, abandoned in the yard of the trading post.

As she took in more of the sight of blood and torn bodies and severed limbs, Nicole felt ashamed that she had rejoiced at first. Sickened, she turned away.

"Fire your rifles!" David Cooper yelled. "Shoot, shoot, shoot! Keep them on the run. And shut that damned door."

"Let me at the port, Maw," Tom demanded.

The rifles banged away, sounding puny in Nicole's ears after the roar of the cannon. Finally Cooper ordered an end to the shooting.

"If we let 'em drag their dead out of here, they may be in a mood to leave."

Nicole waited in dread, wondering whether the Indians would come again. The sunset rays pouring through the ports on the west side of the blockhouse slowly faded, leaving the main room dark. People lit more candles. David Cooper directed the reloading of the cannon.

The group in Raoul's office were singing hymns again, and many people sitting around the hall joined them. Nicole sat beside Pamela Russell on a bench and took her hand, and soon Pamela began to talk quietly. She told Nicole things about Burke, the books he enjoyed reading, his favorite dishes, jokes he used to tell her.

"I always envied you, Nicole, with so many children. We wanted children so much, and we never got any. And now we'll never--"

Nicole tried to think of something to say, but everything that came to her sounded foolish to her mind's ear. Looking at Frank standing by a port, she thought, _I have been blessed, and Pamela hasn't been. But why?_ That had to mean something. She couldn't think what.

"It helps me, when life is hard, to believe that God has a plan," she said, patting Pamela's hand. "His plan is like a painting that's so big we can only see dark spots or bright spots without knowing what it all means. But I think one day he'll take us up with him, where we can see the whole picture and understand it."

"Nicole," Frank called. She gave Pamela's hand a squeeze and went to see what Frank was looking at through the rifle port.

Even at this distance she could hear the roaring of the flames. Sparks shot up past the palisade, and a red glow filled the sky.

"They're burning the town," he said. "Our home is gone. Our shop."

She turned back to see Pamela, sitting on the bench, a lost look on her pale face. She thought of the people who had not managed to reach the shelter of the trading post. She put her arm around Frank's waist and pressed herself against him.

"You and I are alive and all of our children are alive," she said. "God has blessed us."

16

Yellow Hair

"Wolf Paw has come back!"

White Bear felt a hollow in his stomach as the cry ran through the camp. Wolf Paw had vowed to bring death and destruction to the pale eyes such as they had never known before.

Before he left, Wolf Paw had held a ritual dog feast to insure success. He had hung one of his own dogs from a painted pole by its hind legs and disemboweled it alive, asking Earthmaker's blessing on the war party. Then his wives, Running Deer and Burning Pine, had cooked the dog and served bits of the meat to the braves and warriors who would follow Wolf Paw on this raid. If he would choose one of his cherished dogs to be sacrificed, what would he do to the people of Victor?

For days White Bear had held himself rigid, hardly able to eat, lying awake at night, waiting for Wolf Paw's war party to come back. What horrors would he have to face now?

Women and children ran to surround the returning braves and warriors. White Bear saw Iron Knife on horseback towering above the crowd, his huge arms lifted triumphantly. From each fist dangled a scalp. Beside him was Wolf Paw, a blue cloth, stained red with blood, wrapped around his left shoulder. Wolf Paw's right hand was raised high, gripping three long hanks of hair with disks of white flesh hanging from them. More braves rode behind them, also holding up scalps. Scalps, scalps, scalps.

White Bear staggered. He could not take his eyes from them. The hair was of many different colors--light brown, gray, dark brown, black. Some of the locks were very long, and must have been taken from women's heads.

Could Wolf Paw be holding Nicole's hair, or Frank's? Could it be Grandpapa's?

Heart pounding, White Bear forced himself to push through the crowd. He heard cattle lowing and horses neighing in the distance. Questioning shouts and cries of greeting.

A scream of agony froze him. A woman's voice. And then another, from another part of the crowd, piercing his eardrums. And still more screams. He realized what was happening. Women were learning that their men had not come back.

Scalps and screams. Wolf Paw's gifts to the British Band. White Bear worked his way past women calling out anxious questions.

He suddenly came upon his mother leading a wailing pregnant woman out of the crowd.

"She heard that her husband was killed, and she has gone into labor," Sun Woman said, her face hollow with her own pain. White Bear squeezed her arm briefly as she passed him.

When he got close to Wolf Paw he saw a bound woman's body draped face down across the back of the brave's gray pony.

She wore a ragged blue dress. Her feet were bare, dirty and covered with scratches. She did not stir. From this side of the pony White Bear could not see her face. A sickening suspicion gripped him, and he hesitated, not wanting his fear confirmed.

Wolf Paw, frowning down at him angrily, was still wearing his yellow and red war paint, faded by the ride of several days.

"I raided the town where you lived, White Bear. I took forty head of cattle and twenty horses from your pale eyes relatives."

"I am glad to hear of the cattle," said White Bear. "Our people are starving."

Wanting, and not wanting, to know who Wolf Paw's captive was, he walked around the brave's horse for a better look at the bound woman.

"We killed many pale eyes," Wolf Paw said. "They will never forget Wolf Paw's raid. Tonight we will have a scalp dance for the warriors who have become braves."

White Bear stopped walking. People he knew and loved on both sides had died; he had to learn which ones.

After a moment he collected himself. "And will you dance for the braves and warriors you did not bring back?" It was a cruel thing to say, but Wolf Paw deserved it. Wolf Paw did not answer.

White Bear had to fight himself to keep from crying aloud in anguish. He no longer had any doubt who the captive woman was who hung head down over the spotted pony.

One yellow braid was still tied with a blue bow. The other had come undone, and loose locks of blond hair hung down, almost brushing the ground.

He bent to see Nancy's unconscious face.

Coming up beside him Redbird asked quietly, "Do you know this woman?"

"Yes," he said. It all came back to him--last summer at Victoire, the meetings on the prairie, that night in the cornfield beside her father's house when she had begged him to "know" her. Had he missed her? Yes; he had to admit that. Did he love her? He was not sure, but, happy as he had been with Redbird, he often thought of Nancy and wondered if she still longed for him as she had when he left her.

How, without hurting Redbird, who stood next to him watching as he stared down at Nancy, could he explain what this white woman meant to him?

He reached out to untie the rope looped around Nancy's back that held her to Wolf Paw's horse.

"Do not touch her," Wolf Paw growled. "She is for me, and only for me."

No, White Bear thought, he could not let Nancy be kidnapped and raped by this man. Whatever bloody things had been done at Victor, this he must prevent. He readied himself to fight Wolf Paw if he had to.

And how would he explain _that_ to Redbird?

Wolf Paw slid down from his horse and, one-handed, untied Nancy. Fresh blood was soaking through the cloth around his shoulder--a strip of blue gingham torn from Nancy's dress, White Bear now saw.

Weak from his wound, Wolf Paw could not lift Nancy and carry her. Regardless of Wolf Paw's warning, White Bear would not let her fall. He took her from Wolf Paw and eased her to the ground. Her eyelids were fluttering. Redbird, bending awkwardly with her swollen belly, helped him. Their eyes met, and she looked searchingly into his.

A woman's voice cried, "The pale eyes squaw is _not_ for you, Wolf Paw. I will not have her in my wickiup." Running Deer, the older of Wolf Paw's two wives, strode up to Wolf Paw, thrusting her face into his. Behind her came Burning Pine, the younger wife, a papoose strapped to her back, looking equally determined.

"My wives will do as I say," Wolf Paw grumbled, but there was no strength in his voice.

Burning Pine said, "Your wives and children are hungry. We are eating roots and bark. We have no food for any pale eyes."

For now, Black Hawk's band was hidden away on an island of dry ground in the heart of a great marsh north of the headwaters of the Rock River, well into the Michigan Territory. But there was scarcely any game or fish here, and they could not stay in this place much longer.

Wolf Paw said, "I have brought cattle."

"Then the people will eat well because of my husband," Running Deer said. "But the pale eyes woman will not need to eat." Running Deer turned to the crowd. "Many women lost their husbands in Wolf Paw's raid. It is right that the women avenge themselves on this pale eyes."

White Bear's back crawled with gooseflesh. Running Deer meant for the women of the band to torture Nancy to death.

For as long as they could make her pain last, it would take their minds off their hunger and sickness and sorrow. And their own fear of death.

It must not happen. But how could he prevent it?

Feeling like a drowning man being swept away on rapids, White Bear watched Running Deer and Burning Pine lift Nancy from the ground and carry her off, with her feet dragging. Wolf Paw and most of the braves who had returned with him followed.

Wolf Paw's wives pulled Nancy through the band's collection of hastily built wickiups and lean-tos. They brought her to a tall elm tree growing up in the center of the camp. The tree was dying. Its bark had been stripped to cover a wickiup.

By the time White Bear caught up with the crowd around Nancy, her eyes were wide open, but unfocused. Running Deer pushed her against the trunk of the elm tree and drew a knife. With swift, angry slashes, Wolf Paw's senior wife stripped away Nancy's dress and the chemise under it. Nancy stood naked before the tribe. Her eyes were still open and unseeing. She made no attempt to cover herself. She did not seem to know what was happening to her. White Bear's skin crawled with shame at the sight of her degradation.

Women laughed. "Her skin is like a frog's belly!"

Men stared greedily.

Running Deer took a coil of rawhide rope and lashed Nancy to the tree, and White Bear felt the muscles of his neck and shoulders knotting till they ached. He could scarcely bear to look at Nancy, who hung in her bonds, her eyes closed again.

He did not care if they killed him. He would not let them do this. He would not allow it to go on a moment longer.

He put his hand over the five claw scars on his chest and spoke to his spirit self. _O Bear spirit, give me the power to move the people to mercy._

He felt strength surge into his chest and arms, and raising his medicine stick, he strode forward.

When he was only a foot away from Nancy, her eyes opened suddenly, huge and turquoise, staring into his.

"Auguste!" Her voice and face were full of terror.

It came to him with a shock that he must look frightful to her. The man she had loved was transformed into a vision of savagery--painted face, a shoulder-length mane of hair, silver earrings, shell necklace, his scarred chest bare, holding high a painted stick adorned with feathers and beads. And what would she make of his right ear, torn in two by Eli Greenglove's rifle ball? After what she had already gone through, the sight of him must be yet another impossible shock.

"I'm going to help you," he said in English. "Try not to show that you're frightened." Useless advice, he thought. Still, it would be better for them both if the people respected her. There was nothing a Sauk despised more than a show of fear.

He pointed his medicine stick at Running Deer and said sternly, "Stand aside." She glowered at him but stepped back.

Last winter Wolf Paw had snatched this stick from his hand. But that was before White Bear had nearly been killed carrying Black Hawk's message of peace to the pale eyes. That was before they had begun to see for themselves that White Bear had spoken truly when he warned that Black Hawk's hope of a great alliance to defeat the long knives was an illusion. And that was before many of the people had felt his healing touch. He knew how to do things, because of his training with pale eyes doctors, that Owl Carver and Sun Woman did not.

Now White Bear's medicine stick had much more power than a few moons ago. Even at this moment when anxiety for Nancy gnawed at him, he felt pride in his power.

He turned to face the crowd, standing protectively in front of Nancy.

The braves and warriors stared at him, puzzled and angry.

"Is this how you show your strength and courage, by torturing a helpless woman?" he demanded.

Wolf Paw said, "She is a trophy honorably taken in battle."

White Bear pointed to Running Deer. "Wolf Paw meant to take the pale eyes woman into his wickiup for his pleasure. But his wife will not let him. So he pretends that it is his pleasure to let the women torture her."

Feeling stronger than ever, White Bear watched Wolf Paw's face darken. He might be able to outfight any man in the tribe barehanded or with weapons, but not with words. This moment, thought White Bear, began to repay Wolf Paw for shaming him last winter before the council.

_And he will have to let me tend his wound. That, too, will repay him._

Wolf Paw stood glowering at White Bear, his eyes glazing, his breath coming in gasps. He must be on the verge of fainting from the pain, White Bear thought.

"I captured the pale eyes woman," Wolf Paw said. "I give her to the tribe."

"Are we fighting the pale eyes so we can steal their women?" White Bear demanded. "As long as we torture and kill their people, the long knives will think of us as wild animals that must be destroyed. I have lived among the pale eyes, and I tell you that we must show them that we are worthy of their respect."

Wolf Paw grumbled, "We will win their respect by killing them. I have killed many."

_Many at Victor, no doubt_, White Bear thought, feeling as sick as Wolf Paw looked, hating him for his ignorance.

He addressed the whole gathering. "Since Wolf Paw has given this woman to the tribe, let the tribe treat her honorably," White Bear said. "The day will come when we will have to sit down with the long knives and talk."

"Not if we win!" cried Wolf Paw.

"Win?" White Bear laughed scornfully. "Does Wolf Paw still imagine that thousands of long knives are going to surrender to our few hundred Sauk and Fox warriors? We can win only if they decide to stop fighting us. If we make them hate us, they will never stop fighting until all of us are dead."

_It is probably already too late for talking with the long knives, but if I hold out the hope of peace, it may save Nancy's life._

He let his gaze travel over the people who stood in a ring around him. The dark eyes looking at him were mostly sullen and suspicious, because their shaman was telling them what they did not want to hear. No one seemed ready to challenge him, but he knew that if three or four braves were to overpower him and kill Nancy, the crowd would let it happen. His belly muscles knotted with tension.

But, as Wolf Paw had said, they needed all their luck, and it would be best not to tempt the wrath of the spirits by defying their shaman.

_Redbird, you must not fail me._ He gave his wife a look of appeal before he spoke further. Behind Redbird Iron Knife stood like a great oak tree. At least there was no threat to him in Iron Knife's face.

White Bear took a deep breath and his heart fluttered. His life and Nancy's depended on what happened next.

"I take the pale eyes woman under my protection," he said. "Redbird, untie her."

Redbird hesitated for just a moment, her eyes wide, and White Bear held his breath. If, moved by jealousy, she refused to obey him and sided with Running Deer, there was no hope for Nancy.

At that thought a resolve arose in him, dark and powerful as a storm on the Great River, and he filled his lungs and squared his shoulders.

_If they try to kill her, they will have to kill me first. If she is doomed, so am I._

If he stood by and let the people torture Nancy to death, he would hate himself forever.

Redbird lowered her eyes and began to undo the rope around Nancy. Iron Knife helped his sister. Relief brightened in White Bear, like sunlight on the river after a storm. Relief, and a surge of love for his wife. With Iron Knife siding with him and Wolf Paw weakened by his wound, no brave would dare to challenge him.

Eagle Feather was standing in front of the crowd, and White Bear felt proud that his son was seeing the people treat him with respect. That might balance out the memory of that shameful night of the woman's dress.

"Eagle Feather, run and get one of our blankets."

Nancy looked at White Bear with huge, frightened eyes, saying nothing. Terror must have struck her dumb. But he was relieved to see she was able to stand on her own. Redbird put a hand on her shoulder to steady her.

"You're going to be all right," White Bear said in English. "We will take you to my wickiup."

He turned to Wolf Paw. "Come with me. I will see to your wound." Wolf Paw's brown skin looked clammy and bloodless. He had ridden for four days with a bullet in his shoulder. It must come out at once, or it would kill him. But White Bear took pleasure in giving orders to Wolf Paw.

Eagle Feather came with a blanket, and Redbird wrapped it around Nancy.

Most of the people scattered, many to mourn their dead, others to hear the stories of the braves and warriors who had come back with the war party, still others to see the horses and to butcher some of the cattle they had brought back. A small crowd followed White Bear, the yellow-haired prisoner and Wolf Paw.

As Redbird and Iron Knife helped Nancy, now softly sobbing, into the low structure of branches and bark, Owl Carver came up to White Bear.

"I was ready to terrify the people if they turned against you, but you did not need my help. You spoke to them, and against their will they heeded you."

Owl Carver's praise delighted White Bear. But as he saw once again how the old shaman had declined, it took some of the edge from his pleasure.

Owl Carver's eyes were watery and his cheeks were sunken. His arms and legs were thin as spear shafts. The trek up the Rock River had not been good for him. White Bear and Sun Woman had taken over most of the work of caring for the wounded and sick, though Owl Carver did as much as he could.

"You are a Great Shaman, as I predicted you would be," Owl Carver said. "You foretold exactly what would happen if Black Hawk led the British Band across the Great River. But I am sad that your greatness must be proved by the suffering of our people."

White Bear felt his chest expand and a warmth spread through his limbs at these words of his teacher.

"I may need your help yet," he said. "The people do not like me protecting this pale eyes woman."

Owl Carver nodded. "But they respect you. And they will respect you more when you show them you have magical powers."

"I have no magical powers."

"You do. It was not I who put the mark of the Bear on your chest."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that the White Bear is your spirit self. And he can act in this world. The mark of his claws is the mark of his favor."

As White Bear let this sink in, Wolf Paw approached with a stumbling walk. Running Deer and Burning Pine followed him.

Out of their wickiup Redbird brought a blanket, White Bear's Sauk medicine bag and his black bag of surgical instruments.

"Sit in the wickiup with the pale eyes woman," White Bear told Redbird. "She is very frightened."

"I am frightened too," said Redbird as she left him.

White Bear bit his lip. The tone of her voice said, _Who is this woman?_

As White Bear set out the markers for the seven directions, positioning four stones around Wolf Paw, he said, "This will hurt very much and Wolf Paw must not move."

Keeping in place the two stones and the bear's claw White Bear laid on Wolf Paw's chest would force the brave to lie still.

"You cannot hurt me," said Wolf Paw, just as if he were a captive and White Bear was about to torture him.

White Bear turned to the people standing around them.

"All of you join hands and ask Earthmaker to heal Wolf Paw's wound."

Running Deer's face, which had been hard with anger, now melted into tears. Burning Pine looked hopefully at White Bear.

White Bear gestured to Iron Knife to lift Wolf Paw's shoulder slightly. Carefully, gently, he untied and unwrapped the blood-soaked blue rag torn from Nancy's dress. Recent bleeding had softened the scab, so that the cloth came away easily from the wound, which was between Wolf Paw's left armpit and his collarbone. Its shape surprised White Bear: not a round bullet hole, but a long, narrow gash, surrounded by bruised and swollen flesh.

"How did this happen to you?" he asked. He was going to have to hurt Wolf Paw all the more because the wound had gone untreated for four days.

"When the braves attacked the blockhouse all together at the end of the day, the pale eyes opened the door and fired a big gun."

White Bear desperately wanted to make Wolf Paw tell him everything that had happened, but there was no time for that now. And after he heard Wolf Paw's tale, he might want to hurt him even more than he had to.

Raoul kept a naval six-pounder at the trading post; White Bear had heard about it. Probably this was a piece of what the long knives called canister shot or grapeshot in Wolf Paw's shoulder. But then why not a round hole?

White Bear slid the steel rod he would use to explore Wolf Paw's wound through a loop in the end of the tongs. To see how the brave was taking it, he looked up at his face. Wolf Paw stared back at him with hard black eyes as he pushed the probe into the wound with one hand, the other holding the handles of the tongs. When the rounded tip of the probe had gone in about half a finger's length, it touched something hard. Not a bone, White Bear was sure. He moved the probe up and down and from side to side. The only sign of pain Wolf Paw gave was deeper, heavier breathing.

How odd! The object was definitely flat and must have hit Wolf Paw edge on. It lay buried in a muscle. An inch higher and whatever it was would have broken Wolf Paw's shoulder. White Bear moved the tongs into position within the torn flesh, one end on each side of the flat object. His hand ached as he tightened his grip on the tongs. He had learned how to get a good grip on bullets, but the blood would make this flat missile slippery.

Wolf Paw was not breathing now. White Bear did not dare to look into his face. For both of them, White Bear understood, this was a moment of testing.

Holding his own breath, praying to Earthmaker to strengthen his grip on the tongs, White Bear began to pull.

Wolf Paw gave the faintest groan. Another man would probably be screaming.

The flat piece of metal came almost to the surface of Wolf Paw's blackened flesh, but slid out of the tongs' grip just as White Bear was about to draw it out. He gritted his teeth in anger.

Wolf Paw sighed. White Bear looked at his face and saw that only the whites of his eyes were showing under the half-closed lids. Mercifully--for both of them--he had fainted.

White Bear looked again at the object he was trying to pull out of Wolf Paw's shoulder. He could just see a corrugated edge covered with blood. With a bit of cloth he wiped the blood away and saw a bright silver gleam.

He gave a little gasp of amazement.

_A silver coin. The last thing anyone would expect to find loaded into a cannon. Or embedded in a man's body. Those people at Victor must have been desperate._

That gave White Bear an inspiration. No one else was close enough to see what he had seen in the wound. He remembered what Owl Carver had said about showing the people magical powers.

He waited until he saw Wolf Paw's eyelids flutter and then said, "Wolf Paw, because you have allowed the pale eyes woman to live, the spirits will reward you."

Wolf Paw, his lips compressed, frowned at him.

"The spirits will allow me to change the lead ball the pale eyes shot into you to one of their silver coins." He spoke loudly so that the people watching could all hear him.

Wolf Paw stared, as White Bear passed his medicine stick three times in a sunwise circle over the bleeding shoulder.

Once again White Bear pushed the tongs into the wound. He pushed the ends in past the coin, to get a good purchase on it. Wolf Paw groaned. White Bear pulled.

Joy sprang up in him as he felt the silver coin coming free. He had it this time. The spirits might not have changed lead to silver, but they had made him skillful. The tongs came out holding an eight-real silver piece dripping with blood. White Bear held it up for all to see.

Wolf Paw's eyes grew round. The people cried out in amazement. Even Owl Carver looked astonished.

Delighted with the effect, White Bear wiped the blood from the Spanish dollar carefully with the rag from Nancy's dress. It shone in the afternoon sunlight, the head of the King of Spain on one side along with a Latin inscription and the date 1823. On the other side, a coat of arms.

Perfect! Now, he thought with pleasure, the braves and warriors and their wives would be more reluctant than ever to challenge him. And that meant Nancy would be safer.

He held the coin before Wolf Paw's face. "The form is the form of a pale eyes coin, but this is a gift from the spirits."

Wolf Paw, slowly sitting up, took the coin and said, "I will wear it around my neck. Maybe it will be a charm against more wounds."

"Let it remind you that it is honorable to treat prisoners kindly," said White Bear. He kept his face grave, but within he was bubbling over with triumph.

After stuffing the wound with buzzard's down and giving Wolf Paw herb tea to drink, White Bear sent him on his way. The brave stumbled off, leaning on Running Deer. White Bear stood up, stretched his tired arms and legs and turned to the doorway of his wickiup.

A painful moment of doubt assailed him. Was this what the way of the shaman came to, then? Trickery? Perhaps his visions, too, were only dreams. No, the White Bear spirit was real. He had seen the paw print beside his father's body. He bore the claw marks on his chest.

He had to force himself to stoop down, to step through the low doorway and face Nancy. He felt tremulous within. Whatever horrors Nancy had seen and endured, she would surely blame them on him. In all his paint and ornaments he was too obviously a Sauk.

And how would his efforts to protect Nancy and win her trust make Redbird feel? How could he make her truly understand what was between him and Nancy--and what was not?

He was not sure that he himself understood it.

In the light from the open doorway he saw Nancy, crouched on the opposite side of the round hut, trembling, still wrapped in the blanket Redbird had put on her. Redbird and Eagle Feather were sitting silently against the curving wall.

He sat down facing Nancy and she drew away, shuddering.

He said, "Don't be afraid of me, Nancy. I know I look strange to you. I'm the shaman, the medicine man, for my people."

"Your people!" she burst out. "Your people murdered my father!"

He had been afraid of that. He bowed his head and closed his eyes.

"Oh, Nancy. I'm sorry."

_What a ridiculous, futile thing to say._

_I must know what happened at Victor. Nancy's father was killed. Who else?_

White Bear said, "Nancy, I don't ask you to forgive me for what my people did to you. But I did try to stop all this from happening. I pray you'll let me tell you how I tried to make peace. And you are safe now as long as you stay with me."

"Safe with you? Here?" She shuddered. "If I mean anything at all to you, you've got to help me to get away."

His heart sank. The one thing he was sure he could not do was have her set free.

"That will be hard."

"I heard you talking to them. You were ordering them to leave me alone, and they did. Tell them to let me go. Auguste, I'll go mad. I'm so frightened!"

She clutched at his arm. He could feel her fear pouring into his arm up to his heart. He put his hand on top of hers and held it firmly. He wanted to take her in his arms to comfort her, but Redbird's eyes were on him, and she would not understand. So he just patted Nancy's hand and released it.

He told Redbird what he had been saying to Nancy.

"Does she not see that the braves would kill you if you tried to set her free?" Redbird asked.

"She is too frightened to see anything," he said, and turned back to Nancy.

"The only man who can free you is Black Hawk. I'll try to convince him that he should, but he is away with a war party now."

"Killing more innocent men and women and children?" Her teeth and eyes gleamed in the faint light within the wickiup.

Her words left a hollow ache in his chest, but he went on speaking doggedly.

"When he comes back, I'll go to him. Meanwhile, ask your God to help you be brave."

She let go of his arm abruptly. "What do you know about my God, with your paint and your feathers and your magic wand?"

Her words hurt, and he was about to answer angrily, but he told himself she was half mad with terror and grief.

"Because I have these things I can help you," he said gently. "But I want so much to know what happened at Victor. Can you bear to tell me?"

She took his arm again. "I'd just gotten dressed to go out and feed the animals--when I saw the Indians riding toward our house. So many of them! I knew right away. I ran into the house and woke Father. By the time they got to the house he was standing in the doorway. He never even got his rifle loaded, Auguste. Before he could move there was an arrow in his chest."

White Bear knew that Reverend Hale had never liked him; but he was Nancy's father, and to see her father killed--how that must hurt her!

"He was a good man," he said. "He never did harm to our people. It is wrong that he died."

Nancy went on, sobbing softly. "I must have fainted. I remember a ride, I was thrown over the back of a horse, then we were at Victoire. Auguste, they--they just overran Victoire."

"Did anyone get away?"

"I think the people at Victoire must have seen our church and the farms burning, so they had some warning. I couldn't see much. I was left tied on the horse while they attacked. I did see them chase one woman and run a spear through her. It was over very quickly. They set fire to Victoire."

White Bear swallowed hard.

He saw the château with its magnificent hall and its great sweeping roof. There he had lived and learned so much from Grandpapa and Father. Their hopes, their lives, had gone into that great house. And the men and women of Victoire, kindly, cheerful hard-working people--Marchette Perrault, Registre and Bernadette Bosquet. They may not have tried to stop Raoul from seizing the estate, but they had, most of them, loved Elysée and Pierre and Auguste de Marion.

The pain in his chest spread till it seemed to fill his whole world, hammering at him inside and out.

Nancy said, "Then they rode on to Victor, taking me with them."

He choked as he asked, "Did they burn Victor down too?"

"Yes, as they left."

A voice seemed to echo inside him like a scream in a huge, empty hall.

_Nicole! Frank! Grandpapa!_

"Can you tell me--my family--were any of them hurt?"

Nancy said, "I think the people at Victor got into the trading post before the Indians got there. There were men on the palisade shooting at the Indians. The leader, the one with the red crest on his head, tied me to a tree. I had to watch it all."

"He is called Wolf Paw. He is Black Hawk's son."

"I hope the Army gets him and hangs him from the highest gallows in Illinois. He left me tied to that tree all day while they tried to take the trading post."

The words tumbled out faster and faster. When she had first regained consciousness she could hardly speak at all. Now her eyes glittered and she moved her hands violently. Hysteria had broken through her former numbness.

"I could see them using ropes to climb the palisade and charging in through the front gate. Every so often they would pull out some dead or wounded. Just before sunset the one you call Wolf Paw made a speech to them. Then they set fire to arrows and shot them at the blockhouse, and they all rushed in through the front gate. I thought that would be the end, but then I heard a tremendous explosion. I thought maybe somebody blew up the blockhouse. A big puff of smoke rose up over the palisade. Wolf Paw came out wounded. That very big man helped him put me on his horse and tie me there. And then we rode for four days till we got here."

Auguste began to breathe easier. He felt some relief, some hope, despite his pain for the loss of Victoire and for the people who had died there. It sounded as if many of the people of Victor, perhaps Nicole and her family, perhaps Grandpapa, might have come through unharmed.

But another fear took a grip on him. "On the way here, did Wolf Paw ... hurt you, Nancy?"

"No. I think he was too tired and too badly hurt to want to do anything like that. We rode hard, and he kept me tied on his horse all the time. We stopped to sleep long after dark and started riding again before sunup. There was always at least one man awake to guard me."

All the while she had been talking, Nancy had kept a tight grasp on his arm. Now he gently pulled away from her and stood up.

"Nancy, I must leave you for a while."

"No!" Her voice was shrill with fear.

"I must. There are many wounded who need me."

Fearful of how she would react to what he was going to say next, he hesitated. Then he spoke quickly to get it over with, as he did when he had to hurt a patient. "This is my wife, Redbird. She will care for you."

"Your wife?" Even in the semidarkness of the wickiup White Bear could see pain in her eyes.

"Yes." He had no time now to ease her suffering on that score.

He turned to Redbird and said in Sauk, "Do what you can for her. She saw her father and many others of her people killed."

"I must know who she is," said Redbird, fixing him with her slanting eyes.

He laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder. "Have no fear. I will tell you everything, tonight. See that she eats. Give her maple sugar. Help her to rest."

White Bear spent the rest of the day moving through the wickiups under the trees with his Sauk medicine bag and his bag of pale eyes surgical instruments. Wolf Paw had brought back many wounded braves. Together with Sun Woman and Owl Carver, White Bear treated those he could and made the dying more comfortable. He went to the families of the braves and warriors who had been killed and tried to comfort them, performing rituals that helped them let their loved ones go, to walk west on the Trail of Souls.

By late afternoon White Bear was sick with disgust at the suffering and death this war had brought, and wanted nothing more than to go off by himself and weep for his people. Wolf Paw's raid had brought back cattle and horses, but nearly two dozen men had died and an equal number were badly hurt.

_And all for what? To make the long knives hate us more._

At sunset another war party thundered in, this one led by Black Hawk himself, with the Winnebago Prophet riding beside him. And more wounded men to treat.

In the cool of the evening a delicious scent crept into White Bear's nostrils, one that neither he nor any of the British Band had smelled for far too long--roasting beef. Now that it was dark and smoke from fires could no longer be seen, people were roasting the cattle Wolf Paw had brought from Victoire. There were so many empty bellies to feed, they had probably butchered all the steers.

_By rights those are my steers_, White Bear thought wryly. _Raoul stole them from me, and Wolf Paw stole them from Raoul._

White Bear saw many small fires throughout the camp. In time of peace a feast like this would call for one big fire, but that would send up a glow that could be seen from a distance.

He felt a surge of resentment when he saw how calm and contented Black Hawk looked, sitting at a fire before his wickiup, chewing on strips of beef his wife had laid before him on a mat.

Until today the people had been on the verge of starvation. And scouts had reported that an army of over two thousand long knives was working its way up the Rock River toward them. How could Black Hawk bear the responsibility for bringing so much anguish down on his people?

To White Bear's disappointment, the Winnebago Prophet sat next to Black Hawk. At the sight of Flying Cloud, with his long, greasy hair and the mustache that looked something like Raoul's, White Bear's shoulders slumped. He felt an impulse to turn away, and seek Black Hawk out another time.

The Prophet's Winnebago followers were long since gone, but the Prophet himself was still predicting mighty victories over the long knives. White Bear remembered a scripture reading he'd heard at St. George's, that false prophets would arise at the end of the world. This might well be the end of the world for the Sauk; they certainly had their false prophet.

But a talk with Black Hawk about Nancy was too important to put off. White Bear sat down, silently facing Black Hawk. He waited for the war leader to speak to him.

He felt ravenously hungry watching the two men chew their beef. He himself had not had time to eat.

Black Hawk's strong hand stroked the leather cover of one of the law books he had captured at Old Man's Creek.

"You healed my son and drew spirit silver from his body," Black Hawk said. "Accept my thanks."

"I am happy to have made Black Hawk happy."

Black Hawk gestured toward the beef. "Share my food."

White Bear picked up a strip of meat, still hot. Saliva seemed to flood his mouth. He chewed ferociously, closing his eyes for an instant in pleasure. Black Hawk smiled slightly, while Flying Cloud, paying no attention to White Bear, gnawed on a rib.

After a time during which White Bear could think of nothing but the hot, juicy meat, Black Hawk called him back to his reason for coming here.

"I am told you have a pale eyes woman prisoner."

"I came to speak to you about her," White Bear said, and silently asked his spirit self to help him persuade Black Hawk to let her go.

He told Black Hawk how he had convinced the people not to kill her.

"You did well," said Black Hawk. "We must make the long knives respect us, not just fear us. Warriors should not torture and kill prisoners. The great Shooting Star would never let his men torture prisoners."

White Bear felt a glow of pleasure at Black Hawk's approval. He felt more hopeful that Black Hawk might listen to him. He decided to plunge ahead with his request.

"If we give this woman back to the pale eyes, maybe they will talk peace with us."

The Winnebago Prophet stopped eating long enough to say, "Better to keep her. If the long knives attack us we can threaten to kill her."

Aware that Flying Cloud's argument made a kind of brutal sense, White Bear felt a sinking in his chest.

Black Hawk pursed his wide mouth thoughtfully. "The Prophet speaks wisely. It is foolish to give the woman to the long knives as a gift. We should hold her until we are ready to trade her for something." He turned his sombre gaze on White Bear. "You must keep her. You must not let her escape."

White Bear now had to go back to tell Nancy that the Sauk would not let her go. The thought of her terror and misery made him sick with sorrow for her.

And afraid for her too. Every day that the Sauk suffered hunger and illness, every time more men were killed, the women would want all the more to hurt the one pale eyes who was in their power. And the men would hunger to take pleasure with her fair-haired beauty. He could not guard her at every moment. How, then, could he keep her safe?

They sat in silence again. The Winnebago Prophet looked pleased with himself. Black Hawk was grim, probably brooding over how badly the war was progressing.

Desperate to protect Nancy, White Bear could think of only one way.

He said, "I want to make the pale eyes woman my wife."

Black Hawk's eyebrows rose. "Why should White Bear do that?"

"The people will not kill the wife of a shaman."

The Winnebago Prophet burst out, "This is wrong! The spirits have told me that our people must not mate with the pale eyes."

Black Hawk said, "White Bear's father was a pale eyes."

"The offspring of an impure mating should not be a shaman," Flying Cloud grumbled.

White Bear felt his cheeks burn; the Winnebago Prophet might as well have slapped him.

He remembered, so long ago it now seemed, though it was really only nine months, when Père Isaac, speaking at Pierre's funeral, had called White Bear "the fruit of sin." He had thought then that no red man would speak so demeaningly of his parentage, and here now was a shaman of the red men who did.

Black Hawk said, "White Bear has always been one of us. He has seen visions. He has saved many lives. The mark of the Bear, one of the most powerful spirits, is on him. Let him do as he thinks best."

The Prophet said, "The spirits have told me a man should not have more than one wife."

Black Hawk glared at him. "That is foolish talk. I have been content to have one wife, Singing Bird. But my son, Wolf Paw, has two wives, and many of our chiefs and braves have two or three wives. And when many men die in battle, many women need to be cared for."

Flying Cloud grunted and fell silent.

White Bear took his leave of Black Hawk and threaded his way among the shelters and past the small campfires where beef was still roasting on spits.

Redbird must agree to his plan before he could tell it to Nancy. He was afraid; afraid that she would say no, and afraid that his request would hurt her.

When he reached his wickiup he called Redbird out, and they walked through the camp together.

"Sun Woman is with the yellow-haired woman in the wickiup," Redbird said. "Sun Woman speaks to her in the pale eyes' language that she learned from your father. I think the yellow-hair is not so frightened anymore."

"That is good," said White Bear gloomily, "because Black Hawk says she must remain a prisoner."

Redbird sighed. "I feared he would say that."

They climbed a low hill north of the camp and sat on a huge half-buried boulder overlooking a small lake. A newly risen crescent moon was reflected in the still black water.

White Bear put his hand on Redbird's belly and felt the movement of the child within her.

Redbird said, "What is this woman to you?"

White Bear stiffened. Would she understand? Would she believe him?

White Bear searched his mind for a way to explain. "She was a friend to me when I lived at Victor."

"Was she your woman?" Redbird asked.

"No. She wanted to be, but I would not let it happen, because I knew that one day I must leave her."

_And I feared that if I let myself love Nancy I would never return to my people, and to you._

"You did not even lie with her?"

"No."

"I would be foolish to believe that."

"I would tell you if I had done that. I did want to, and she wanted to, but I would not. Does it make you hate her to know she wanted that of me?"

Redbird's head was bowed so that he could not see her face. "You are a man many women would want. I cannot hate them all."

"When I asked you to untie Nancy today and take her to our wickiup, you could have refused me, as Running Deer did to Wolf Paw. Then the women would have cut her to pieces. I could not have stopped them. I thank you for honoring my wishes."

Redbird said, "You would have tried to stop them, and you would have been hurt. I did not want that to happen." She looked up at him suddenly, smiling. "And I knew that people would say, 'See, White Bear's wife does as he asks, but Wolf Paw's wife makes him look foolish.' It felt good to make Wolf Paw look foolish, after what he did to us."

It warmed him to hear her say "us."

"Now I want to do something more for her," he said. "But I can only do it if you will say yes to it." He held his breath.

Redbird said, "If you made her your wife, then no one in the band would dare to hurt her."

White Bear let out a deep sigh. He should have known her thoughts would move as swiftly as his own. He had wondered how to say it to her, and she had said it for him.

"Only to protect her. Not to be truly my wife. Will you consent?"

She stroked the back of his hand. "I think it would be a good thing if we keep her safe. You and I did not want our people to fight and kill the pale eyes." She pressed her warm hand against his. "At least we can keep them from killing this one."

The ripples on the lake reflected fragments of moonlight. White Bear felt he could see his love for Redbird, and it looked like what lay before him--a lake of silver. He leaned against her, and her back rested against his arm.

"I promise you I will not bed with her."

She smiled at him again. "Why promise that?"

The question surprised him. "You are my true wife and the only wife I want." He recalled Black Hawk's loyalty to Singing Bird. That was the right way to live.

Redbird said, "If you do go to her in the night, I will understand. Especially now when I am so big and we cannot get together easily. I believe you when you say you love me more than her. But she is tall and has hair like gold and very white skin, and I am small and have brown skin. Perhaps the pale eyes in you would prefer her."

"I think the pale eyes in me and the Sauk in me are one. And that one prefers you."

She took his hand and moved it down her body till he felt the warm, soft place whence, in little more than a moon, their baby would emerge.

"I want to do this with you now," she whispered. "I think we can, if you go into me only a little way."

When Redbird and White Bear returned to their wickiup, the crescent moon had reached the high point of its trail across the sky. Within the simple shelter he and Redbird had built, it was too dark to see anyone.

His mother's voice whispered, "Eagle Feather and Yellow Hair are sleeping. She is terribly frightened, but she has been through so much she is exhausted."

"I thank you for helping her," White Bear whispered. "In the morning I must tell her that Black Hawk will not let her go."

"That makes me sad for her," said Sun Woman. "She is in such misery. I sense a strength in her, but this is a very bad time for her. You must not stop being kind to her, not even for a moment."

Sun Woman ducked out through the doorway of the wickiup.

Nancy was sleeping in Redbird's bed. Redbird and White Bear lay down together on his pallet of reeds and blankets, her back against his chest, and slept.

* * * * *

When White Bear's eyes opened, the faint light filtering through the layer of bark overhead let him see a figure sitting up across from him. Outside, he heard the sounds of the camp stirring, men and women calling to one another, horses stamping.

He felt a rush of pity as he recognized Nancy. What she must be feeling at this moment!

"Oh my God," he heard her say. "Lord Jesus, help me." It must have taken her a moment to realize where she was.

"Nancy," he said, trying to keep his voice calm and pleasant, "come with me and let us talk."

They left the wickiup and she walked through the camp with her eyes on the ground, too frightened, he supposed, to look about her. People stared, but White Bear wore a forbidding look, and they kept their distance.

She had on a doeskin dress that Sun Woman had given her, and she had done up her two blond braids the way she always had. He felt a little catch in his throat as he looked at her and remembered those not-accidental meetings on the prairie near Victoire.

Every so often as they walked along she twisted her shoulders inside the soft leather and rubbed her arms uncomfortably. They passed a group of warriors who had felled a big oak tree and were burning and scraping its inside to make a dugout. The men stopped work to watch her go by.

Seeing the way they looked at her, White Bear thought, _Yes, she must marry me_. He hoped he could persuade her that it would be the only way for her to be safe.

He led her to the western edge of the high ground on which the band had made their camp. They stopped when the earth underfoot turned soft and wet. Before them lay an expanse of reeds that vanished into morning mist.

"Did you talk to Black Hawk?" she asked, her voice trembling. "Can I get away from here?"

White Bear remembered Sun Woman's admonition to be kind to Nancy at every moment. He tried to think how best to tell her the bad news, how to add only the smallest possible amount of fear to her burden.

"Black Hawk is pleased that I stopped the people from hurting you yesterday," he began tentatively. "He said the white men despise Indians when they kill their prisoners."

Her lips trembled. "He's not going to let me go, is he?" she said, and sobs began to shake her body. When she was able, she turned pleadingly toward him. "Couldn't you do anything for me?"

White Bear spread his hands helplessly. "I talked to him as best I could." He tried to tell her something encouraging. "He just wants to keep you until he can talk to the soldiers and make some kind of a truce."

She drew away from him, her red-rimmed eyes wide. "A truce? Does Black Hawk really think he can make a truce? Don't you realize what _your people_, your brave Indians, have been doing all over the frontier? Burnings and massacres everywhere. I told you what they did at Victor. Do you think the soldiers would ever be willing to talk peace with Black Hawk now?"

White Bear had listened to the returning warriors' tales of victories over the long knives at Kellogg's Grove, at Indian Creek, along the Checagou-Galena road. In despair he had realized that what the Sauk saw as battles in a war to defend their homeland were, to the white people of Illinois, bloody and abominable crimes. Who, after all, had Black Hawk's war parties been killing? Some soldiers, but mostly farmers and their wives and children.

It tormented him now, as it did day and night, that no one could see the bloodshed as he did, with the eyes of both a white man and a Sauk. To him, what the Sauk were doing was horrible, but it was done out of a desperate need to cling to the land that meant life to them.

And Nancy's capture showed him how much his years among the pale eyes had changed him. Even if Wolf Paw had brought back a captive woman who was a stranger to him, he would have tried to save her. Nor could he feel that a people willing to torture any woman to death were fully _his_ people.

Nancy shook her head. "There will be no truce, Auguste. They're coming to destroy you."

"We asked for peace," he began, "before all this killing started. I went with a white flag myself--"

Her chest heaved, and her face was a mottled red and white.

"They don't _want_ peace with you. Your braves will kill me when they realize that. Or the soldiers will kill me when they kill all of your people."

"No!" he cried, knowing the truth in her words and fighting the agony within.

"Let me go!" she screamed.

She suddenly whirled away from him and threw herself into the reeds. She tried to run, and in a moment was in water up to her hips. Frantically battering at the tall water grasses, she struggled to keep going. The mist was beginning to swallow her up.

Too surprised to move, White Bear stood watching her for a moment. She would surely die out there in the marsh, and she didn't realize it. He plunged into the marsh after her. He drove his legs through the cold water. The mud sucked at his moccasins. By the time he caught up with her, he was barefoot.

He threw his arms around her. She thrashed about, turned and struck at his face with her fists. Her eyes were wild, like a trapped fox's, her cheeks bright red, her mouth twisted and quivering.

"I've got to get away!"

"Nancy, you can't." They were waist deep in water, and he felt his feet sinking into the mud.

He grabbed her shoulders and shook her as hard as he could. "Listen to me!"

She went limp in his arms, and he had to hold her up.

"I can't stay here. I won't let them kill me!"

He pulled her toward dry ground, the cold water swirling around them, slimy mud tugging at their feet.

When they were out of the water, dripping, he said, "If there were any way you could escape from here, I'd help you. If you try to get away, you'll die. There are miles of swamp in every direction. Only Black Hawk and a few braves know the way out. You'd drown or be buried alive in quicksand. Or the warriors would catch you, and they would kill you no matter what I did. And they'll kill me if I help you try to escape."

"I'll die if I stay here." Her eyes were dull with hopelessness.

"No, you won't. I'll take care of you. My family will protect you--Redbird, Sun Woman, Owl Carver, Iron Knife. You'll be safe with me."

She leaned against him. "Auguste, I can't bear being so frightened. My heart is so full of fear it will burst."

"The band will not free you, but they will not hurt you. They respect me. I talk to the spirits for them and heal them."

She took a long look at him and spoke more calmly. "You look so strange, dressed like a--like a--"

"Like a real Indian?" He tried giving her a little smile. For an instant a little life came back into her face.

_I can heal her fear, too, if she will let me._

He felt an inward glow as she managed to return a tremulous smile.

She said, "But you're still that fine young gentleman who charmed me so, back at Victor, aren't you?"

"Yes, I'm that man too." He looked down at her bare feet. "You've lost your moccasins. We must get you another pair." And she was lucky not to have a leech or two clinging to her feet; so was he. His moccasins were lost too. Clothing would be hard to come by, with the band on the run in strange country, but he need not make her feel worse by telling her that.

"I have to resign myself to staying with your people, don't I?" she asked. "Thank God you're here, Auguste. Maybe it was Providence that your uncle stole your estate from you."

_Yes, Earthmaker's way is surprising_, he thought.

"One thing I must ask of you, Nancy. For your protection, you and I must go through a wedding ceremony. Then no one will be allowed to bother you."

"A wedding!" She let go of him and stepped away quickly.

His heartbeat quickened with anxiety over her apparent shock.

"Nothing to be afraid of. A simple ceremony." He recalled his wedding to Redbird last fall. He might be a shaman, but he'd not had the slightest premonition that he would go through the same ceremony with a different woman less than a year later.

"But you already have a wife. That pretty little woman who is ... expecting." She reddened. "You told me she was your wife." Soaking wet, she turned forlornly away from him.

"In our tribe men may have more than one wife."

He expected to see contempt in her eyes, her pale eyes' morality outraged.

Instead she said sadly, "Is she the reason you would not do what I wanted the night you left Victor? Were you married to her even then?"

He had to force the words out. "No, but I did love her even then. And she-- That blue-eyed boy you've seen in our wickiup--he is our son. He was born after my father took me to Victoire."

She shook her head, the blond braids swinging. "You were honest with me. You didn't tell me about Redbird, but you didn't make a fool of me, as another man might have. A man like your uncle. But how does your wife feel about me?"

What did she mean, _A man like your uncle_? Had Raoul approached her? He put that question aside while he framed an answer to her question.

"Redbird agrees to this wedding. She, too, wants to help you. If you are part of our family you will be protected. She wants that."

She stared at him. "But I'm a Christian! I can't go through a pagan wedding ceremony to be your _second wife_. How could I do that to my father, a minister?"

He tried to sound reassuring. "We will all know, you and I and Redbird, that it is not a real marriage. I've no doubt your Christian God will see and understand. And your father, if he sees you, surely he wants you to live."

_No, Philip Hale, as I remember him, might well expect her to die for her faith. He might well want his daughter to join him in the other world. But never mind._

He went on quickly, "Of course, you will not have to--know me, as your Bible says. In the sight of the tribe you will be my wife, that is all. In our wickiup your virtue will be respected."

She laughed ruefully, but tears were running down her cheeks. "Oh, Auguste, remember how I begged you to marry me? I even prayed for it, would you have imagined that? And now my prayer has been answered. Only it didn't turn out exactly the way I hoped, did it?"

White Bear's heart filled up with a dark foreboding. Nothing had turned out as any of them hoped, but much had happened as they feared.

17

Uncle Sam's Men

Tears filled Raoul's eyes, blurring the newspaper and the letter on his candlelit camp table. His hands were cold as a corpse's as he pressed them against the sides of his head.

_Oh, God! A drink! I need a drink!_

He reached for the jug beside the letter. A hand lifted the tent flap and Eli Greenglove slouched in.

The sight of him frightened Raoul. Did he know yet?

Not much chance there'd be a letter for Eli in the sack of two-week-old mail that had just caught up with Raoul's battalion. No one in Victor likely to write to Eli. Not now.

Eli's mouth was drawn hard. It was a hot night, and he wore no jacket, only a plain brown calico work shirt, with a pistol and a knife at his wide brown belt.

"Levi Pope got a letter from his missuz. There was an Injun raid on Victor. You hear anything?" Eli's voice was as flat as the prairie. He sat on Raoul's camp trunk.

"Yes," Raoul said, choking on the single word. "A war party attacked Victoire."

He took a swallow from the jug. A cold, aching space was growing in the pit of his stomach. The whiskey settled in the middle of the ache like a tiny campfire in the middle of a blizzard.

He handed the jug to Eli, and Eli sipped and put the jug back on the table.

"Goddammit, don't just sit there staring at me." Eli displayed his ruined teeth as his lip curled back in a snarl. "_What 'n hell happened?_"

Raoul picked up the letter in a shaking hand and read aloud--horrible words, written in a flowing black script.

"'It is my sad duty as your sister to send you the news that Clarissa Greenglove and your two sons have perished at the hands of Indians.'"

"Oh, Lord God an' Savior," Eli groaned. His head fell back on his neck, his mouth open. His Adam's apple stuck out.

"'Also that our beloved Victoire has burned to the ground.'"

Raoul went on:

"Clarissa and Andrew and Philip, along with other people who lived at Victoire and in Victor, were murdered on the morning of June seventeenth.

"In your sorrow, may it comfort you to know that your fortified trading post, where we took shelter and defended ourselves, saved the lives of most of us. The cannon that you set in the blockhouse was employed to good effect, even though we hesitated at first to use it, since no one here knew how to fire such a weapon. Nevertheless, fire it we did, and broke the Indians' last charge and drove them off.

"Mr. Burke Russell, whom you placed in charge of the trading post, was killed whilst fighting on the parapet. Mr. David Cooper, whom you also appointed as caretaker, gave us the leadership and strength we badly needed to see us through. He was the only experienced fighting man among us.

"I cannot bear to write more. The sights we saw when we came out of the blockhouse will haunt my dreams forever.

"Though the Indians could not lay hands on our bodies, they destroyed our property. Our house was burned down and our printing press and woodworking machines ruined.

"When it was all over, Frank rode to Galena, though I begged him not to, for fear there were Indians yet lurking about. But he must needs publish his paper. He arranged to have an edition of the _Visitor_ printed on the press of the Galena _Miners Gazette_, and brought the copies back here on a wagon. I am sending you a copy of the paper under this cover. Frank's account will tell you everything there is to know about the raid, and more perhaps than you would wish to know.

"Our father is well. He and Guichard fought bravely in our defense.

"I do not reproach you. My heart goes out to you, Brother, for I know you must be suffering. Remember that all happens as God ordains. May He grant you peace."

_What the hell does she mean, "All happens as God ordains?" God wanted my woman and my kids murdered by Indians?_

"Oh, Christ Jesus," Eli said. He shook his head, then resting his elbows on his knees, pressed his hands to the top of his head.

_Even Papa had to fight._

Raoul's heart felt bruised, as if beaten with a hammer.

_I do not reproach you._ That was reproach enough. He had taken every man who would sign up for the militia. He had promised them their wives and children would be safe. He'd led them away in pursuit of Black Hawk, vengeance and glory.

Eli looked up. "What does it say in the newspaper?"

Raoul started to hand it to him.

"You read it to me."

Raoul had forgotten that Eli couldn't read. Clarissa couldn't either. Now she'd never learn. Nor would the boys.

He shook his head and brushed his hand across his forehead. "I _can't_ read this out loud."

Greenglove's eyes were hard as bullets. "You wipe your damned eyes and read that damned newspaper."

Raoul rubbed his eyes and took another pull from the jug. Greenglove held out his hand and Raoul passed him the jug.

Raoul picked up the newspaper, hating the sight of it, and began to read the column headed with the single word, MASSACRE!

Frank's story told how the people in the trading post held the Indians off all day and finally drove them away by firing the cannon. Then came the grievous task of finding and burying those who had not had time to reach safety.

Then, for Raoul, the most dreadful lines of all:

In the ashes of Victoire, it appeared from examination of the charred remains that the skulls of the men and women had been cloven by tomahawk blows. Parts of the children's bodies were scattered about the ruins, as if they had been chopped to bits before the Indians set fire to the great house.

Why hadn't Clarissa gotten away? She'd taken to drinking heavily in the last year, so much so that he'd had to hit her more than once for letting the boys run loose without keeping an eye on them. She had probably been lying abed in a drunken stupor while everyone was fleeing the château, the boys sleeping in the room with her. Hadn't anyone tried to wake them?

Those faithful French servants who loved Elysée and Pierre so much, they didn't give a damn about Raoul's whore and his bastard sons. After all, he had thwarted Pierre's dying wishes. And he had struck his aged father with his fist in front of all those Victoire people.

Still, they'd have been human enough to try to do _something_. If they'd had time. They'd holler and bang on the door. Try to wake them up. But there wouldn't have been time. A hundred or more Indians galloping down on the château. The servants who saw them coming would barely have time to get away. Some of them hadn't made it. Some of them had died with Clarissa and the boys; maybe the ones who'd stayed behind to try to warn them.

That was how it must have been.

Frank's article in the _Visitor_ said that some of the people in the distant farms had saved themselves by hiding in root cellars or in nearby woods. The Indians were in too much of a hurry to get to Victor to bother searching carefully. One family, the Flemings, had ridden to the shut-down lead mine. Some Indians pursued them to the mine but didn't follow them in. The Flemings hid so deep in the mine they had trouble finding their way out again, but they did survive.

But one person had neither hidden nor been killed:

While the body of the Reverend Philip Hale, D.D., was found in the burnt wreckage of his house, his daughter, Miss Nancy Hale, has not been found. It is feared Miss Hale may have been kidnapped by the Indians. Both the church and the house Reverend Hale built on the prairie were burned down.

As Raoul read aloud the list of the dead, he thought of Nancy and then of his sister Helene. Did they do _that_ to Nancy? The red devils! Probably did. Horrible!

He saw the naked, slashed, violated body lying on the prairie. Nancy Hale's body. Just like Helene's.

But it could be, too, she was alive. And if he kept after Black Hawk, he might be the one to rescue her. There was comfort in that.

A little comfort.

And then a black bile of hatred for himself trickled up into his throat.

Great God in Heaven, this man he was sitting with--he'd had this man's daughter in his bed for six years. And now she was murdered. And already he was figuring how to replace her.

_Maybe I am as bad a man as Papa said I was._

_That's what Nicole meant by "All happens as God ordains." This was to punish me._

He took a drink to wash that thought away.

He winced when he came to the name Marchette Perrault on the list of dead. Maybe she had died trying to help Clarissa. Did Armand know yet?

Eli stood up. "Well, poor Clarissa. Poor little boys. It was a black day in our lives when Clarissa and me met up with you, Raoul de Marion."

The words tore at a wound that was fresh and bleeding.

"Look here, now, Eli. Don't you know that I feel as bad as you do?"

"No, I don't know that. Clarissa was all I had in the world. I kept hoping you'd find it in your heart to marry her, but you never treated her decent. Never cared enough for them kids to give them your name. Your brother, he did more for that half-Injun son of his than you did for your two that was all white."

_All white they were, but half Puke_, Raoul thought, feeling his disdain for the man who stood slumped before him.

Puke, a good nickname for Greenglove's breed. Missouri puked up the worst of its people, and they landed in Illinois. Clarissa's breasts flattening and sagging, her shoulders round, her teeth stained by pipe smoke. So slatternly she'd gotten to be, he hardly cared to take her to bed. And Phil and Andy growing up with that same washed-out, weak-boned Greenglove look.

_How could I think that way about my own kids? What kind of a man am I? And now they've been murdered, and I'm still despising them._

He had to quit this. He was torturing himself. Wasn't it bad enough? It was the goddamned Indians he should be hating.

"We'll have our revenge, Eli. We'll kill a hundred Indians for each of ours who died."

"Like you murdered them three at Old Man's Creek. I warned you not to do that. That was what got Clarissa and her kids killed. I won't be helping you get your vengeance, Colonel Raoul de Marion. Because if I did stay around you, sooner or later I'd want blood for blood of mine that's been spilled."

Raoul felt a chill, facing Greenglove's implacable, dull-eyed hatred. But he was damned if he'd back down before this human weed.

"You'll leave this company when your term of enlistment is up and not one damned day sooner. You're captain of the Smith County company."

Greenglove's mouth curled in a cold smile.

"By tomorrow there won't be any company. The Smith County boys heard about what happened at Victor. Most of them'll be quitting."

Raoul felt the heat rising in his neck and head.

"The hell they will! My Smith County boys will want Indian blood just like I do. And just like you would if you hadn't taken a notion to blame Clarissa's death on me."

Auguste. The half-breed. Raoul felt his blood boiling as he saw the olive-skinned face mingling Pierre's features with Indian looks. The face he'd never stopped hating from the moment he first saw it. Auguste was dead. Eli, here, had shot him. His body was rotting away somewhere on the prairie behind them.

But the Indians of the British Band were alive--Auguste's people. They snuck up on Victoire, Raoul's home. Burned it to the ground. Tomahawked his woman. Chopped his children, his two boys, Andy and Phil, to pieces.

To pieces.

He saw that, for a moment, too vividly, and almost screamed. He grabbed the jug and burned the bloody picture out of his mind with a swallow.

Auguste's band, skulking around up the river somewhere.

Why, Auguste might have given them the idea. Told them all about Victoire and Victor. Lots of helpless women and children there. A rich trading post. A big white man's house to burn down.

_My uncle kicked me off the land_, Auguste might have said. _Avenge me. Go kill his woman and his children and burn his house down. And while you're at it, kill every one of those white dogs in Smith County._

Sure, he probably put the idea in those devils' heads before he got shot.

It hadn't been enough to kill Auguste. Wasn't enough.

He had to kill off every last one of Black Hawk's Indians. Exterminate the whole band--bucks, squaws and papooses.

And he would shoot any shirker who refused to go with him.

Greenglove shrugged. "Go chase Injuns, then, if that's your heart's desire." Then he smiled in a knowing way Raoul found strangely disturbing. "But you'll maybe find a surprise waiting for you up there in Michigan Territory. Almost makes me want to stay with you, just so's I could see the look on your face."

Raoul felt a chill. Why the hell was Greenglove grinning like that?

"Damn you, you can't just walk off, Eli! You took an oath. You signed up for another thirty days when your enlistment was up in May. I can have you shot for desertion."

"Go ahead. Shoot me yourself."

Eli slowly raised the tent flap and stood there a moment, turning to give Raoul one last, strange, unmirthful smile. Raoul eyed the pistol at Eli's belt. Most likely all primed and loaded. His own pistol, unloaded, was hanging from a tent pole behind him.

_If I went for my pistol, that'd give him an excuse to put a ball in me. And he'd do it before I could even get a damned cap in place._

Eli gave Raoul one final nod, as if he knew what Raoul had been thinking, and let the tent flap fall behind him.

Raoul reached for the jug. It felt light in his hand, and he shook it. Empty.

Everything. Empty, empty, empty!

He got up, weaving slightly, and walked to the opening of the tent.

"Armand!" he shouted.

_Oh my God, now I'll have to give Armand the news about Marchette._

* * * * *

Raoul awakened, sweating. One side of his tent was glowing white, the sun beating down on it; he had been sleeping in an oven. He sat up, and his vision went black and his head spun. He swung his feet, still in dirty gray stockings, over the side of his cot. He nearly stepped on Armand, who was lying flat on his back on the straw-covered floor, his beard fluttering as he snored through his open mouth.

Standing, Raoul saw Nicole's letter and the _Victor Visitor_ lying on his camp table beside a burned-down candle and four empty jugs. He remembered what had happened at Victor. He fell back onto his cot and pounded his fist on his chest, trying to numb the pain in his heart.

_God damn the Sauk! Damn them! Damn them!_

Armand, when he learned what happened at Victoire, had not blamed Raoul as Eli had. He'd wept over Marchette--whom he'd beaten almost daily when she was alive--and had sworn vengeance on her murderers, the British Band. And he had sat with Raoul till both of them were drunk enough to sleep.

Raoul's head and body felt as if they were on fire. His fingers curled, grasping at empty air.

He buckled on his belt with his pistol and his Bowie knife, stumbled out of his tent and stood beside it, pissing in the tall grass.

He was facing the Rock River, less than a quarter-mile wide here, a sheet of sparkling blue water bordered by forest. Lined up along the bank before him were a dozen big box-shaped flatboats. The tents of his own militia battalion and of two others were spread over the grassland around him.

He suddenly sensed that something was wrong. He hadn't heard the bugler blow the dozen notes signaling the start of the day. He saw now that the men weren't assembled but were wandering aimlessly about the camp.

What the hell was it Greenglove had said?

_By tomorrow there won't be any company._

Down near the flatboats a big crowd was gathered. One man, standing on a barrel, was addressing them. His voice, shrill and insistent, carried to Raoul on the warm June air, but he couldn't make out what the man was saying.

Raoul didn't like this. He didn't like this at all.

He started walking toward the river and found Levi Pope and Hodge Hode squatting in front of a fire, making coffee simply by boiling water with coffee grounds in it.

"Sorry for your loss, Colonel," said Pope.

Hearing Pope speak of what happened at Victoire was like being kicked in a spot that was already bruised. Raoul had to pause a moment before he could speak.

"Thank you. Your family come through all right?" He dreaded what he might hear in answer.

"Your sister wrote a letter for my missuz," Pope said. "They came through tolerably. Thanks to the way you fortified the trading post. That was mighty foresighted, Colonel."

Raoul's chest expanded and he felt a little better. This was how he'd hoped the men would react, not blaming him for the tragedy as that bastard Greenglove had.

"Levi's letter told as how my boy Josiah made it to the trading post too," Hodge said. "Mr. Cooper even let him do some shootin' at the redskins."

_Mr. Cooper? Since when did David Cooper get to be so high and mighty?_

"I need some of that coffee," Raoul said. Hodge strained the grounds out of the coffee by pouring it through a kerchief into a tin cup and handed the cup to Raoul.

The black liquid scalded Raoul's lips and tongue, and didn't treat him any better when it bit into his whiskey-burned stomach.

"Anything to eat?"

With a bitter grunt, Levi Pope took a square biscuit out of a paper wrapper and held it out. "These worm cakes is pretty lively, but dip 'em in the coffee a couple of times and you'll boil the little buggers to death."

Raoul shut his eyes and waved the weevil-riddled hardtack away.

"What the hell is that bunch doing down by the river?"

Hodge Hode grinned. "They call it a 'pub-lic in-dig-nation' meeting." He drawled out the words, amused. "Say they won't go across the river into Michigan Territory. Say they want to go home."

"Any of our men talking that way?"

"Oh, a heap of them, Colonel," said Levi.

"I'll see about that."

"Hodge and me ain't quittin'. We won't go home till we've killed us some Injun trash." Levi lovingly stroked the handles of his six holstered pistols, three on each side of his belt.

But Levi and Hodge made no move to get up and join Raoul. They would go with him across the river, he saw, but they were not about to help him discipline the other men. He thought of ordering them to come with him, but decided not to test their loyalty that far. Eli had walked out on him. He didn't know who he could trust.

Hell, he could do it without these two, anyway.

For reassurance Raoul took a grip on the handle of his Bowie knife as he approached the crowd. Could he cow dozens of men if they were determined not to obey him?

_Sure. Might have to carve a few bellies, but the rest will fall into line._

That was how he ran Smith County.

The man standing on the barrel was saying, "You know what the Injuns call that country up there? The Trembling Lands. It's all swamp, water and quicksand. You take a horse out on what looks like solid ground, before you can blink, he sinks belly deep."

That kind of talk made Raoul want to use his knife. But that would probably only rile these rebellious bastards all the more.

_Got to put a stop to this. Line them all up by the boats. Tell the first man to get in. If he won't, shoot him. Then go on to the next. That'll change their minds in a hurry._

He told himself disgustedly to quit dreaming. Not even in Smith County could he get away with shooting white men just because they wouldn't obey him. Not in broad daylight, anyway.

The man standing on the barrel said, "If Black Hawk has holed up in that country, that means he's finished. Hell, his people will starve to death up there. What do we got to follow him for?"

Pushing his way through the crowd, Raoul heard a man near him call out, "Volunteers is what we are. That means we serve at our own pleasure. Well, I'm not volunteering for any more."

A chorus--"Right!" "Yeah!" "Me neither!" "That's telling 'em!"--rose all around Raoul, maddening him as a swarm of biting flies would madden a horse.

He saw a familiar stoop-shouldered back in the crowd--Justus Bennett. Ever since Old Man's Creek, Bennett had been whining about the fine suit of clothes and the two expensive law books he'd lost, demanding that the state of Illinois pay for them. Now he was standing here, encouraging would-be deserters just by listening to them.

Raoul grabbed his shoulder and pulled him around. "You're a lawyer. You know damned well this meeting is illegal. Get over there with Pope and Hode, or you're no more a lieutenant in my battalion."

Bennett stared back at him with beady eyes. "That's immaterial, seeing as we're all going home."

"No one's going home," said Raoul, loud enough to make the men around him turn to look. "Get the hell back to your outfit."

He gave Bennett a shove. The lawyer glowered at him, but slunk away.

Raoul pushed his way to the front of the crowd. The men fell back, making way for his blue jacket with its officer's gold stripes. But the sun beat down on his head. He realized that he had forgotten to put on his hat, and he wasn't shaved and his jacket was unbuttoned.

And, nothing. Hell, he could handle men. He didn't have to dress up for that. He drew his knife and faced the man on the barrel.

"Get down off there."

"Now listen, Colonel, this is a public meeting."

Raoul waved the knife. "You've had your say. Jump."

The man stared defiantly at Raoul. Raoul thought he might have to cut him up a little, and wondered if he was up to it. The man's eyes wavered from Raoul's down to the thirteen-inch blade. And he jumped.

But he wasn't quite done talking. "It's a free country, Colonel. Man's got a right to speak his mind."

Raoul said, "Tell that to Black Hawk."

He wasn't quite sure what he meant by that, but he heard several chuckles and was encouraged.

He scrambled up on the three-foot-high barrel. It rocked under him, and the dregs of whiskey sloshing around in his body made him feel dizzy. He decided, after he got his feet set near the rim of the barrel, that he would be safer if he sheathed his knife.

"You men's term of enlistment is not up. Any man who won't cross that river is a coward and a deserter, and I'll see you're dealt with."

"Go to hell!" one man shouted.

"You talk about cowards," another man called. "Didn't your whole battalion run all the way from Old Man's Creek to Dixon's Ferry, from forty Injun bucks?"

"They don't call it Old Man's Creek no more," a raucous voice cried. "Now it's de Marion's Run."

Raoul pulled his knife again.

"The man who said that about de Marion's Run--come up here and say it again." He shook the knife.

"Quit wavin' that pig sticker around and get down off that barrel, de Marion. We heard enough from you." Raoul saw a rifle pointed at him. The blood pumping through his body suddenly went from hot to cold.

A new voice broke in.

"Lower that rifle!"

The tone was deep, easy and confident in command. It offered no alternative. The rifle came down as quickly as if in response to a drill sergeant's order.

A short, plump officer with thick black eyebrows came up to stand beside Raoul's barrel. He wore a stained, broad-brimmed wool hat and a blue Army jacket over fringed buckskin trousers. The gold stripes on his upper arm identified him as a colonel. The saber at his side nearly dragged on the ground. He might have been comical looking, but somehow he wasn't. Raoul had seen the officer at command meetings and knew that despite his mixed dress, he was Regular Army. This morning, though, he couldn't remember his name.

Movement in the distance caught Raoul's eye. A long line of blue-uniformed troops was marching across the prairie about a hundred yards away, their shakoes bobbing. They came to a halt, turned and faced the militiamen. They came to parade rest, each man with a rifle at his side. The morning sun glittered on bayonets.

Some militiamen glanced over their shoulders at the line of Federal soldiers, and a nervous muttering of "Bluebellies!" spread through the crowd.

"You can get down from there now, Colonel de Marion," said the short officer. "I'd appreciate it if you'd let me handle this."

Raoul hated to admit it to himself, but he was relieved. Crouching slowly and carefully, so as not to make an ass of himself by falling, he climbed down from the barrel.

"That's Zachary Taylor," Raoul heard someone in the crowd say as he moved, now unnoticed, to stand apart on the riverbank. Raoul felt foolish that he had forgotten Taylor's name, especially when Taylor knew his.

Instead of standing on the barrel, Taylor hitched himself up and sat on it, gesturing in a friendly way to the men to gather around him.

He spoke with an easy southern drawl, but he made his voice carry.

"Now, men, I don't set myself up as your superior, even though I am a Federal officer. We're all equal Americans here." He nodded as if thinking something over. "In fact, many of you are important men in civilian life, and I have no doubt some of you will hold public office and be giving orders to _me_ some day."

Raoul's eyes traveled over the crowd, and he noticed one figure taller than most, eyes grave as he listened intently to Taylor. That Lincoln fellow, who had been such a nuisance at Prophet's Town. Raoul wondered if the young man was for or against crossing the Rock River today.

Taylor said, "The best assurance you have that I'll obey your orders when it comes your turn is that I'm obeying the orders I've got now. I will tell you in a moment what those orders are. But let me refresh your memory about what Black Hawk and his savages have done to the people you and I are sworn to defend."

He pulled a folded paper from the side pocket of his blue jacket and read from it.

"One man killed at Bureau Creek. One man at Buffalo Grove, another at the Fox River. Two on the Checagou Road. A woman and two men killed on the outskirts of Galena. Apple River Fort besieged, four dead. Seven men massacred at Kellogg's Grove. Three whole families, fifteen people, wiped out at Indian Creek. Victor besieged, and seventeen men, women and children massacred."

Raoul saw the shamefaced glances of men who knew him shift his way. He looked down at the ground angrily. He didn't want these men pitying him.

But an image of burned and scattered flesh and bones reared up suddenly in his mind. It struck at him like a rattlesnake. He almost threw up. He clenched his fists and held himself rigid.

One man called out, "Colonel Taylor, that's why we don't want to cross the state line. The Indians are attacking all over the place, and we want to be back home to protect our people."

Taylor nodded. "That's understandable. But I've been fighting Indians for a long time. I came up against old Black Hawk nearly twenty years ago in the war against the British. I've got a score to settle with him, because he whipped me then, and I promise you he will not whip _us_ this time. Yes, that's wild country up there, no doubt about it. But we'll have a band of Potawatomi scouts led by one of their chiefs, Billy Caldwell, to guide us. And General Winfield Scott is coming across the Great Lakes with five hundred more Federal troops. With all that help, we'll finish Black Hawk.

"And we must finish him. The murders and massacres will not stop as long as Black Hawk and his tribe are on the loose. If you go back to your farms and settlements, there'll be a dozen of you in one place and twenty in another. And one morning or night you'll find yourself facing a war party of a hundred, hundred fifty braves, like the people at Apple River and Victor did. Our strength is in our numbers, and while we are three thousand and more together, we've got to seek out the British Band of the Sauk and Fox and destroy them."

Raoul heard a murmur of assent. His heart lifted. The little colonel was winning them over, and the war would go on.

"In plain English, gentlemen and fellow citizens, my orders from Washington City are to pursue Black Hawk wherever he goes, and to take the Illinois militia with me. I mean to do both. Now, there are the flatboats drawn up on the shore." He paused, then slid down from his perch on the barrel and, standing very straight, pointed over their heads. "And here are Uncle Sam's men, drawn up behind you on the prairie."

Taylor was so short that only the men near him could see where he was pointing. They turned first, and then in an ever-widening ring the men in the farther reaches of the crowd turned to look at the long, blue-clad line stretched behind them like a chain.

Raoul heard resignation in the militiamen's voices.

"Boys, I'm for the flatboats."

"Me too. I signed up to fight Injuns, not Americans."

A man called out, "Hell, Colonel, we're _all_ Uncle Sam's men."

Taylor smiled, reached up to settle his mottled hat on his head, and said, "Then I will be proud to lead you."

He strode through the assembly.

At the edge of the crowd he turned and raised his voice. "Officers, assemble your men. We'll take the troops over first, then the horses. I want everyone on the other side by noon."

Taylor walked over to Raoul, squinted at him and sniffed audibly.

"You look like the backside of hell, sir. You been drinking this early in the day?"

"I haven't touched whiskey this morning," Raoul said, not adding that it was only because when he woke up all the jugs in his tent were empty.

"Well, then you were drinking damned late last night. Appearing in front of these unruly men looking like a sot is no way to get them to obey you."

Raoul eyed the short colonel's mismatched uniform parts and wondered where he got the gall to criticize. But he wanted to be on this man's good side.

"My wife and two sons were murdered by the redskins. At Victor. They've been dead for two weeks, and I just found out about it last night."

Taylor reached out and gripped his arm. "Damn! I am sorry, Colonel de Marion. I should have realized you might have lost loved ones there. I'll see that _you_ get leave to go home."

Back to Victor? Raoul trembled at the thought of having to see the ruins of Victoire and the town--the graves of Clarissa and Phil and Andy. Having to face people who, like Eli, might believe that he put them in harm's way. Besides, he had a mission to carry out. Kill Indians. And there were no Indians to kill in Victor now.

"No, Colonel, no," he stammered. "I want to go after Black Hawk's people. We can't let them get away."

"Nor will we. General Atkinson and I were talking about that just yesterday--and about you, as it happens. You own a Mississippi steamboat, don't you?"

Puzzled, Raoul answered, "Yes, the _Victory_. It makes a regular run from St. Louis to Galena."

"We're certain that if we don't catch up with Black Hawk, wherever he's hiding up in the Michigan Territory, that he'll try to take his band west, to the Mississippi. If he gets across it, we'll have a hell of a time catching him." Taylor's eyes glinted hard as glass marbles. "We are determined, Colonel, not to allow him to make a successful retreat. We have to show all the tribes that they can't murder white people and then light out for Indian country and get off scot-free."

Taylor's words, now that the near-mutiny was over, lifted Raoul's heart. He had left Victor in April hoping for revenge for Helene and for his own sufferings of years ago. But now there were more slaughtered innocents to avenge--and now he had the army of the United States to help him do it.

"I'll do anything to get those redskins."

"With your ship patrolling the stretch of river where they're likely to cross, we could be sure that Black Hawk won't escape us."

"You want me to go back and get the _Victory_ ready?" He felt himself trembling again.

"For now you'll go along with us into the Michigan Territory," Taylor said. "But if it looks as if Black Hawk is making a run for the Mississippi, you'll see that we cut them off. The _Victory_, eh? Aptly named."

Raoul's grieving, vengeful heart rejoiced. When the time came, he'd have the cannon from the trading post mounted in the bow of the _Victory_. Then let any damned Indians try to cross the Mississippi. He'd pay them back for what they did to Victoire.

But he remembered Nicole and Frank coming to him, telling him the militia was needed to guard Victor. He'd laughed at their fears. If he'd listened to them, Clarissa and Andy and Phil and those other people might still be alive. Victoire and Victor would still be standing. Hadn't he had some hand in bringing death and destruction upon his home?

No, it was all the Indians' doing.

_I'll get you, Black Hawk. If I have to follow you all the way to Hudson's Bay. There won't be a one of your damned British Band left alive when I'm done._

He would make them suffer. From this moment on, he had only one thing to think of and only one thing to do: kill Indians.