Chapter 5

1832

Moon of Strawberries

_June_

18

The Trembling Lands

Redbird thought, _Our land by the Rock River was so good to us, and now see what we have come to_.

Only starving people tried to make food from cattail seeds and the inner bark of slippery elm and willow trees.

With a small steel knife Redbird cut cattails, dropping them into a basket she carried over her arm. It would take thousands of the tiny seeds, painstakingly picked from the white fuzz and then ground into meal, to make a little bread that must be shared among five people.

Redbird moved slowly, pushing her swollen belly before her. As much as her back and her feet hurt, she was determined to spend every day out foraging until the baby was born. For the baby's sake she had to eat as much as she could, but she did not want to take that extra portion from the rest of her family without contributing as much as she could to the common supply.

She sang as she walked along, asking the Trembling Lands to yield fruits and berries. She found no fruits or berries, but singing kept her spirits up, and she thought it helped the others too. Yellow Hair smiled and nodded to her to show that she liked the song.

Sweat trickled down her back and inside her doeskin dress. Gray clouds lay heavily over the Trembling Lands, and the air was warm and wet. Even though the water of the lake was dark and muddy, Redbird was looking forward to bathing in it.

And she was looking forward to a private talk with Yellow Hair. Yellow Hair had been with them for many days and nights. It was time she went to bed with White Bear.

Yellow Hair walked beside her around the edge of the lake. Ahead of them ran Eagle Feather with a captive pale eyes boy named Woodrow. Iron Knife had brought Woodrow back from a raid, and White Bear had taken him under his protection too.

Woodrow, a few years older than Eagle Feather, was darting this way and that, uprooting plants and throwing them down, tasting berries and spitting them out. Redbird watched him with amusement. She had already grown fond of him.

Woodrow said something to Yellow Hair, who smiled and turned to Redbird.

Speaking the pale eyes' tongue slowly, adding the few Sauk words she knew and using gestures, Yellow Hair managed to explain to Redbird that Woodrow was unhappy because he did not know what to pick.

"If look good, pick," Redbird said, using the little English White Bear had taught her. "Not eat. If I say good, then eat."

Woodrow grinned and nodded to Redbird to show he understood. He ran off after Eagle Feather, who was looking for birds and squirrels to shoot with his small bow and arrow. Woodrow had been a captive only half as long as Yellow Hair, but unlike her, he seemed happy with his lot.

Redbird doubted that Eagle Feather and Woodrow would find any squirrels or birds. Very little that was edible, plant or animal, lived in this marsh, and over a thousand people had been foraging in the area for more than a moon. The last time the British Band had eaten well was when Wolf Paw brought the cattle. And among so many people, those cattle had not lasted long. Many people were digging in the ground for worms and grubs, roasting them and eating them in handfuls. Some people were even secretly killing and eating horses, though Black Hawk had decreed death for anyone caught doing that.

As for Redbird herself, she felt an emptiness in her belly from the time she woke till the time she went to sleep, and she found herself wanting to sleep longer and longer as her strength ebbed away. She worried constantly that the baby inside her was not getting enough nourishment and would die or be stunted. The people around her were starting to look like walking skeletons.

They came to a point of land covered with pale green shrubs thrusting out into the lake. Redbird called Eagle Feather.

"Go for a swim around the other side of this point and take the pale eyes boy with you."

Eagle Feather's blue eyes glowed. "Maybe I can shoot a frog."

Once the boys were gone, she said to Yellow Hair, "We take bath." Yellow Hair smiled gratefully.

As they waded naked into the greenish, murky water, Redbird eyed Yellow Hair's body, so different from a Sauk woman's. She remembered how hungrily the braves had stared at Yellow Hair when Wolf Paw's wife stripped her before the tribe.

Yet it was easy to imagine that such pale skin was a sign of sickness. Yellow Hair's face and hands were somewhat tan, but every other part of her was white as milk. Her ribs were showing, a sign of the hunger they were all suffering. Still, her breasts were round, with pretty pink nipples. Her legs were long, and her buttocks curved out sharply; those of Sauk women were flatter. Even though the hair under her arms and between her legs was light in color, she had an abundance of it, much more than the fine tufts of black hair Redbird had in those places. She had undone her braids, and her hair fell like a golden curtain down her back halfway to her waist.

_What a beautiful creature she is!_

What an evil, stupid thing it would have been if Running Deer and the others had been allowed to cut her to bits and burn her.

A man might find Yellow Hair's differences from Sauk women attractive. A man such as White Bear.

She felt no fear that the pale eyes woman would take White Bear away from her. He showed many times every day, with his looks, with his movements, with his words, that Redbird, and not Yellow Hair, was first in his heart.

Redbird waded into the lake until the water was up to her breasts and her feet were sinking in the ooze. Then she pushed herself forward and dog-paddled through the reeds. It was wonderful to let the water take the weight of her belly off her hips and legs, a welcome relief to feel so cool.

In the night in the wickiup she often heard Yellow Hair moving or weeping softly. And that meant that Yellow Hair must have heard White Bear and Redbird loving each other in bed. This was only to be expected. When families slept all together in lodges and wickiups, the children early came to know how their parents took pleasure together during the night, and were unembarrassed when they grew up and their turn came. But how did the sounds of White Bear and Redbird together make Yellow Hair feel?

White Bear had said that Yellow Hair had wanted him when he lived among the pale eyes. And lately Redbird and White Bear had been sleeping apart on their separate pallets more often, because Redbird, in the discomfort of the final moon of carrying this baby, rarely wanted White Bear inside her.

And so Redbird had searched her heart and knew that she was willing to share her husband with Yellow Hair.

White Bear and Yellow Hair could go to bed with each other.

And should.

It would be good for Yellow Hair if her yearning for White Bear could be satisfied, at least for a time. The pleasure of mating was a healing thing. It restored the ill to health, and it made the well strong and happy.

Redbird could see in Yellow Hair's eyes--such a bright blue--how much she longed for White Bear. Being close to him, Redbird thought, helped Yellow Hair forget she was a captive.

Some days ago, not long after White Bear had taken in Woodrow, Redbird had told White Bear she would not mind if he took Yellow Hair into his bed. He had laughed and patted her belly and insisted he could wait until she wanted him again.

Why should he _have_ to wait, when a woman who desired him was right there in his wickiup?

It was good that she had spoken to him, even though he claimed he did not want Yellow Hair. At least he knew that if Yellow Hair did come to him in the night, they both had Redbird's blessing. But she doubted that Yellow Hair would ever approach White Bear that way. Not without encouragement.

She stopped swimming, and let her feet down into the mud so that she stood beside Yellow Hair. Here the water of the lake almost came up to Redbird's shoulders, but Yellow Hair's breasts were well above it. They smiled at each other.

Yellow Hair crouched down in the water till it was up to her neck. She dipped her hair into the water, then lifted her head and squeezed the water out of her hair with her hands.

The water was good and cool, she said, but she wished she had some soap.

White Bear had explained what soap was, and Redbird smiled and shook her head. If water would not wash dirt away, a Sauk scrubbed with sand. As for hair, Redbird left hers braided. Once at the beginning of summer and once at the end, she felt, was often enough to let water touch her unbound hair.

Now that she had decided to talk to Yellow Hair, Redbird felt a tightness in her throat. What if the idea of sharing White Bear made Yellow Hair angry? Sharing a mate was not, Redbird knew, according to pale eyes custom.

There was only one way: to begin in spite of her fear.

She said, "You know about woman and man? What they do?" She signed with her fingers to make her meaning plain, and saw that she had succeeded when the pale eyes woman's face turned a deep red. Redbird wished Yellow Hair were standing up in the water, so she could see whether the rest of her body turned red too.

Yellow Hair said she knew a little about what men and women did, but her mother had died a long time ago and her father never spoke of such things.

"You want me teach?" Redbird asked.

Yellow Hair turned red again, looked down at the water and nodded.

So, as they waded back to the shore of the lake, Redbird tried with many gestures and a few words to teach Yellow Hair, as Sun Woman many summers ago had taught her. When they were out of the water, Redbird picked up a stick and drew a little picture on the mudbank. When she was finished, she giggled. Yellow Hair took a good look and turned red again, all the way down to her waist, Redbird noticed. She turned away, but Redbird saw to her relief that she was laughing. Redbird scratched out the picture.

They sat on the bank where they had left their clothing, letting the air dry their bodies. From a pouch she had brought with her Redbird took a wood-stoppered gourd containing musk oil. She and Yellow Hair rubbed the oil on their bodies to keep mosquitoes off.

Yellow Hair wanted to know if the first time with a man hurt very much.

"Some women hurt much. Other women little."

She patted Yellow Hair's wrist to reassure her. "I think you hurt little. After that, feel very, very good." She patted herself between her legs to make plain what she was talking about, and Yellow Hair blushed again.

"_Best_ feeling," Redbird added, smiling. It was surprising, Redbird thought, that Yellow Hair could become a fully grown woman and yet still have her first time with a man to look forward to.

They sat in silence for a time, Redbird afraid again because now she had to take the next step.

But before she could speak, tears began to trickle down Yellow Hair's cheeks. She spoke brokenly, and it was hard for Redbird to follow her. She seemed to be saying that she expected to die before she ever knew those good feelings Redbird talked about with a man she loved. She had already lived for twenty summers, and now it seemed she might not live much longer. And never have a man.

It was true. There was big danger to Yellow Hair. If anything happened to White Bear, she would have no protector. Many Sauk hated pale eyes. One might get at her. Or her own people might even kill her by mistake.

Yellow Hair had missed so much. So tall and beautiful, but she had nothing to show for her life--no man, no children. Redbird felt sorry for her.

"You love White Bear?" she asked, hugging herself as she said the word "love" to show what she meant.

Now Yellow Hair turned pale--even paler than usual--and drew away from Redbird. She shook her head violently, her bright golden hair swinging all wild and loose, and said, "No, no, no!"

But she stared at Redbird too fixedly, and Redbird could see that she did not mean what she said.

White Bear wanted Yellow Hair, but said he did not want her. Yellow Hair loved White Bear, but said she did not love him.

White Bear and Yellow Hair were both being foolish. It came of Yellow Hair being pale eyes and White Bear being part pale eyes.

And so now Redbird took a deep breath and said, "When we sleep tonight, you go to bed of White Bear. He make you happy."

Yellow Hair's eyes grew huge and her face glowed with a joyous wonder. She stammered and gasped as she asked Redbird if she really meant it, if she would really let such a thing happen.

"I happy when you happy, White Bear happy," Redbird said.

Redbird had come to see Yellow Hair as a younger sister who needed her help and guidance. She liked Yellow Hair much more, in fact, than she liked either Wild Grape or Robin's Nest. Her sisters had always sneered at White Bear, and Yellow Hair saw what a fine man he was.

Yellow Hair suddenly looked frightened. She stood up abruptly, picked up her fringed doeskin dress and struggled into it. When her head appeared through the neck of the dress and she shook her hair free, she was crying again.

No, she insisted, she couldn't do that. It would be wrong.

Redbird thought she understood. This hungry, dangerous time was a terrible time for a woman to be carrying a baby.

"You not want baby? Sun Woman makes tea keeps woman from getting baby."

Yellow Hair talked for a long time. Redbird tried hard to follow what she said, asking questions and making her repeat herself. It had to do with Jesus, the pale eyes spirit Père Isaac always talked about. Jesus would not like it if Yellow Hair went to bed with White Bear.

Redbird remembered White Bear telling her that Yellow Hair was the daughter of a pale eyes shaman. The Jesus spirit might be a special spirit for her, then.

_But I am also the daughter of a shaman. I can teach her what we believe._

"Jesus not here," Redbird pointed out. "We children of Earthmaker."

But also, Yellow Hair explained, by pale eyes custom a woman who slept with another woman's husband was a bad woman.

"White Bear _is_ your husband," Redbird said. "My father shaman. He marry you and White Bear." Surely that was more important than what a lot of pale eyes who were not even here to see might think. Among the Sauk, many would call Yellow Hair a bad woman for _not_ sleeping with White Bear.

"We Sauk people. What you do with my Sauk man is good."

Yellow Hair sighed and wiped her tears with her fingers. Maybe she would go to White Bear in the night, and maybe not. She spread her hands helplessly. She did not know what to do.

Redbird saw that she could tell Yellow Hair no more. The pale eyes would have to make up her own mind.

Yellow Hair gave Redbird a sad smile and thanked her for her kindness. And after Redbird had put on her dress and her moccasins, Yellow Hair gave her a little kiss on the cheek.

With a wooden comb Redbird had given her, Yellow Hair combed out her long blond locks and began to braid them again.

They rejoined Eagle Feather and Woodrow and spent the rest of the afternoon searching for food, returning to camp when the clouds overhead turned purple and the sun made a brief appearance, blazing like a prairie fire on the flat horizon of the marshland.

Redbird bit her lip anxiously as they walked back to the camp. If Yellow Hair decided not to go to bed with White Bear, she might think, according to her pale eyes custom, that Redbird was a bad woman for saying she should. But what if Yellow Hair went to bed with White Bear and he came to love Yellow Hair more than he did Redbird? She had thought that could not happen, but now that she had spoken out, she was not so sure.

That night Redbird curled up on her solitary pallet of blankets laid over a mat of reeds on one side of the wickiup. Yellow Hair lay in her sleeping place, and the boys were in the one they shared. White Bear was still visiting and treating ill people. Many people, especially the very old and the very young, were falling ill in the Trembling Lands. There had been many deaths since they crossed the Great River. Bit by bit the band was losing the wisdom of the old and the promise of the young.

White Bear came in long after the two women and the boys had settled down for the night. He went to his own pallet on the east side of the wickiup.

Now that Redbird was ready for sleep, the baby within her woke up, and its kicking, along with burning feelings that rose from her stomach to her throat, kept her awake.

The stillness was disturbed only by the chirping of countless frogs.

_Where were those frogs today when we were looking for food? We must ask the Frog spirit to let us catch some of them._

Then she heard another movement. Someone was crawling across the reed-covered floor of the wickiup. She caught her breath. Yellow Hair's sleeping place was on the side opposite White Bear's, and the movement was unmistakably from her bed to his.

A little later she heard other sounds that were also easy to recognize--the crackling of a bed's reed matting, whispers, little gasps and groans, loud, fast breathing.

Yellow Hair's cry of pain sounded as if it had come through clenched teeth. She still did not want anyone to know. Redbird smiled to herself.

As she listened to White Bear's heavy panting, Redbird remembered the sharp pain inside her when she first received him on the island near Saukenuk.

White Bear sighed loudly, and then everything was still for a time, and Redbird heard the frogs once more. They were probably mating too. How wise of Earthmaker to make his creatures into woman and man, so they could give each other such wonderful pleasure. Earthmaker knew everything, but it was hard to see how he could have invented man and woman without having seen something that gave him the idea.

Him? Redbird had always pictured Earthmaker as a man, a giant warrior, but now she wondered whether the spirit that gave life to the world and all things in it might be a she. Or, better yet, maybe there were two Earthmakers, a he and a she.

As she had so many times before, she wished now that the tribe's custom would permit her to become a shaman, so that she might see into these mysteries with her own eyes, as White Bear and Owl Carver had.

The sounds started up again from White Bear's bed, the movements, the whisperings. Redbird thought about how good it was to have her man filling her solidly, giving her delicious feelings as he moved in and out. And she felt herself warm with desire.

She smiled ruefully in the dark.

_Now I want him and I cannot have him, because I sent Yellow Hair to his bed._

_I hope this baby will be born soon, so I can lie with White Bear again. Of course, even then I will still let Yellow Hair have him, sometimes._

When Redbird awoke at sunrise and got up to begin the day's foraging, Yellow Hair was back sleeping in her own place. In the faint light that filtered through the wickiup's elm-bark skin, her pink mouth looked soft and childlike.

White Bear was seated cross-legged on his bed, loading the rifle he had brought with him when he came back to the tribe. With food so short, even the shaman had to go out and try to hunt to supply his family; the people he treated had no gifts to give him. She stood looking at him, waiting for him to speak to her, but he kept his eyes on his rifle with foolish shyness.

Did he think she was angry at him, or that she was going to tease him, the way Water Flows Fast might?

Poor Water Flows Fast--she made few jokes since her husband, Three Horses, was killed at Old Man's Creek.

Redbird said, "I know what happened last night. I am glad that it happened. It was good for her and for you."

Now White Bear's dark eyes met hers, troubled. "Yes, it is good for me and Nancy--Yellow Hair--but only for now."

"What troubles you?" she asked him.

"One day, when Yellow Hair must leave us and go back to her own people, I think she will be very sad. That is why I did not lie with her when she wanted me to at Victor. I knew we would have to part."

"Now she has what she wants, at least for as long as she stays with us. Now she will have something to think about besides how afraid she is."

He smiled at her. "And you made it happen. I know that you sent her to me. You are a great troublemaker."

He stood up and stroked her cheek with his fingertips, and she felt a glow inside, certain now that speaking to Yellow Hair had been right.

* * * * *

The afternoon sun heated the interior of the birthing wickiup till it felt like a sweat lodge.

Redbird screamed. It was not a baby; it was a wild horse down there, kicking its way out. She felt about to faint.

The pain died away. Groaning, Redbird went limp between Wind Bends Grass and Yellow Hair, who held her arms. Sun Woman crouched before Redbird, observing the progress of the birth by the light of a single candle.

Her skin slick with sweat, Redbird was squatting naked over a pile of blankets in the center of the wickiup. Her back and legs ached unbearably.

"You don't have to scream so loud," Wind Bends Grass said abruptly. "It doesn't hurt that much."

Redbird wished her mother could feel this pain and know how much it hurt. She felt like telling Wind Bends Grass to leave the birthing wickiup.

Sun Woman said gently, "No one knows how much another person hurts."

_I don't remember this much pain when Eagle Feather was born. Maybe I am going to die._

Sun Woman stood up and wiped Redbird's forehead with a cool, wet kerchief, then cleaned her bottom for her, where a little blood was dripping.

"I can see the top of the baby's head," Sun Woman said. "It will be a good birth. You are almost done now."

Redbird looked up at the mare's tail, dyed red, that hung over the wickiup doorway, medicine to make the birth go easier.

_Let it be over soon_, she prayed. Her pains had started at dawn, and now it was past midday. Sun Woman had used up four candles, and in the whole band there were hardly any candles left. It had not taken this long with Eagle Feather.

Yellow Hair rubbed the arm she was holding, and Redbird managed to look at her and smile. Though Redbird had meant to honor Yellow Hair by asking her to help here, she was not sure now that she had done the right thing. The pale eyes woman's face was icy white, and she kept biting her lips as if trying to keep from being sick. She had probably never seen anything like this before.

Wind Bends Grass had insisted that it was bad luck to have Yellow Hair present, but Redbird had ignored her.

The next pain came, and Redbird, to show her mother how much it hurt, screamed even louder and longer than she had to. This time the pain gave her hardly any rest before it came again. And another came stepping on its heels. And another.

Her screams were continuous now, and she was hoarse and coughing and did not have to pretend. Her eyes were blind with tears. She dug her nails into the arms of Wind Bends Grass and Yellow Hair and bent forward, pushing as hard as she could.

She felt the enormous mass breaking out of her, and found her voice again in a scream that could split the very sky open even as the baby was tearing her in two.

Her ears rang. She felt broken and useless, like an empty eggshell. She hurt terribly, but a great weight was gone from inside her.

Wind Bends Grass said, "You have done well, my daughter."

Redbird started to cry, from pain, from relief, and because she had finally pleased her mother.

From the floor she heard a tiny cough, and then a drawn-out wail. She looked down and saw the little bright red figure in Sun Woman's arms, its eyes screwed shut, its mouth wide open, at the joining of its legs the life-giving crevice. A glistening blue cord coiling up from the baby's belly joined her still to Redbird's body.

She felt another pain now, and pushed out the afterbirth with a groan. Wind Bends Grass and Yellow Hair helped her to stumble to the bed against the wall of the wickiup. They wrapped her in a light blanket, while Sun Woman cut the cord and set it aside to be dried and put in the baby's medicine bag. Then Wind Bends Grass bathed the tiny body first with water, then with oil. She put her granddaughter in her daughter's arms.

"What will you call her?" she asked.

Redbird had thought of a name in the lake where she and Yellow Hair had been bathing several days ago. "I will call her Floating Lily."

"A good name," Sun Woman said.

Floating Lily's voice was strong. Hungry already, and she had only been in the world a few moments. Redbird pressed the little mouth against her breast. She prayed that she would have milk. She had eaten as much as she could; now she must give nourishment.

She felt the rhythmic pull on her breast. The baby's mouth was full of milk; no more crying. A warm feeling spread through Redbird's body.

After Redbird had fed Floating Lily, they both slept. It was near sundown when the three women attending her helped her limp with the baby back to her own wickiup. Each time she took a step it felt as if a club hit her between her legs, but her heart rejoiced that the ordeal was over.

Yellow Hair said that she would go and look for Woodrow and Eagle Feather. She was crying. Redbird was not sure why.

In the wickiup, White Bear was waiting for her. As she lay on her bed with Floating Lily, his eyes lit up with joy at the sight of his daughter. He picked the baby up, which made her cry, and he laughed and handed her back to Redbird.

"I was not with you to see our son born," he said. "I have never been happier in my life than I am at this moment."

The hide curtain over the wickiup doorway was pulled aside and Owl Carver entered, holding his owl's head medicine stick in one hand and a bowl of smoking aromatic herbs and wood shavings in another. His white hair was getting thinner and thinner, Redbird noticed, and he walked with a permanent stoop. He blew the smoke over Redbird and Floating Lily to bless them.

"May she walk her path with honor," he said, laying his hand on Floating Lily's head. He left, the scented smoke lingering behind him.

When Redbird bared her breast, White Bear leaned over and kissed her nipple, his lips catching a droplet of milk that had formed there. She put Floating Lily to her breast and lay in contented silence with her husband sitting beside her.

He took up his book and read aloud:

"Whence Hail to thee, Eve, rightly called Mother of all Mankind, Mother of all things living, since by thee Man is to live, and all things live for Man."

"What does that mean?" she asked.

He translated the words into Sauk, and said, "It means that all life comes from woman."

Iron Knife's head suddenly appeared in the doorway, his eyes wide, his mouth drawn down.

"White Bear! Long knives coming this way, thousands of them."

Redbird's body went cold, and she clutched the baby to her. How could she keep this tender new life safe in the midst of flight and fighting?

"Maybe they will not be able to find us," White Bear said.

"No, the scouts say they have Potawatomi guides riding with them, who know where to look for us. Potawatomi dogs! To side with the long knives against us."

"The Potawatomi must have been forced to help," said White Bear quietly.

Iron Knife said, "Black Hawk says we must break camp right now. We will head west as quickly as we can toward the Great River."

Redbird tightened her arms around Floating Lily until the baby cried out in pain. Instantly she relaxed her grip, but in her mind she saw the long knives coming, with their cruel, hairy faces, murdering them all with their guns and their swords. She saw the people she loved sprawled dead in the mud of the Trembling Lands. White Bear had told her that Black Hawk's war parties had killed many pale eyes, even women and children. Now the long knives would take terrible vengeance. Even as she stroked the baby and whispered to soothe her, her heart pounded in her chest.

There would be hard traveling ahead and even less food, thought Redbird. Trying to walk after just giving birth, the pain would kill her.

For an instant she hated Black Hawk for having led them into this suffering. If only the British Band had listened last winter to White Bear. And to her. Then hatred gave way to sick despair. She would die before they ever reached the Great River. And Floating Lily, who had just come into the world, would die too.

Iron Knife left them. White Bear turned to Redbird, and she saw in his eyes the same hopelessness she felt. But if he gave up, too, they were truly lost. Why, then, go through the agony of a flight from the long knives? They might as well stay here and let the long knives come and kill them.

White Bear said, "The Turtle told me, 'The many who follow Black Hawk across the Great River will be few when they cross back.'" A chill went through her as she saw how those prophetic words were coming true.

The little bundle in Redbird's arms stirred. Anger rose in her. Despite Black Hawk's blundering, despite the deadly hatred of the long knives, she and her husband and her son and her baby daughter would not let themselves be killed.

"Then if we do not cross the Great River we will escape in some other direction," she said firmly. "Go and find Eagle Feather and Woodrow. I will start to pack our belongings."

He smiled gratefully at her, reached for her and held her. She felt herself gaining strength from his strong arms around her.

"For a few days I will not be able to walk or ride. You will have to tie me to a travois and pull me along, as we do with old people."

"If I have to carry you in my arms," said White Bear, "I will do that."

Now that she was determined to fight to stay alive, she smiled up at White Bear and pressed herself against him. She _was_ love. The power of a great spirit, perhaps that she-Earthmaker she had once thought of, filled her.

The Turtle, she thought, had said that many would die. But he had also said that a few would live.

She and her husband and her children, they would live.

19

The Band Divided

The setting sun, warming the flat land at the foot of a hill beside the Great River, cast deep shadows in the hollows of Redbird's and Nancy's faces. How thin they were getting to be. Fear for them wriggled snakelike through White Bear's own empty stomach.

_Has Earthmaker abandoned his people? No--worse--this is the fate he has chosen for us. He bestows evil as well as good on his children._

Redbird said wearily, "What did the council decide?" She unfastened the sling in which she carried Floating Lily on her back and cradled the baby in her arms, frowning into the tiny brown face. White Bear knew what she was thinking. Floating Lily was too quiet.

White Bear said, "Black Hawk wants to go north and seek refuge with the Chippewa. He took the compass my father gave him out of his medicine bag and showed it to the chiefs and braves. He said we must follow its arrow north. But Iron Knife disagreed with him."

Redbird's eyes widened. "My brother never disagrees with Black Hawk. Black Hawk has lived three times as long as he has."

"Iron Knife spoke for many of the younger braves," White Bear said. "They want to cross the Great River here, now, and bring the war to an end. Black Hawk reminded them that we have only three canoes. Each canoe can hold only six people, and two of those six must paddle back and forth. They would have to ferry nearly a thousand people. He said the long knives would reach us long before we all got across. Iron Knife said they would make rafts and more canoes. In the end the three chiefs and most of the braves said they would cross the river. Only a few have agreed to go north with Black Hawk."

It had taken a whole moon to cross from east to west, from their camp in the Trembling Lands to this place where the Bad Axe River emptied into the Great River. The land through which they passed, following an old Winnebago trail, was rolling prairie at first. Then they plunged into country that was ever wilder and more mountainous as they struggled westward. At the last they had to cut their own trail. They marked their passage with kettles, blankets, tent poles and other possessions too heavy to carry--and their dying old people who could walk no more, and their dead children. The only good thing about this rugged land was that it slowed down the long knives even more than it did Black Hawk's people, who knew by the time they reached the Great River that their pursuers were two days behind them.

White Bear told Nancy in English what he had just told Redbird about the council.

"If the band is dividing, where will _we_ go?" Nancy asked.

"I asked Black Hawk--I begged him--to let you and Woodrow go." Anger crept into White Bear's voice as he recalled Black Hawk's stubbornness. "He still refuses. He wants to take the two of you north with him."

Redbird said, "But pale eyes prisoners are no good to Black Hawk now." White Bear was pleased to see that she had learned to get the drift of English conversations between him and Nancy. He did not like to feel that he was leaving Redbird out of anything, especially since he _knew_ Nancy now.

"True," White Bear said to Redbird in Sauk. "And if we meet up with long knives again they will shoot first and not think to look for pale eyes among us. I want to get Yellow Hair and Woodrow away from the tribe before there is another battle."

There had been one great battle with the long knives halfway through their trek, on the south shore of the Ouisconsin River. Many had died on both sides, but Black Hawk had managed to get most of his people away after nightfall. Right now White Bear could almost hear the huge army of long knives crashing through the forests behind them.

But Nancy shook her head violently. "I feel safer with you." Her eyes glistened with tears.

Ever since Redbird had encouraged Nancy to seek his bed, White Bear had feared that when the time came for their parting, it would hurt her badly.

And him as well. In the moon just past he and Nancy had joined bodies and hearts many times. Now it seared his throat to speak aloud his decision that Nancy must leave the British Band.

He sat down on a fallen tree trunk and reached out to her. Nancy came over and took his hands and sat beside him.

"With the band going in two different directions, this is your best chance to get away. You and I have loved each other, but you are still a white woman, and my people murdered your father. Why should you share our fate? And what about Woodrow? If you and he go together, you have a better chance of reaching safety."

She bent over, her shoulders shaking with sobs. "If you're going to die, I want to die with you."

A moon ago, he thought, she had desperately wanted to escape from the British Band. Now her own heart was holding her captive.

Eve's words to Adam as they left Paradise rose unbidden in his mind: _With thee to go, is to stay here; without thee here to stay, is to go hence unwilling._

"But no one wants to die," he said gently. "For you to stay now when you can escape would be madness."

It was a madness he felt himself. There was a part of him that wanted to keep her with him, to let her stay, however all this might end. He had to force himself to keep to his plan to help her get away.

Eagle Feather and Woodrow came from the woods along the south bank of the Bad Axe River, arms loaded with boughs for the wickiup that now they would not bother to build.

White Bear squatted down before Woodrow and grasped his shoulders.

"Tonight I am going to help you and Miss Nancy to get away from our band and back to the white people." He would be sorry to lose the boy.

Eagle Feather, standing nearby, said nothing. But his face, full of woe, told White Bear that he understood.

"I guess Miss Nancy and me could find our way to white folks if we follow the river," Woodrow said uncertainly. With the beaded headband Iron Knife had given him wrapped around his high forehead, and his face browned by the summer sun, he looked like a Sauk boy, except for his light brown hair. He seemed not much happier about leaving the band than Nancy.

"I'm not going to send you to find your way alone," White Bear said. "I'll go with you until I see you in safe hands. Prairie du Chien and Fort Crawford are south of here on the river. If we go in that direction we're bound to meet some of your people."

"I got no people but you," said Woodrow. "You treated me better than my folks ever did."

White Bear felt a catch in his throat. He remembered how, seven years ago, he had fought against being sent from the tribe when Star Arrow came looking for him.

Eagle Feather's blue eyes rested gravely on White Bear. "What about Mother and Floating Lily and me? Are we going to cross the Great River now?"

White Bear remembered again what the Turtle had said in his vision. He looked out at the river, tinged with red by the sunset, and felt a chill. Calamity, his shaman's sense told him, awaited those who tried to escape by crossing the river again.

"No." White Bear looked over at Redbird, who held Floating Lily to her breast. "Day after tomorrow at the latest, the long knives will be here. I want you to go with Black Hawk. Though I think Black Hawk has led us unwisely, still, to go north is safer. Three lodges, about fifty people, are going with Black Hawk. Owl Carver, Flying Cloud, Wolf Paw--they will follow him."

He shook his head sadly.

"What is it?" Redbird asked.

"Even Wolf Paw disagrees with Black Hawk about going north. He himself will remain at his father's side, but he is sending his two wives and his children across the river. He thinks they will be safer. I think he is wrong."

He gazed out at the reddened river and shook his head again.

"Wolf Paw made the right choice for his family," said a deep voice behind him. White Bear turned to see Iron Knife's huge figure, silhouetted by the setting sun. Behind him trudged a much smaller shadow whom White Bear recognized at once--Sun Woman.

White Bear hurried to his mother, put his arm around her shoulders and led her to the fallen tree to sit down. He could feel her bones under her doeskin dress.

"How is my mother?"

She patted his hand. "Very tired. But alive."

"Are you hungry?"

"One good thing about getting old is that I do not want as much food."

White Bear felt immediate relief that they did not have to share their few boiled roots and their bits of meal cake, and then he hated himself for begrudging food to his own mother.

_Getting old_, she had said. She was not an old woman. From what she had told him, he guessed her age was less than fifty summers. But the woman before him was terribly gaunt and stooped. The privations of the moons just past had aged her beyond her years.

He felt a stone block his throat as he realized that his mother might not have much longer to live.

Iron Knife bent down and hugged Redbird, then patted Woodrow's head with a big hand while the boy looked up at him with shining eyes. It was Iron Knife, leading the war party that had captured Woodrow, who had insisted the boy be allowed to live.

Like everyone else in the band, Iron Knife was mostly brown skin stretched over a skeleton, but his was a very big skeleton, a head taller than White Bear's. Studying Iron Knife, White Bear wondered whether he could ask his help in getting Woodrow and Nancy safely away.

Iron Knife said, "There is no safety in following Black Hawk. He said the British and the Potawatomi and Winnebago would join forces with us, and they did not. Now he says the Chippewa will help us. He is sure to be wrong again. And before he gets to the Chippewa he must travel through Winnebago country for many days, and now most of the Winnebago are helping the long knives hunt us."

Sun Woman said, "Black Hawk knows that if we join the rest of the tribe in Ioway, he will no longer be leader. No doubt those who accepted He Who Moves Alertly as their chief have prospered as much as we have suffered. Black Hawk will have to take second place to He Who Moves Alertly. That sticks in his throat like a fishbone. He would rather lead us on and on until we all die."

White Bear had to force his voice from a chest tight with urgency. "You will not have time to build enough canoes and rafts before the long knives are upon you."

And the heads of the long knives would be full of names like Kellogg's Grove, Old Man's Creek, Apple River Fort, Indian Creek and Victor, and their hearts would be ravenous for revenge.

Iron Knife sat down on the tree trunk beside Sun Woman and pointed at the river. "If they attack us before we can cross, we can defend ourselves on that island."

White Bear followed Iron Knife's gesture. The sun had just set behind the western hills, and the Great River now reflected a pale blue back at the sky. A long, low island covered with spruce and hemlock trees bulked darkly an arrow's flight from shore. White Bear shivered. His shaman's senses told him that this was a place of grief and horror, an isle of death. He did not like the name of this river at whose mouth they were camped--the Bad Axe.

Trying to ignore the rapid thudding of his heart, White Bear readied himself to talk to Iron Knife about Woodrow and Nancy. He hated having to reveal his plan. If Iron Knife was against letting the two pale eyes escape, all would be lost. He opened his mouth, hesitating.

But he needed Iron Knife's help getting horses and avoiding the warriors guarding the camp. He reminded himself that Redbird's brother had always given him help when he needed it. He decided to go ahead and talk to him.

He said, "It would not be good for Yellow Hair and the boy to cross the river or to go with Black Hawk. I have taken them into my care, and now I am afraid for them. If there is a battle, the long knives may kill them by mistake."

Iron Knife grunted. "I would be sorry to see that happen."

White Bear's heartbeat steadied. He felt more sure of himself now.

He took a deep breath and said, "I have been thinking of helping them to get away."

Iron Knife smiled at White Bear, reached across Sun Woman and patted his knee. "That is well."

"It honors you, my son," said Sun Woman.

White Bear felt knots released in his chest and shoulders. "I was hoping you would see this as I see it."

"I will offer to watch the horses tonight," Iron Knife said. "Come when you are ready, and I will have three picked for you."

Sun Woman said, "If the long knives see you with Yellow Hair and the boy, they will try to shoot you."

White Bear put an arm around her bony shoulders and pulled her to him. "There is danger all around us, Mother. I think those who follow Black Hawk to the north will be safest. Redbird and the children will go that way. I think you should too. Do not try to cross the Great River."

"I have walked enough," said Sun Woman. "My legs ache and my feet are bruised. If I follow Black Hawk, I will end like the old people who sit down by the trail and wait for death."

"I speak as a shaman," White Bear said. "I have a bad feeling about this river crossing."

Sun Woman stood up. "And I speak as a medicine woman. I have seen many kinds of death, and I would rather drown or be shot than die little by little of hunger and weariness."

White Bear hugged his mother again. "I know we will meet again in the West," he said. That, as they both knew, could mean across the river or at the other end of the Trail of Souls.

Sun Woman said, "My son, you have made my heart glad. Every day of your life you have walked your path with courage and honor. May you walk the same way always."

Redbird held Sun Woman and Iron Knife, each in turn, for a long time. And after they had gone, White Bear and Redbird went together into the thick woods along the edge of the Great River.

Away from the others, White Bear became aware of the shrill chirping of choirs of crickets filling the night air. Mosquitoes shrilled around his ears and stung his hands and face. He and Redbird had long since used up the oil that kept them off. But the scratches and bruises of the trail of hardship they had walked these past moons had toughened their skins and their spirits so that mosquito stings meant little.

White Bear found a clear spot in the midst of a stand of young maples, and they lay down side by side. He put his hand on her breast, fuller than he had ever felt it, swollen with milk for Floating Lily. She slipped her dress down off her shoulders and let him touch her bare flesh. Very gently, knowing it was tender from nursing, he caressed her nipple with his fingertips.

"Before I leave tonight I will give you the deerhorn-handled dagger my father gave me," he said softly. "I must go unarmed, so that the long knives will not kill me if they catch me. Keep it for me till I come back."

"I am afraid," she whispered. "When you and Yellow Hair and Woodrow are gone, Black Hawk will know you helped them escape. What will he do to you when you come back?"

"By the time I return to you, he will not be angry. He will realize he did not really need them."

And then, too, White Bear might be captured or killed. The last time he had gone to the long knives they had nearly killed him. The sight of Little Crow's head bursting, blood flying everywhere as Armand Perrault's bullet smashed it, would never leave his memory.

If that happened to him, Black Hawk's anger would not matter.

Redbird wriggled closer to him, her hand stroking his chest as his stroked hers. "I do not think any Sauk warrior would be willing to steal prisoners away from his chief. I think you do this because you have lived so long with pale eyes."

White Bear felt desire for her swelling in him. They had coupled twice only since Floating Lily was born. He pulled her skirt up so he could stroke her belly and the smooth insides of her thighs.

"From what I saw among the pale eyes," he said, knowing a bitterness even as he sought the joy of Redbird, "they are more obedient to their chiefs than we are. And though it makes our hearts weep, if our people are not to disappear, we must learn to obey our leaders as the pale eyes do. But this night I must disobey our war chief."

"We must change," said Redbird. "But if we become like the pale eyes it will be the same as disappearing." Then she whispered, "Oh!" as his touch in a warm, moist place pleased her.

She loosened his loincloth, and his breathing quickened as her fingertips played awhile with him; then she grasped his hard flesh firmly. He sighed as he felt her fingers squeezing him. He should save his strength, he thought, because he would be awake and traveling all night, and probably all day tomorrow, with Nancy and Woodrow. But he and Redbird might never be together like this again. He rolled over on top of her and let her small, gentle hand guide him into her as he groaned aloud with the pleasure of it.

* * * * *

A tiny sliver of a new moon had risen just above the hills on this side of the river. White Bear, Nancy and Woodrow made their way south of the band's camp to a meadow in a hollow between hills.

Here the band had turned out their few remaining horses to graze and sleep. From the north end of the camp, beside the Bad Axe River, came the sound of men's voices and the light of fires. Men were stripping the bark from elm trees to make simple canoes and tying driftwood logs together to make rafts.

White Bear, Nancy and Woodrow worked their way around the edge of the meadow. The horses were dark shapes standing quietly. White Bear could hear Nancy stifle a sob every now and then. She had been crying all evening.

He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her close and tell her she did not have to leave him. He was the cause of her pain and could do nothing about it. He could, possibly, save her life, but he could not make her happy.

A tall shadow suddenly stood in his path.

"I have three horses ready for you," said Iron Knife. "I even found saddles, to make it easier for you to ride. They belonged to men who died at the Ouisconsin River battle."

White Bear had been carrying the rifle and powder horn Frank had given him. He thrust them at Iron Knife.

"I want you to have this rifle. A pale eyes uncle of mine--a good uncle--gave it to me. If I meet the long knives now, a rifle will not help me."

Iron Knife took the rifle and slung the horn over his shoulder. "May the spirit of the Great River watch over you."

His heart aching, White Bear opened his mouth, wanting to tell Iron Knife again to go with Black Hawk, not to stay here at the mouth of the Bad Axe. But he knew Iron Knife's mind was made up. Redbird's brother was strong, not only in body, but in doing what he had decided.

Instead of speaking, White Bear reached up and grasped Iron Knife's broad shoulders and squeezed hard.

* * * * *

White Bear, Nancy and Woodrow led their horses quietly along the riverbank, finding places where the shrubbery was thin enough to allow passage. White Bear kept glancing over his shoulder, and when he could no longer see the band's fires to the north he whispered to Nancy and Woodrow to mount.

He let his horse find its own path beside the rippling water. Many times as they rode southward he caught himself dozing off, fatigued not only by exertion and lack of sleep but by hunger. He watched the thumbnail-shaped moon slide across the sky over the river. As it sank in the west he called a halt and told Nancy and Woodrow they could rest till sunup.

They tied their horses to saplings and crawled in under the boughs of a big spruce tree. Woodrow fell asleep at once, but Nancy crept into White Bear's arms.

By her movements she told him that she wanted him.

"Forgive me," he said. "I am so tired." She stroked his cheek reassuringly. But her face against his was tear-wet.

She fell asleep with her head on his chest.

Daylight and a loud chorus of birdsong woke them. Soon after they started riding, they passed through an empty village of bark-covered lodges, Winnebago he was sure, beside the river. Winnebago friends of Black Hawk had said that the long knives had ordered all Winnebago to camp within sight of the forts to show that they were not helping Black Hawk.

A clear trail led south from the village along the riverbank, and White Bear, Nancy and Woodrow rode along it. By the end of the day they should be near the settlement of Prairie du Chien and the long knives' Fort Crawford.

When the sun was high over the river, White Bear heard a sound that sent fear rustling down his back--the drawn-out shouts of long knife leaders calling orders. The cries came from somewhere to the south.

With horror, he saw it at once in his mind: One long knife army coming from the east. Now another marching up from the south. Both heading for the mouth of the Bad Axe where the people were trying desperately to get across the river.

A little later he heard the rumble of many hooves.

He wanted to turn and gallop back to warn the band. They had no notion that this second army, much closer to them, was coming.

Nancy said, "You'd better leave us here. They'll shoot at you."

Fear for himself and for his people tempted him to agree, but he firmly shook his head.

"I must stay with you until I'm sure you're safe. It is a matter only of minutes."

Soon White Bear glimpsed the Stars and Stripes fluttering among distant trees and the noon sun glittering on brass buttons. Federal troops. At a clear spot on the trail, where Nancy and Woodrow would be visible from a distance, he called a halt.

"You two stay on the trail. Nancy, pull your braids around to the front so they can see your blond hair. Woodrow, take that headband off. You want to make sure they see that you're white. Just hold your horses still, and when you see the first soldiers, raise your hands above your heads. And call out to them in English."

_Oh, Earthmaker, keep them safe._ This was the best he could do for them.

Nancy kissed him hard on the mouth.

"I love you so much," she said, her voice breaking. "And I know I'll never see you again. Go on, get away from here!"

White Bear led his horse back into the woods between the river and the bluffs. He tied the horse and then crept back through the shrubbery to watch Nancy and Woodrow.

Terrified by the thought that he might see them shot down before his eyes by careless soldiers, he held his breath.

He heard hoofbeats approaching at the gallop.

He heard Nancy cry, "Help us, please! We're white people!"

_Good._

Two men wearing tall, cylindrical black shakoes and blue jackets with white crossbelts rode up to Nancy and Woodrow, who lowered their hands. After a brief conversation, all four rode off down the trail.

In a burst of relief, White Bear let his breath out. For a moment he could not move, so limp had his fear for Nancy and Woodrow left him. He whispered a prayer of thanks to Earthmaker.

He crept back to his horse and walked it till he found a deer track the horse could follow, then mounted and trotted northward.

He was back riding on the trail when an arrow, thrumming, buried its head in the dirt just in front of him. It startled him so that he nearly fell out of the saddle. He reined in his horse.

Men on horseback emerged from the trees ahead of him. They rode toward him silently, five of them. Two pointed rifles at him, the other three bows and arrows. They were red men, but wore pale eyes' shirts and trousers. Their hair was long, bound by brightly colored sashcloth bands, and they grew it full, not shaving part of their heads as most Sauk men did.

He sighed and held his hands out from his sides to show that they were empty. The Winnebago could have shot him off his horse without warning, so he supposed they meant to let him live.

The man on the right side of the trail, who held a bow with an arrow aimed at White Bear's heart said, in Sauk, "I am called Wave. We are looking for Black Hawk. Where can we find him?"

White Bear decided to make a joke of that. "Do you want to help him fight the long knives?"

Wave laughed, and translated it for his companions, who laughed also. He wore a brave's red and white feathers dangling from earrings, with two more standing upright in his hair.

He said, "The long knives have offered horses and gold to whoever captures Black Hawk. We are not enemies of the Sauk, but we want the long knives' friendship." The man spoke Sauk fluently and without an accent.

"It is a shame that the Winnebago fight on the side of the long knives," White Bear said. "One day they will take your land from you, as they have taken ours from us."

Wave shrugged. "Look what has happened to you, who fought against them."

_Red man betrays red man, and only the whites gain. It is as I told Redbird. If we want to live in this land, we ourselves must become like the whites._

"Come," said Wave. "We must take you to the long knives' war chief."

White Bear slumped in despair, realizing that he was no longer a free man. He looked about him. The trees, the birds, the Great River, they were all free, but he was in the power of his enemies. The world was a darker place. Black Hawk's war, for him, was over. He wished he could have warned his people about the approaching army of long knives. And also, his heart ached for the Sauk he was unable to warn of the second long knife army. A yearning for Redbird and Eagle Feather and Floating Lily seemed almost to pull his heart from his body. He prayed that they had safely left the Bad Axe country by now and headed north with Black Hawk. Probably he would never see them again. Probably the long knives would kill him. With a sigh, he turned his horse's head in the direction Wave had pointed.

* * * * *

While his regiment rode by, the long knife war chief, a stocky man with a long face, thick eyebrows and hard blue eyes, stood by the side of the trail facing White Bear. He was Colonel Zachary Taylor, he had told White Bear. A burly, red-faced soldier with a sergeant's three chevrons on his forearm stood beside Taylor staring at White Bear with open hatred.

"What are you, a renegade white man?" Taylor demanded. "How come you speak good English?"

"I am Sauk, Colonel. My name is White Bear. My father was white, and he took me to be educated among the whites for several years."

"Well, White Bear, what were you doing on this trail? Chasing the white woman and the boy we just picked up?"

"It was I who brought them to you."

Taylor snorted. "You expect me to believe that?"

"Miss Hale will tell you it is true."

"Well, we already sent her and the boy back to Fort Crawford with an escort, so that will have to wait. But you do have her name right. Where are the rest of the Sauk? Trying to cross the Mississippi?"

"I cannot help you, Colonel. Any more than you would give information to the Sauk, if we captured you."

Taylor's sergeant said, "Sir, let me and a couple of my men take this half-breed for a stroll in the woods. We'll find out what you want to know."

"No, Benson, no." Taylor brushed the suggestion aside with an irritated wave of his hand. "Showing how they can resist torture is a regular game with Indians. He'll just sing Indian songs till he dies, and listening to that would be worse agony for you than anything you could do to him."

"Well, then let's shoot the bastard, sir, and be done with him. The militia don't take no prisoners. Why should we?"

Taylor threw back his head, and even though he was shorter than the sergeant, managed to look down his nose at him. "We're professional soldiers, Sergeant. I trust we know how to conduct ourselves better than the state militia. No, we'll just take him along with us. An Indian who speaks both Sauk and English could be of use to us, alive. I see you have a full head of hair and you wear no feathers, White Bear. That mean you haven't killed anybody? Or just that you don't want the fact known?"

"I haven't killed anybody." White Bear thought of adding that he had saved more than one white life. But he couldn't expect them to believe that. He would not expose himself to their scorn.

He said, "I am a medicine man, a shaman."

Taylor looked at him gravely. "Educated as a white man and educated in the way of the spirits, too, eh? And with all that learning you couldn't warn Black Hawk away from this disaster?"

White Bear shook his head. "He listened to other voices."

Taylor's eyes narrowed. "Well, whatever advice you gave him, it's all over for your chief now. God pity your people."

White Bear said, "All they want now is to go back across the Mississippi and live in peace. Those who are left."

Taylor fixed him with an angry stare. "It's too late for that. Things have gone too far. You people are going to have to suffer for what you've done."

White Bear felt his limbs go cold as he heard the steel in Taylor's voice. This was not a bad man, White Bear sensed, not a man like Raoul. But whatever mercy was in him had no doubt long since been washed away by the blood shed by Black Hawk's war parties.

_No doubt while he talks about making my people suffer he thinks of himself as quite a civilized man._

"Revenge, Colonel?" White Bear said. "I thought you were professional soldiers."

The sergeant balled his fists. "Please, sir, let me teach him some respect."

Taylor cocked his head, listening to a distant sound, then turned to look downriver.

"He's got a much more bitter lesson to learn, Sergeant. As do all his people."

White Bear heard it too. A chugging sound. It had been a while since he had heard a noise like that. He followed Taylor's gaze down the river. All he could see was a column of gray smoke in the sky to the south. But he knew what it was.

A steamship.

Because he could not ride to warn his people, he wanted to cry out in agony. He saw what would happen--those few frail canoes, the steamship bearing down on them, two long knife armies marching inexorably toward the mouth of the Bad Axe.

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

20

River of Blood

Raoul uncorked the jug standing on the chart table and held it out to Bill Helmer, captain of the steamship _Victory_. A portly man with muttonchop whiskers, his hands firmly gripping the polished oak steering wheel, Helmer silently shook his head.

Raoul lifted the jug in a mock toast. "May we have a merry day of Indian fighting." He took two long swallows, and decided he felt strong and happy.

Helmer shook his head. "Mr. de Marion, there's nothing merry about fighting Indians."

"If that's your opinion, Captain, I'll thank you to keep it to yourself," said Raoul. He wanted a little warmth right now besides what he was getting from the jug, and he despised this dour man for not giving it to him.

Helmer shrugged and bent his gaze on the river.

Raoul knotted his fingers behind his back, and found that the effort relieved the tightness in his belly. He went to stand at the pilot house window and stared out at the forested bank where the Bad Axe River emptied into the Mississippi.

Militiamen were wading across the Bad Axe from south to north, holding their rifles, bayonets fixed, over their heads. The Bad Axe was more a creek than a river, shallow now in August, winding through a channel thick with bright green reeds. As the men slogged up the north bank, they leveled their rifles and plunged into the trees.

A blue haze of powder smoke already drifted amidst the pine and spruce north of the Bad Axe mouth. The popping of rifles carried to Raoul across the water over the wheeze and clank of the _Victory_'s steam engine, fueled with oak and split pine.

Raoul wondered what was happening in those woods. Were the Indians fighting back, defending their women and children? He hoped the militiamen would go on killing until they'd exterminated the whole band. After four months of chasing the Indians across Illinois and the Michigan Territory, after all the innocents murdered--_Clarissa_, _Phil_, _Andy_--surely the militiamen would not be soft.

He felt tears starting up, and he quickly took another pull at the jug. He wished he could be in at the kill instead of out here in the river.

_I want their blood on my own hands._

Lieutenant Kingsbury, in command of the gunnery crew assigned to Raoul from Fort Crawford, came up the stairs from the foredeck to the hurricane deck and entered the pilot house. He mopped his brow as he set his cylindrical shako, sporting its red plume and gold crossed-cannons artillery badge, on the chart table.

"Gets damned sticky on the river in August."

Raoul offered his jug. "Help you forget the heat."

Kingsbury grinned, thanked Raoul and took a big drink. His cheeks reddened, and he dabbed at his thick brown mustache with his fingertips.

"I don't hear much shooting on shore," he said, handing the jug back to Raoul, who took a swallow before setting it down.

"Just what I was thinking," said Raoul. "Where the hell are all the redskins? I figure there's about a thousand left. They can't all have crossed the Mississippi before we got here unless they had a whole fleet of canoes."

The _Victory_ had caught one canoe in midstream when she arrived on the scene. Raoul's militia sharpshooters had blanketed it with rifle fire, killing all six Indians aboard, and the overturned canoe had drifted downstream, out of sight.

Raoul picked up a brass telescope from the chart table and studied the riverbank, moving the circular field from point to point. He saw plenty of militiamen, but no sign of Indians.

"Look," said Kingsbury. "Militiamen coming back out of the woods."

Raoul swept his telescope back over the riverbank. Men in buckskins were dragging their rifle butts along the ground, sitting down on the river's edge and splashing water on their faces, shaking their heads angrily, raccoon tails on their caps wagging.

One man did emerge from the trees with a big grin, holding high three bloody scalps dangling from hanks of black hair. Another man led two Indian ponies. So, the Sauk still had a few horses with them.

Kingsbury said, "Looks like they only met a handful."

Raoul drummed his fingers on the polished oak sill. "A rear guard. The rest could have headed north. But I don't think they did. They were aiming to cross the Mississippi."

His telescope brought closer an island north of the Bad Axe mouth, about fifty yards out from the Mississippi's east bank, thickly covered with spruce and hemlock. He saw two bark canoes with stove-in bottoms beached at the island's southern tip. Between the island and the riverbank the water had a pale green look that said it was shallow.

"I've got a feeling most of the Indians are hiding out on that island." His pulse quickened and his breath came fast.

His first thought was to land on the island with his men and flush the Indians out. But there could still be a couple of hundred warriors left to the band. No, they'd have to use the six-pounder first.

"Captain Bill, sail along the west side of that island. I want to get a closer look at it."

The spokes flew under Helmer's hands, and the _Victory_'s side paddles churned up the water.

Raoul, followed by Kingsbury, hurried down the stairs to the foredeck, where his own dozen militiamen, all Smith County boys who had reenlisted, watched him stride the planks to stand beside the six-pounder. It had saved the townspeople at Victor; now, mounted on the _Victory_'s foredeck, it would finish the Sauk.

The late morning sun beat without mercy on the open deck, and sweat trickled down from Raoul's armpits. He wanted to throw his jacket off and wear just a shirt, but the military blue, the gold braid and the brass buttons gave him authority that he'd found he needed, not so much in dealing with his own men as with other officers.

Hodge Hode said, "We got 'em treed now, Colonel."

"But stay under cover," said Raoul. "These raccoons will be shooting back." His eyes tried to tear holes in the thick greenery on the island.

The Smith County boys crouched down behind the bales of hay lined along the railings and cocked their flintlocks.

Raoul patted the gun's black muzzle affectionately, and the three artillerists in blue jackets grinned and nodded at him. They had put their shakoes aside and wrapped rags around their heads to keep the sweat out of their eyes. Beside the cannon were stacked canisters of grapeshot and flannel bags of powder. In a few minutes, Raoul thought with pleasure, that grape would be sending a heap of red devils to Hell.

As the _Victory_ steamed around the tip of the island, Raoul searched the forest with his telescope. He guessed the island to be a quarter of a mile long. It was deeply forested enough to conceal hundreds of Indians.

Midway along, he saw a gleam of sun on brown skin in the shrubbery near the river's edge. He swung the telescope back to the spot. Nothing now. But the quarry was there, all right. His lips drew back from his teeth.

"Captain Bill," he called to the pilot house. "Turn our bow toward the island. Kingsbury, get ready to fire."

Kingsbury saluted and called orders to the gun crew. A gunner slid a bag of powder into the six-pounder's muzzle and rammed it home. Another pushed a canister of grapeshot in after it. The third held the burning linstock ready.

Raoul called to the bridge. "Captain, hold her position." The captain waved acknowledgment from behind the glass, and Raoul heard him ring a bell relaying his orders belowdecks. A moment later levers clanked and Raoul felt the deck tremble as the paddle wheels on the sides of the ship reversed themselves.

"Shoot when you're ready, Lieutenant," Raoul said.

_God, how I love this!_

Kingsbury shouted, "Fire!"

The gun thundered, deafening him, and leaped back in its cradle of tackle. Raoul watched the woods eagerly as a white smoke cloud spread over the water. On the island, branches flew in all directions. A big tree fell. He heard a scream followed by a series of wailing cries. He almost cried aloud with pleasure.

An Indian staggered out from behind the trunk of a tall pine. He dragged one leg, a useless mass of bloody meat, and fell heavily to the ground. He held a rifle. He shook his fist at the _Victory_, then aimed the rifle from his prone position.

In sudden fear, Raoul was about to duck behind a hay bale when a dozen shots cracked out from the railings beside him. Bleeding from his chest and his head, the Indian collapsed and rolled into the Mississippi. Nodding happily, Raoul watched the current catch his body. It drifted slowly downstream, trailing blood.

"Keep firing!" Raoul roared. A cannoneer swabbed inside the gun barrel to cool it down for more powder. In a moment the gun boomed out again. More trees splintered, but no more Indians were flushed out.

"Raise elevation ten degrees," Kingsbury called to the gunners. "They're probably lurking farther back in the woods."

Raoul heard the clicks as the gunners used hand spikes to raise the cannon in its carriage.

After the cannon went off, dirt and broken tree limbs sprayed out of the forest, and Raoul heard shrieking sounds that he hoped were the screams of Indians.

The cannon boomed again and again. With hand signals to Captain Bill in the pilot house, Raoul had the _Victory_'s bow swung to starboard and then to port, so that the grapeshot struck the island in a wide arc. Trees slowly toppled over, and shrieks of pain and shouts of rage and defiance pierced the silence between the roars of the cannon.

He pictured the lead balls tearing into howling Indians, ripping their flesh apart. He remembered Helene's body in Lake Michigan. He remembered Black Salmon's lash on his back. He saw--as he had seen them two weeks ago--the heap of blackened, split logs that had been Victoire, his home, the place where Clarissa, Phil and Andy died. He saw the mound of earth in the family cemetery where they lay together. What little had been left of them.

The cannon's heat was his rage. The cannon's boom was his roar. The grapeshot was his vengeance. He hurled his hatred over the water and into the trees, blowing Indian bodies to shreds.

He heard something hum past his head and plunk into the pilot house behind him. He saw smoke puff from the shadowy base of a clump of spruces. Another puff, and another. The reports of rifles carried across the water.

"Sir!" Kingsbury's hand gripped his shoulder, the fingers digging in.

Raoul realized he had been momentarily out of his mind with fury. Breathing heavily, he got his eyes focused on the brown-mustached lieutenant.

"Get down, sir, before you get hit."

Reluctantly, because he wanted to see where the grapeshot was hitting, Raoul crouched down behind a hay bale. When he'd first come out on deck he'd been afraid of being shot at. Now he felt sure they couldn't hit him.

The six-pounder repeatedly tore into the area on shore where powder smoke had appeared. Raoul saw no sign of Indian bodies, but the firing from the trees stopped.

"Gawd, I'd hate to be on the angry side of this gun," said Levi Pope.

A dozen or more Indians burst from the trees and dove into the water. Some of them started swimming out toward the _Victory_; others turned south, following the current. Some just splashed helplessly.

"Shoot!" Raoul shouted.

Gleefully, he ran into the pilot's house and grabbed his breech-loading Hall rifle. He rushed back to stand by the rail. He took aim at the nearest Indian in the water. He heard his breath coming heavy, as it did when he was in bed with a woman.

Only the warrior's shaven head, scalplock flowing behind, was far enough out of the water to present a clear target. The Indian seemed to be trying to swim past the _Victory_, toward the distant shore opposite. Raoul took his time aiming at the shiny brown dome and pulled the trigger. He saw a splash of red, then the Indian's arms and legs stopped moving and the body drifted southward with the current.

Pushing cloth-wrapped bullets down the tight, rifled bores of their muzzle-loaders with practiced speed, Raoul's men could easily get off three shots or more in a minute. The sky blue of the river soon turned red with blood from bodies that floated swiftly away.

"Yee-hah!" Hodge Hode yelled. "This is more fun than huntin' wild goose."

"The ones we do not get, they will drown," said Armand Perrault. "There is no place for them to swim to."

It was true; the opposite shore of the Mississippi was too far away, and this shore was lined with Federal troops and state militia, who would shoot any swimming redskin they saw. The Indians must have known they were doomed, but still they came on, little groups jumping into the water, each one probably hoping to be lucky enough to escape alive. Most of the heads Raoul saw in the water streamed black hair; must be women and children, not scalplocked warriors.

But it didn't really matter what they were.

_They killed my woman and my kids._

He saw a head trailing long black hair and blood in the water not ten feet off the starboard bow. Close enough to see it was a boy. He was trying desperately to swim with one arm, his face distorted with agony. Raoul aimed his rifle between the wide, terrified eyes that stared into his own. He pulled the trigger. The brown face sank below the water.

_That's for Phil and Andy._

Groups of Indians threw themselves into the river from the distant parts of the island, but the steamboat turned quickly upstream and downstream, back and forth again and again, to pursue them, Raoul's sharpshooters wiping out each party of swimmers in turn. Captain Bill might not enjoy this work, but he did it well.

Raoul heard himself laughing under his breath as he thought of all the Indians who were dying before his eyes, because of _his_ ship and _his_ cannon and _his_ riflemen.

Then the _Victory_ resumed steaming slowly along the length of the island, stopping at intervals for the cannoneers to blast the forest. Kingsbury changed elevation with each shot, so that showers of grapeshot blanketed the island from side to side.

Finally Raoul decided that they had done all they could from the ship. All that blood in the water made a fine sight, made him yearn all the more to wet his hands with blood.

Climbing back up to the pilot house, he said, "Take her to the south end of the island, Captain Bill. As close as you can. We're going to land."

Helmer stared at him, but said nothing.

He'd better say nothing.

Raoul took his pistol out of its holster and checked to see that it was primed and loaded. He unsheathed his replica of Bowie's knife. He hefted it, heavy as a meat cleaver, in his hand and tested the edge with his thumb. It would cut. By God, it would cut. He slid it back into its sheath.

He opened his mouth, gulping air in his excitement. His hands tingled and his whole body felt as if it were growing bigger. He wanted to kill Indians. He wanted to wade in their blood. Maybe find Black Hawk himself and take his scalp with the big Bowie knife. He hoped there would be hundreds of redskins still alive, cowering on that island. He needed to kill them by the hundreds.

The ship's progress down the length of the island seemed to take forever.

He tried to calm himself. After that bombardment with grapeshot, after so many Indians had been shot trying to swim away, there probably wouldn't be many left alive on the island. It wouldn't really be a fight; they'd be close to helpless.

"After we're ashore," he said to Helmer, "take the ship over to the troops on the Mississippi bank and tell General Atkinson we've found the main body of the Sauk. Tell him to send as many men as the _Victory_ will carry."

* * * * *

The steamboat's shallow draft allowed her to move in close, so Raoul and his dozen Smith County boys could jump down into knee-deep water, holding rifles, bayonets screwed in place, and pistols and cases of cartridges and shot over their heads. The water was cold and clammy through Raoul's flannel trousers, and his feet squelched in his boots.

The _Victory_ drew away with a thumping of her engine and puffs of thick, black smoke from her two smokestacks. Just the sight of that steamship should have been enough to scare hell out of the Indians, Raoul thought.

He and his men clambered up sloping rocks to stand in a clear area of level ground. Just where the woods started, the upper half of an Indian lay on his back, trailing long, bloody ribbons of gut. The eyes were open, staring.

_Now, that's what I wanted to see._

"Remember that we take no prisoners," he said.

Hodge Hode said, "Well, come on, let's knock them 'coons out of the trees."

An arrow punched through Hodge's neck from front to back.

Raoul's heart stopped, then thumped so hard with fear that he thought it might split his chest open.

Hodge dropped his rifle and fell to the ground, gagging.

Raoul went down on his knees beside Hodge, seized the arrow just under its knife-sharp flint head and pulled it through. As the feathered end went through his neck Hodge made a retching sound. His tongue stuck out of his mouth.

Raoul cursed under his breath as he bent over Hodge. This couldn't be happening.

More arrows were flying past them. Raoul's men fired a ragged volley into the woods, and the arrows stopped.

The arrow had cut through an artery and pierced Hodge's windpipe. His breath whistled in and out through the hole in his throat, his blood pumping out of him and soaking into his red beard.

"He is going," said Armand, kneeling beside Raoul.

"Aw no," Hodge managed to murmur.

Raoul felt sick as he watched blood fill Hodge's mouth and pour out of it. Then the big man went limp and his eyes rolled up in his head.

"Let's get the bastards!" Raoul growled. He was left scared as hell by Hodge's death, but he was damned if he'd show it.

They climbed over big branches knocked down by the _Victory_'s cannon and ran in among the trees, Raoul taking the lead. Spruce branches whipped his face.

_I must be crazy, charging into the woods like this. We could all get what Hodge got._

High-pitched war whoops shrilled out of the forest shadows ahead, and more arrows whistled at them.

Knowing it was only luck that none of them hit him, Raoul wanted desperately to fire his rifle into the forest. But he forced himself not to shoot until he could see a target.

Brown figures rushed toward him, darting from tree to tree. He fired at a warrior leaping between the thick trunks of two pines. The Indian disappeared, but Raoul was sure he'd missed. He jerked the breech of his rifle open and slapped in another ball-and-powder cartridge with frantic speed.

The same Indian reappeared from behind another tree only six feet away. Raoul brought the rifle up and fired. The Indian fell over backward.

Another brave leaped at him from the side, swinging a tomahawk. Raoul shifted his rifle to his left hand and pulled out his Bowie knife. The Indian's eyes were huge and white and wild. His upraised arms left his chest wide open, ribs showing so sharp you could count them. Raoul lunged, thrusting the knife. The Indian's rush drove him onto the blade. His tomahawk came down on Raoul's forearm. It hurt, but it didn't even hit hard enough to cut through Raoul's sleeve. Raoul planted his foot in the already-dead Indian's belly and jerked the knife out of his body.

As the warrior collapsed, Raoul noticed that his face was bare brown skin devoid of paint. They'd even run out of war paint, he thought. In the middle of this battle, that gave him a moment of pleasure.

Rifles were going off on both sides of him. Levi Pope fired into the upper branches of an elm tree and whooped as a warrior's body came crashing down. The air was full of blinding, bitter smoke.

Then silence. Motionless Indians lay on the forest floor.

But so did two more of Raoul's own men. One lay face down, perfectly still. The other was on his back, head propped against a tree trunk. An arrow, feathers black and white, stuck out of his chest. His eyes were open but saw nothing. His arms and empty hands jerked, the movements less like a human being's than like a dying insect's. Raoul felt bile rising in his throat and bit his lips hard to stop himself from puking.

_That could just as easily have been me._

Another man had an arrow in his arm. Armand pulled it out of him with a mighty jerk. The man screamed, and Armand clapped a big hand over his mouth.

Raoul's nine remaining men looked from the two dead men--the second man's arms had stopped jerking--to Raoul. Were they just waiting for orders, or were they accusing him?

"Injuns're gettin' ready for another charge," Levi Pope said. "I can see them skulkin' out there."

"Pull back!" Raoul ordered. "Pick up those dead men's rifles." His voice rang out strangely in the still forest.

Reloading and walking backward, rifles pointed up, Raoul and his men retreated to the tip of the island. Armand carried the extra rifles. They piled up fallen trees to make a hasty barricade.

Raoul lay behind tree trunks long enough for the sweat to cool on his body. Mosquitoes and little black flies stung him incessantly. He wondered if the Indians would ever attack. He'd gotten himself into a very bad spot.

Rifles went off, and bullets plunked into the tree barricade. Brown bodies came leaping out of the forest. Raoul suddenly remembered how the Indians had rushed out from behind the Lake Michigan dunes twenty years ago, and for a moment he was a terrified little boy. His hands shook so violently he almost dropped his rifle.

With shrill yips and yells Indians came at them. Arrows and bullets whizzed over the heads of Raoul's men as they ducked down behind their shelter. Raoul forced himself to concentrate on shooting. He poked his rifle through an opening between broken tree limbs, aimed at a running Indian and fired.

His two remaining close companions in this war, Levi and Armand, lay shooting on either side of him. Hodge was dead, his body sprawled a few feet behind them, and that by itself brought Raoul close to panic. He had always felt the big redheaded backwoodsman could never be hurt.

Arrows flew thick and fast. Raoul and his men, reloading from the cartridge and shot cases they had carried ashore, kept up a steady answering fire.

He felt shame smouldering in his spine and along his limbs. What a damned fool he'd been. He had been so sure that storm of grapeshot from the _Victory_ would finish off the Indians. He had expected this to be nothing more than a stroll through the forest, counting the dead and killing off the helpless remnant. Instead it seemed there were plenty of Sauk warriors left, very much alive, fierce as wolverines. And he and his men were trapped at the tip of this damned island with no place to retreat but the river. In the river they'd be helpless under enemy arrows and bullets, just like the redskins who had tried earlier to swim away.

The Sauk war cries had fallen silent, and the shots and arrows had stopped. Raoul peered through a chink in the tree trunks piled before him. All he could see was dark green boughs with no sign of movement.

"What you figger they're doing now?" Levi said. He had his six pistols laid out on a log in front of him.

"Probably getting ready to charge us," said Raoul.

How long before the _Victory_ got back? From here at the south end of the island he could see the white steamship anchored off the riverbank, her two black stacks giving off little white puffs, her side paddle wheels motionless. She looked very small and very far away. No chance Helmer or Kingsbury could see that Raoul and his men were fighting for their lives here.

What were the men, Levi and Armand and the others, thinking? Again and again, it seemed, his decisions cost lives. He remembered Old Man's Creek--de Marion's Run--and he felt his face get fiery hot at the shame of it.

And then there was Eli Greenglove's bitterness that night they parted, accusing him of putting Clarissa and the boys in harm's way. And something about a shock Raoul would get--what had Eli meant by that?

He heard a splash and turned to look behind him. His heart stopped. A near-naked Indian was rushing at him out of the water, scalping knife high.

Hands trembling, Raoul had barely time to roll over on his back and fire his rifle up at the screaming warrior. Sunlight glinted off the long steel blade. There was a moment of black terror after the rifle went off. Nothing seemed to happen. His hands had been shaking too hard, he thought, to aim well.

But then the Sauk dropped to his knees and fell over on his side. The knife dropped from his hand. Seeing he was safe for this instant, Raoul took another ball-and-powder cartridge out of his case and shoved it into the breech.

The Indian rolled over and pushed himself up on his hands and knees, a long string of blood and spittle dangling from his mouth. Calmer now, Raoul took careful aim and put a bullet in the shaven brown skull.

Two more dripping Indians were charging out of the water. Rifles went off beside Raoul. One Sauk fell, then the other, just as he was swinging his tomahawk at a man on the right end of Raoul's line.

The militiaman screamed. The steel head of the tomahawk was buried in his buckskin-clad leg.

"See to him, Armand," Raoul said.

Armand, crouching, ran over to the wounded man. But first he attended to the fallen Indian next to him. He grabbed the brave's head and twisted it around. Raoul heard the crack of bones.

"To make bien sure," Armand said, teeth flashing in his brown beard.

Three men dead, two wounded. Eight men left. Maybe a hundred Sauk warriors out there, maybe more.

_What a stupid time to die, right when the war's almost over._

Raoul gnawed on the ends of his mustache and peered into the impenetrable forest. He and his men were all going to die. He was sure of it. He felt fear, but more painful than the fear was an ache in his heart for all that he was going to lose--all that was due him that life hadn't paid out to him like he deserved. He wanted so much to live.

A line of Indians came out of the trees, some with rifles, some with bows and arrows. There must be twenty or thirty of them. They weren't whooping, as they usually did. They were silent, their eyes big, their mouths set in lipless lines. They were like walking dead men, coming at him. That was what they were. They knew they were going to die, but they were going to take this little band of white men with them.

Raoul had all he could do to keep from curling up behind his tree barricade, head in his arms, whimpering with grief and fear. He made himself aim and fire. The Indian he'd picked out as a target kept on coming.

_We're done for_, he thought, over and over again. _We're done for._

Slowly--he did not seem able to move quickly--he inserted another cartridge into the breech of his rifle. All around him rifles were going off with deafening booms.

And from behind him there was more booming.

He looked up. Indians were falling. One here, one there, then three, then two more. Their line was breaking up.

_God, the men are shooting good!_

He heard voices behind him and looked around.

At the same moment Levi Pope said, "Well, here be a sight to welcome."

Ten feet or so behind him a line of men in coonskin caps and gray shirts were methodically firing over his head. He'd been so lost in panic and despair he hadn't heard them coming.

He looked back at the Indians. Brown bodies lay tumbled on the ground, some only a few feet from his barricade. Those on their feet were backing up. They melted into the tattered forest.

For a moment Raoul could not move. He lay clutching his rifle with a grip so hard it hurt his hands, panting heavily.

"It's safe now," Levi Pope said quietly, standing up.

Raoul pushed himself to his feet. His legs were shaking so hard he could barely stand. He looked around and saw militiamen wading across to the island from the east bank of the Mississippi.

The men who had been skirmishing in the forest north of the Bad Axe must have seen the fighting on the island.

Too dazed even to feel happy, Raoul stood taking long breaths and watched the militiamen come.

He had never in his life needed a drink more than he did now, and he had forgotten to bring any whiskey with him.

* * * * *

The southern tip of the island was soon crowded with riflemen. Raoul's three dead were stretched out under blankets, and a burly horse doctor from the mining country was bandaging the leg of the man with the tomahawk wound.

"Colonel Henry Dodge," said a tall, whip-lean officer wearing a bicorn hat. He shook hands with Raoul. "We're almost neighbors. I'm from Dodgeville settlement, just a little ways north of Galena."

"I'm damned glad you came over, Colonel," said Raoul, feeling like a fool to have gotten himself trapped. "The Sauk still seem to have a power of fighting men left."

"Glad you saved a few for us. There were only about two dozen redskins on the north side of the Bad Axe. They let us see them to draw us away, I guess, from the main body hiding out here. But the way you were blasting this island with grape, I was afraid we'd have nothing to do but bury Indians. Or pieces of them."

Dodge ordered his men to spread out in two lines, one behind the other, across the width of the island. Raoul positioned his little party in the center of the foremost line.

"Advance, my brave Suckers!" Dodge called, and the men laughed at the nickname for Illinoisians. Holding up a long cavalry saber, Dodge led the militia line, bayonets leveled, into the broken trees.

Raoul looked downriver for the _Victory_. She had dropped a wooden ramp to the riverbank, and blue-uniformed regulars were boarding. When they got here there would be enough soldiers on the island to wipe out the Indians ten times over.

That would be Zachary Taylor's outfit, from Fort Crawford. Raoul had heard that the five hundred Federal troops sent from the East had been decimated by cholera, though their commander, Winfield Scott, was still on the way here.

Raoul turned and pushed forward, stumbling over tree trunks, shoving branches out of the way with his rifle, muscles rigid against the arrow he feared would come whistling out of the gloomy shadows ahead. He saw no living Indians, but many mangled corpses. He tripped over a bare, brown severed leg. A moccasin, flaps decorated with undulating red, white and black beadwork, was still on the foot.

Three Indians, swinging tomahawks and war clubs, sprang out from behind a pile of grape-blasted birch trees. Raoul and the men flanking him started shooting. The Indians were riddled before they got within ten feet.

Raoul was sure he'd killed one of the warriors. He went to the body, drew his Bowie knife and gripped the long black scalplock. He carved a circle with the sharp point in the shaved skin around the scalplock. White bone showed through when he pulled the patch of skin loose, the round spot quickly filling with blood.

The scalplock was long enough to let him tie it around his belt. The hair felt coarser than a white man's.

They pressed on into the forest, again and again meeting desperate little bands of red men, who rushed them only to be felled by a hail of lead balls. Raoul heard the constant banging of many rifles going off in other parts of the forest.

And sometimes he heard the high screams of women and children. After the screams, silence.

Raoul smiled to himself. This was how he wanted it. No prisoners.

Killing no longer seemed dangerous. It no longer felt like sport. It became simply work through the day's heat. It was tiring work, but good. With some surprise Raoul realized that the line of troops had swept most of the island and were now approaching the north end. He could see Indians up ahead through the trees. This might well be the last of them. Eagerly, rifle ready, he rushed forward.

He burst into a clearing and found himself facing a half circle of nearly a dozen bucks, their shaved scalps and bare chests gleaming with sweat. Behind them cowered a pack of squaws and children.

The warriors shouted at Raoul and his men and beckoned to them. Right in the center was one man much taller than the rest, with the red and white feathers of a brave tied into his scalplock. Whatever insults or challenges he was uttering, he looked Raoul right in the eye and shouted directly at him.

Raoul felt a chill of fear. The Indian's flesh was wasted, but his skeleton was huge. He looked like he'd be as hard to stop as a tornado. And he was holding a rifle in arms and hands so big that they made it look small.

The other warriors didn't have rifles or even bows. They must have run out of powder and shot and arrows. They held clubs and knives and tomahawks.

_They want us to fight hand to hand. That's what Indians do to show their courage._

_The hell with that._

With a movement that seemed almost contemptuous, the big Indian dropped the rifle to the ground. He reached down and picked up a war club painted red and black, with a huge spike at its end.

"Let's pay 'em back, boys!" Raoul shouted. "For all of our people they killed."

"Oui! For Marchette," said Armand, raising his rifle. His first shot caught a warrior in the chest and knocked him down.

At that the Indians rushed Raoul and his men.

Raoul felt himself trembling uncontrollably as the bony giant in the center came straight at him. The big Indian held his war club in front of him, as if to deflect bullets.

Forcing his arms to hold steady, Raoul aimed his rifle at the Indian's head and fired.

And missed.

_I should have aimed at his chest._

Raoul cursed his shaking hand as he dropped his rifle and pulled his pistol.

The brown giant gave a long, full-throated war cry.

Raoul pulled the trigger. He saw a spark, heard the bang of the percussion cap, but there was nothing more. He cried out in a fury. His sweat must have dampened the powder.

The club came down on the pistol, and Raoul to his horror felt it knocked out of his hand. Again the big Indian screamed out his blood-freezing war whoop and raised the club high.

Raoul's empty hand fumbled for his Bowie knife. He had it out, a death grip on the hilt. He lunged at his enemy. A jolt ran through Raoul's arm to his shoulder as the point of the knife sank deep between two thick ribs.

The Indian gave a deep groan and staggered back. He swung his club, but too late. Raoul felt a numbing blow just where his neck met his shoulder, and fell to his knees.

He was looking right into the dark brown eyes of the Indian, who had also fallen. The eyes were unblinking, dead. The massive body collapsed against him.

Raoul shouted, a wordless cry of rage, and a red curtain swept over his eyes. He jerked the knife out, releasing a cataract of blood. With an effort that wrenched his arms he hurled the brown giant away from him.

Taking a scalp wasn't enough, after a fight like that. Raoul got a firm grip on the thick, stiff-standing hank of black hair in the center of his enemy's head and brought the knife down on the brown throat. Chopping and slicing and sawing, as if butchering a steer, Raoul cut through the thick neck until at last the head came free.

He lofted the head in his left hand, looking up at the still-open dead eyes.

"There, you goddamned redskin son of a bitch! Thought you could kill me, huh?"

A shrill woman's voice broke in on his triumph.

He turned to see a witchlike woman wrapped in a blanket. Her finger was pointing at him. Her voice went on and on, screeching at him.

She was tall, but starvation had stripped the flesh from her bones. Her sunken eyes seemed to glow in her skull-like face. He felt as if he was facing some horrid spectre.

He threw the warrior's head down. Curse him, would she? He snarled like an angry wolf as he reached for the woman. She didn't even try to get away. He seized the scrawny neck and pulled her to him, bringing the Bowie knife's point up against her throat.

She started singing, a weird, high-pitched caterwauling. He'd heard something like it before. Where?

When he'd been about to shoot Auguste and those two other Indians at Old Man's Creek. They'd sung like that right at the end.

Her dark eyes held him. They were not clouded over with anger or terror, but clear with full understanding that he was going to kill her. She was not afraid. He wished he could frighten her, force her to grovel, but someone might try to stop him from doing it. Her voice went on and on, chanting, up and down.

He'd silence her now. Redskin bitch.

He drove the knife into her throat and jerked it sideways. Her song ended in a sickening rasp.

Still the brown eyes were fixed on him. Her blood spurted out of the gash he had cut open, splashed over his knife blade, poured hot on his hand. It spread down over her dress and over the gold lace on his sleeve. He looked down at his red hand and felt some force within him stretch his lips and bare his teeth.

He thrust the woman away from him. Her eyes were still open, but she looked at no one and nothing. She fell to the ground like a bundle of sticks. She lay on her back, the deep wound in her throat spread wide, her eyes staring up.

He stood over her and saw that something shiny had fallen out of the front of her dress and lay beside her head. Tied around her neck with a purple ribbon was an oval metal case splashed with blood.

He had seen the case, or one like it. He reached down with the knife and slashed the ribbon. He wiped his knife on his jacket and slammed it into its sheath, then picked up the slippery case and opened it.

A pair of spectacles. Round, gold frames, thick glass lenses.

They looked exactly like Pierre's old spectacles. Was that possible? How could this Indian woman have gotten them? Stolen from Victoire, when the Sauk burned it?

Or had the mongrel somehow gotten his father's spectacles, taken them with him when he fled from Victor? Pierre's watch had disappeared then; Raoul was sure Auguste had stolen it. And if this woman had Pierre's glasses now, could she be the Sauk woman Pierre had lived with, the mother of his bastard son?

Despite the August heat beating down on the clearing, the air around Raoul suddenly felt winter cold. All day long while he fought the Indians he'd struggled with his fear of being killed. Now a worse fear had him in its grip, a fear of something worse than death, of having called down upon himself a vengeance that would follow him beyond the grave.

_My God! I've just killed Pierre's squaw._

The spectacles stared up at him like accusing eyes. The flesh of his back prickled.

He shut the case and dropped it into his pocket. If it was Pierre's he couldn't just throw it away.

The few remaining Indians, a flock of women and children, huddled weeping with their backs to a big tree, arms around one another. Some were already wounded and screaming in pain.

Tiredly Raoul told himself he must reload rifle and pistol and get on with the killing. But his anger was spent. He felt empty, worn out.

From somewhere behind him came a shout of, "Cease fire!"

It was welcome. He'd done enough.

"Yonder come the bluebellies," said Levi.

"Ah, merde," muttered Armand, standing with red-dripping bayonet above a pile of bodies.

Raoul looked around. The order to stop the shooting had come from their rear, from a short, stout officer who, as Dodge had, was advancing with drawn saber. Colonel Zachary Taylor.

Taylor looked around the smoking glade at the dead, big bodies and little ones, brown flesh and tan deerskin splashed with bright red, eyes staring, limbs helter-skelter.

"Jesus Christ." He turned to Raoul, pain in his bright blue eyes.

Raoul felt his face grow hot. "Colonel," he said, "you understand why we had to--"

Taylor's expression changed from sadness to weariness. "I've been out on the frontier for over twenty years. I don't see anything here that I haven't seen before." He turned away before Raoul could answer and called, "Lieutenant Davis!"

A tall young officer with a handsome, angular face came up to him and saluted.

Taylor said, "Jeff, run ahead and make sure any Indians left on this island get a chance to surrender." He turned to Raoul again, shaking his head.

"Why let them surrender?" Raoul said.

"There's only a few left alive," said Taylor. "And we're not going to kill them. And if you need a reason, it's because I wouldn't feel right about it, and I know a lot of the men wouldn't feel right about it."

Taylor turned to one of his men, a red-faced trooper with a thick blond mustache. "Sergeant Benson, get me that Sauk man we captured. We'll be needing to talk to the Indians. We want to find out what's happened to Black Hawk."

Raoul was painfully aware that Taylor's eyes had shifted to his right hand, covered with blood. He wanted to hide it behind his back.

He looked Raoul up and down. "Good God, man. Do you know you've got blood all over you?"

"Enemy blood," said Raoul.

"I see you've got a scalp tied to your belt," Taylor said. "General Atkinson issued an order against mutilating enemy dead."

Raoul felt himself shaking again, not with fear, but with anger. "I saw one of my best friends shot dead with an arrow through the throat today."

"And this?" Taylor asked, pointing to the severed head of the big brave lying a few feet from Raoul's red-spotted boots. "Was this to avenge your friend too? You'd better get back to your steamship, Mr. de Marion. I don't think we have any more need of your services here."

It was not so much Taylor's words, but the mingled contempt and pity in his voice that enraged Raoul. His fist clenched on the handle of his knife.

Taylor wore a pistol and carried a saber, but he was a far smaller man than Raoul, and his stout body, dressed today in a blue jacket and knee-high fringed buckskin boots, seemed to invite attack.

Taylor's calm blue eyes went to Raoul's hand, then back to his face. He stood motionless, waiting.

_God! What am I thinking? The regulars would shoot me down the minute I drew this knife._

Raoul silently beckoned to his men and started back through the broken trees the way they had come.

After walking a short distance, Raoul saw the sergeant Taylor had sent behind the lines coming toward him with an Indian walking beside him.

Raoul glanced at the Indian and stopped dead.

He felt as if the arrow he'd been expecting and fearing all day had finally struck him.

_There are no ghosts._

But Auguste couldn't be alive. He'd been shot to death at Old Man's Creek.

Was this what killing Pierre's squaw had brought on him?

The man before him had gone hungry for a long time. His almost skull-like face was a chilling reminder of the woman whose throat Raoul had slashed. But his gauntness also made him look more like Pierre than ever before. His buckskin leggings, like those of the Indians Raoul had just killed, were dirty and full of rips and holes. But the pale scar line running down his cheek, and those five parallel scars on his bare chest, left Raoul in no doubt who this was. Auguste's dark eyes burned at Raoul, alight with a fierce hatred.

The sergeant pulled Auguste by the arm. As the mongrel turned, Raoul suddenly saw that the middle of his ear was missing, the empty space bordered by partly healed red flesh.

Stunned speechless, Raoul looked at Levi and Armand, who stared back at him. They couldn't speak either. They were just as shaken.

Still burning at Taylor's high-and-mighty dismissal of him, Raoul was staggered by the shock of this meeting. But he saw one thing clear. All right, Auguste was still alive. That meant Raoul's revenge on the Sauk was not complete. Auguste was a traitor. Auguste was a murderer. And Raoul was going to work day and night to get him hanged.

21

The Red Blanket

Longing to hear that White Bear was safe, Redbird could not stop thinking about him. She sat cross-legged on the ground with Floating Lily bundled in a blanket on her lap. She gazed out at the small lake where Black Hawk and his few remaining followers had set up camp. This was a peaceful place, but with White Bear gone and her dread of what might have happened to her loved ones at the Bad Axe, she could feel no peace.

"A lovely place, this lake," said Owl Carver, sitting beside her.

_But it is far from White Bear._

The thought of White Bear's having to make his way through Winnebago country haunted her. She longed to look into the birch forest behind her lean-to and see him walking toward her through the white tree trunks.

She missed Yellow Hair and Woodrow too. They were to her another sister, another son. She hoped that by now they were out of danger.

She had left so many people behind at the Bad Axe, people who had always been part of her life--Sun Woman, Iron Knife, her two sisters. In the seven days since Black Hawk had led their little group north on the ridge trail leading to Chippewa country, there had been no word from the rest of the band.

Redbird's fear for the people she loved was like a ferret eating away at her insides.

From his medicine bag Owl Carver took the pale eyes time teller White Bear had given him and opened its gold outer shell. Redbird saw black markings on its inner surface and two black arrows.

_Could it tell me when White Bear will come back?_

The old shaman dangled the time teller by its gold chain over Floating Lily's tiny head. The gold disk gave off a regular, clicking sound, like the beating of a metal heart. Floating Lily's brown eyes opened wide and her flower-petal lips curved in a wide, toothless smile.

Eagle Feather, sitting beside Redbird, said, "Grandfather? Is it right to use a sacred thing just to make the baby smile?"

Owl Carver smiled. His face these days seemed to have caved in. All of his front teeth were gone, and his mouth was as sunken as Floating Lily's, while his chin and his nose jutted out.

"A baby's smile is also a sacred thing."

Redbird said, "Have you asked the spirits what has become of the rest of our people?"

From a cord around his waist Owl Carver untied a medicine bag decorated with a beadwork owl. He opened it, let little gray scraps sift through his fingers and sighed.

"Last night I chewed bits of sacred mushroom," Owl Carver said. "I saw pale eyes' things--lodges that travel over the ground on trails made of metal, smoking boats with bonfires in their bellies, villages as big as prairies. Crowds of pale eyes seemed to be cheering for me. It made no sense. It told me nothing about what happened at the Bad Axe. Maybe I took too much."

Redbird glanced down at Eagle Feather. His mouth was a circle, and his blue eyes as he stared up at Owl Carver were so wide that she could see the whites above and below them. He strained toward Owl Carver, his longing to follow his father and grandfather in the way of the shaman showing in every line of his body.

She had always felt that same longing.

"Let me try your sacred mushrooms," said Redbird. "Sun Woman says sometimes women can see into places where men cannot see."

Owl Carver set the medicine bag down between himself and Eagle Feather. He sliced his hand through the air, palm down, in refusal.

"The magic might get into your milk and be bad for the baby."

Resentment was a bitter taste in Redbird's mouth. But she had to admit there was no telling what the mushrooms might do to Floating Lily's unformed spirit. Still, she knew Owl Carver welcomed that excuse because he did not want to give the mushrooms to a woman.

Eagle Feather shouted, "Look!" He pointed up at the sky.

Owl Carver and Redbird both looked up. Scanning the cloudless midday sky for a moment, she saw two tiny black shapes high up, circling slowly.

"Eagles!" said the boy. "My guardian spirits."

Redbird squinted. Yes, those were the wide-spreading wings of eagles. The birds were searching for prey. Like the long knives and their Winnebago allies. Their remorseless circling frightened her.

Those bright blue eyes of Eagle Feather's saw farther than hers did, thought Redbird. She looked down at him proudly, as he wiped his hand across his mouth and smiled up at her. His pointed chin reminded her of White Bear.

"If the Winnebago find us here, will they kill us?" she asked her father.

Owl Carver waved his hands. "They are not our enemies, but they will do what the long knives demand."

In a strange voice Eagle Feather said, "Mother?"

Frightened by his flat tone, she reached for him. But with the baby in her lap she could not get to him before Eagle Feather fell over on his side with his eyes shut.

She screamed.

She laid Floating Lily on the ground and picked up Eagle Feather. He lay limp in her arms, his head lolling, his mouth hanging open.

After all they had been through, this was more than she could bear. She burst into tears, her heart thudding like a deerskin drum.

"What is it?" She turned to Owl Carver. "Help him."

The shaman crouched over his grandson, looking down into his face, bending low to sniff his breath.

"Redbird, be very quiet. We must not wake him."

"What happened to him?" she whispered, trembling.

"This." He gestured to the open medicine bag that lay where he and Eagle Feather had been sitting. "He must have taken some bits of mushroom while we were looking up at the eagles."

Terror cascaded over her. "What will it do to him?"

Owl Carver emptied the gray scraps into his hand and then poured them back into the bag. "What a foolish old man I am, leaving that bag open right next to him."

Eagle Feather had gone on a spirit journey. And her own sensitivity to the other world told her that he was _meant_ to. She felt for him the fear she had felt for White Bear in that long-ago Moon of Ice.

"No," said Redbird sadly. "You were not foolish. It was Earthmaker's way. He sent those eagles to take our eyes away from the medicine bag."

With infinite care, so as not to disturb him, Redbird carried Eagle Feather into the lean-to, resting his head on the blanket roll that held everything she had been able to carry.

"I will stay with you until Eagle Feather comes back," said Owl Carver. Redbird picked up Floating Lily and held her tightly.

As the sun crossed above the lake, they sat watching the small, still body. Redbird could barely see Eagle Feather's narrow chest rise and fall in the shadowy lean-to. There were moments when she was sure he was dead.

Sunset had turned the small lake to a sheet of beaten gold when Eagle Feather sat up suddenly, his eyes wide.

"The Bad Axe!" he shrieked. It was the voice of a child struggling with a nightmare.

"Eagle Feather!" Redbird cried.

Owl Carver put his hand on her knee. "Be quiet."

"The Bad Axe!" Eagle Feather called out again, staring at something no one else could see. "The Great River runs red!" His eyes closed and he fell back.

Redbird felt as if she were shivering in a blizzard. Eagle Feather's words seemed to open a doorway of second sight in her own mind, disclosing a horrifying vision of bodies drifting in red-tinged water.

She heard a sound behind her. Suddenly terrified, she whirled. In the birch forest she saw a man riding toward them on a gray pony. The beat of hooves sounded hollow among the trees.

Feeling on the edge of madness, she let out a scream. She had wanted so much for White Bear to come to her that way, that she thought for a moment it was he. Like White Bear's, his head was unshaved, his hair long.

But as he came closer through the white tree trunks, a hand raised in greeting, she saw he was not White Bear. His full head of hair had a brave's feathers tied into it. A Winnebago. She saw a second rider behind him. An attack? But they were approaching slowly, their hands empty.

The Winnebago dismounted and led his pony till he was standing over them.

He wore four red and white feathers, one hanging from each silver earring, two tied into his hair. A leader of warriors. Heart pounding, she moved protectively closer to the lean-to where Eagle Feather lay. Owl Carver slowly got to his feet. She glanced at him, and when she saw how grim his face was, her own terror increased.

Another Winnebago rode out of the woods, dismounted and stood beside his companion.

The first man turned to take something from his saddle.

Scooping Floating Lily up in her arms, Redbird leaped up to give the alarm. The brave held out a restraining hand.

"Wait! We are two only, and we come to talk peace." The man spoke Sauk.

He faced her, smiling tentatively, and held up a beautiful calumet, its red pipestone bowl gleaming in the sunset, its polished hickory stem as long as a man's arm.

Owl Carver drew himself up in all his white-haired shaman's majesty. "Who are you?"

"I am called Wave," said the man holding the calumet. "This is He Who Lights the Water. He does not speak Sauk."

Redbird glanced down into the lean-to, to make sure Eagle Feather was all right.

"Who is in the lean-to?" Wave asked a little suspiciously as He Who Lights the Water stepped forward to look in.

"My grandson," said Owl Carver. "He is sick."

"Many of you must be sick. And hungry," said Wave. "Time your leaders took pity on the women and children and ended this war."

More Sauk men and women were coming over now to see the newcomers. The two Winnebago were men of courage, Redbird thought, coming alone as they had into a camp of fifty or more desperate people.

Redbird's mother came to stand beside Owl Carver. She asked what was wrong with Eagle Feather, and Owl Carver explained in a whisper.

"Children will eat anything they can get their hands on," Wind Bends Grass scolded. "Now he will probably grow up to be a madman." Redbird held back a shriek of rage.

Black Hawk and the Winnebago Prophet strode through the gathering crowd to face the newcomers. Black Hawk carried under one arm one of those heavy paper bundles captured at Old Man's Creek. He glanced at Redbird, and she thought she saw reproach in his eyes, even though he had said he forgave her for her part in Yellow Hair's and Woodrow's escape.

Flying Cloud addressed Wave in a strange tongue.

"This Winnebago brave is the son of my sister," said the Prophet pompously in Sauk.

_Does he think that means we are saved?_ Redbird wondered, sick of the Winnebago Prophet forever claiming that victory awaited just a little farther along the trail, when it was so clear that the trail led only to death.

Wave said in Sauk, "My father is a Sauk who married into the Winnebago. So I come to you as one joined with you by blood. We were sent by the chief of our band, Falcon."

"How did you find us?" Black Hawk asked.

"One of our hunters was passing this way and saw your camp. He was afraid to come near you, but he told me. I have been looking for you for many days."

Wolf Paw, his face so deeply lined that he looked as old as his father, came to stand beside Black Hawk. "Do you have news of our people who were trying to cross the Great River?" he asked. He touched the silver coin that hung around his neck, as if for luck.

Dread flowed cold through Redbird's arms and legs.

_Now we will know._

Wave and He Who Lights the Water looked at each other for a long, silent moment.

"What has happened?" Black Hawk pressed them.

"The long knives caught up with them," said Wave. "Most of the people were hiding on an island in the Great River. The long knives had a smoke boat that fired a thunder gun at the island and killed many people. Then the long knives landed on the island and killed nearly all that were left."

Redbird reeled, stunned.

_Sun Woman! My second mother! Iron Knife! Oh, no! O Earthmaker, let it not be so._

Cold crept over her as she remembered Eagle Feather's cry: _The Bad Axe! The Great River runs red!_

Black Hawk gave a cry of anguish. His paper bundle dropped to the ground with a thud. He sat down on the ground, picked up a handful of ashes from Redbird's campfire and threw them on his head. The people around him screamed and wept and held one another in their grief.

Wind Bends Grass fell against Owl Carver, and both of them sank to the ground weeping. Redbird saw Wolf Paw standing slumped and motionless, his arms hanging helpless at his sides, his face gray. He had insisted that both his wives and his four children try to cross the Great River at the Bad Axe, thinking they would be safer.

Sobbing and clutching her baby, Redbird watched the orange sun disappear behind the pointed treetops on the western shore of the little lake. She thought, Iron Knife, so strong and always there when she needed him, must be gone. Her two sisters and their new husbands, probably dead.

The people mourned, some sitting on the ground, some walking about distractedly, some standing, holding each other.

And now Eagle Feather was stricken. She could not get the chill out of her body.

When it was dark she relit her fire. Floating Lily woke and cried, and Redbird held her to her breast. Then she crawled under her lean-to to look at Eagle Feather. His eyes were still shut. He had not moved since his outcry, and his breathing was shallow.

_I cannot bear this. Eagle Feather lying as if dead, White Bear vanished, most of my people dead._

_Why have I been spared to suffer so?_

Black Hawk began to mourn aloud for his lost people:

"Hu-hu-hu-u-u-u-u ... Whu-whu-whu-u-u-u-u ..."

The rest of the people joined in the wailing. Redbird noticed that Wave and He Who Lights the Water cried out, too, and tears ran from their eyes. She liked them for joining the mourning.

Owl Carver was sitting beside her, holding the hands of weeping Wind Bends Grass. His own features, as much of them as she could see in the twilight, were still and drawn, shrunken by sorrow.

Redbird thought, the Sauk were known far and wide as a people who never shirked the demands of honor. If even one man of Black Hawk's party smoked the calumet with Wave, that would oblige Black Hawk and his remaining braves to surrender to the Winnebago and make peace.

Redbird said, "Now, with so many dead, can we have peace? Will you smoke the pipe with these two men?"

Owl Carver said, "If I were alone, I would smoke the pipe with them. But I will not go against Black Hawk."

"We are all that is left of the band," she said. "Someone must take the calumet and smoke it."

And by that odious Sauk custom, she thought, clenching her jaw, it would have to be a man.

As darkness deepened, the wailing died down. Wave and He Who Lights the Water made a little fire at the edge of the lake near Redbird's lean-to.

One by one the last people of Black Hawk's band drifted close to Wave's fire.

The Winnebago brave stood before the fire holding the peace pipe. Twilight lingered in the sky behind him while the firelight before him illuminated his heavy features.

Sitting near Eagle Feather, Redbird looked around and saw silent figures standing in the shadows as the people waited to hear what Wave had to say. Gravely he took tobacco out of a pouch at his waist and filled the bowl of the calumet. Then he touched a dry stick to his fire and carried the flame to the pipe. It flared up bright yellow over the pipe bowl as he puffed on it.

Wave cleared his throat and spoke in a strong voice. "Earthmaker gave us the sacred tobacco as a means of making peace among us. No one may break a promise sealed with tobacco. Our chief, Falcon, asks me to say this to you:

"Black Hawk, you have frightened the long knives greatly, brought them much sorrow, and forced them to pursue you over rivers and swamps and mountains. Black Hawk, your honor has been satisfied. Falcon offers this tobacco to you and asks that you end this war, for the sake of your women who are hungry and sick and your children who are without fathers."

_Yes, let it be done. Let this war be over before all of us are dead._

Redbird's heart leaped with hope as she saw Black Hawk reach toward the pipe that Wave held out to him. He was about to take it and smoke it! But his hand, instead of grasping, only pointed at the pipe.

"I will not smoke this pipe. I believe the Sauk should fight on until they cannot fight anymore."

_Please, Earthmaker, let at least one man be moved to stand for peace._

Wave added more tobacco to the pipe and puffed on it again. He stood before the Winnebago Prophet.

"Show your wisdom, Uncle. Smoke the sacred tobacco."

Flying Cloud took a step backward and raised both arms. "It is wrong for the Winnebago to turn against us in our time of need. Go back and tell your Chief Falcon that if he does not join us in making war on the long knives, they will take his land from him as they have taken ours from us." He crossed his arms before his chest.

Despairing, Redbird realized that the Winnebago Prophet could not smoke the pipe because that would be admitting that all his advice up to now had been wrong.

"What will you do, Sauk shaman?" Wave said to Owl Carver. "Do not the spirits tell you to smoke the calumet?"

"Please do it, Father," Redbird whispered.

She wanted to shout it aloud. But she held her tongue. She remembered with pain the derision of Wolf Paw and the others when she spoke out at the war council.

She bit her lip. Maybe, by speaking out that time, she had turned people away from the path she wanted them to take. She would not make that mistake again.

Owl Carver said, "Black Hawk has always been my chief. I follow where he leads."

Redbird groaned. Now she wished she had spoken out.

Eagle Feather stirred beside her. Heart frozen, she looked down at him. But he was motionless again.

Wave turned next to Wolf Paw, who closed his eyes, bowed his head and made no move to accept the pipe. Redbird saw that the red crest on his head was faded and limp.

She could only watch as the two Winnebago went from man to man in the circle of firelight, holding out the pipe, each man refusing.

"Please," Wave pleaded, "is there not a man here wise and strong enough to smoke the calumet and save the lives of his people? Please--more pain and death is needless."

In a day or two a war band of Winnebago would come after Black Hawk's party. They would greatly outnumber these fifty people. They would have rifles with plenty of powder and shot, given to them by the long knives. They would slaughter the men and take the women and children into captivity.

_Earthmaker, I beg you, do not let your children die._

She heard a rustling beside her. She gasped in fright and her hands went cold.

Eagle Feather was up on his hands and knees.

The boy crawled out from under the lean-to, climbed to his feet and stood straight.

A half-moon hung over the little lake, and she could see Eagle Feather's set face, one side red with firelight and the other pale white in moonlight. His bright blue eyes fixed on Wave, he strode forward, a small, determined figure.

Astonished, Redbird could only stand and watch. How could this be happening?

He stood before Wave and held up his hands. For a moment there was silence in the camp, disturbed only by the crackling of the fire and the rustling of the birch leaves around them.

"No!" Black Hawk cried, his rasping voice full of anguish. "Do not do it!"

"Stop!" The Winnebago Prophet reached for Eagle Feather. Owl Carver quickly blocked his way.

"You must not touch him. He returns from a spirit walk."

Solemnly Wave handed the pipe down to Eagle Feather.

Others took up the cry. "No! No!" But no one laid a hand on Eagle Feather.

And many were silent, and Redbird knew that she was not the only one in the camp who wanted Eagle Feather to smoke the pipe.

Awed, Redbird realized that the spirits hovered over Eagle Feather, guiding him. Her son had been chosen to save the remnant of the band, though only six summers had passed since his birth. She felt her mouth trembling.

Eagle Feather put the mouthpiece of the pipe to his lips and drew in. A deep puff. Though he was but six years old and had never smoked before, he showed no pain as the hot smoke filled his tender mouth, nor did he cough. Redbird's heart swelled with pride.

Eagle Feather blew the smoke out again. A single puff, according to custom.

Wave's thick features were breaking in tearful relief.

Eagle Feather had known just what to do. And there could be no doubt in anyone's mind that he meant to do what he had done. He held the pipe up to Wave.

A new cry of pain rose from Black Hawk, and the Winnebago Prophet joined him as loudly.

But Redbird's heart was happy. She hugged Floating Lily.

Their long agony was over at last.

Eagle Feather turned and walked back to her, straight and steady, as if he had not been lying all day long unconscious. She quickly handed Floating Lily to Wind Bends Grass, knelt down and held her arms out to her son. He ran into them, and they held each other tightly.

"It was good that you smoked the pipe. Very good."

Eagle Feather said, "When the eagles came over the lake, my spirit self whispered to me to eat from Grandfather's medicine bag. Then I went to many strange places and saw many very bad things. The long knives killed many people. At the end of it all, I lay in the lean-to and I heard a voice say that if someone would smoke the calumet there would be peace. And my father's spirit self, the White Bear, came to me and told me to smoke."

_If White Bear had been here he would have smoked the calumet. I know he would._

Owl Carver put his hand on Eagle Feather's shoulder.

"The boy is the grandson of Owl Carver and of Sun Woman. He is the son of White Bear. He has had his first vision. It is foreordained that he should be a Great Shaman."

Redbird felt flames burning under the skin of her face.

"He is the son of Redbird as well," she said, her voice shaking.

Owl Carver put his other hand on Redbird's shoulder. "Yes, he is your son."

Suddenly his old face crumbled. "And all my other children are gone," he wept. "Redbird, you are the only one left."

* * * * *

Redbird trembled as she saw Fort Crawford, a great square formed by long stone lodges connected by log palisade walls. Hard-faced long knives in blue jackets surrounded the Sauk, pointing rifles at them. Redbird drew the sling in which she carried Floating Lily around from her back to hold her tight. With one hand she pulled Eagle Feather, who stumbled under a heavy blanket roll, close to her.

"You will all camp in the field beside the fort," said Wave. "If anyone tries to escape, those left behind will be punished."

Redbird heard a wordless cry from behind her. She turned and was astonished to see a group of gray shadows standing in a meadow outside the fort. She saw they were Sauk women, some holding babies, some with small children standing beside them.

Redbird swung Floating Lily around to her back and rushed to the silent women, praying that among them she would see Sun Woman or her sisters. She moved more slowly as she realized that the eyes of each silent face she peered into were lifeless and the mouths slack.

These few, she grasped with horror, were all that was left of the people who had tried to cross the Great River at the Bad Axe. Just as White Bear had predicted.

She came to Water Flows Fast, barely able to recognize her. She had changed terribly, a change that had begun when the long knives killed her husband, Three Horses, at Old Man's Creek. The older woman's face had lost its roundness. Her cheeks sagged and her head shook with a constant tremor.

"Is it really you, Redbird? In the flesh? I am not on the Trail of Souls?"

Redbird drew Water Flows Fast to her.

"Redbird, they killed everybody. They kept killing and killing. They would not stop. Even babies. I don't know why I'm still alive. My children are dead. They tried to swim away, and the long knives shot them in the water."

Wild Grape, Redbird's younger sister, rushed up to her. They fell into each other's arms, weeping. Redbird had never loved her sister as much as she did at this moment.

Wild Grape said, "I saw Robin's Nest die. She stood before a long knife. She was holding her baby son. She begged for her life. He just smiled and shot her. She dropped the baby, and the long knife shot him on the ground. They would have killed me, but a long knife chief came along and stopped it."

"And Iron Knife?" Redbird asked. "What about Iron Knife?"

Wild Grape drew back and looked at Redbird with huge eyes. "Redbird, one of them cut off Iron Knife's head."

Redbird screamed as Wild Grape babbled on.

"Yes, with a knife this big." She held her hands wide apart. "And Sun Woman called down the wrath of Earthmaker upon him, and with the same knife he cut her throat."

Redbird fell to her knees sobbing. "Oh, no more! No more!" Water Flows Fast and Wild Grape knelt with her and held her, and they wept together.

Redbird cried until Floating Lily began to wail. Redbird gave her daughter the breast and a warmth spread from her baby's sucking lips, blunting the edge of grief and calming her a little.

Wild Grape said, "I have seen White Bear."

Redbird's body went rigid. Floating Lily pulled her mouth away from Redbird's breast and started to cry again.

"White Bear? Alive?"

Wild Grape nodded. "When the long knives were killing us at the Bad Axe, he came. He was the long knife war chief's prisoner. He spoke for the long knife chief, told us not to be afraid. But then he saw Sun Woman lying on the ground with her throat cut. He fell down beside her and screamed and tore at his face. The long knives had to hold him. I thought they might kill him, or he might kill himself. They dragged him away. I think he is a prisoner right there in that fort."

_Or perhaps he is dead_, Redbird thought bitterly. _Like everyone else._

In miserable silence she made a little tent out of her blanket in the field by the fort, using sticks Eagle Feather found for her. She and her children huddled under the blanket, the sorrow in her belly like a wolf inside her trying to gnaw and claw its way out.

The thought that White Bear might be on the other side of those walls of white-painted limestone was more than she could stand. She could not move or speak. Long knives stood around the edges of the field, watching the remnant of the British Band with their cold pale eyes. Redbird almost wished one of them would shoot her and end her pain. But then what would her children do? She did not want Eagle Feather and Floating Lily to die.

Later that day Owl Carver hobbled over to her, followed by a thin-lipped long knife with a rifle.

"Good-bye, my daughter." He looked very old and tired. It was a miracle that he had lived through this war. She noticed that he held in his hand the owl-decorated medicine bag.

"Where are you going, Father?"

"The Winnebago Prophet, Black Hawk and I must go into the fort to meet the pale eyes war chiefs. I guess they will shoot us or hang us. I cannot see the future anymore. Wave tells me that the rest of you are to walk south to the Rock River. The long knives will keep you at their fort there till next spring. Then they will let you cross the river to join He Who Moves Alertly in Ioway country. Take care of your mother and your sister. You are the strongest and wisest of my children."

He thrust his medicine bag at her.

"If I bring this into the fort it may be lost to our people forever. You are my child. You must be the spirit walker for the British Band."

A golden glow spread through her body. She took the bag from him--it was very light in her hands--and held it against her chest. She tried to speak, but her throat closed up on her.

Owl Carver said, "Remember always, all people, even the pale eyes, are children of Earthmaker. Whatever power Earthmaker gives you, never use it against another person. If the long knives hurt you, you can ask for strength to fight them yourself, but never call on the spirits to attack them."

"Yes, Father."

_Even if they have killed White Bear, I will not use the power of the spirits against them._

"Farewell, my child."

Redbird took Owl Carver's hand. "If you meet White Bear there in the fort, tell him I am alive and Eagle Feather and Floating Lily are alive, and one day we will all be together."

Wolf Paw stood beside her, watching Black Hawk, the Winnebago Prophet and Owl Carver walk into the square of buildings. They were followed by six blue-coated long knives pointing rifles at them and by a delegation of Winnebago chiefs and braves.

She clutched the medicine bag tightly.

Her eyes clouded over. She saw a crowd of pale eyes with distorted mouths, shouting. Terror seized her, and she tried to cry aloud, but she could not. The white faces dissolved, and she saw a mound of earth in a forest. Atop it was a willow wand with a small strip of red blanket tied to it. Darkness closed in around her.

She felt strong hands gripping her arms. Her sight cleared, and she realized that Wolf Paw was holding her.

"You were falling," he said.

"I am afraid," she said. "I have seen death on the trail before us."

Wolf Paw looked down at her with earnest eyes. He had aged so much! He had untied the red horsehair crest from his head, a wise thing to do, because there were pale eyes who might recognize him as a leading Sauk brave and want revenge. He now had only a short, irregular growth of black hair on the middle of his scalp and stubble growing around it, but he still wore the silver coin around his neck.

He said, "Whatever we must face, you have more courage than any of us. I have not forgotten many winters ago when the spirit Bear came to our camp. I turned and ran while you stood fast."

She waved a hand. "It was only White Bear."

"We did not know that then. From that day when I ran and you stood, I have always wished that a child of mine might possess your courage and wisdom."

She remembered how he had pushed her aside the night she stood beside White Bear and warned the tribe against going to war. She remembered the woman's dress he had forced on White Bear. But the man she saw before her was lost and grieving. He had lost his war. He had let his wives and children be killed. He had failed himself. He had nothing left to believe in.

So she only said, "Be as a father to the children I do have. Help me protect them."

* * * * *

The sun beat down on her bare head, and the dust of the trail choked her. This was the Moon of Dry Rivers, the hottest time of summer. Every step hurt her heart, because every step took her farther away from that fort where the long knives might be holding White Bear. Might be. She had never been able to find out.

By the third day of their trek southward along the Great River, the soles of Redbird's moccasins had worn through. She stumbled over ruts dug in the wide trail by pale eyes' wagon wheels. The sun had baked the packed dirt of the trail till it was hard as stone.

When the long knives let them stop to rest at midday, she took from her blanket roll White Bear's knife. With the knife she cut strips away from her doeskin dress and bound them around her feet. She cut up Eagle Feather's shirt and wrapped his moccasins so they would last longer.

A long knife with a thick blond mustache was standing over her with his hand out.

"Give me that. No knives."

He spoke the pale eyes' tongue, but she knew enough of it to understand. But she couldn't give up the knife. It was all she had left of White Bear. Her grip tightened on the deerhorn handle, and she thought she would stab the long knife--or herself--before she would let go of it.

She tried to tell him that this was precious, that it belonged to her husband who was a shaman. But she did not have the American words to say that.

He just kept saying "No knives," and his face turned a deep red. His hand rested on the butt of his pistol.

Wolf Paw came over. He took her wrist in a strong grip and took the knife from her hand and held it out, handle first, to the blue-coat.

She understood why Wolf Paw had forced her to give up the knife, but she was angry with him.

"That was White Bear's knife from his father," she said.

"The long knife would have killed you," Wolf Paw said. "We cannot fight them." She saw the hopelessness in his eyes, and she put her hand reassuringly on his arm. When the long knives ordered them to get up and start walking, he walked beside her.

She was hungry all day long. A food wagon followed the party. Three times a day the soldiers got meat and bread from it, but the Sauk got only corn mash on tin plates, which they washed out in the river and returned to the food wagon. Several times a day they were allowed to stop and drink from the river. Redbird prayed that her milk would hold out for Floating Lily.

She sang a walking song, to try to forget her pain and to help her put one aching foot in front of the other.

"We walk this trail, following the deer. Sing as you walk, oh, braves and squaws! Last night I dreamed my moccasins Struck fire as they touched the ground."

When she raised her voice others joined in. After a while even Wolf Paw began to sing in a deep voice.

Five blue-coated long knives rode before the Sauk and another five behind them. Redbird looked around at her people, a hundred or so, mostly women and children. The men numbered about twenty. Tired, hungry, sick, broken in spirit. All of them on foot now, the last of their horses having been taken away at Fort Crawford.

She remembered Owl Carver's parting words to her. _You must be the spirit walker for the British Band._ And Wolf Paw had said that she had the courage and wisdom to face death on the trail.

Whatever this remnant of her people might have to meet now, she promised herself that she would use all her strength to help them through it.

They came to a smaller river, the Fever, that flowed into the Great River. A flatboat to take travelers across was drawn up on shore. The long knives had angry words with the men who would pole the flatboat. Redbird understood that the boatmen would not carry her people. Let them swim, their gestures said. But the river was too deep and its current too swift for these half-starved, exhausted people.

While the long knives argued with the boatmen, more pale eyes came to watch. They must have a town nearby. Redbird felt a chill of fear at the hatred she saw in their faces. How frightened of the British Band they must have been only a moon or two ago. Now they had what was left of the British Band at their mercy.

The long knife leader shouted and drew his pistol and waved it. Shaking his head, the chief of the boatmen made an angry gesture toward the flatboat. The long knife took coins from his saddlebag and handed them down to the boatman. The long knives began to herd Redbird's people on board.

It took three trips to carry all of the Sauk across the Fever River. By this time hundreds of pale eyes men, women and children had gathered at the riverbank.

Redbird and her children were in the last group to cross. She heard angry cries. The pale eyes were throwing rotten vegetables, clumps of dirt and small rocks. She pulled Floating Lily around from her back to hold her in her arms. A soft tomato hit Redbird in the ear. She heard laughter. She wanted to keep both hands on the baby, so she did not wipe away the pulp and seeds that dripped down her neck. She ran on board the boat.

When she stumbled off on the other side of the river she was panting, breathless with relief. She felt a hand wiping the tomato pulp from her neck--Wolf Paw. It was good to know he was nearby.

The next morning when they set out, Wolf Paw picked up Eagle Feather, whose ragged moccasins had fallen from his feet. He lifted him over his head and set him on his shoulders. Redbird smiled her thanks, and Wolf Paw returned a sad look, then sighed and lowered his gaze to the ground. All that day he trudged beside her with Eagle Feather on his back. That night he slept near Redbird and her children.

The following day the trail led past flat fields, mostly planted with corn, stretching to the edge of the Great River. For a moment, reminded of the cornfields around Saukenuk, Redbird's heart lifted. Then she recalled that from now on only pale eyes would plant corn in this country.

On her left bluffs rose up, overlooking the river like the statues of spirits. Ahead she could see many pale eyes lodges built on the side of a hill. At the top of the hill was a fort surrounded by a wall of upright logs. She saw a dark mass of people spread across the trail ahead.

They were not standing to one side, as those at the last town had. They were blocking the way.

She felt that she knew this place, though she had never been here before. After a moment she understood why. White Bear and Yellow Hair had both talked to her many times about the village where White Bear had lived with his father, Star Arrow. The great lodge they lived in must be somewhere beyond that hill. And the walled building at the top of the hill would be the trading post of White Bear's uncle, the one who had driven him away from here and who had tried to kill him at Old Man's Creek.

As she got closer she heard angry voices. Again she took her baby in her arms. She looked around for Wolf Paw and was grateful to see him at her side. He set Eagle Feather down, and the boy seized her skirt.

But if this was the town where White Bear had lived, this was where Wolf Paw's war party had killed many men, women and children. This was where the big gun had fired into Wolf Paw's body the silver coin that still hung around his neck. What if these people recognized him? She was glad again that he had taken off his red crest. The coin, she noticed, had disappeared, too, inside his buckskin shirt.

But whether they recognized Wolf Paw or not, these people would hate her people.

Terror seized her as she remembered her vision at Fort Crawford--death on the trail. She tried to stop walking, but the people behind her pushed her on. The mounted long knives behind them were driving everyone forward.

Closer to the pale eyes standing in the trail, she saw that most of those in front were men, and they were holding clubs and rocks. Her legs turned to water and she felt that she might fall down. She did not have the strength to go on, to walk toward the death she had foreseen days ago. Her own people jostled her. The long knives were calling orders, trying to make the Sauk move ahead, but nobody wanted to be the first to come near that angry crowd.

The long knife with the yellow mustache rode ahead and spoke to the crowd, waving his hand at them to clear the way. They shouted back at him.

The crowd surged forward.

And the blue-coats rode into the fields on either side of the trail.

She could not see the villagers, because Wolf Paw had stepped in front of her.

Eagle Feather's frantic grip was hurting her leg. She hugged Floating Lily tightly in her arms, hoping that if she were felled by a stone, her body would protect her baby.

_They are going to kill all of us._

The shouts of the pale eyes battered at her ears. Rocks, many bigger than a man's fist, hurtled through the air. Redbird saw women and children falling around her.

She heard a thud that made her ears ring, and suddenly Wolf Paw was slumping to the rutted trail in front of her.

Men charged at the fallen Wolf Paw with rocks and clubs raised. Eagle Feather suddenly let go of Redbird and plunged into the crowd of Sauk behind her. She watched him disappear as he burrowed in among the legs of the women and men.

"Redbird!"

Squeezing Floating Lily against her chest, Redbird looked around frantically at the sound of her name.

At the edge of the crowd she saw yellow braids and blue eyes and arms waving. Yellow Hair, her face twisted with anguish, was trying to force her way through to her.

There were other people with Yellow Hair. A very stout woman was pushing and pulling at the angry men and women around her, shouting at them to stop what they were doing. And a man with sandy hair was also fighting the other villagers.

_White Bear had an aunt and uncle in this village._

But the crowd pushed forward, and she could no longer see those few who were trying to help her people.

The men were beating Wolf Paw. One powerful-looking man with broad shoulders and chest and a thick brown beard lifted a club to bring it down on Wolf Paw's head.

In the pale eyes' tongue Redbird cried out, "No! Please!"

The man turned and stared at her, madness in his eyes.

"You kill my wife!" he roared. His spittle wet her face. He reached for her.

She screamed and screamed. His hand grabbed at Floating Lily's tiny body, and the baby shrieked with pain and terror. Redbird tried to bite and kick him, to squirm away. He swung his club at her and hit the side of her head. The blow stunned her, weakening her grip on her baby.

The brown-bearded man wrenched Floating Lily from her arms.

Her screams tore her throat. The man whirled away from her, lifted Floating Lily high over his head. The crowd enveloped him, and the baby disappeared in their midst. Screaming, punching and kicking, she fought to get at Floating Lily, but people pushed her back and threw her to the ground.

Her voice was gone. She crawled through the stones and the dirt. She saw the legs of pale eyes men and the skirts of pale eyes women, and in their midst a small unmoving body, wrapped in a blanket soaked with blood.

The people rushed off in a different direction, and she crawled along the trail until she could reach out and take her daughter in her arms. She pulled herself into a sitting position, holding the bundle in her lap. Her hands were wet with blood. She looked down at the tiny crumpled face, blood running out of the baby mouth. No movement. Arms and legs limp. No sound. No breath.

Her mind went blank. A mantle of blackness covered her eyes.

When she came awake, Yellow Hair was sitting beside her, holding her in her arms and sobbing. The fat pale eyes woman was standing over both of them, tears streaking her face. She was holding a red blanket in her hands, offering it to Redbird.

At the sight of the strange white face Redbird screamed and shrank away, pressing the baby in her arms to her breast. She pulled away from Yellow Hair, who sat on the ground and buried her face in her hands.

The fat woman put the blanket on the ground and stumbled away from Redbird. She got a short distance and began to throw up, coughing and sobbing. The sandy-haired man went to her and held her.

Redbird watched the anguish of Yellow Hair and the fat woman numbly. She hurt too much to have any feeling for anyone else. She understood that the woman had given her the blanket to wrap Floating Lily. She hitched herself over to the blanket and picked it up and wrapped it around the bloody bundle without looking at it.

The bright red of the blanket, she thought, would keep Floating Lily warm.

From some distance away the anguished cries of other people reached Redbird's ears. Others must have been hurt by the pale eyes villagers.

Yellow Hair, still crying so hard she was unable to speak, moved beside Redbird and put her hand on the blanket.

The crowd that had attacked the Sauk were gathered in a field beside the trail. The ten long knives on horseback had formed a line and had pushed them back. Too late.

The fat woman seemed to have forgotten Redbird. She staggered away from the Sauk, screaming at the people in the field. It was impossible for Redbird to understand her words, but her voice was full of rage. Some of the people answered back, but in sullen voices Redbird could hardly hear.

Redbird could not stand up. She felt no strength at all in her trembling legs.

"Eagle Feather!" she cried. She called her son again and again.

He came and stood before her. "Is Floating Lily dead? Did they kill her?"

"Yes," said Redbird.

Eagle Feather began to cry. "Why did they kill my little sister?"

Redbird felt a touch on her shoulder. Wolf Paw's hand. His forehead was gashed and blood was running down into one eye that was swollen and shut.

"I thought they killed you," she said.

"It would have been good if they had."

"No," she said, "do not wish that."

Redbird sensed a silence and realized that Yellow Hair was no longer crying. She and Wolf Paw were staring at each other.

Now, thought Redbird, Yellow Hair could have her revenge for her father's death, for her own suffering. All she had to do was tell the villagers who Wolf Paw was, the leader of the war band that had attacked Victor. The brave who had kidnapped her. The long knives could not--would not--stop the people from killing him on the spot.

Yellow Hair sighed and put her arm around Redbird's shoulders. Perhaps she didn't want revenge. Redbird was too sick with grief to wonder much about it.

Wolf Paw said, "Four others are dead, and many more are hurt. We will carry our dead away from this place. I think the long knives will let us bury them farther along this trail."

Holding Floating Lily's body tightly, Redbird let Wolf Paw take her by the elbows and lift her to her feet. She felt Yellow Hair's arm still around her shoulders. She began to cry quietly.

Wolf Paw said, "Even though you grieve for your baby, the people who are wounded need your help. Sun Woman taught you, and you were White Bear's wife and Owl Carver's daughter. You are the only one who knows what to do."

"I have hardly any medicines left," she said.

"You can pray for those who are hurt," Wolf Paw said. "And when we bury the dead, you can speak to their spirits for us."

_You must be the spirit walker for the British Band._

A long knife rode over and spoke to Yellow Hair. Redbird understood that he was telling her that she could not stay with the Sauk prisoners.

In the way they had learned to talk to each other Yellow Hair told Redbird that she would have gladly died to save Floating Lily. She promised to do what she could for the remaining people.

"You, me, sisters," Redbird said.

Yellow Hair put her arms around Redbird, pressing Floating Lily between them. She bent and kissed Redbird on the cheek, her tears wetting Redbird's face.

Redbird glanced up at the long knife who had spoken to Yellow Hair. His mouth under his yellow mustache twisted in scorn.

Yellow Hair began to sob again, and her arms tightened around Redbird. Redbird felt White Bear's aunt and uncle gently trying to pull Yellow Hair away from her.

The mounted long knife shouted angrily. Would they shoot Yellow Hair if she didn't leave?

Frightened for Yellow Hair, Redbird twisted her arms and shoulders and broke free from her.

The fat woman and the sandy-haired man drew Yellow Hair away. But her sobs became louder, turned to screams.

"My baby!"

Redbird knew those pale eyes' words. And it was true, she thought. Had not Yellow Hair been in the birthing wickiup with Redbird? Had she not been present for every instant of Floating Lily's early life? Was she not also White Bear's wife?

_She feels the same pain I do._

Yellow Hair's screams died away as White Bear's aunt and uncle half carried her away from the trail. Her cries were drowned out by the shouts of the long knives, ordering the Sauk to get to their feet and start walking again.

As Redbird, holding Floating Lily, stumbled down the trail she looked at the crowd in the field. They were not shouting or throwing rocks now. They just stared. Perhaps they were satisfied.

Her eyes met those of the brown-bearded man who had torn Floating Lily from her arms. He saw her holding her dead daughter, and his face was still red and rigid with hatred.

She had understood enough of his tongue to understand what he had shouted at her: _You kill my wife_.

At the sight of him she felt heavy as a stone. There was nothing she could do that would bring Floating Lily back. Her baby's little feet were on the Trail of Souls. Only death would free Redbird from pain.

Wolf Paw, once again carrying Eagle Feather, walked beside her. She sensed someone walking on her other side and turned to look. She saw a shrunken, wizened woman with a sad face. It took her a moment to realize that it was her mother, Wind Bends Grass.

Many footsteps later, when their trail passed through woods, the long knives let them stop. They unstrapped small shovels from their saddles and gave them to some of the men. The Sauk men dug five deep graves and placed the bodies--three women, one man, and a baby--sitting upright in them.

Wolf Paw dug Floating Lily's grave, letting Eagle Feather do part of the work.

Before covering Floating Lily with earth, Redbird tore a small strip from the red blanket the fat woman had given her and set it beside the grave.

When the five were buried Redbird saw the eyes of all the people turned toward her, and she knew they expected her, in spite of the grief that was killing her, to complete the rite.

First, she sang.

"In your brown blanket, O Earthmaker, Wrap your children and carry them away, Fold them again in your body ..."

When she had finished the song, she spoke to the dead.

"You are innocent of wrongdoing," she said. "You have no debt to pay, no promise to keep. You have kept faith and walked with honor the path that led to these graves. Do not linger here in hope of avenging yourselves on those who killed you. Great happiness awaits you in the West. The Owl spirit will show you how to set your feet on the Trail of Souls. Go now, begin your journey."

After she had spoken, the people broke willow wands from trees growing by the water and set them upright on the mounds of earth. Redbird took the piece of red blanket and tied it to the end of the wand over Floating Lily's grave.

_Your path on this earth was a short one, my daughter. But the earth is not a good place for our people just now. And many, many of your Sauk brothers and sisters will journey with you on the Trail of Souls. Go now into the West, and your father and brother and I will one day follow after, and we will all be together again._

As she stepped back from the grave she remembered how, two days ago, far to the north, she had seen this grave in her mind and had fainted. With a sinking heart she understood how terrible were the shaman's gifts she had longed for all her life.

The long knives had sat silently beside the trail, letting their horses graze while the people buried their dead. They did not seem worried that anyone might try to escape. After all, where could a Sauk go in this country? Once they might have walked freely anywhere this side of the Great River. Now all who lived in this land hated them.

Redbird could not tell whether the long knives were ashamed that they let these people in their care be killed. Maybe they were pleased, maybe it did not matter to them. When the people came out of the woods, the long knives stood up, silent and expressionless, and mounted their horses again for the journey south.

Wolf Paw walked beside Redbird and Eagle Feather. Redbird missed the familiar weight of the baby on her back, and started to weep again. Her breasts, filling with milk that would not be sucked, began to ache.

After they had walked a long time in silence, Wolf Paw said, "I failed you, Redbird. You asked me to protect your children. I sent my own wives and my children to their deaths, and now I did not save your daughter. I am not a man."

The pale eyes had not killed Wolf Paw, Redbird thought, but they had killed his spirit. She would try to heal him. Nothing would bring back Floating Lily, but perhaps she could give new life to this man.

When they stopped to sleep that night she lay on her back on the ground staring up at the sky, Eagle Feather snuggled close to her, Wolf Paw and Wind Bends Grass nearby.

A bird appeared on a tree limb overhead.

Even though it was night, she could somehow see that the bird's plumage was a red as bright as the strip of blanket she had left on Floating Lily's grave. Around his eyes was a black mask, and on his head a crest of red feathers.

The bird flew to a more distant tree limb, and she felt that he called her to follow him. She stood up, and none of the sleeping people noticed her. She walked past a long knife on guard with a rifle, and he looked right through her.

The bright bird darted into a black opening in the hillside above the river, and Redbird followed. In the cave all she could see was the glow of red wings far ahead of her. There were many twists and turns, and she went down very far.

She began to see light ahead. It appeared so gradually that her eyes adjusted to it easily, and when she came to a chamber that was brightly lit she was neither dazzled nor blinded.

The walls of the chamber rose high above her, hard and smooth and clear as ice, and they glistened with a light that seemed to be everywhere behind them. She heard a murmuring and a rustling, and saw in niches cut into the wall many kinds of creatures, plants and animals and birds. She looked down at fish swimming restlessly in the dark pool that formed most of the floor.

In the center of the pool was an island, and on the island a huge ancient Turtle squatted on four wrinkled, gray-green legs.

_Welcome, daughter_, said the Turtle.

22

Renegade

Raoul sat on the edge of his chair in Fort Crawford's assembly room, waiting for the guards to bring in Auguste. In a row beside him sat seven other militia officers, all of whom had been witnesses against the Indian leaders.

Raoul discovered all at once that he was trembling with anticipation.

_Let today be the day_--it was almost a prayer, but he did not know who would hear such a prayer--_let them string him up today_.

_Let me see that damned mongrel die._

Today the commanders of the army that had defeated Black Hawk would tell the Sauk and Fox leaders their fate. The less important Indians were to be dealt with first, so Auguste would be coming in now.

Raoul watched avidly as Auguste walked in between two privates, his wrists handcuffed, carrying an iron ball at the end of a chain attached to his ankles. The sight of the mongrel in chains was more satisfying than a good swig of Old Kaintuck.

Raoul had not seen Auguste since the day they had faced each other too briefly on that bloody island off the mouth of the Bad Axe. Again Raoul saw that Auguste's right ear, partly covered by his long black locks, was split into upper and lower halves, with a red, partly healed gap between them.

_Eli's bullet must have gone through his ear instead of his head. And, knowing Eli, that was no accident. That was why he said I'd find a surprise up in Michigan Territory._

Raoul's fingers worked in his lap. That gap-toothed old bastard had deliberately lied to him about killing Auguste. Why? What could he gain by keeping Auguste alive?

Auguste's dark eyes widened as they met Raoul's, and from across the room his hatred struck Raoul like a blow. Raoul remembered the woman whose throat he had cut.

_His mother. But killing her was still not enough to pay me back for Clarissa and Phil and Andy. For the burning of Victoire._

Auguste turned his back to Raoul and faced the three commanders, who sat at a long table behind which a big American flag was nailed to the plaster wall.

In the center was Major General Winfield Scott, finally arrived from the East to take charge of what was left of the war. Raoul hoped Scott had come out here with President Jackson's orders to send this pack of savages to the gallows. The general had listened intently to everything Raoul had to say against the mongrel. Raoul distrusted Scott's fancy uniform, his heavy gold-braided epaulets and the white plume on the cocked hat that lay beside him. But Scott's features were severe, his brows straight and black, his nose sharp and his mouth tight. Raoul saw no pity in the look he bent on Auguste.

Flanking Scott were Colonel Zachary Taylor and white-bearded Brigadier General Henry Atkinson, who had commanded the militia and troops right up to the battle at the Bad Axe.

Winfield Scott glanced at a paper before him and said, "Auguste de Marion, by some also called White Bear, you are named in Colonel Taylor's report as one of the ringleaders of Black Hawk's uprising. We have heard testimony that you are a renegade and murderer."

Auguste glanced at Raoul and then said, "Have I the right to hear what has been said against me?"

Scott shook his head. "This is only a hearing, not a court-martial. What do you have to say for yourself?"

"I advised my people to keep the peace," Auguste said. "And the British Band did not take my advice. So I am not much of a ringleader. And I never killed anyone, so I am no murderer. As for being a renegade, I was born a Sauk. I'm no more a renegade than any other member of my tribe who followed Black Hawk."

Auguste's voice rang loud and clear. Raoul noticed that his speech seemed more accented than he remembered it. Probably from living with Indians and talking only their talk for nearly a year.

_Is it only a year since I drove him from Victoire? Seems a whole lifetime away._

Scott cast sideways glances at Taylor and Atkinson.

"We are told you are an American citizen," said Zachary Taylor.

Auguste said, "Sir, my father was Pierre de Marion, an American citizen, and because it was his wish, I lived as a white man for six years. But my mother was Sun Woman of the Sauk tribe, and I remained a Sauk in my heart."

Scott said, "Your heart doesn't matter to the law. What was your conduct during the war?"

Raoul listened, blood hammering in his skull, to Auguste's account of Old Man's Creek. Auguste named him, turned and pointed to him.

"Then he came toward me to shoot me. I ran into the tall grass. Eli Greenglove, one of his men, shot me." He touched his mangled ear. "It was dark and the men were drunk, and I was able to stay alive by pretending to be dead. When Black Hawk found out that his emissaries had been shot, he believed he had no choice but to go on fighting. It was only then that the British Band began to attack whites."

Anger drove Raoul to his feet. "Sir, I must answer that."

Scott turned hard blue eyes on Raoul. "That won't be necessary, Colonel. I've already had a complete report of what happened at Old Man's Creek." Raoul heard a faint disdain in Scott's elegant Virginia drawl and felt his face turn hot.

Scott consulted in a murmur with Taylor and Atkinson. Raoul sat down slowly and drummed his fingers on his knee. He looked up to see Auguste staring stonily at him, his manacled hands clenched into fists. Raoul made himself hold Auguste's gaze.

_Shaman. I wonder if he does have any power to hurt me._

_Nonsense._

_But what is he thinking, what is he planning?_

Scott said, "We've read depositions from Miss Hale and the boy Woodrow Prewitt stating that Auguste and his squaw protected them and cared for them while they were captives of the Sauk and that Auguste eventually led them to safety."

Raoul clenched his jaw and his breath steamed out of his nostrils. He wished he could give Nancy Hale the back of his hand across her stuck-up face. The redskins had murdered her father. They'd kidnapped her. Probably they'd raped her, though she'd never admit it. How in hell could she defend this mongrel?

Scott said, "It seems to me we have no evidence that this man did any harm to the United States or to any of our citizens. However, there are serious accusations against him, such as the charge that he instigated the Sauk raid on Victor. If he is not legally an Indian, which this board of inquiry is not competent to determine, then any acts of war he participated in were crimes against the people of Illinois. His guilt or innocence must then be a matter for a civilian court to decide. And the appropriate place would be the county where he lived with his father, where there would be records and witnesses."

Raoul could hardly hold himself back from jumping up and shouting in triumph. He forced himself to look anywhere but at Auguste, knowing that what he felt would be all too easy for the others to read.

"You may as well hang me yourself, General," Auguste said quietly, pointing at Raoul. "_He_ runs that whole county. No witnesses will dare to come forward for me, and he's had all my records destroyed."

"Without records, nothing can be proved _against_ you," said Scott.

Raoul felt a hollow open in his stomach. What the hell had Burke Russell done with Auguste's adoption records and Pierre's will? The damned Indians had killed Russell. And that pretty wife of his just refused to speak to Raoul.

Auguste said, "But, sir, I don't believe there's even a court in Smith County to try me."

Zachary Taylor shuffled some papers. "Yes, there is. Smith County had a special election a month after that bad Indian raid. Elected county commissioners, and a man named Cooper is judge of the circuit court. I think we can guarantee White Bear, or Auguste de Marion, a proper trial."

Raoul clenched his fists. Things had gone sour in Smith County while he was off fighting the Sauk.

General Atkinson said, "I don't know about that. Seventeen men, women and children were killed in that raid. Sending this man to stand trial there could be simply condemning him to death by Lynch's law."

_I wish it could be that simple._ Remembering the cool reception he'd gotten in Victor when he went there to outfit the _Victory_ for the war, Raoul began to have second thoughts about whether things would go his way.

_I'll have to get my Smith County boys together and make sure Cooper runs that trial right._

Raoul stole a glance at Auguste and saw that his face was set in that hard, expressionless mold Indians took on when they didn't want to show what they were feeling.

Scott said, "Send a good officer and a couple of men to Victor to escort this man and insure a fair trial."

"Right, sir," said Zachary Taylor, making a note. "Lieutenant Jefferson Davis and two enlisted men will go along with him."

_Damn!_ Taylor had jumped at the chance to send Lieutenant Davis away from the fort, Raoul thought with annoyance. The gossip around Fort Crawford was that Davis was courting Taylor's pretty daughter, and Taylor didn't approve.

Scott turned his gaze on Raoul. "And you, Colonel de Marion. By all accounts you're a very prominent citizen in that community. It's obvious there's bad blood between you and your nephew. I'll hold you responsible if there's any violence against him."

"Understood, sir," said Raoul, calmly enough, but hating to hear the mongrel called his nephew. Scott's threat was empty; once the general was back East he wouldn't care about the fate of one half-breed out on the frontier.

Scott turned to Auguste with a small smile. "While you are on trial, I'll be negotiating a treaty with the Sauk. And after that, if they don't hang you, I think President Jackson would be most interested in meeting you."

A treaty? A meeting with Jackson? Raoul quivered with anger and could barely keep himself from letting out a shout. Did that mean Scott wasn't going to hang Black Hawk and the rest of them? Was he taking the Sauk leaders to meet the President?

_Well, if he does, the mongrel won't be with them_, Raoul thought, comforting himself with the picture of a hempen rope around Auguste's neck.

* * * * *

_My baby!_

Auguste felt as heavy as if he had turned to stone. He sat hunched over on the plank bed covered with a corn-husk mattress, in his cell in Victor's village hall, clutching his stomach as tears ran from his eyes.

After what Frank Hopkins had just told him, he no longer cared what happened to him here in Victor. These people had killed Floating Lily. Let them kill him too. He did not want to live in a world that had killed his baby daughter.

He felt a comforting hand on his shoulder. He glanced at it and saw Frank's ink-blackened fingers pressing into the blue calico shirt his captors at Fort Crawford had given him.

He looked up to see lawyer Thomas Ford's sad eyes on him, but kindly gestures and looks meant nothing to him now. How could people tear a baby girl from her mother's arms and beat her to death?

_But the Sauk war parties killed children too. All people are cruel, white and red._

"I would be better off on the Trail of Souls," he said in a low voice.

_My mother and my daughter, Sun Woman and Floating Lily, both dead._

"Nancy and Nicole and I tried to stop them," Frank said, his eyes moist, "but the crowd was too big. We couldn't get through until it was too late. Nancy told us the baby was your daughter. Nicole and Nancy tried as best they could to comfort your wife."

For all he knew, Redbird might think him dead. He had asked his guards at Fort Crawford to pass word to her that he was alive, but he had no idea whether any of his messages had reached her.

Ford, the lawyer from Vandalia Frank had hired to defend Auguste, said, "What happened shows how angry the people of Victor still are against the Sauk. I still think we have to ask for a change of venue." Ford was a short, slender man with a round face and bright, intelligent eyes. Leaning against the rough-hewn log wall of Auguste's cell, he wore a dark brown frock coat with a high collar that came up to his ears.

Frank said, "Many people here feel terribly sorry for Auguste. And a lot of us decided, after we survived the siege, that we wouldn't put up anymore with the lawlessness that Raoul and his crew represent."

_But Raoul is back now_, Auguste thought. _He'll start to take control again._

Ford said, "Well, Auguste ought to tell us what he thinks. It's his neck."

Auguste took a deep breath. The clean smell of fresh-cut wood filled his nostrils. A good smell, but it reminded him that this village hall was only recently rebuilt, that last June Wolf Paw's raiding party had burned down everything in Victor except Raoul's trading post. How could he possibly get a fair trial here?

Auguste said, "At least here I have some people who know me and care about me."

Ford sighed. "So be it. Frank, I want a list of every man who was in the mob that attacked the Sauk prisoners. We don't want any of them sitting on the jury."

As Frank and Ford discussed trial tactics, Auguste gazed around at this dark little chamber on the second floor of the village hall. It might be his last home on earth. The only window was a square barred hole high up on the south wall, too small to let much light in--or for a man to climb out through. This morning a light rain falling outside spattered through the window, and the cell felt damp and cool.

_When Frank built this cell, he could never have thought his own nephew would be a prisoner in it._

"We have a power of work to do, Auguste," Ford interrupted his thoughts. "So far I can't find anyone who confirms your story of what happened at Old Man's Creek. This Otto Wegner fellow whose life you saved, he and his family have moved down to the Texas country in Mexico."

Frank said, "We do have two people who'll testify that you protected them and never went on any war parties while they were prisoners of the British Band--Miss Hale and the boy Woodrow."

At the mention of Nancy's name Auguste felt a wrench in his heart. He knew that she had stayed in Victor, teaching in a new schoolhouse Frank had built for her on the site of her father's church. Her absence in the week he had been here had hurt him deeply.

"Frank," he said, "why hasn't Nancy come to see me?"

Thomas Ford said, "Miss Hale is a very bright young lady, and instead of rushing down here to visit you when you arrived, she waited till I got here and then she asked me what she should do. I told her that there must not be even a breath of a suggestion that there was anything between you two. If people believed she had, ah, been intimate with you, they'd consider her a loose woman--doubly so because you're an Indian--and they wouldn't listen to a word she said."

"I understand," Auguste said, feeling bitter, but also feeling that the load of grief he'd borne since arriving at Victor had lightened a little. Nancy had not forgotten him, as he'd feared she might after she got back among whites. He felt shame that he had even imagined she might turn against him. And when the trial started, at least he would see her again.

* * * * *

The smell of fresh-cut wood pervaded the courtroom on the first floor of the village hall, as it did Auguste's cell. Frank must have worked seven days a week since last June, Auguste thought. Even though he'd hired half a dozen assistants, it was a wonder he'd found time to write and publish his newspaper.

Judge David Cooper, a man with a square, muscular face and piercing blue eyes, sat at a long table with the flags of the United States and the state of Illinois on stands behind him. A carpenter's mallet lay on the table. Probably borrowed from Frank, Auguste thought. He had a vague memory of Cooper's being present and saying something to Raoul the day he'd been driven from Victoire. Auguste stood as Cooper read out the charge of complicity in the murder of 223 citizens of the state of Illinois by the British Band of the Sauk and Fox Indian tribes.

Behind Auguste sat three blue-coats, Lieutenant Jefferson Davis and his two corporals. The prosecutor, Justus Bennett, and his assistant occupied a third table. The courtroom being not quite finished, the twelve jurymen sat on one side of the room in two pews carried over from the Presbyterian church.

Auguste knew only three of the jurors--Robert McAllister, a farmer whose family had survived Wolf Paw's raid by hiding in their root cellar; Tom Slattery, the blacksmith; and Jean-Paul Kobell, a stableman from Victoire. He had no reason to think any of those three bore him any special ill will, though they might have good reason to hate any Sauk. The others he knew not at all, which meant they must have moved to Victor since he left.

Behind the trial participants about fifty citizens of Smith County were crowded into the courtroom, sitting in chairs or on benches they had carried into the village hall themselves. More stood along the walls.

During the first hour of the trial Raoul de Marion, the first witness for the prosecution, testified. He lounged in a chair beside the judge's table.

Auguste sat in a cold fury as he heard, for the first time, an account of the war between the British Band and the people of Illinois as many pale eyes must have seen it. A murdering band of savages had invaded the state. The brave volunteers had pursued them, endured the loss of comrades, but eventually had triumphed, administering a righteous retaliation by exterminating most of the invaders.

Bennett, a lean man whose rounded shoulders gave him a serpentine look, turned to Thomas Ford. "Your witness, sir."

Ford, very erect in contrast to Bennett, stood up and walked toward Raoul. "Mr. de Marion, why on the night of September fifteenth, 1831, did you offer a reward of fifty pieces of eight to anyone who would kill your nephew, Auguste de Marion?"

"Objection," Bennett called from his seat. "This has nothing to do with the defendant's conduct in the Black Hawk War."

"On the contrary Your Honor," said Ford. "It explains how my client got involved in the war."

"I'll allow it," said David Cooper.

After Ford repeated his question, Raoul said, "I don't remember offering any reward."

"I can produce at least ten witnesses who heard you and saw you hold up a money bag."

"Well, he provoked me. He'd tried to cheat me out of my inheritance."

"Apparently you'd already got control of the estate. By force of arms. Was it necessary to go on and incite men to kill him?"

"I figured he might do just what he did--stir up the Sauk against us and try to use them to take the land away from me."

Ford turned to the jury, and the spectators could see the incredulous look on his face. Auguste felt a warmth for Ford. He seemed to know what he was doing. But it still made him uneasy to know that his life was in the hands of another man, no matter how competent.

"And why were you going to shoot Auguste, when he came to you with a white flag at Old Man's Creek?"

"He was trying to lead us into an ambush."

Ford sighed, clasped his hands behind his back and took a few paces away from Raoul. He threw an exasperated look at the jury, as if to say, _What can I do with this man?_

Then he turned suddenly and said, "Mr. de Marion, in 1812, when you were just a boy, were you not present at the incident known as the Fort Dearborn Massacre?"

"Objection," said Bennett. "This certainly has nothing to do with the man who's on trial."

"Goes to the character of the witness, Your Honor," said Ford.

"I'll let you ask the question," said Cooper. "Please answer, Mr. de Marion."

Raoul hunched over and his face grew darker. "God knows I was at Fort Dearborn."

"And did you not see your sister horribly murdered by Indians. Were you not subjected to two years of captivity and slavery?"

"I did. I was." The words came out in a hoarse whisper.

Ford said, "Mr. de Marion, after those terrible boyhood experiences, to have your brother attempt to bring an Indian into the family must have seemed the crowning insult. I put it to you that your accusations against Auguste stem, not from any misdeeds of his, but from your hatred for him because he is an Indian."

Justus Bennett was on his feet. "Objection. The honorable defense attorney isn't asking questions. He's making a speech defaming the witness."

Cooper nodded. "Sustained." He turned to the jury and said, "The jury will forget about everything they just heard the defense attorney say."

Auguste shook his head. How could any man forget something he had just so clearly heard? In all his years of living among the pale eyes, he had never attended a trial. Now, on trial for his own life, he saw that the ways of the pale eyes were even stranger than he had ever realized.

The next prosecution witness was Armand Perrault.

At the sight of Armand, Auguste broke out in a cold sweat of fury. This man, Frank had said, was the one who snatched Floating Lily from Redbird's arms. Walking up to the witness chair, Armand avoided Auguste's eyes. Always before he had shot Auguste looks of hatred. Today he was showing his guilt.

Aching knots spread through all Auguste's muscles. Were he alone with Armand, he would hurl himself at him and try to kill him, barehanded. But in this crowded courtroom he was helpless. His hands tightened on the links of his chain till they hurt.

He felt a firm grip on his forearm; Ford, sitting beside him, letting him know that he sensed his pain.

Led by Bennett's questions, Armand repeated Raoul's claim that the three peace messengers were actually the vanguard of a Sauk attack.

"Why do they keep harping on this?" Auguste asked Ford in a whisper.

"Makes you out a murderer," Ford said out of the side of his mouth, "if you tried to lead the white militiamen into a trap at Old Man's Creek."

When it was Ford's turn to question Armand he said, "You pulled the trigger on one of Black Hawk's peace messengers, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Armand, his teeth gleaming in his brown beard. "And I did not miss."

"And you killed an Indian baby on the road going through town about three weeks ago, didn't you?"

"I don't remember."

Ford raised his hands toward the beamed ceiling. "Come now, Mr. Perrault. A hundred or more people saw you drag that child from its mother's arms."

"These were the same Indians who came here and murdered my wife, Monsieur Légiste."

"That baby probably wasn't even born when your wife was murdered, Mr. Perrault."

_If I ever get free I'll kill you, Perrault. By the White Bear spirit I swear it._

A chill came over Auguste at his own thought. He recalled Owl Carver's warning against trying to turn the power of the spirits against any other human being. Terrible consequences lay in store for the shaman who did so.

_I'm probably going to be hanged as it is. What else can happen to me?_

Auguste heard Raoul's voice from somewhere behind him, among the spectators. "Hey, Bennett! Aren't you going to say anything? What's this got to do with the mongrel?"

"Order!" Cooper rapped on his table with a carpenter's mallet.

Bennett stood up a little uncertainly. "If it please your honor, I called Mr. Perrault to testify about what happened at Old Man's Creek. I don't see why counsel for the defense is bringing up this other incident."

"All right, Your Honor," said Ford. "I have no more questions for this baby killer." Auguste saw sudden pallor in the part of Armand's face not covered by his beard.

"Objection!" shouted Bennett.

Ford looked pained. "What in Heaven's name is wrong with calling a spade a spade?"

Cooper said, "Well, try to keep your language a little more elevated, Mr. Ford."

"Certainly, Your Honor. I have no more questions for this infanticide."

As Ford turned away to sit down, Auguste saw a quick little smile crease Judge Cooper's face, then disappear. He began to feel hope stirring in a heart that had been heavy ever since he came to Victor. This trial would not be conducted according to Lynch's law.

But he still burned with hatred for Armand Perrault. He turned to watch Perrault go back to his seat.

And his skin tingled. Just past the gaunt-faced Lieutenant Davis, Nancy was sitting, only two rows of chairs away. Her deep blue eyes widened as she looked at him. Her smile was, as Cooper's had been, just a brief shadow, but her face flushed, and she shook her head almost imperceptibly.

Auguste understood. As Ford had said, if Nancy were to testify in his behalf, people must never know what they had been to each other. All their hatred for red men would come boiling up, and they would hang him for having intercourse with a white woman, if for nothing else. He nodded ever so slightly, tore his eyes away from hers.

Woodrow was sitting beside Nancy, holding her hand. He had no need to hide his feelings, and gave Auguste a big grin. Auguste smiled back at him, but at the sight of Woodrow, longing for Eagle Feather was a knife in his heart.

_I don't even know whether Eagle Feather is alive._

And grief for poor little Floating Lily crushed him.

There were Frank and Nicole sitting together, with one of their smaller children--Patrick, Auguste thought--squirming on Nicole's lap. The sight of the baby made him want to weep.

There were Elysée and Guichard, two old men sitting side by side. Grandpapa had a home of his own now, he'd told Auguste while visiting him, a small frame house on a hillside north of town, also built by Frank. And a young doctor named Surrey who had just moved into the county looked in on Elysée regularly.

_Good that they have a new doctor here._

Too bad, though, Gram Medill had died. Of an infection, Auguste had heard, that she'd refused to let Dr. Surrey treat.

Auguste saw many more spectators whom he did not recognize, people who stared back at him with hostility or--at best--curiosity.

A handsome young woman wearing a black bonnet and a black dress caught his eye. There was a strange intensity in her look, but her mouth was drawn tight, and he could not tell whether she felt hatred or sympathy for him. Then he remembered who she was--Pamela Russell, widow of the town clerk whose brains had been dashed out by a Sauk war club during the attack on Victor. Nicole, on one of her visits to the village hall, had described Russell's death to him and told him how Pamela had insisted on touching off the cannon that broke the war party's attack.

_She will probably want to be the one to put the rope around my neck._

The prosecutor called Levi Pope to the stand. The shambling backwoodsman held his coonskin cap in his hand as he approached the witness chair. This was the first time Auguste could remember seeing him without a rifle. Its absence made him look strange.

Bennett led Levi Pope through an account of Old Man's Creek. Then Thomas Ford rose to question him.

"All right, Levi. When the three Indians, including Auguste, came into your camp with the peace flag, how'd you know it was treachery?"

Levi frowned and shook his head. "Well, when we seen that the woods was full of Injuns."

"Now, we've heard many times during this trial that 'the woods was full of Injuns.' How many Indians did you see?"

"'Twasn't me that saw them. It was the scouts Colonel Raoul sent out."

"So you didn't see any sign yourself that the Indians were trying to lead you into some kind of trap?"

"Well--no, sir."

"And when you rode into the forest on the north side of Old Man's Creek, did you see any Indians?"

"No, sir. They must of all run off by that time."

"When did you first meet up with Indians?"

"Oh, we rode maybe an hour up along the river. It was full dark then, and they come down off a hill in front of us, a-yelling and screaming."

"A frontal attack, then. If the Indians were planning to ambush you, what did they gain by sending three men into your camp claiming they wanted to talk surrender?"

Levi Pope's face seemed to elongate as he contemplated Ford's question. "I don't rightly know."

"Do you think the Indians are stupid, Mr. Pope?"

"Well, they was stupid to start this war." Levi grinned at Ford, looking pleased with himself. Auguste heard some appreciative chuckles from the spectators. He turned and saw Levi Pope's wife, a skinny, pale woman, frowning at her husband as if his testimony made her angry.

Ford nodded and held off on making his reply while he paced the open space before the judge's table and let his calm gaze travel over all the spectators and jurymen. He waited until the hall was quiet.

"Maybe the Indians thought it was a stupid war, too, Mr. Pope. Maybe that is the real reason Black Hawk sent those three braves to your camp."

"Objection," called Bennett. "Mr. Ford is just speculating."

Ford said, "Your Honor, the claim by Colonel de Marion and others that the Indian attempt to make peace, in which Auguste de Marion participated, was some kind of dastardly trick is, itself, merely speculation."

Judge Cooper grunted. "Well, let's stick to what people know, not what they think they know."

"Fine with me, Your Honor," said Ford, "as long as the prosecution is held to the same standard."

Auguste's belly tightened as he heard Ford speak sharply to the judge. He'd seen some hope in Cooper. He didn't want him antagonized. Then he slumped, letting his manacled hands dangle. What difference? He didn't have a chance anyway.

Ford went back to his seat, smiling grimly at Auguste, and Levi Pope, looking somewhat puzzled, slouched back to his place among the spectators. Judge Cooper declared that proceedings were over for the day and that the defense would call its witnesses tomorrow.

Hopelessly, Auguste stood up and bent over to pick up the iron ball chained to his leg. Perhaps, he thought, Lynch's law would be better. At least it would not prolong his suffering, make him relive moment by moment everything he and those he loved had suffered over the past year. And sooner or later he was bound to end up in the same place--a grave.

The following day Nicole was sitting in the witness chair, answering Ford's questions in a soft, melodious voice.

Ford asked, "Do you agree, Mrs. Hopkins, with your brother's charge that Auguste is a renegade and murderer?"

Nicole's full face reddened with anger. "My God, no! Auguste never turned against us. He left Smith County because Raoul would have had him murdered if he'd stayed. Auguste has never harmed anyone."

Ford's next witness was Mrs. Pamela Russell. Hearing the spectators murmuring questions to one another after Ford called her name, Auguste wondered anxiously what a woman whose husband had been killed by Wolf Paw's raid on Victor could possibly say that would help him. Her black dress and bonnet made her face look even paler. She clutched a black leather bag in her lap.

Ford said, "Mrs. Russell, did your late husband entrust any papers to you concerning Auguste de Marion?"

"Not exactly, but he kept such papers in our house and told me about them. I kept them safe after he died."

"What were they?"

"A certificate of adoption and a will."

"Why did he keep them in your home instead of in the village hall?"

Pamela Russell's dark eyes flashed as she searched the courtroom, looking, Auguste suspected, for Raoul.

"Raoul de Marion, who never let my husband forget that he owed his job to him, ordered Burke to destroy both papers."

"That's a lie!" came Raoul's shout from the back of the hall.

Justus Bennett looked toward Raoul and said, "Colonel de Marion, please. What this woman is saying might even help our case."

"All right," Raoul called. "But you watch what you're doing."

"Now, Mrs. Russell--" Ford began again.

"Burke knew that what he told him to do was wrong. So, instead of destroying the adoption certificate and the will, he brought them home and kept them in his strongbox in our cellar. When the Indians burned our house, the papers survived." She paused, gazing over Ford's head. "The papers survived."

"Do you have them now, Mrs. Russell?"

She unbuckled the strap that closed the leather bag in her lap and drew out two folded pieces of paper. She handed them to Ford, who unfolded them with a flourish and turned to the judge.

Ford asked, "Your Honor, may I read these documents to the court?"

"Go right ahead," said Judge Cooper.

"First, the certificate of adoption," said Ford.

Auguste felt a hard lump rise to block his throat as Ford read the statement that Pierre de Marion, on the sixteenth day of August, 1825, did declare his natural son, hereafter to be known as Auguste de Marion, to be his lawful son, granting him all rights and privileges to which that status might entitle him.

Auguste covered his burning eyes with his hand.

_I meant so much to him._

"Now," said Ford, "the will: 'I, Pierre de Marion, residing on the estate called Victoire, in the County of Smith and State of Illinois, make this my will and revoke all prior wills and codicils.'"

It was the will Auguste had fought against until Pierre had finally persuaded him to smoke the calumet; the will giving the château and the land to Auguste. There were also monetary gifts to a number of servants, including one of two hundred dollars to Armand and Marchette Perrault. Auguste heard an angry-bee buzzing among the spectators. By seizing the estate, and concealing the will, Raoul had wiped out these gifts. He'd have to face some angry servants today, Auguste thought with satisfaction. Including that swine Perrault.

"The prosecution will want to see those papers," said Bennett when Ford had finished reading.

"Of course," said Cooper. "You may have a look any time. In my presence."

After Ford had given the jurors the two papers to look at and had returned them to Cooper's table, he turned to Bennett.

"Your witness."

Bennett slouched into the open area before the judge's table. "No questions. Mrs. Russell, widowed by those savages, has surely suffered enough."

Pamela Russell stayed sitting in the chair beside the judge's table, clutching her leather bag. Her bosom, Auguste saw, was rising and falling with some powerful emotion.

"That's all, Pamela," David Cooper said softly. "You can go now."

She stood up, looking like a woman in a trance, and moved slowly toward the door in the rear of the courtroom. Auguste turned in his seat to watch her. She stopped before Raoul, who was sitting near the back. He stared up at her as she pointed at him.

"How dare you call me a liar, Raoul de Marion! When it's you that lied about what you told my husband. My husband never fired a gun before in his life, and he had to stand up and be killed, because you took all the men who could shoot away with you. I hope those papers ruin you."

Spots of red stood out on her cheeks. She covered her face with her hand and rushed out of the courtroom.

"How come you didn't shut her up, Judge?" Raoul shouted after she was gone.

"I figured she deserved to have her say," said Cooper calmly.

Ford said, "The defense calls Miss Nancy Hale."

Auguste's heart started to beat harder as he watched Nancy, tall and straight in a pale violet dress, walk to the witness's chair. Just what he had feared a year ago, when Nancy first asked him to make love to her, had happened. He felt a love for her--an impossible love, now--that was as strong in its way as the love he felt for Redbird.

In answer to Ford's soft-spoken questions, Nancy told how she had been captured and how Auguste had intervened to protect her, and later to protect Woodrow. She told how he had risked his life to escort her and Woodrow to safety, and had ended up being captured.

Bennett got up to cross-question.

"Miss Hale, this may be a hard question for you to answer in open court. But it is important to this trial. It's well-known that Indians are no respecters of the virtue of white women. So, what I'm asking you is ..." He paused and leaned over her. "Were you subjected to anything of a shameful nature while you were a prisoner of the Sauk?"

"Objection," called Ford. "The question itself is shameful. It has no possible bearing on this case."

Judge Cooper glared at Bennett. "What call do you have to ask her that?"

"Defense counsel has taken us down a lot of winding roads, Your Honor. I'm attempting to determine facts about the defendant's character."

"I'll allow it," said Cooper, his voice low and reluctant, and Bennett turned with a look of satisfaction to Nancy and repeated his question.

Nancy looked him coldly in the eye. "I've already said. Auguste de Marion protected me. I was never harmed."

Bennett narrowed his eyes. Raoul had chosen the man well for his purposes, Auguste thought, hating Bennett for tormenting Nancy.

"Well, but what about Auguste de Marion himself? Didn't you live in one of their huts with him? Did he ever approach you with lewd intent?"

"Certainly not!" said Nancy. "Yes, I did live in his--the word is wickiup, Mr. Bennett. But the situation was perfectly proper. His wife and child were with us all the time."

From the back of the hall Raoul brayed, "She probably enjoyed it. She always had an eye for the mongrel."

Auguste felt his neck grow hot. He wanted to kill. But someone would stop him before he reached Raoul; and even to try to attack him would only confirm the picture Bennett was trying to paint, of a murderous savage. He forced himself to sit still.

And yet, he thought, as he breathed deeply to calm himself, it was Nancy who was concealing the truth and Bennett and Raoul who sensed what had really happened. But their very words for it--"shameful," "lewd intent"--turned the truth into a lie.

He and Nancy had proclaimed their love in honor before the British Band. Now he felt as if he were tied down on a forest floor and weasels and crows were biting and pecking at him. Why must he and Nancy hide their love from these hate-filled people?

He heard indignant murmurs provoked by Raoul's outburst.

"Shocking!" someone said.

"No gentleman would talk that way."

Auguste heard Lieutenant Davis sitting behind him, say to one of his men, "If I weren't on duty, I'd teach that scoundrel a lesson."

Someone with the accent of Victoire called out, "Raoul, your father is right! Tu es un sauvage!"

Cooper pounded on his table with his wooden mallet until there was silence.

Thomas Ford called, "Master Woodrow Prewitt, will you take the stand, please?"

Woodrow walked past Auguste, who felt a warmth for him and, again, a pang of longing for Eagle Feather.

Under Ford's questions, Woodrow told how White Bear and Redbird had treated him like a foster son, and how White Bear had helped them escape.

When it was Bennett's turn, he stood threateningly over Woodrow. "Have you forgotten, young man, that you had a real, white, Christian father and mother? Have you forgotten what the Indians did to them?"

"No, sir," said Woodrow in a small voice.

"Well, then, how can you make it out that this half-Indian and his squaw were such fine people? They held you prisoner!"

"Sir, my pa used to whip me before breakfast and after supper. My ma laid in bed most days, drunk. White Bear--Mr. Auguste--he was kind to me. So was his missus. Living with them was shinin'."

"Shining!" Bennett looked disgusted.

Woodrow shrugged. "Well, would'a been, if the soldiers hadn't always been chasing us."

Auguste heard the thump of boots. He turned to see Raoul storming up from the back of the room.

"That boy's lying!" Raoul roared. "Indians took me prisoner when I was his age--I know firsthand how kind they are, I got the scars to prove it. The half-breed's white squaw has made it worthwhile for the kid to lie. If I get my hands on him, I'll beat the truth out of him."

"Sit down, sir!" Lieutenant Davis jumped up from his seat behind Auguste and blocked Raoul's way. Auguste turned to see Raoul's big frame just a few feet from him, close enough for him to smell whiskey fumes.

"This is none of your business, Davis," Raoul growled.

"General Winfield Scott and Colonel Zachary Taylor commanded me to see that this man receives a proper trial," said Davis in a calm, steady voice.

Judge Cooper rapped his mallet. "De Marion, I won't allow you to disrupt this court."

Raoul shouted at Cooper over Davis's shoulder. "Don't you forget, Cooper, that when you're not wearing that black robe you're just a small farmer who bought his land from me and sells his crop to me."

Cooper was standing now, his jaw clenched. "That's enough, de Marion. Sit down."

Raoul's head turned slowly from side to side. For a moment he stared at Auguste, his eyes full of hate. Auguste felt an answering hatred boiling up in his chest.

Raoul and the lieutenant stood facing each other for a long, silent moment. Then Raoul turned abruptly and strode back to his seat. Auguste, whose attention had been fixed on Raoul and Davis, became aware of men sitting down all over the courtroom. He wondered whether they were Raoul's men.

Auguste felt his guts squirm as he realized what a thin barrier protected this trial from being abruptly ended. Raoul could call on his crew of rogues to drag him out and hang him at once. The judge and the three Federal soldiers might not be able to stop him.

Ford called Auguste to the witness chair. Auguste had sat rigid for so long that standing up made him stumble, and Ford put a steadying hand on his arm.

As he sat down he felt himself trembling at the sight of dozens of pale eyes faces, hard, solemn and expressionless, looking at him. Bearded men squirting tobacco juice into brass spittoons. Women eyeing him from under bonnets. He looked for the friendly faces in the room--Nancy, Woodrow, Elysée, Guichard, Nicole, Frank.

Ford said, "We've heard bits and pieces of your story from many different people, Auguste. If you were just another Sauk Indian you wouldn't be on trial here today. You'd be with your people, what's left of them. But because you've lived with whites and your father was white and you have a claim to a white man's property, you're accused of being a traitor and a murderer. I want you to tell us about your life. How come you're both Indian and white man?"

As Auguste talked he forgot the watching faces and saw again Sun Woman and Star Arrow, Black Hawk and Owl Carver, Redbird and Nancy, Saukenuk and Victoire, Old Man's Creek and the Bad Axe.

When he was done, Ford thanked him quietly and sat down. It was Bennett's turn.

He shuffled toward Auguste, fixing him with small eyes that glinted with malice.

"We have to take your word for it that you spoke for peace in the councils of the Sauk and Fox Indians, don't we? And we have to take your word that you went to the camp of Colonel de Marion's spy battalion on an errand of peace, don't we?"

"That's right," Auguste said bitterly. "Because all my witnesses are dead."

"Don't try to get us to feel sorry for you," Bennett rasped. "This courtroom is full of people who've seen loved ones stabbed, shot, scalped, cut to pieces, burnt to ashes. At the hands of your Indians." He raised his voice to a shout. "And while that was happening, you were behind the red fiends! Urging them on to kill and kill some more!" He turned away, face twisted in disgust. "I have no more questions for you."

Cooper said, "Does the defense have any more witnesses?"

"No, Your Honor," said Ford, and Auguste's heart sank as he walked back to his seat. Bennett, he felt, had finished him with those few sentences reminding people what the Sauk had done to them.

Auguste turned to Ford, whose round face was blank, unreadable. No hope there. Ford had done his best, Auguste was sure. But he had no more chance against the hatred here in Victor than Black Hawk's band had against the armies of the United States.

_I am going to be hanged._

"Hold it there!" called a voice from the doorway of the courtroom. "He _has_ got two more witnesses."

Auguste saw a tall, mustached man thumping up from the back of the court with the aid of a crutch and a peg leg. Beside him a skinny man with a small head and a gap-toothed grin shuffled over the plank floor. A rifle hung from one long arm.

It took him a moment to recognize Otto Wegner and Eli Greenglove.

Alert, wary, he watched them come up the aisle between the spectators' chairs.

Cooper raised a hand in warning, said, "Mr. Greenglove, you'll have to put that rifle down before you come any farther."

"So be it," said Greenglove, handing the rifle to one of Jefferson Davis's corporals who had risen to bar his way. "I just needed it to make sure I got this far alive."

Ford came over to Auguste and said in a low voice, "I take it these men are offering to testify in your defense. Do you want them?"

"I think Wegner must be here to help me," said Auguste. "But I don't know why Greenglove is here." He remembered his conviction that Greenglove had missed him on purpose, and shrugged. "I haven't got much to lose."

Ford began with Wegner, asking him how he came to be in Victor when word was he had emigrated to Texas.

"My family and I only got as far as New Orleans, where we are buying provisions to join the colony at San Felipe de Austin. Then this gentleman comes to me." Wegner pointed to Greenglove, now sitting in the front row of spectators. "He tells me Herr Auguste is to be tried at Victor. At once we take the steamboat. I pay for both his passage and mine, using money my family needs. I tell you this not to praise myself but to show how much that man means to me." Now Wegner pointed to Auguste, who looked down at the floor, his face hot and his throat choked.

Ford nodded gravely. "I understand you were at Old Man's Creek, Mr. Wegner. What happened to you?"

Wegner told the story just as Auguste remembered it, ending, "I lost my leg, but I still have my life, thanks to Auguste de Marion, for whom I never did a single thing good."

_If I could have taken him back to the Sauk camp, I might even have saved his leg._

Ford said, "Mr. Wegner, we've heard that Auguste de Marion is a murderer and a traitor to his country."

"Lies!" said Otto Wegner firmly. "By the rules of war he had every right to kill me and he did not. He is the most Christian man I have ever known."

_I wonder if Wegner knows I have never believed in any spirits but Earthmaker and the Turtle and the Bear._

Returning from the witness chair, Wegner stopped to take Auguste's hand in both of his. "I am so glad I could come and speak for you. You are a _great_ man, Herr Auguste."

Auguste, struggling to hold back tears, murmured his thanks. Perhaps Elysée could replace the money Wegner had spent getting here, if the Prussian was not too proud to take it.

Ford began questioning Eli Greenglove about Old Man's Creek.

"Hell, there weren't no Injuns in ambush in the woods," Greenglove drawled. "'Twas plain as day what was going on. They was a few scouts that come to watch what happened to the peace party. Most of our men were carrying a right powerful load of whiskey. Some of the men saw the scouts hiding in the woods and got excited. Colonel Raoul, he used that as an excuse to order us to finish off the Injuns with the white flag."

"And you shot Auguste?" Ford asked.

"I give him that ear." Greenglove pointed in the general direction of Auguste's right ear. "Hoped he'd be smart enough to play possum after he was hit."

"Why did you choose not to kill Auguste? Did you think it would be murder?"

Greenglove cackled scornfully. "Hell, that never stopped me before. No, it was real simple." He paused, and the courtroom was still. "I saved that boy's life because I wanted Colonel Raoul to marry my daughter, Clarissa."

And suddenly Eli Greenglove started to cry. Tears ran down his bony cheeks and sobs shook his lean frame.

Ford stood looking wide-eyed, turned to stare at Auguste, who himself was dumbfounded, having never seen a man like Eli Greenglove cry.

Bennett broke the embarrassed silence. "Your Honor, I don't see what this man's daughter has to do with the case."

Greenglove's moist eyes narrowed to angry slits. "Just shut up a minute, lawyer, and I'll tell you. My daughter lived with Raoul de Marion for seven years and bore him two kids, but he wouldn't marry her because she weren't good enough for him. No, he had to have the preacher's daughter. That lady, Miss Hale." He pointed toward the spectators. "But she was sweet on Mr. Pierre's boy, Auguste, and I could see he had an eye for her too. As long as Auguste was alive, I figured there'd be a chance that Miss Hale would run off with him. So I made sure to keep him alive."

Auguste's heart sank. If the jury believed what Greenglove was saying now, wouldn't that make them think that there must have been something between him and Nancy when she was kidnapped by the Sauk?

Greenglove's lips drew back from his stained teeth. "But then that sonofabitch Raoul had to go and kill Black Hawk's men that brought the white flag. There weren't no real war before that happened. If he'd sent them messengers on to General Atkinson, the whole thing would've been over in May. Every one of them white people, soldiers and farmers, men, women and children, was killed by that man there." He pointed a skinny finger in Raoul's direction. "Meanin' my daughter Clarissa and my two grandkids."

"Your daughter was a slut, Greenglove," Raoul shouted. "I'd've never married her if she lived to be a hundred." Auguste turned and saw him standing in the back of the courtroom, Perrault and a few more of his bully boys flanking him.

"Oh?" said Greenglove in a whisper that somehow was loud enough for the whole court to hear. "You are very lucky they took my rifle away from me, Colonel Raoul."

Ford said, "I think that's all. Mr. Bennett, do you wish to cross-examine?"

Raoul, from the back, cut in, "Judge, this man is a deserter from my militia battalion. He's been on the run for the past three months. What he's said here is worth nothing."

Cooper frowned at Greenglove, then at Raoul. "I don't see what difference that makes. They bring convicted criminals out of prison cells to testify."

Ford said, "In fact, if this man risked arrest to come here, that makes his testimony all the more believable. To say nothing of going all the way to New Orleans to bring Mr. Wegner back."

"No, it doesn't show him any more honest," Bennett spoke up. "It just means he wants revenge against Raoul de Marion."

Cooper rapped with his mallet. "The testimony can stand. The jury'll decide what it's worth. Lieutenant Davis, have your corporals see that Mr. Wegner and Mr. Greenglove reach the town limits safely. And then, Lieutenant, I'd like a word with you. Meanwhile, the lawyers for each side can sum up."

Flanked by the two blue-coated corporals, Greenglove and Otto Wegner started side by side toward the courtroom door, Wegner's peg leg thumping on the plank floor.

"You go to Hell, Eli!" Raoul snarled as Greenglove passed him.

Greenglove laughed. "I got a better idea from ol' Otto here. I'm a-going to Texas!"

The two men walked out the door as a silence fell over the courtroom.

Auguste wondered, had their testimony saved him? They had told the truth about what happened at Old Man's Creek, but since when had truth meant anything to the pale eyes? If those twelve men sitting in church pews on the right side of the courtroom decided they wanted to hang him, they would hang him even if their Jesus spirit himself came into the courtroom and told the truth about him.

And after seeing the slaughter at the Bad Axe, could Auguste doubt that killing all red people was what all pale eyes most wanted to do?

Cooper and the lieutenant talked quietly at the judge's table. When Cooper called on Bennett to sum up, the prosecutor rose and sidled over to the jury.

"About the supposed adoption papers and Pierre de Marion's alleged will, Mrs. Russell's claim that Mr. Raoul de Marion ordered these papers destroyed is hearsay. She has no direct knowledge that Mr. de Marion gave any such instructions to her husband. More important--if Pierre de Marion adopted Auguste, that makes Auguste a U.S. citizen, and his participating in acts of war by the Sauk nation against the United States is treason. Auguste made war on his own flag.

"Whether Raoul de Marion did right or wrong in running his nephew off Victoire, gentlemen, one thing is sure. Auguste went back to the British Band carrying a powerful grudge against this place and these people. So, I put it to you, he decided that if he could not be a white landowner, he would destroy the white landowners.

"And he had the power to do it, because the Indians would listen to him. They knew him as a witch doctor, and they also knew that he had been educated among whites. And so he used his power to push Black Hawk toward war. He is an accomplice to the murder of every white man, woman and child killed by his fellow tribesmen.

"Auguste de Marion or White Bear or whatever he chooses to call himself"--Bennett pointed an accusing finger at Auguste--"should be hanged as a traitor and a butcher of his own people."

Auguste heard mutterings of approval from around the courtroom and a loud "Damned right!" from Raoul. His feeling that this trial was hopeless grew deeper. Bennett had told the jury what they wanted to hear--the version of the truth that would let them do what they wanted to him.

Ford stood up, wiping his brow. The room was hot for late September. He crossed the front of the courtroom to stand before the two rows of jurymen in their borrowed church pews.

"Gentlemen of the jury, I took up arms against the Sauk and Fox Indians under General Edmund Gaines in 1831. I am not prejudiced in favor of Indians. I only ask that you try to understand _this_ man whose life is in your hands.

"You have to decide two questions: One, by traveling and living with the British Band of the Sauk and Fox from September 1831 to August 1832, did Auguste de Marion commit treason against the United States? Two, is Auguste de Marion guilty of the murder of any citizens of the United States or the state of Illinois?

"Is Auguste a traitor to his country? Well, it seems to me that if anything, Auguste holds dual citizenship in the United States and in the Sauk and Fox nation. And, far from being a traitor to either, he tried to make peace between them. The only thing he ever carried against the United States was a white flag.

"Has Auguste committed murder? All we know for a fact is that no one has seen him raise a violent hand against another human being. Otto Wegner told you how Auguste had a chance to kill him, and instead helped him escape. At great peril to himself.

"You've heard Pierre de Marion's will, which explains why Raoul de Marion, who illegally seized the great house known as Victoire, has been so eager to hound this young man to his death.

"This man has lost everything a man holds dear. His father and mother. His home here in Victor. His home among the Sauk.

"Almost all of his people, his loved ones and the friends of his youth, have been killed. Everyone who lives in Victor knows to their sorrow what happened to his infant daughter. His wife and son are captives, too, and he cannot be with them or provide for them. Which of you, having had so much taken from him so cruelly, would not go mad with grief?

"He has lost so much. All he has left is his life. Let us not, I beg of you, take that from him as well."

Ford sat down in the midst of a heavy silence. Auguste tried to send his shaman's sense forward into the future to tell him how the jury would decide, but his spirit met a blank wall.

He glanced out a nearby unshuttered window and saw a blue afternoon sky with a few white clouds. Within the wooden walls of this courtroom, sky and sun, prairie and river, seemed very far away.

Judge Cooper said, "Gentlemen of the jury, we have prepared a room upstairs for you. We'll send food and drink to you as you require. There are cots in case you can't make up your minds today."

As he watched the twelve men file up the stairs behind the judge's table, Auguste could not stop his mind from wandering to the worst. He thought about what it would be like to be hanged, the rough grip of the rope on his neck, the blood bursting in his head, the world going black, his body jerking in hopeless struggle, breath cut off, lungs aching, the final silencing of his heart.

He heard a harsh laugh in the back of the room. He turned and saw Raoul in the midst of a group of men standing near the doorway of the courtroom. Beside Raoul was Armand Perrault. Raoul looked at Auguste and smiled. Auguste knew what that smile meant.

Whatever the jury decided, for him there would be no escape from death.

23

Sharp Knife

Late that afternoon, Lieutenant Davis called Auguste from his cell and took him down to the courtroom.

"Judge said send for you. I think maybe the jury's reached a verdict."

Entering through the rear door of the courtroom, Auguste met Raoul's eyes and his longing for vengeance made his blood feel like molten metal in his veins.

The jurymen came in through a side door. Robert McAllister, foreman of the jury, glanced at Auguste, then handed David Cooper a folded piece of paper.

"He looked at you," Ford whispered. "It's an old tale among lawyers that if members of the jury have found the defendant guilty, they don't look at him."

Cooper read the note and sighed loudly, as if he found the message burdensome. Then he took goose quill and ink and wrote a note of his own. McAllister watched him write, looking over his shoulder, sighed as heavily as Cooper had, looked at Auguste again. After a moment he nodded and took the judge's note back upstairs.

"Well," said Judge Cooper to the courtroom at large, "it seems the jury's a pretty fair distance from a verdict. They can't agree on a lot of things. So, I've given orders that they stay upstairs and keep at it. It looks like we won't have a guilty or not guilty until tomorrow. The prisoner will go back upstairs to his cell. Court will open at nine o'clock in the morning."

Auguste heard the rear door of the courtroom slam and knew without looking around that Raoul had left.

That night Auguste lay on his corn-husk mattress wondering whether he should try to run away when they took him out. To be shot while trying to escape might be more honorable than hanging. He wished he could see Redbird and Eagle Feather one last time. He wished Nancy would come to visit him. Or at least Nicole, Grandpapa or Frank. But Lieutenant Davis said that for the prisoner's safety no one would be allowed into the village hall tonight.

He heard a key turning in his door lock. He climbed to his feet.

"Come on," said Davis quickly. "We're taking you out of here."

_They've come to kill me_, Auguste thought. It would not be the first time an inconvenient Indian was "shot while trying to escape." But his shaman's insight told him Davis was as trustworthy as any Sauk.

"Why? Before the verdict?"

"They did reach a verdict today. You are found not guilty."

Not guilty! Joy flooded through him as he stood, so amazed that he could not move, staring at the open cell door.

When he had recovered enough to move, Auguste followed Davis out of the village hall, to where the two corporals waited with horses in the silent street. The river rippled black and silver in the light of a three-quarter moon. The Ioway bluffs opposite were black bison shapes under a sky spangled with stars.

The moonlight helped Auguste guide his horse up the steep road out of the village. Davis led, followed by Auguste, the two corporals bringing up the rear. After weeks of imprisonment, Auguste reveled in the cool night air blowing in his face.

They passed the trading post. The road was wider here, and the three soldiers bunched around him. Raoul was surely in there getting drunk, laughing as he looked forward to seeing Auguste swinging at a rope's end.

They trotted along the ridge leading to Victoire. Auguste's heart started to beat harder as he approached the place that had been his home.

The remains of the mansion sprawled on its hilltop like the skeleton of some huge animal, blackened timbers rearing up in the moonlight. People had died bloody, horrible deaths there. Was the place haunted now? Accursed?

A longing came over him to climb that hill again, to sweep away that ruin and rebuild. Put up a fine new house like the ones he'd seen in the East.

_I could do so much with this land, but I'm running away from it again. Leaving it to Raoul again._

Then they were past Victoire, but the yearning for it clung to him like a lover's scent.

"By morning you'll be far out of your uncle's reach," said Davis, riding beside him.

Auguste's heart swelled in his chest with the thought that he was more nearly a free man than he had been in weeks.

"If I'm not guilty, why must I run away?"

"Surely you realize that your uncle and his cronies were planning to take you straight from the courtroom to the nearest tall tree if the court didn't sentence you to death. The foreman brought Judge Cooper a note stating their verdict. The judge wrote back, telling them he would say they hadn't reached a verdict, and he wanted them to remain in seclusion overnight while we spirited you out of town. They were willing to put up with the inconvenience. After all, who'd want to find a man not guilty and then see him taken out and hanged?"

Auguste's heart felt like a cup that was overflowing. The jury had understood him; they had believed him.

"I never even got a chance to thank Mr. Ford."

"Main thanks he'd want is knowing that you got away safely."

As they rode on, Auguste's happiness faded. The town that had been his home for six years had exonerated him. But he still had to run away from it at night, for the second time in his life. He hated to do this.

This was something else Raoul had taken from him--his moment of vindication.

Pain throbbed in Auguste's chest with the jouncing of the horse under him. He remembered his mother's body, like a castaway doll, her eyes pathetically wide, the gash in her throat, the splash of blood on her doeskin dress. She must be avenged. How could he let the man who murdered her walk free? Silently he called on the Bear spirit to avenge Sun Woman.

Again he remembered it was wrong to ask a spirit to harm any person. Even so, if he could not hurt Raoul himself, he wanted him hurt, whatever price he himself might pay.

And once again he was fleeing from people he loved. Elysée. Nicole and Frank.

Nancy.

"Soon I must go back," he said.

Davis turned his head to stare at him. "Go back? In the name of the great Jehovah, what for?"

It was Auguste's turn to be surprised. It seemed so obvious that he had to return to Victor and face Raoul.

"I belong in Victor as much as I belong with the Sauk."

He could not, he decided, turn his back on Victor a second time.

"Why are we going east?" he asked.

"You've have been found not guilty in Victor, but you're still a prisoner of war, Auguste. Your future is in the hands of the President of the United States."

Auguste remembered now. General Winfield Scott at the hearing at Fort Crawford had said, _If the people of Smith County don't hang you, I think President Jackson would find a meeting with you most interesting_.

A chill spread across his back at the thought of meeting Andrew Jackson himself. What would he and Sharp Knife have to say to each other?

* * * * *

Auguste leaned into a small window cut in the thick stone wall of Fort Monroe. He stared through iron grillwork at a blue-gray expanse of rippling water. Eastward on the horizon lay low land, the other side of Chesapeake Bay. Pressing his forehead against the bars he could see the bay opening to the south into that vast open ocean the pale eyes had crossed in their relentless search for new land.

A faint breeze cooled Auguste's sweat-beaded brow. This was the Moon of Falling Leaves, but it was still hot as summer.

Black Hawk had said little since their arrival. No doubt, Auguste thought, the old war leader was comparing this huge stone fortress with the log forts of the long knives he had besieged in his own country. He must be absorbing the lesson it taught of the true magnitude of the long knives' power. But when he did speak he sounded as defiant as ever.

"Why must I wear the clothing of my enemies?" Black Hawk stood in his loincloth staring at the uniform that a soldier had laid out on his bed. Auguste admired Black Hawk's lean, muscular body. It was hard to believe that he had seen sixty-seven summers and winters. His wide mouth was drawn down with distaste as he eyed the tall, red-plumed shako, the dark blue jacket with its gold-trimmed collar, gold lace chevrons on the upper arms and brass buttons, the lighter blue trousers, the white leather belt.

"Sharp Knife wishes to show his respect for you by giving you the dress of one of his war chiefs," said Auguste.

_It is also his way of reminding you that you are subject to him._

Owl Carver said, "It is a mark of hospitality. Just as Chief Falcon gave us new doeskin garments when we surrendered to the Winnebago."

Auguste felt a thrill of pride as he recalled the amazing tale Owl Carver had told him about Eagle Feather's part in that surrender. A boy not yet seven summers old whose vision moved him and showed him how to bring a war to an end was surely destined for great things.

Owl Carver looked strange, with his long white hair and megis-shell necklace, in a peacock-blue cutaway coat and tight gray trousers. Auguste was also wearing a pale eyes' suit with a dark brown jacket. The Winnebago Prophet was dressed similarly in shades of green and gray. Auguste had shown Owl Carver and Flying Cloud how to don the pale eyes' clothing, and now they stood stiff and uncomfortable in the room they shared, waiting for Black Hawk to put on his military garb.

Owl Carver said, "And the American pale eyes are not your enemies any more. You have made your mark on the treaty paper."

"This time for all time," said Auguste, putting his heart into his voice, remembering that Black Hawk had signed and broken treaties before.

Black Hawk sighed. "The spirits of hundreds dead at the Bad Axe cry out to me that the Americans are still our enemies."

That was ever Black Hawk's way, Auguste thought, brooding on old wrongs, regretting agreements made with the pale eyes. Irreconcilable.

_He will never change. But we must change._

One hope had preoccupied Auguste throughout the month-long journey east, by steamboat to Cincinnati, where he caught up with Black Hawk's party, by horse-drawn coach and finally by that astonishing new pale eyes' invention, the railroad. Auguste must find a way for the Sauk to live in a world where the pale eyes ruled absolutely. He was the only one who understood both Sauk and pale eyes. It was up to him.

"Do you want to say again the words you will speak to Sharp Knife?" Auguste asked.

"Yes," said Black Hawk. "Will he be surprised to hear me speak to him in his own language?"

"Very surprised. He will know you are a very smart man."

Haltingly Black Hawk repeated his speech in English, which Auguste had, at the chief's request, been teaching him. Black Hawk had told Auguste what he wanted to say. Auguste had translated it, and the old leader had learned it word by word.

Smiling, Owl Carver said, "This is just what your vision foretold, White Bear, that Black Hawk would speak to Sharp Knife in Sharp Knife's own lodge."

_Yes, and I told you then that it did not mean Black Hawk would conquer Sharp Knife._

But Auguste did not have the heart to remind Owl Carver of the unhappy reality. Silently he helped the reluctant Black Hawk dress.

He wished now that he might have another vision of the future beyond this moment.

* * * * *

It took Black Hawk and his companions two days to travel by steamboat from Fort Monroe to Washington City. As the meeting with Sharp Knife drew closer, Auguste grew more and more fearful. If Jackson and Black Hawk quarreled, the President might decide to throw all of them into prison for life. He might even have them quietly killed. He was the most powerful man between the two oceans.

They slept overnight in the ship's cabin. Auguste dreamed that he stood empty-handed and helpless while Raoul came at him with a huge dagger.

The next day, at about nine in the morning, Black Hawk and his three advisors were riding in an open carriage down Pennsylvania Avenue, with columns of long knives four abreast on horseback before and behind. Auguste felt bewildered listening to the rattle of hooves. Only a few moons ago the long knives were hunting Black Hawk and his band. Now they escorted Black Hawk with honor. The change was dizzying.

Auguste looked about him curiously at the capital of the United States. It was a sprawl of large brick and frame houses, and Pennsylvania Avenue was a muddy, deeply rutted thoroughfare as wide as a cornfield. Behind them on its hill was the Capitol Building, an immense square stone structure topped by three low domes. The air was thick and damp and hot, and moisture-laden gray clouds lay overhead. Auguste longed for the drier climate of Illinois.

Pale eyes and many of their black-skinned slaves stood under the poplar trees lining the sides of the avenue. They waved cheerfully to Black Hawk and clapped their hands. From time to time Black Hawk raised a hand in solemn greeting.

Auguste had expected that they would have to endure jeers and cries of hatred when they were paraded through Washington City. But, surprisingly, people were welcoming them as if they were heroes. It gave him a feeling of hope. His people might learn to live with these people.

Auguste was awed by the size of the President's House, three or four times bigger than Victoire. It stood behind an iron fence at the western end of Pennsylvania Avenue. All this for the Great Father, thought Auguste. It seemed all the more impressive because the entire building was painted white.

Among the Sauk, colors always meant something. Auguste asked Jefferson Davis, who had ridden with their mounted escort, what the white of the President's House meant.

Davis smiled wryly. "Why, that's to hide the scorch marks from where the redcoats burned it in 1814."

But how fitting it seemed that the Great Father of the white people should live in a white palace. Auguste felt a tingle of excitement as the blue-coated officers ushered his party up the front steps.

Owl Carver stuck his hand into a pocket of his jacket and pulled out the gold watch that had once been Pierre de Marion's. He smiled, toothless, at Auguste.

"You told me I could use this to tell when the pale eyes will do things. See now. One of the long knife chiefs told me this." He pointed to the face of the watch. "When the long arrow is here and the short arrow is here, we will meet with Sharp Knife." He had pointed to the numerals XII and XI--eleven o'clock in the morning.

They awaited Sharp Knife in the East Room of the President's House. An officer told the four Sauk to stand abreast, with Black Hawk at the right end of their line and Auguste on the left. The arrangement told Auguste that the long knives considered him the least important member of the Sauk delegation, an estimate with which he agreed. A dozen long knife colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, all in blue jackets and gold braid, stood in two groups flanking the Sauk.

Even though he had never had any reason to doubt his shaman's vision, Auguste was surprised at how exactly he had seen the room they were standing in--its rows of windows with blue and yellow drapes, its three glittering chandeliers and the four huge mirrors in gilded frames facing each other across an immense blue and yellow carpet with a red border. Under each mirror was a fireplace. Four fireplaces, to keep one room warm in winter.

The long arrow on Owl Carver's watch had moved from XII to VI, and the old man was uttering doubts of its power to tell him anything when a black servant opened a door at the far end of the room and all the long knives in the room drew themselves up stiffly, clicking their heels together. Sharp Knife came slowly into the room.

Andrew Jackson in person looked just as he had in Auguste's vision, only more terrifying. Whatever unknown red man had first called him Sharp Knife had chosen aptly. With his long, narrow face and his extraordinarily tall, thin body, he looked like a blade come to life. A shock of white hair stood up as stiff as Wolf Paw's crest on top of his head, and thick white eyebrows shadowed eyes as bright as splinters of steel.

Raoul's words of over a year ago came back to Auguste: _I'd like to see what an old Indian killer like Andy Jackson would say to you._

Auguste felt he was face to face with the power that had destroyed the Sauk. This man, with his own hand, had slain Indians by the hundreds, had uprooted whole nations and driven them westward. This was the leader of those endless swarms of murderous, grasping pale eyes who, territory by territory, were driving the red people from their homes. This was the man who willed that white people should fill all the land from ocean to ocean.

But Sharp Knife was also frail as an icicle. He moved one step at a time, as if in great pain, and Auguste sensed that he was afflicted with many ailments and troubled by many old wounds. Auguste saw in him an immeasurably powerful spirit that kept him going in spite of so much sickness and pain.

"Which of you is the one that can speak English?" Jackson asked. Auguste had expected his voice to be like thunder, but it shrilled like a knife on a grindstone.

Feeling a painful hollow in his belly Auguste said, "I am, Mr. President." Only this morning Davis had told him that was the way Jackson was to be addressed. "I am White Bear, also called Auguste de Marion."

When Jackson turned his gaze on him, Auguste felt it with the force of an icy gale.

"Colonel Taylor wrote me a long letter about you. I want to have a talk with you later. Now, tell the chief I am happy to greet him as a friend. Tell him there will be peace between me and my red children as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers shall run."

A talk later? What did Jackson have in mind for him? Auguste wondered as he translated for Black Hawk.

"Now shall I speak to him in his tongue?" Black Hawk asked.

"This would be a good time," said Auguste.

Black Hawk took a step forward, leaving Owl Carver, Flying Cloud and Auguste standing behind him. Auguste saw that Black Hawk was shorter than Jackson, but broader in chest and shoulders. And, Auguste believed, stronger and healthier though they were about the same age.

Black Hawk raised his right hand in greeting and said in English, "I am a man. And you are a man like me."

Jackson looked startled, then stood very straight and stared intently at Black Hawk's bronze face as the war leader spoke the memorized words slowly, one at a time.

"We did not expect to conquer your people. I took up the tomahawk to avenge great wrongs that we could no longer bear. If I had not been willing to fight, the young men would have said Black Hawk is too old to be chief. They would have said Black Hawk is a woman. They would have said he is no Sauk. So I raised the war whoop. You are a war leader, and you understand me. I need say no more. I ask you to give me your hand in friendship and to let us return to our people."

"A very fine speech," said Jackson. "I was not told that you spoke English, Chief."

Auguste repeated the President's comment in Sauk.

Black Hawk said, "Tell him that you taught me how to say what I wanted to say in the pale eyes' tongue."

Jackson grunted. "I see. Yes, White Bear, you and I will have to talk. Well, tell him that we will send him back to his people when we are certain we'll have no more trouble from them."

Auguste wanted to say, _Almost all the people who caused you trouble are dead_. But he merely translated Jackson's words for Black Hawk.

_Why does Jackson want to talk to me?_ Auguste did not like the sound of it. Did Sharp Knife have in mind some treachery against Black Hawk?

Black Hawk said, "Tell the Great Father that the Sauk will be quiet as long as the pale eyes do no more harm to them." Auguste had a sinking feeling, as he translated this, that he might well be reopening hostilities right here in the President's House.

Jackson answered, "We never have done any wrong to your tribe. When we buy land from people we expect them to honor their agreements."

_Two stubborn men_, thought Auguste. Black Hawk was right in saying that they were alike.

When he told Black Hawk what Jackson had said, the chief answered, "Say to him that I have thought much about this. I do not think land can be bought and sold. Earthmaker put it there for our use. If people leave their land, then someone else can take it and use it. But it is not something like a blanket or a pot, that can be carried away by its owner. It belongs to all Earthmaker's children."

Black Hawk's words worried Auguste, giving him the feeling that a storm was about to break. Jackson, he knew, was a hot-tempered man, a man who had killed others in duels. Black Hawk might be bringing further trouble on himself, on all of them, by speaking so candidly to Sharp Knife.

He considered changing Black Hawk's words to a speech more agreeable-sounding. But that would be a kind of treachery, he decided. Out of loyalty to Black Hawk, he must convey his meaning exactly to Sharp Knife. So, watching with inner trembling as Jackson frowned and shook his head, he faithfully translated.

Jackson looked directly at Auguste, not at Black Hawk, as he answered.

"You Indians just do not understand that land is the source of all the goods of civilization. That's why the white man is so much richer and more powerful than the red man. Among us, every piece of land is owned by a particular man, and that man makes good use of his land to produce wealth. Never mind, don't translate that," he ordered. "It's just as well the chief and I have no more words on this point right now."

Auguste felt deep relief that Black Hawk's words had not angered Jackson. Unsmiling, the President took a stiff step toward Black Hawk and thrust out his hand. Black Hawk reached out to him, and they clasped hands solemnly, staring into each other's eyes. Auguste felt a shiver run through him at the sight of that handclasp. Now Black Hawk's war with the pale eyes was truly at an end.

The white officers standing on either side of Jackson and Black Hawk clapped their hands, and after a moment of hesitation Auguste, Owl Carver and the Winnebago Prophet applauded too.

Jackson said, "Lieutenant Davis, take the chief and these two older medicine men on a tour of the President's House and the gardens." He turned his blue eyes on Auguste. "White Bear--Mr. de Marion--I'd like you to accompany me to my office for a private word."

Now Auguste's heart pounded as he followed Jackson, accompanied by two soldiers, up a flight of stairs. He sensed that Jackson must have demands in mind, and knew that because of what he had been--_old Indian killer_--the Sauk would not be helped by his yielding to those demands. But what might refusal mean? Imprisonment? Death?

Jackson's office was a large room, well lit by big glass windows, where the President's polished oak desk was piled high with papers. The two soldiers stationed themselves on either side of the door, and as Auguste entered behind Jackson he saw a guard with a bayonet-mounted rifle standing like a wooden statue in one corner of the room. Auguste wondered whether there was always a guard there, or only when Jackson had an Indian visitor. Jackson folded his tall body inch by painful inch into a large mahogany chair. With a gesture he invited Auguste to sit opposite him in a comfortable chair with curving wooden arms and legs.

"I want you to consider staying here in Washington City, Mr. de Marion," Jackson said abruptly. "I think you can be of great service to your Indian people and to the United States. I'm impressed by the way you prepared that speech for Black Hawk. Zack Taylor has written me that you're a remarkably learned fellow. There are plenty of men and women who straddle the border between the white and the red races, but most of them are trash--illiterates and drunks who hang around Army posts. You seem to be an important man both in the white world and among your fellow tribesmen."

Auguste's body went cold. Jackson did want him to work for him. He found himself resenting the President's apparent expectation that he could easily be won over. But he was afraid that if he refused outright Jackson might take it out on the Sauk.

He shook his head. "You overestimate me, Mr. President. I have no importance in the white world. I had a place, but it was taken from me. Among the Sauk--yes, I am what you would call a medicine man, but I begged them not to go to war against the whites and they did not listen to me."

Jackson waved that away with a long, bony hand. "I can see that you are capable of accomplishing much. I have a situation for you in my Bureau of Indian Affairs. If you do well in that post you might one day head the bureau as Commissioner, responsible for the welfare of all the Indian tribes under the protection of the United States."

Auguste felt overwhelmed. Jackson's proposal went far beyond anything he had imagined. Was he wrong in thinking that he must refuse?

No, he must reject Jackson's offer. The President meant to use him against his own people.

Auguste looked straight into Jackson's steel-splinter eyes. "You expect more trouble with the Indians, don't you, Mr. President?"

Jackson frowned. "Why do you say that?"

"Up to now you've been assuring the red men that they could live in peace on the west side of the Mississippi. But now you can't promise them that anymore."

"You _are_ a medicine man, de Marion. How have you divined that?"

Auguste felt as if he were walking on bad ice and might at any moment break through and drown. He should not be so bold with this all-powerful man.

"I know that General Scott has signed a treaty with He Who Moves Alertly whereby the Sauk give up a strip of land fifty miles wide running down the _west_ side of the Mississippi."

Jackson clenched his fist until the knuckles showed white. "You were not supposed to learn about that treaty till you returned to Sauk country."

"We traveled over a thousand miles, Mr. President. We talked to many people, and they talked to us."

"And with someone who speaks English as well as you do in the party, you were bound to learn. Does Black Hawk know about this?"

"No, sir."

Jackson's smile was knowing. _He thinks I'm willing to betray Black Hawk._

Before Jackson could speak, Auguste said, "He would be angry if he knew. He would protest to you. And it would do no good. It would only mar the meeting between you and him."

Sharp Knife's smile broadened. "Exactly the sort of tactful decision I'd expect of you. Just why I want you to help me."

Auguste was frightened, but felt he must make it clear to Jackson where he stood.

"Mr. President, when you force the red people to give up land west of the Great River, how will they live? Soon there won't be enough land for them to hunt on."

Jackson spread his hands. "If their food supply runs short, our Indian agents can supply them until they find other means of livelihood."

To depend on government agents for the very food they put into their mouths? That would be a kind of prison.

His heart galloping, Auguste decided to speak even more boldly. "You are looking for someone to reconcile the red man to having his land stolen from him, Mr. President."

"Mr. de Marion, the United States is not a thief." A fierce glare lit Jackson's eyes.

_I must try to be bold without being rude._

"I meant no insult, Mr. President. The red man _thinks_ his land is being stolen from him."

Jackson frowned at Auguste as if he was not sure whether he was being sarcastic, and, indeed, hearing his own words, Auguste was not quite sure how he meant them.

"Exactly," Jackson said. "The red man doesn't understand what is happening. You can help to see that this _must_ be."

Auguste hesitated. He had not had time to think. He was not ready to decide his whole future and perhaps bargain away the future of his people in a moment. Staying here in Washington City just might be the best thing he could do for the Sauk. Working for and with Jackson, he could protect his people, warn them of danger, avert attacks on them.

But his choosing to refuse Jackson was not the outcome of a momentary impulse. His whole life had taken him to this place on his path. The path might wind; its direction might sometimes be lost in shadows. But it did not lead to Sharp Knife. Jackson was a far better man than Raoul, but they were both on the same side, the side of the dispossessors.

"What the red men don't understand, Mr. President, is how much they are giving up."

"Black Hawk said land can't be bought and sold," Jackson said. "Then it belongs to whoever can make the best use of it."

Each man owning his own land and defending it against all comers, thought Auguste, that was the centerpost of the white way of life.

"I understand that you feel a responsibility to your people, to provide them with land," Auguste said. "But whether it is legal or illegal, just or unjust, I can't help you to move my people or any other red people off the land they are living on."

Jackson's face seemed to sharpen. "You could have done much for Indians by working for me. I'm surprised that a man of your intelligence and education would prefer running around in the woods wearing a loincloth."

Auguste was reminded of Nancy's words, _hunting and living in wigwams_.

Jackson reached into an inner pocket of his black jacket and took out a pair of spectacles. To Auguste they looked somewhat like Pierre's. Auguste thought with sorrow of Sun Woman and wondered what had happened to the spectacles he had given her. Jackson bent forward and picked up a sheet of paper from one of the piles on his desk.

"Ask one of the soldiers in the next room to help you find the rest of your party."

* * * * *

A few days later Jefferson Davis came to see Auguste in his new room, a small wedge-shaped chamber in one of the towers of Fort Monroe.

"I see they've moved you," said Davis with a smile.

Auguste nodded. "I believe President Jackson prefers that I no longer associate with Black Hawk and his party."

"Seems so," Davis said. "President Jackson plans to send Chief Black Hawk and Owl Carver and the Prophet on a tour of our big cities. Jackson's up for reelection next month. And, of course, he wants Black Hawk to see at first hand what he's up against. The President has made it clear that you are not to go along."

Auguste shrugged. "He offered me a position. I refused."

A smile warmed Davis's pale, gaunt face. "People don't ordinarily say no to the President of the United States. Well, you'll go home all the sooner. Black Hawk and the others won't get back to the Sauk reservation in Ioway till sometime next year. But I'm leaving tomorrow to rejoin Zachary Taylor's command at Fort Crawford, and I'm to take you with me, to return you to your people."

Auguste did not answer. He sat down heavily on his bed, which he had pulled next to the one small window in his room, overlooking the strait called Hampton Roads.

Did he want to go back to his people? He remembered a thought that had come to him while talking with Andrew Jackson. Each man owning his own land. That was the key to the white way of life.

But he longed to see Redbird and Eagle Feather again. Were they well or sick? He wanted to hold Redbird in his arms, mourn Floating Lily with her. That wonderful story he had heard from Owl Carver about Eagle Feather and the calumet--he wanted to tell Eagle Feather he had done well.

But, go back to the Sauk? He knew now, especially after talking to Jackson, what the future of the Sauk would be. Never to see the Great River again. To lose their land bit by bit. To be confined to a tract of land in Ioway far smaller than the territory they'd formerly ranged over. Not permitted to hunt where they wished. Might have to beg food from an Indian agent, as Jackson had said. They would not choose their own chiefs as they always had, but would have chiefs picked for them by the whites, men like He Who Moves Alertly, who knew how to use both the pale eyes and their own people to advance themselves. A miserable life, a prison life, a slave's life.

Memories crowded his mind. The words of the Turtle: _You will be guardian of that land that has been placed in your keeping._ Sun Woman's lifeless brown eyes staring up at him at the Bad Axe. The charred ribs of Victoire under a three-quarter moon.

He thought of the endless acres of farm and grazing land stretching around Victoire. He remembered the verdict Not Guilty. The eyes of David Cooper, hard but honest.

If he could take Victoire away from Raoul ...

Then he would have something to offer Redbird and Eagle Feather. If he won his rightful place in the world the whites were building, he could bring his wife and son to share it with him.

"What's the matter?" said Davis, breaking in on his thoughts. "Doesn't the idea of going back to your people make you happy?"

Auguste shook his head. "No."

"What other choice do you have?"

"I could do more for my people by staying in the white world. Not as Jackson's Judas goat, but as master of Victoire."

Davis took a step backward, astonished. "Master of Victoire! Have you lost your senses, man? We barely got you out of Smith County alive."

"Will you take me back there instead of to the Sauk in Ioway?"

Davis shook his head. "I'm not authorized to do that."

"Am I still a prisoner?"

"You're a guest of Uncle Sam. But that doesn't mean I can spend Uncle Sam's money taking you anywhere you want to go." Davis frowned in thought. "But I could turn you loose in Galena instead of taking you all the way over to Ioway. That wouldn't make any difference, monetarily. Not that I'm ready to go along with this, but could you manage to make it to Victor from there?"

"I'll write to my grandfather and ask him to send a horse to Galena for me."

"If your grandfather has any sense he'll tell you to get the hell across the Mississippi to the Sauk reservation."

"My grandfather has a power of sense. But he also loves me and will want to see me again."

"If you show your face in Victor you'll be swinging from a tree limb before the sun sets."

"Not if I can take Raoul by surprise."

Davis shook his head. "This is wrong. I'm letting you go to your death."

Frightened, seeing his plan through Davis's eyes, Auguste was tempted to change his mind. Yes, go back to Ioway, live safely in the warm heart of the tribe. Why face a mob of rifle-toting bullies led by Raoul? It was hopeless. He would surely die.

But he saw again those rolling acres, the great house rebuilt, the wealth and what he could do with it. If he turned his back on that, he would stunt the rest of his life with regret and longing.

He said, "It's not suicide. I'm risking my life, yes. But if I don't try to right the wrong that has been done to me, life will not be worth living."

Davis sighed. "A man has to stand up for what he believes in, even if it looks like a lost cause. I guess that's what you and Black Hawk and all your people have been doing all along."

Now that Auguste was committed, fear came back. He'd have to face Raoul's men, dozens of them, alone. Even the Bear spirit could not give him the strength and skill to do that.

There must be a way to meet Raoul alone. Ambush him? But that way, even if he succeeded in killing Raoul, the town and Raoul's friends would never accept him as master of Victoire.

The man he'd just met, Andrew Jackson, was well known as a duelist. In his years at Victoire Auguste had heard more than once of Raoul meeting men in single combat. Pierre and Elysée had spoken with disgust of Raoul's dozen or more killings.

A duel. That would be the way to do it. If he succeeded in killing Raoul in a duel, no one would try to stop him from retaking Victoire. With Raoul gone, his men would be leaderless.

Of course, Raoul had killed many men and Auguste had killed none. But the Bear spirit would fight on Auguste's side. And if he failed, he would rather die fighting for what was rightfully his than spend his life drinking the bitter water of defeat.

A few days before he left Fort Monroe, Auguste persuaded Davis to let him be allowed to walk on the parade ground at the same time as Owl Carver. A sadness came over him at the sight of the old shaman, a gray army blanket thrown over his shoulders despite the warmth of the day, walking with stiff steps across the grass. The heavy-lidded eyes did not light up with recognition until Auguste came close to him.

Then Owl Carver took both Auguste's hands in his, and Auguste noticed something he had never seen before. The sudden realization awed him.

_His eyes look so much like those of the Turtle!_

Wondering how Owl Carver would think of what he was doing, he told him, "I am going back to the pale eyes' town. Back to Star Arrow's home. I mean to try to take back the land from my uncle."

Owl Carver closed those ancient eyes. He spoke after a moment's hesitation, and when he did his voice frightened Auguste. It was the eerie singsong voice he used when he was prophesying for the tribe.

"When a man or woman suffers an injury too great for them to bear, an evil spirit is born in them, a spirit of hate. The evil spirit ruins whoever harbors it. The evil spirit occupies a man and drives him onward until he does things to others that make them hate in their turn, and thus the spirit continues. I think your uncle has been carrying such an evil spirit."

Auguste broke out in a cold sweat hearing the warning in Owl Carver's words. He remembered the hatred that rose in him whenever he thought of Raoul. Was the spirit of hatred kindled in Raoul at Fort Dearborn now passing to him?

"I pledged to my father, smoking the sacred tobacco, that I would hold the land he gave me," Auguste said, as much to hearten himself as to persuade Owl Carver. "Tobacco bound you and Black Hawk in honor to surrender when Eagle Feather smoked it. I must honor my promise."

But he still felt cold within, as Owl Carver, his eyes now clear-sighted and grave, gripped his wrist tightly. "Do not let your uncle's evil spirit cross over to you. See that it be your promise, and not greed, like the greed of the pale eyes, that takes you back to that land. And, above all, do not use your shaman's power to harm your enemy, or you will suffer for it."

"I will not," said Auguste, but he felt unsure of himself. After all the evil he had endured, how could he _know_ that he would not unleash his greatest powers if that were the only way he could destroy Raoul?

The grip of the bony fingers on his wrist tightened. "Set your heart, White Bear, not upon getting back this land, but just upon walking your path."

The deep lines in Owl Carver's face were drawn downward with pain, and Auguste felt the crushing weight of grief as he realized they were both thinking the same thought--that they would never see each other again.

24

Challenge

Following the dimly seen figures of Guichard and his horse, Auguste breathlessly climbed a narrow, steep pathway that switched back and forth up the steep, wooded hillside. He led his horse by the reins. Halfway up the hill they came to a flat place, an open clearing. Auguste smelled wood smoke. The windows of a cottage glowed yellow, promising safety.

While Auguste waited in the dark, Guichard stabled the horses, then knocked on the cottage door.

"We have arrived, monsieur," he called, and pushed the door inward.

Auguste blinked in the light of a dozen candles set on a circular chandelier. Across the room by the fireplace a book fell to the rug, a Kentucky quilt was swept back and a pair of long, skinny legs draped in a nightshirt swung over the side of a chaise longue.

"Grandpapa, don't get up." But Elysée was already hobbling across the room to Auguste's outstretched arms.

Elysée buried his white head in his grandson's chest. Auguste held his grandfather tightly; the answering embrace was not as strong as it had been even a few months ago when the old man had visited him in his cell. The fragility and weakness saddened Auguste.

Bare feet peeping from under another nightshirt pattered down a ladder from the second-story loft. Before he reached the bottom, Woodrow jumped and rushed to hug Auguste.

"I been staying here ever since we found out you were coming. So I could tell Miss Nancy right away when you got here."

Nancy. His heart raced as he remembered her in the witness chair defending him and standing up to Raoul's abuse. He badly wanted to see her, to hold her in his arms.

But could he allow himself to feel so much for Nancy, when he hoped to bring Redbird here?

_That is looking too far down the trail. I may not live to see Redbird again._

Out there in the dark the enemy might be gathering even now.

"You still live with Miss Nancy, Woodrow?"

"She's adopted me." The boy stared down at Elysée's small Chinese rug. "I guess that makes me your son too."

Auguste understood what Woodrow meant. Auguste had taken Nancy as his wife according to Sauk custom, and Woodrow knew it. He saw Elysée's puzzled look, and knew that he might have difficulty explaining later. But he must not hesitate now. He squeezed Woodrow's bony shoulder.

"I'm proud."

"I'm proud of you, White Bear. I'm glad you came back. I'm off to Miss Nancy's soon as I get my britches on." The boy scampered back up the ladder.

"Guichard, go get Nicole and Frank," said Elysée as he drew Auguste across the room and gently pushed him into a chair.

"They'll be sleeping, Grandpapa," Auguste protested.

"They would be furious if we did not wake them," said Elysée, his falcon's face severe. "And it is safest that we meet late at night."

Auguste wondered, was any time safe? Did not the enemy have eyes and ears for the night?

Auguste threw off the riding coat Guichard had given him in Galena and sat down in a straight wooden chair by the chaise longue, close to the welcome warmth of the fire. He noticed a pistol and a rifle mounted on brackets over the mantel, with two powder horns hanging beside them. Guichard filled three small glasses with an inch of brandy apiece, drained one quickly and left the other two and the decanter on a small table within easy reach.

"I felt ten years younger when I saw Raoul's face turn purple when he came into court with his rogues and heard that you had been spirited away." Elysée wiped his wet cheeks with a blue kerchief. "I cry so easily. I _am_ getting old."

"I am crying, too, Grandpapa."

Elysée turned a stern but still moist eye on him. "Enough crying, then. Tell me everything you have seen and done since the trial."

Auguste described his journey to Washington City and the meeting with Andrew Jackson.

Woodrow, dressed now for riding, lingered to listen as Auguste repeated Black Hawk's speech to Jackson. Then he solemnly shook hands with Auguste and left.

"Be careful out there," Auguste called after him.

Elysée said, "President Jackson, what sort of man is he?"

"His nickname, Old Hickory, is apt. He's hard, very hard."

Auguste told about his refusal of Jackson's offer of a post and being cut out of Black Hawk's touring party.

Elysée shook his head doubtfully. "To take a position in the government might have opened up an excellent career for you."

Auguste shook his head. "I knew what Jackson wanted to use me for. The Bear spirit would tear my heart out if I ever consented."

Elysée raised an eyebrow. "You still believe in such things--bear spirits and all that?"

Auguste thought of his resolve to succeed as a white man. Even so, the Bear spirit was as real as his grandfather.

"I don't just believe, Grandpapa. I know."

Elysée's reply was cut off when a weeping Nicole pushed the door open, followed by Frank and Guichard. Auguste held his aunt in his arms, rejoicing in the strength he felt in her ample body. Guichard brought more chairs from a rear room and set them close to the fire. They sat in a circle, their backs to the dark outside.

"All this going from house to house isn't safe," said Nicole. "Raoul is probably having all of us watched. He won't feel he really owns Victoire as long as Auguste is alive."

Frank said, "He might know that President Jackson sent you back from Washington City. We've been getting regular reports from back East about Chief Black Hawk's tour, and your name wasn't mentioned."

"Do you have any news about the rest of my people?" Auguste asked.

Nicole said, "The Sauk prisoners who walked through here are being held at Rock Island."

Auguste said, "I must go there and find Redbird and Eagle Feather."

Hearing that she was still in Illinois, he wanted more than ever to rescue her from hunger and fear and captivity, to bring her and Eagle Feather here to Victoire.

_If I live to do that._

"Will you join the other Sauk in Ioway after you find your family?" Frank asked.

Auguste shook his head. "No, I must take my rightful place here. I can no longer live as a Sauk. If we are to live and prosper, we must live as the whites do, each man holding and tending his own land. I want to show my people how it can be done. I want to take Victoire back."

A silence filled the room. A log on the fire broke in two with a loud crack, spattering sparks on the screen.

Auguste looked at each of them in turn. There was worry in Elysée's eyes. Nicole's full face was pale with fear, and Frank looked bewildered. Guichard, standing against the wall, sipped brandy.

Frank said, "But Raoul--he'll try to kill you."

"I mean to let him try. I mean to challenge him."

"You can't." Nicole's voice was shrill. "He's got dozens of men behind him."

"He will have to fight me man to man. Raoul can hold his place only as long as his followers think he is the strongest and bravest. They don't respect him the way they used to. He made too many mistakes. And some of those mistakes have cost lives among his own men. If he tries to kill me without fighting me, he'll slip further in their eyes. If he loses the respect of his men, he loses everything."

Nicole said, "But you're going up against someone who has killed many times."

_True. And he killed Iron Knife, the biggest and strongest brave in the British Band._

"I must do this," said Auguste. "I have never killed, but I know how to use weapons. I must do it for my mother. For all the Sauk that he has killed. And so that my father's will may be done. I believe the Bear spirit will help me."

He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. If he let these people persuade him, he might give up and run away.

Elysée groaned. "The Bear spirit again. Auguste, think how many men have gone into battle believing God and the saints and the angels would help them. And have died."

Auguste wished he could explain. Maybe for white men the spirits did not exist. But he knew that his visions were real. The Bear spirit was not just another part of his mind. It had a life of its own. It had left the marks of its claws on his body. It had left its paw print in the earth beside Pierre's body when it took his spirit away.

"If it was wrong for me to try to fight Raoul, Grandpapa, I would receive a warning."

Elysée shook his head sadly, disbelieving. Auguste was sad, too, thinking how much more there was to the world than Grandpapa would ever let himself know.

The Seth Thomas clock on the mantel over the fireplace chimed once, making them all jump. One o'clock in the morning. Auguste, at the end of a journey by railroad, steamboat, coach and horseback that had taken weeks, felt a bone-deep ache of exhaustion. But it was only bodily fatigue. Now that he was in Victor he was excited, and his mind was wide awake.

Frank put an ink-stained hand on Auguste's shoulder.

"Listen, Auguste. Even if you were to succeed in killing Raoul, you wouldn't get Victoire back."

"Why not?"

"Things have changed around here. People don't hold with the idea that every man should carry a gun and be a law unto himself. They've seen that only leads to a gang like Raoul and his rogues running things. They've decided they wanted the county run by those they've picked. And men like David Cooper and Tom Slattery came forward. Slattery is our new sheriff."

Elysée said, "The _Victor Visitor_ has had much to do with this change."

Frank shrugged modestly and went on, "Right after your trial a group of men in Victor and on the farms hereabouts, mostly newcomers, formed an organization called the Regulators. They said it was a disgrace that the Army had to guard you during your trial and that you had to flee from the town when it was over. They're determined to keep order in Smith County, and Slattery has sworn them all in as deputies to make what they do legal. Things are tense now between the Regulators and Raoul's men, but the Regulators have more numbers and more spirit."

"Well then," said Auguste, exasperated, "why wouldn't these Regulators support me if I kill Raoul?"

"Because dueling is against the law. You'd stand trial again, for murder. And, by God, much as it might pain him, Cooper will hang you."

"And if you don't kill Raoul," said Nicole, "you'll die and he will still have Victoire."

Auguste felt as if he were struggling in a net of heavy ropes. His hands and heart ached for revenge on Raoul. Even if he did not get Victoire back.

But that was madness, to kill Raoul and be hanged for it.

"What can I do, then?" he asked in a low voice.

Nicole said, "David Cooper still has the papers that prove Pierre adopted you and left Victoire to you."

For just a moment Auguste felt his burden of fear grow lighter. He would fight Raoul in a courtroom. No one need die.

But no--he waved the idea away.

"They acquitted me of murder, but a jury of new settlers in Illinois is not likely to make an Indian the biggest landholder in the county."

Nicole said, "They would, because they would know that if they found for you and against Raoul, they would be finding for the whole family, not just you."

Auguste said, "Even if I could get a fair trial, I wouldn't live to hear the verdict."

"Yes, you would," said Frank. "Fear of the Regulators would stop Raoul from murdering you."

Auguste felt the ropy net tightening. Three moons ago his life had been in the hands of twelve white men. Now Frank was asking him to trust unknown white men again. And again, it seemed, he had no choice.

"Is there nothing else I can do?" The words came out as a cry of pain.

"You said you want to live as whites do," said Frank. "Then you have to start to think and act like a civilized white man. Seek your remedy in the law."

More than once, Auguste thought, he'd seen that civilized white men were as quick to flout the law as to seek a remedy in it. But, resigned, he slumped in his chair, his hands hanging down between his knees.

"I will follow your advice."

Nicole came over to him and stroked his hair. "We'll be beside you every moment, Auguste."

The menace of rope or bullet or knife seemed driven off a bit, as Guichard put another log on the fire and they began to talk about going to Vandalia, finding a lawyer--perhaps Thomas Ford again--and filing suit against Raoul. There was still the possibility--the likelihood--of failure. But at least he might come through alive.

The clock struck two.

A sharp banging on the door startled Auguste. Everyone fell silent, dreading what might be out there.

Guichard went to the door, opened it a crack, then pulled it wide.

Auguste saw a flash of blond hair under a bonnet and eyes of deepest blue. The sudden leap of his heart lifted him out of his chair. He barely heard the little serving table beside him topple over, spilling his brandy.

He ran to Nancy, holding out his arms.

* * * * *

The lenses on the desk stared accusingly up at Raoul.

_Why do I keep taking them out and looking at them?_

It was like picking at a scab, making it bleed over and over again, so that the wound never healed.

With a gentle hand he closed the silver case. He had long since cleaned and polished it, but he still remembered it as he had first seen it, streaked with the blood of the Indian woman he had just killed. He put the case in his desk drawer.

Armand Perrault, sitting across the desk from Raoul, grunted with disgust.

Ignoring him, Raoul picked up his whiskey glass and sipped from it, running the tip of his tongue over the ends of his mustache.

"Why don't you get rid of those damned spectacles?" Armand said as he refilled his glass from Raoul's jug.

When Armand picked up his glass it left a wet ring that would stain the polished maple surface. There were already many rings on the desk, even though it had been shipped out from Philadelphia only two months ago. They looked like owl's eyes, staring as the spectacles stared.

But Raoul couldn't bring himself to care about how his desk looked, just as he couldn't care enough to get started on rebuilding Victoire. He preferred to live at the trading post. He hadn't felt like doing anything, ever since Auguste's second escape from Victor. Next spring, he told himself, he'd get the work going.

And so he sat up late every night in his counting room with Armand and they drank and told each other the same stories about the war with Black Hawk's band. There were men to drink with in the trading post taproom, but he didn't care for most of them. Armand had been with him longer than anybody. Raoul might not like him much, but he was used to him.

Armand had grudgingly accepted Raoul's explanation that he hadn't read his copy of the will carefully before sticking it in the fire. He thanked Raoul for the belated two hundred dollars and dismissed Pierre's generosity as an attempted bribe from beyond the grave.

Raoul stared at his stained desk. The drawer was still open, the silver case still visible. "They were my brother's spectacles."

"I know that. Why do you keep them? You hated your brother."

Raoul brought the flat of his hand heavily down on the desk. "Shut up! You know nothing about it."

_How do I feel about Pierre? Do I still love him in a way? Is that why I keep his spectacles?_

Unwilling suddenly to consign the silver case to his desk, he dropped it into his jacket pocket. Armand probably wanted him to throw it away so he could retrieve the case and sell it for the silver.

Armand said, "Your brother put the horns on me. And his Injun friends killed my wife. Mon Dieu, how I wanted to see that bastard son of his hang for that!"

Raoul was tired of hearing Armand go on about dead Marchette, to whom he'd given nothing but blows and contempt when she was alive. Going to bed with Pierre was the only good thing that ever happened to that poor woman. But he said nothing; after all, he himself had cared little enough for Clarissa when she was alive.

"You'll get a chance to kill him yet," said Raoul. "He'll be back this way."

It was now nearly a week since the sergeant at Fort Crawford in Raoul's pay passed the word that Andrew Jackson had sent the mongrel back West. To think, that vermin meeting the President!

If Auguste traveled as fast as the news, he must be nearly here. Raoul's informant said that Auguste was supposed to be sent with a military escort to the new Sauk reservation in Ioway. Raoul was sure Auguste would come to Victor instead.

When Auguste came back to Victor, he would go at once to Nancy Hale's cabin, or send for her. Surely she had lied in court about what she and Auguste were to each other. The boys Raoul had sent to watch her cabin would let him know of Auguste's arrival.

Armand nodded vigorously. "May le Bon Dieu grant me the chance to kill him. But what makes you so sure he will come here?"

"Because he knows that he can prove Pierre left Victoire to him. Cooper has those papers, and Cooper helped him escape, so he has Cooper on his side."

Armand said, "Two pieces of paper. Easy enough to make them disappear."

"How in hell am I going to get them away from Cooper? Him and his Regulators."

Glowering at Raoul, Armand leaned back in his chair, making it creak. He folded his hands across the big belly that stretched his homespun shirt.

"Kill Cooper and there will be no more Regulators."

_How I wish I could._

Pouring himself another drink, Raoul said, "Armand, you're damn near as stupid as an Indian."

Armand's eyes narrowed and for a moment Raoul saw a flash of hatred that reminded him of the way the overseer used to look at Pierre.

"Have a care how you talk to me, mon colonel," Armand said in a voice that sounded like millstones grinding together, "I am your one friend. Otto Wegner and Eli Greenglove turned on you, Hodge Hode is dead, Levi Pope has joined the Regulators."

_It's true. I have no other friends but Armand. I have no family. What's happened to me?_

"Damn it, it _is_ plain stupid to talk about fighting the Regulators, Armand. Kill Cooper and we'd have a countywide war on our hands."

"I believe we could frighten the Regulators into backing down, mon colonel--if _we_ showed some courage."

_That's a jab at me._

Whiskey and anger almost made Raoul lash out again at Armand, but he felt a sudden fear that Armand would turn on him and he would be all alone.

Raoul brooded for a time, then finally spoke.

"Wait till I get the lead mine opened up next spring. We'll go up to Galena, you and I, and we'll recruit the roughest, meanest miners we can find. And we'll make it plain to them that they'll have two jobs--to dig for lead and to fight Regulators. When we've got enough of them down here, we'll take on Cooper and his crowd in the next election. I'll spread whiskey and money around and our boys will beat up anybody who says he won't vote our way. Smith County will belong to us again, Armand."

He heard hurried footsteps echoing on the split-log floor of the fort's main room. Someone rapped on his office door. Like a swimmer coming up from the bottom of a lake after a dive, Raoul rose up out of his comfortable whiskey haze.

"Who's there?" he growled.

Josiah Hode, a skinny, red-haired youth in dark calico shirt and workman's trousers, a big hunting knife at his waist, pushed the door open. Hodge's orphaned son.

_This is what my Andy and Phil would have grown to look like._ The thought hurt Raoul because Andy and Phil were dead and because he had never really loved them.

"What is it, Josiah?"

"Someone rode up to Miz Hale's door and banged on it. I snuck right up to the fence. When they came out I saw it was that Woodrow kid that lives with her. And she got out her own horse and rode toward town with him."

"Did you follow them?"

"Long enough to see that they went up to old Mr. de Marion's place."

"_He's_ there!" Raoul said. He felt as if he were out hunting on a frosty morning and had just sighted a buck with spreading antlers. He clenched his fist and brought it down on his desk, hard. He opened the drawer again, took out a small bag of coins and slammed the drawer shut.

He counted out nine Spanish dollars. "Josiah, you divide these between the three of you for keeping good watch." He dropped a tenth piece of eight into the boy's cupped hands. "That's for you, for bringing me the good news."

Josiah grinned, all teeth. "Thanks a heap, Mr. de Marion."

"Armand, I want about twenty men. Go round them up. Have them meet me at the trading post gate."

"Très bon, mon colonel."

Raoul thought a moment. He had planned to hang Auguste, but they couldn't leave a body around for the Regulators to find.

"We'll take him out to the lead mine and finish him there. I know parts of that mine where nobody'll ever find anything."

"Can I come, Mr. de Marion?" Josiah asked. The glow of admiration in his eyes warmed Raoul.

Raoul gave the boy a grin. "Sure, Josiah. Bring your dad's rifle. I'll show you how Smith County takes care of its Indian problem."

* * * * *

"Do Nicole and Grandpapa know about us?" Auguste asked Nancy as they sat side by side on the split-rail fence Guichard had built around Elysée's garden.

"I told Nicole," she said. "I was afraid she'd condemn me, but I had to confide in someone. She was very sweet to me about it, not a hint of reproach."

"Nicole understands." His voice sounded choked. He didn't know how he knew Nicole that well--from glances, from hints in her voice perhaps--but he was sure that her own desires were as large as she was. And her generosity larger still. She would feel nothing but goodwill toward another woman's longing for a man.

Nancy put her hand on Auguste's, and his breath quickened. Her face seemed to pull his eyes, and he saw, in the light of the waxing moon, that she was more beautiful tonight than he had ever seen her. Her cheeks were rounder now: he hadn't fully realized how haggard she had been as a captive of the Sauk.

_We all looked like buzzards' meals. But even then I loved to look at her._

Right now he felt the blood throbbing in his body. He wanted to pick her up and carry her into the woods beyond the house and be upon her. As any healthy Sauk husband and wife would greet each other after a long time apart. He was so aware of his hunger for Nancy and hers for him that he could hardly think of anything else. Their need lit up the little garden with a glow brighter than the moon's.

But what of Redbird? Even though she accepted Nancy as truly his wife, as much as herself, somehow it did not seem right for him to love Nancy now. It had been right when they were living with the British Band; here in Victor it was not right.

"I knew you would come back," Nancy said, sensing his desire but not his hesitancy, bringing her lips so close to his he could almost taste them.

He inched away from her, so as not to be utterly overcome by her nearness.

He decided to talk of other things. He told her of the plan he had come here with, to challenge Raoul. He told her how Frank had persuaded him to try to retake Victoire with the law's help.

"The Turtle has said that I must be guardian of the land and see to it that no pale eyes prospers by stealing from the Sauk," he said. "If I can take Victoire back from Raoul, my people will have a place to come to in the land that was once theirs."

"You mean for the tribe to come back and live on the estate?"

"No, they could never come back to Illinois as a tribe. But families could come and live here for a while--they could send their children here--they could learn our ways. And the wealth of the estate could help them, wherever they might be."

"Will you bring Redbird and Eagle Feather here?" she asked, squeezing his hand.

_Does she want me to say I won't? No, she cares for them too. We were a family._

He said, "Yes, if I can get Victoire away from Raoul, I will bring them here."

He saw her eyes close and knew that he was hurting her, and that deepened his own pain still more.

She let go his hand and twisted her fingers together in her lap. "Of course Redbird is first in your heart. But how can she live here with you? Where her baby was torn out of her arms and killed by a mob of white people."

"I've asked myself that many times. I will have to hear what Redbird says."

He remembered what Sun Woman had said when Pierre asked her to come with him to Victoire. _I could not look into pale eyes faces all day long. My heart would dry up._ And surely Redbird had more reason to hate the sight of white faces than Sun Woman had seven years ago.

Could he himself live here? He talked about retaking Victoire, about living as a white man, but he recalled the heaps of dead he had seen on that blood-soaked island off the Bad Axe River. Could he live among the people who had done that?

Nancy said, "Would you still want to live at Victoire if Redbird said she would not come with you?"

He saw Redbird's small face, her slanting eyes, the fringe of black hair that fell over her forehead. He felt her slender arms around him as they had held him so many nights in their wickiup. He saw the love and fear in Eagle Feather's eyes when they parted so that he could take Nancy and Woodrow to safety. The pain of being away from them almost made him want to weep.

"I don't know the answer to that. The trail I follow is dark. I must go one step at a time."

The chill night air carried a sound to his ears. Off in the distance, on the bluff south of this hill, a man's low voice spoke a few words, then another voice answered. He heard a boot crunch on gravel. A door slam.

The hair on the back of his neck lifted.

He raised his head, and his ears felt as if they were opening wider, to take in everything that came to him. The noises were all faint; no pale eyes would even have noticed them.

"What is it?" said Nancy.

The sounds seemed to come from the town. Who would be up so long after midnight?

"Some men talking, a long way off." He listened for the space of a few breaths. "I don't hear anything now."

Victor, he decided, was making him overly fearful.

Nancy said, "If Redbird does come to live with you, what will become of you and me?" She took his hand in both of hers, stroking his fingers. "I love you, Auguste. Now more than ever. Before, my life depended on you. Now I know that I love you of my own free will."

"And I love you, Nancy."

"But you love Redbird too. More than me."

"Not more than you. In another way. Sometimes I seem to be two people."

"Among the Sauk you could have both me and Redbird as wives. And when I was a captive, and I thought I might die at any time without ever having loved you, then I accepted your way. But if Redbird lived here, you and I would have to be together in secret. And I couldn't live my whole life that way."

He had known it would hurt like this. This was the very reason he had tried again and again to renounce Nancy's love.

"I understand," he said, and the words seared his throat.

_But now I would never give up a moment I spent with her, even to escape this pain._

He ached to put his arms around Nancy and to feel her holding him. But he made himself sit rigid, fingers digging into his thighs.

Nancy spoke, and he could hear the iron of grief in her voice. "If Redbird comes here as your wife--I'll leave here. Maybe we'll go back East. Woodrow and I."

She stopped abruptly, too choked by tears to speak. The fence rail they were sitting on shook with her sobs.

Something broke inside Auguste, and he felt his eyes burn as the wetness trickled down his cheeks. He slid from the fence and held out his arms to her.

"To see you again and hear you say you'll leave me forever," he said. "It hurts too much."

She came into his arms, pressing her wet face against his. Her lips twisted against his, burning, devouring. Her arms slid around him, her hands stroking his neck. He could feel her pulling at him as he held her and her legs gave way.

He knew they were going to have each other and could not help themselves.

He pressed his hand on her breast, loving its softness, feeling her risen nipple push against his palm through silk and calico.

Footsteps crackled in the shrubbery at the bottom of the hill.

He froze, all his senses straining.

The hot blood in his veins turned in an instant to icy water.

"Auguste, for God's sake," she whispered.

"Someone's coming," he said. He felt her shiver against him.

He heard many men. They were trying to move quietly, filtering up the hill through the woods. But few pale eyes could walk unheard among shrubs and trees and piles of fallen leaves, especially at night.

Along with fear, he felt a sudden anger at himself that made him want to pound his fist on his head. He'd heard the voices before, farther off, in the village. He should have listened. He'd have known who and what they were.

His ears told him the approaching men had formed a semicircle, slowly closing as they climbed toward Elysée's cottage. His heart fluttered in his rib cage, skipping beats, then pounding hard.

Nancy seized his hand.

"God protect us, Auguste!" she whispered. "I hear them too. Your uncle must have found out that you're here. You've got to get away."

"Into the house. Hurry."

In the front room of Elysée's cottage Frank and Nicole were sitting by the embers of the fire. The others had gone to sleep. Nancy flew into Nicole's arms.

"We've got to get word to the Regulators," said Frank when Auguste told him about the men coming up the hill. He shook Woodrow, who had been napping on the chaise longue.

"Go by way of the ravine on the other side of this hill," Frank told the boy. "Tell Judge Cooper Raoul and his men are coming to kill Auguste." He turned worried eyes on Auguste. "Perhaps you'd better go with Woodrow. You'd be safe at Cooper's."

"No," said Auguste. "If I run for it and they catch me, they'll surely kill me. I'm going to do what I came to do. When Raoul gets here, I will challenge him." His heart pounded so hard that his voice shook.

"Oh, no, Auguste!" Nancy cried.

Woodrow stood hesitating by the door, listening.

"They're almost here."

"Go!" Frank snapped at him. Woodrow ran out.

"Go carefully, Woodrow," Nancy called after him.

"Challenging Raoul is just--just madness," said Frank. He went to the mantel and reached for Elysée's pistol.

"Frank, you can't!" Nicole cried.

"What choice do we have?" he said. He took one of the powder horns down and sat to load and prime the pistol.

Auguste said, "Frank, there are too many of them. If you try to fight them you'll only fire that pistol once, and then you'll be dead."

Frank said, "In a few minutes Cooper and the Regulators will be here. All we have to do is hold Raoul and his men off a bit."

"Please," Auguste said. "Let me go out and meet Raoul alone."

Elysée said, "Absolutely not." He stood in his long nightshirt in the doorway of his bedroom. He gestured to Guichard, who had followed him out.

"Load my rifle, Guichard."

"Grandpapa, no!" Auguste cried. He wanted to throw his arms around the old man and protect him.

Elysée shrugged. "Perhaps as Frank says, we can face them down without shooting. You stay out of sight, Auguste. They cannot know for certain that you are here."

"I will not let this happen," Auguste said. "I'll leave now. I'll follow Woodrow." He strode to the door.

_They could be out there._

_If they are, then I can face Raoul as I first planned._

He yanked the door open and saw Raoul grinning at him, his face yellow in the candlelight from the cottage.

And beyond Raoul, filling the clearing, a crowd of men with rifles.

* * * * *

Raoul couldn't see the mongrel's face. The light spilling out of Elysée's house left Auguste in shadow. But he did see the split right ear, partly hidden by Auguste's long black hair. He hefted the cap-and-ball pistol held loosely in his right hand. This time there would be no missing.

_Now. Point the pistol and pull the trigger. He isn't even armed._

But behind Auguste, Raoul saw Frank Hopkins with a pistol and Papa with a rifle. If he shot Auguste, he'd have no time to reload. They'd have the drop on him. And even if they didn't shoot back, they'd be witnesses against him.

Looking past Frank he saw Nicole and Nancy Hale glaring at him, wide-eyed. At the sight of Nancy his jaw muscles clenched and his hand tightened on the pistol grip.

_How could she turn away from me and take up again with that redskin bastard?_

"Come on out, mongrel," he said to Auguste. "Maybe a jury found you not guilty, but we know you're guilty as hell. You sent that Sauk war party here." He raised his voice. "And you, Papa, Frank--you're fools to defend him. His Indians were trying to kill you too."

Auguste said, "Raoul, you were the cause of the Sauk coming to Victor. You are a liar and a fool and a coward. And a thief and a murderer."

Auguste stepped forward and slapped Raoul's face.

The blow came too suddenly for Raoul to react. It wasn't even hard enough to hurt much. It was purely a gesture of contempt.

Then Raoul's rage came. It flared up like a forest fire. He brought up the pistol. Auguste's unprotected chest was less than a foot away.

But Auguste spoke again before Raoul could fire. "Will you shoot an unarmed man now, Raoul? Go ahead, prove yourself a coward. When you took Victoire away from me, you wouldn't fight me. At Old Man's Creek--de Marion's Run--I stood before you with my hands empty, and then you tried to shoot me. You don't have the sand in you to face me fairly."

Raoul sensed that Auguste's words were aimed not at him, but at the men behind him. He felt angry, trapped.

_Shoot, dammit! Shut him up._

_No, it's too late. All these men heard what he said._

"You're afraid to fight me man to man. I challenged you the day you drove me away from Victoire, and you backed down. I challenge you again, Raoul."

An answer sprang into Raoul's mind. "I accept. Let the weapons be your neck and a rope."

But even as he spoke he had a sinking, uneasy feeling.

He did not hear any of his men laughing.

Armand said, "What the hell, Raoul. You've killed hundreds of Indians, some of them a lot bigger than this one. Give him his duel."

For a moment Raoul felt like turning his pistol on Armand. The overseer was paying him back, he realized, for the contempt he'd endured.

"I'm ready to meet you now or any time, mongrel. Let it be tonight. But where there will be no witnesses to charge the winner with murder."

Auguste said, "I would be a fool to trust you and your men."

"You have to," said Raoul. "I'm not giving you any choice. The men will see to it that it's a fair fight. That's what they want." He couldn't keep the bitterness out of his voice. "Come with us, or I'll shoot you down on this doorstep."

Frank Hopkins, pistol pointing at Raoul, crowded into the doorway beside Auguste.

The black O of the muzzle pointed at him chilled Raoul. He'd heard that Frank had fired on the Indians attacking the trading post. Seemed that day had changed him. Now he was a man like any other, taking up the gun like any other.

Frank said, "Auguste is not going with you. There will be no duel. Get away from this house now."

Seeing Frank's foolish defiance in the face of over twenty armed men, Raoul almost laughed.

But that pistol in Frank's hand could end his life. He couldn't shoot Auguste while Frank held it on him.

Raoul swung the barrel of his own pistol to cover Frank's chest.

"Get back inside, Frank," he said, putting a steel edge into it.

Instead, with a sudden movement that almost made Raoul squeeze the trigger, Frank came forward, stepping in front of Auguste.

Raoul saw another movement in the doorway, and then he was staring into his father's glittering eyes. Elysée's rifle, long barrel trembling only slightly, was leveled at him.

Raoul decided the best attack was to laugh at them. "Look at the mongrel's protectors. A weakling who would never carry a pistol and a lame old man in his nightshirt."

He heard a few snickers among the men behind him and felt encouraged.

But, he thought with fury, he was still trapped. His pistol was aimed at Frank, but Frank's pistol and his father's rifle were both pointed at him. If he shot Frank, would Elysée shoot him?

With the palm of his hand he pushed back the hammer of his cap-and-ball pistol, the muzzle still aimed square at Frank's chest.

"Papa, Frank, both of you get out of the way, or Frank is a dead man."

But Raoul felt as if the bottom was dropping out of his stomach as he looked at the two men. Neither Elysée nor Frank replied. Raoul saw resolution in Frank's light blue eyes. The man who had never wanted to kill was prepared to die.

_I have to shoot first._

He heard Nicole scream as his finger tightened on the trigger.

Frank and Elysée were pushed apart. Raoul was looking into Auguste's eyes, blazing with a dark fire.

_Kill the mongrel now, and you're done with him forever._

He squeezed the trigger hard. The hammer fell, and the pistol boomed and blossomed red fire and white smoke.

The pistol and the rifle pointed at Raoul both went off, hurling a blinding bitter cloud back into his face.

He stood unhurt.

Elysée and Frank had fired, but by pushing unexpectedly between them Auguste had spoiled their aim.

The smoke cleared. Raoul saw a black spot on the left side of Auguste's white shirt. In an instant it was a spreading scarlet stain.

Auguste's eyes were shut. He fell back against Nicole, his knees buckled and he sagged to the ground. Nicole, her skirts billowing, threw her arms around Auguste and eased him down.

Raoul felt a surge of triumph.

_At last! I killed the sonofabitch!_

But below the triumph, like chill black water under thin ice, lay fear of what might happen now. His knees trembled.

Raoul saw Nancy Hale staring at him, her eyes full of hate.

_Well, if I couldn't have you, he won't either._

"It was you led me to him, Nancy," he said, grinning as he saw her mouth twist in anguish. "When you came here, we knew he was here."

"I pray that you burn in Hell for all eternity, Raoul de Marion!"

"Pretty talk for a minister's daughter," he laughed.

"Mon colonel!" Armand called. "We hear men running this way. Must be Regulators. Let us ambush them. We have time to find hiding places."

"No," said Raoul. "We'd have to silence this bunch."

He gestured at Frank, Elysée, Guichard and Nicole, who were lifting Auguste's body into the house.

_Will I truly have to stand trial for murder? Me? I never have before._

He stared into the empty doorway. Had he really finished Auguste? He'd better go in there and see. But there were three armed men in there, and if he had killed Auguste, nothing could stop them from trying to kill him.

In fact, it might be a good idea to get away from here. With his family all fired up and the Regulators on the way, a very good idea.

He heard Nancy scream again and again. Nicole suddenly appeared in the doorway.

"You are not my brother anymore, Raoul. I'll bear witness against you and so will Papa and Frank." She broke down and sobbed, then caught herself. "You'll hang for this murder, and then, just like Nancy says, you'll burn in Hell."

_She says it is murder. Then the mongrel must be dead for certain._

Raoul felt a vast relief. At last he had lifted from his shoulders the burden that had crushed them ever since Pierre brought the savage boy out of the forest.

But the relief lasted only for a moment. The fear came back. His legs were still shaking. He wanted to run for it at once, to get a horse and ride out of Smith County and keep going.

It wasn't just that he had killed a man. This killing was not like other killings. This was not some nameless Indian or some river rat knifed in a taproom brawl. This was his brother's son. The people in this house had loved Auguste.

He remembered, and it was like something breathing cold on his neck, the fear he'd felt looking into Auguste's eyes at Fort Crawford. Medicine man. Was there some way Auguste could hurt him? Could Auguste, even in death, get at him?

Raoul shook himself, shook off the haunting, frightening thoughts like a dog shaking off water.

He had never meant to shoot Auguste in front of witnesses. Now the Regulators were coming and they'd find the body in the house, and him with the smoke practically still twisting up from his pistol barrel. And he wasn't ready to fight them. The trial wouldn't last even as long as Auguste's had.

He had to go to ground somewhere until he could collect more men.

_The lead mine._

Even if they came there looking for him, he knew the mine so much better than anyone in Smith County that they'd never find him. Only two or three men who had worked the mine before the Indian war still lived in Victor, and they would not help the Regulators. In fact, he was sure he was the only one who knew about some parts of the mine.

"Speak to us, mon colonel!" Armand demanded. "Do we fight?"

"No," said Raoul. "They outnumber us."

He pulled Armand to the edge of the clearing around Elysée's little house.

"I'm going to make a run. I can be out of the county by daybreak. I'll come back in a couple of weeks, maybe a month. By that time things will quiet down, and I'll bring with me the men we need to run these Regulators out."

Let them think he was going to ride straight out of the county. Let the Regulators chase him along the Checagou road, and the Galena road and the Fort Armstrong road. Meanwhile, he'd hide out in the mine till they quit looking for him. Then he'd leave the county. But it would be best if no one at all knew exactly what he had planned.

"What will _we_ do, mon colonel?" There was accusation in Armand's eyes. He probably felt Raoul was deserting them. What the hell did Armand expect him to do? He was doing the best he could for them; if he led them into a fight he'd only get them killed.

Like he'd gotten men killed at de Marion's Run and at the Bad Axe.

"For now, scatter. Deny you had any part in this. Wait for me to come back."

"It will not go easy for us, mon colonel," Armand growled.

"I'll be back," Raoul said. "And when I am, it will be just like old times in Victor."

He plunged into the trees behind Elysée's house. While the Regulators charged up the hill, he'd have no trouble finding his way back to the trading post by moonlight.

Alone, moving quickly through woods he'd known since boyhood, he felt suddenly lighthearted. He might be on the run, but he'd done the most important thing. He'd killed Auguste. He had a winter to get through, maybe a hard winter. But by next spring things would be back the way they were in the days when he'd been happiest. Before he'd ever heard that Pierre had a son. When he'd ruled like a king in Smith County.

25

The Other World

To Nancy, young Dr. Surrey looked like a brainless clothier's mannequin in his black frock coat and ruffled white shirt. Though Woodrow had routed him out of bed at nearly three in the morning and he had spent over an hour working on Auguste, he didn't seem tired. If he wasn't tired, what in God's name had he been doing? Now he was leaving, and Auguste was still unconscious.

A helplessness in Surrey's face, round and blank as an unbaked pie crust, turned Nancy's grief and fear into fury. She wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him until he promised that he could and would save Auguste.

"The bullet pierced his left lung," Surrey said. "But it was a shoot-through, luckily, so I didn't have to dig in there and pull it out. Many a doctor has killed a pistol-shot man that way."

Nancy took a step toward the doctor. He was her only hope, and she would not let him escape.

"Aside from not killing him, Doctor, what have you done for him?"

"I packed the wound with cotton, front and back, to stop the bleeding. I put dressings on. I told Mrs. Hopkins how to change the cotton and dressings. And now he is in the hands of the Almighty."

_Earthmaker, Auguste would say._

"I hope the Almighty guided _your_ hand, Doctor."

"Knowing your father was a man of the Lord, I'm sure your prayers for Auguste will be heard. He's got to stay where he is, in his grandfather's bed, and fight for his life. I expect he'll take a fever, maybe pneumonia. The punctured lung is of no use to him. He'll draw breath with the other one. He'll be delirious, and you've got to get some food into him--soup's the best, because he'll probably be able to swallow that. His body will fight while his mind sleeps. I'll be back to see him every day."

Through tight lips she said, "Tell me the truth, Doctor. Do you think he'll get better?"

"One man in four survives such a wound, Miss Hale."

Nancy's shoulders slumped. This man could do nothing more.

"Good night, then, Dr. Surrey."

Back in the bedroom, Nancy could hear the crackling that was Auguste's breathing, as blood bubbled in his pierced lung. His face beeswax-yellow in the candlelight, he lay under the canopy of Elysée's four-poster, covered to his chest by a quilt. His arms lay stretched out on either side, his fingers slightly curled.

_His breathing is so noisy, at least we'll know when he stops._

Nancy felt as if she herself were being swept away on a black tide of sorrow.

Elysée, sitting by the bed staring into his grandson's face, looked almost as near death as Auguste. Guichard stood behind him, a clawlike hand perched on his master's shoulder.

Nicole, her eyes round and dark with suffering, asked, "What can we do for him?"

Nancy said, "The doctor says it's up to Auguste and God."

Elysée grunted. "Where was God when this happened?"

If Auguste were conscious, Nancy thought, he would be asking Earthmaker for help. In the camps of the British Band Nancy had never seen Auguste give up on a sick or wounded person. He had applied his remedies, gone into his trance, danced and chanted to summon the aid of his spirit helpers, wrestled with the hurt till either the man's soul left his body or the healing was well begun. At first his practices had seemed foolish and savage to her. But Auguste had done his work with such devotion that she came, watching him, to love him all the more. And, out of love, to respect what he did.

_But he's not the only one who practices that calling._

Maybe that was what he needed now. One of his own people to call on the spirits for him.

If only Auguste were awake, he could tell her what to do.

Redbird had helped Auguste with his work.

She remembered the last time she had seen Redbird, small, emaciated, holding the broken body of Floating Lily in her arms. Redbird was probably more in need of help than able to give it.

And yet, Nancy had seen that she had a marvelous knowledge of healing. Besides, she had told Nancy that she wanted to be a shaman herself, like White Bear and Owl Carver.

It would be better to go to Redbird than sit here and watch Auguste die.

"I'm going to his people," Nancy said. "To find someone I think can help him."

"No Sauk will be willing to come here," said Frank. "Not after what these people did to them."

"This one will," said Nancy.

* * * * *

A heavy, cold rain drummed on the leather top of Nancy's buggy. Driven by a sergeant, the little carriage splashed into the Sauk camp that huddled beside the wooden walls of Fort Armstrong. A dozen peaked army tents, their grayish-white canvas sagging under the rain in a muddy field, were all Nancy could see. There were no people in sight. "I don't know how you're going to find anybody here, ma'am," said the sergeant. Nancy judged him to be a few years older than she was. His name was Benson. He had tomato-red cheeks and a blond mustache so thick that it completely hid his mouth.

Dark faces started to appear at the tent flaps. She wanted to weep as she saw the misery of the women and children who slowly came out, some of them holding blankets over their heads, to stand in the mud and stare at her.

_Shouldn't I be glad to see the Sauk brought so low?_

Didn't she owe it to her father, Nancy asked herself, to rejoice in the fate of the people who had murdered him? And what about the horrid things they'd done to her? So proud they'd been, the yellow-and-red-streaked faces, the feathers in their hair, the day Wolf Paw led them to burn and kill at Victor. Now they huddled, what was left of them, in the rain in a muddy field in tattered army tents.

But she felt no pleasure seeing the Sauk in final defeat. Through Auguste, they had become her people.

She felt suddenly uncomfortable sitting in the shelter of the buggy's top, staring down at the sodden figures in the rain. If they could stand in the rain, she decided, she could too. She jumped down.

"Ma'am!" the sergeant called, sounding alarmed. But he made no move to follow.

In an instant her bonnet, her shawl, her dress, were all sopping. But she didn't care, because the people she was looking at were soaked too. She looked for familiar faces. The people standing before her seemed made of mud. From head to foot they were a dull brown color.

"It is Yellow Hair!" She understood the Sauk words and looked around to see who had spoken, but all she saw were black eyes wide with sudden fear. Of course they all remembered her as the pale eyes woman who had been kidnapped and nearly killed, and who had escaped. They must think she had come to accuse and punish.

Yes, now that they knew her, they were backing away, ducking into their tents.

"No--wait--" Nancy cried. She wanted to tell them not to be afraid, but didn't know how. Redbird was the only one she could talk to. And _fear_ was not a word Redbird had taught her.

A man was standing in front of her. His eyes were empty, his face thin and dirty. He seemed familiar. He held out his hands. He seemed to be saying, "Here I am. Take me."

All at once Nancy recognized Wolf Paw.

His hair had grown out, hanging down in short black strands all around his head. But at last she recognized that noble face that--much though she'd hated him at first--had always reminded her of the engravings she'd seen of Roman statues.

She understood what he was trying to tell her. If she'd come to find the murderer of her father, the man who had kidnapped her, here he was. He was at her mercy.

He seemed to have lost everything else, she thought, but not his courage.

"Is that Injun threatening you, ma'am?" called the sergeant from the shelter of the buggy.

"Not at all," she said, and smiled at Wolf Paw. She felt heartsick to see how the splendid warrior had declined into a shabby spectre.

She tried to tell Wolf Paw, in the mixture of Sauk, English and gesture that she had used with Redbird, that she had not come here to avenge herself on him, that all she wanted was to find Redbird.

But then Redbird was standing before her.

Like Wolf Paw, she had changed so much that for a moment Nancy wasn't sure this _was_ Redbird. She was as thin as a fence rail, and those colorful things Nancy remembered her wearing, the feathers and beads, the dyed quills, the painted figures on her dress, all were gone. She clutched a coarse brown blanket around her shoulders. Her head was bare. Water dripped from the fringe of hair across her forehead and poured from her braids. She wore, not the doeskin clothing Nancy remembered, but a torn gray cotton dress that was too big for her and dirty around the bottom edge. Looking down, Nancy saw that Redbird's feet were bare, her toes sinking into the mud.

Nancy felt warm tears mingling with the cold rain on her face as she saw Redbird smiling at her.

"Redbird, I am glad to see my sister," Nancy said in their special language. "Where is your wickiup?"

Redbird spoke to Wolf Paw in Sauk words too low and rapid for Nancy to follow. He grunted assent and trudged through the mud toward a distant tent. Watching him, Nancy felt pity at his rounded shoulders and old man's shuffle.

Redbird beckoned Nancy to follow her to the tent she'd come from.

"Where you going, ma'am?" the sergeant called.

"I'll be all right," Nancy called over her shoulder, raising her voice over the drumming of the rain. "This is the woman I came to find."

She could see the young soldier shaking his head. Why would a young white woman go into the filthy, disease-ridden tents of these Indians?

_May the Lord open his eyes and heart._

At first the inside of the tent seemed black as a moonless night to Nancy, and the smell of damp, unwashed bodies made her stomach churn. She took Redbird's hand and held it for reassurance. Not too tightly; the bones felt delicate.

Redbird explained that they had no dry wood for a fire. The long knives had promised to bring them some, but they hadn't yet. The air was as chill in the tent as it was outside, and Nancy heard women and children coughing.

They sat in silence for a time, Sauk fashion. Nancy's eyes adjusted to the dim light filtering through the canvas till she could see Redbird's face. She saw Eagle Feather looking at her out of the shadows with huge blue eyes, a little skeleton whose covering of skin looked like stretched brown leather. Hurting inside, she greeted him with a pat on the arm. If only she could do for him what she had done for Woodrow. Now she could see four other women and two little girls huddled together near the rear.

Nancy broke the silence. "Redbird, White Bear needs you."

Wincing in pain, Redbird narrowed her slanting eyes. She asked what had happened to White Bear.

Redbird, Nancy learned, had heard no news of Auguste since the day he left Black Hawk's camp to take Woodrow and Nancy back to the whites. Auguste had told Nancy that he had tried to get word to Redbird; now she silently damned the soldiers for not bothering to pass the messages on. No doubt they thought it not worth the trouble.

When Nancy told Redbird that she had left White Bear four days ago, unconscious with a bullet wound in his chest, she saw the gleam of tears on Redbird's cheeks.

"The pale eyes doctor says he can do no more," Nancy finished. "You are the only one who can help him now. You know the Sauk way of healing. You told me you wanted to be a shaman."

No, Redbird said quietly, she _was_ a shaman. The declaration startled Nancy.

"You told me the men wouldn't let you be one."

In their private language, Redbird said that for a long time she had not understood what it meant to be a shaman. She had thought that a shaman must be made by another shaman. But now she knew that if people came to a person for help, that person was a shaman. And people were coming to her.

"I have come to you," Nancy said. "You can help White Bear."

Redbird gave a helpless grunt that said she could not. The soldiers would not let her leave.

Nancy reached into her handbag and drew out a folded paper. "I have spoken with General Winfield Scott. This says that you may come with me."

Redbird sat in the damp straw looking down at her hands folded in her lap. Nancy waited anxiously for her to speak.

After a moment, her voice full of pain and uncertainty, Redbird asked, did White Bear _want_ to see her?

The question shocked Nancy. It had not occurred to Nancy that Redbird might ever doubt Auguste's love for her.

Recovering from her surprise, Nancy said, "Before his uncle shot him, White Bear told me he was going to come here to find you and Eagle Feather. You are first in his heart, Redbird."

_And, my God, how I wish it could be me!_

Redbird looked sadly at Nancy. She was not first in White Bear's heart, she said. That land that had been stolen from him was.

Shocked, Nancy started to blurt out a denial. But she realized she could not. Auguste had gone to Victor before he went anywhere else.

_But he is dying!_

"Do you want to save his life?" Nancy asked.

Oh, yes, Redbird did, if Earthmaker would help her. In the shadows of the tent Nancy could see the glint of tears on Redbird's cheek.

"Then you will come with me?"

Redbird lowered her pain-twisted face. Must she go back to the place where they killed her baby?

At the memory, Nancy broke into sobs and threw her arms around Redbird, as she had done that terrible day.

"I will always remember Floating Lily," Nancy said. "I fought to save her. I thought she was my baby too."

They held each other in silence for a while, and then the thought came to Nancy that even a small delay might make the difference between Auguste's living and dying. Nancy felt a chill that ran deeper than the cold, damp air in the tent.

"Redbird, he will die if you do not come. You have to come."

Redbird sighed. It was true; she would go with Yellow Hair.

Nancy's heavy heart felt a little lighter. If there was any hope at all for Auguste, it lay with Redbird.

One thing they must take with them, Redbird told her. When they were marching to this place, a soldier had taken White Bear's deerhorn-handled knife from Redbird. It was the same soldier who had come with Yellow Hair today, the one with the red face and the yellow mustache. It would be well if Yellow Hair could get it from him so they could bring it back to White Bear. It would give him strength.

"I brought money with me," Nancy said. "I will buy it back from him if I have to."

_I'll get it back from him if I have to kill him._

* * * * *

Redbird's eyes blurred as she stared at White Bear's face, as pale as the moon. She wanted to scream, to throw herself weeping on his form. Her longing to see him open his eyes, to hear his voice, was so strong it hurt her. She remembered the night of his vision quest, when she was sure he would freeze to death. She thought of the summers they had been apart, the nights they had lain together. She thought of poor, dead Floating Lily and of blue-eyed Eagle Feather, left in Wolf Paw's keeping.

_O come back to me, White Bear!_

She had never tried to heal anyone this close to death. When she and Yellow Hair arrived, the grandfather said that White Bear had sometimes opened his eyes and spoken. But each day he had been awake a shorter time.

Redbird saw that White Bear was already wandering in the other world. A thread no stronger than a strand of spider's silk linked his spirit with his body.

She let the love she felt for White Bear flow through her, giving her strength. She felt the eyes of Yellow Hair, the grandfather and the old servant upon her, but she ignored them. She squatted down on the floor beside White Bear's bed and unrolled the blanket in which she carried her medicines and supplies and the possessions White Bear had left with her at the Bad Axe.

Her eye fell on the bundle of talking papers White Bear had cherished so, that he said was called something like "The Lost Land of Happiness." There was power in that bundle of words. Gently she laid it on his left side, near the wound. On his right she placed the knife that Yellow Hair had been able to retrieve for her.

Arranging the three medicine bags on the floor, she took pieces of elm bark from the largest one and gave them to Yellow Hair.

"Make a tea for him from this. It will give him strength when he awakens."

She forced herself to turn her back on White Bear and go out of the house. With her she carried the blanket and the medicine bag adorned with the beadwork owl. She crossed the little clearing around the house and entered the woods. Here, where no one could see her, she opened the medicine bag and took out five tiny gray scraps of the magic mushroom. She put them into her mouth and chewed and swallowed slowly.

Then she got down on her hands and knees and spread her blanket. Oak, maple and elm leaves, brown, red and yellow, lay thick on the ground. She scooped leaves into the blanket. When she had gathered a big pile, she bundled them up and went back into the house.

Carefully she spread the leaves on the bed over White Bear's body. She heard the grandfather say something to Yellow Hair.

Yellow Hair spoke quietly to her, saying that the grandfather feared that the leaves were not clean and would make White Bear sicker.

How could the leaves not be clean, Redbird wondered, when they came from the woods, outside any dwelling?

But she answered, "Must do what I know. If seem wrong to him, must do anyway, or can do nothing."

She heard Yellow Hair talking quietly to the grandfather while she settled herself on the floor beside the east side of the bed. She could not understand the words, but she heard acceptance in the old man's sigh.

Grief and fear that White Bear would die trembled inside her. Breathing deeply, she let the strength of those feelings enter into her spirit, urging her on to begin the journey she must make.

She must go into the other world and find her guide. She began the medicine woman's chant Sun Woman had taught her:

"Let me walk through the dark place To the light of the other world. Oh my red spirit Bird, fly to me, Sing to me from the other world.

"Let me walk the sunwise circle Into the night that hides this man. Oh my red spirit Bird, sing to me And fly with me to the other world.

"Sing and fly, Sing and fly, In the sunwise circle To the other world, Into the night."

She allowed the chant to settle into a simple, repetitious humming that slowly, with the help of the magic mushroom, drew her soul out of her body.

She stood up. The three people gathered at the foot of the bed did not see her standing. They were looking at her seated body. She looked down at White Bear. She saw through the leaves she had spread over him and right through his skin.

Five glowing streaks ran from his collarbone to his belly. The claw marks of his guardian.

She saw the hole in his chest, how it ran between his ribs. In the eight days he had been lying here, the wound had closed up. If he lived long enough, it would heal slowly. But there was water pooling in his chest, and the longer he lay there unconscious, the more the water would fill up his chest until he drowned.

His spirit must be coaxed back from the other world.

She began to walk the sunwise circle around White Bear's bed, from the east to the south, White Bear on her right. She passed Yellow Hair, White Bear's grandfather and the old servant. They stood like carved statues, unseeing. She walked around the west side of the bed. The head of the bed was against the north wall of the room, but she simply walked through the wall on one side of the bed, took a few steps along the north side of the cottage, then entered the wall again and continued her circle.

When she had completed her ninth circuit of the bed, she saw a cave mouth in the eastern wall of the bedroom. Unhesitatingly she walked into the black, circular opening.

She could not see where the light in the cave was coming from, but its curving walls were clearly visible to her. Here and there she passed paintings. She had seen them when she made her first journey to the other world, after she buried Floating Lily. She saw the Wolf, the Coyote, the Elk and the Buffalo. Near the floor of the cave she passed paintings of the Trout, the Pike, the Salmon and other fish. She looked up and saw the Owl, her father's guardian spirit.

The passage slanted downward and grew narrower until her head brushed the cave roof and her shoulders touched the walls. Then she rounded a bend and bright blue light greeted her.

The cave opened out high on a hillside. She was looking down at tall yellow grass rolling in waves to distant hills.

A black cloud of crows flapped up out of the grass and flew over her head, laughing raucously.

Then she heard a marvelous singing.

She recognized it at once, the song of her guardian spirit, the Redbird. She saw a blood-colored flash, and then the Bird perched on a branch of blue spruce on the hillside. He had one bright eye cocked at her, ringed in black. His red crest stood up on his head as Wolf Paw's had in better days.

"White Bear is out there on the prairie," the Redbird spirit sang. "He is hunting his uncle."

"Can I heal him?" Redbird asked.

The dazzling Bird chirped a yes. "He is lost. He is wandering with his other self, the Bear spirit. He will not leave the spirit world until the Bear finds his uncle."

Redbird shivered. "What will White Bear's guardian do to his uncle?" She remembered both Owl Carver and Sun Woman saying that a shaman's power must never be used to harm any person.

"What must happen, must happen," the Bird sang. "If White Bear is to be free to go back to his body."

Redbird still felt uneasy. A shadow, like a sudden prairie storm, seemed to fall upon the landscape.

The streak of scarlet sailed out over the endless grass, and Redbird ran down the hill until the tassels were waving high over her head. She could see nothing on all sides of her but yellow spears of straw. Overhead was a patch of bright blue framed by tassels. In the center of the blue the Bird spirit hovered, wings a blur of red. She pushed her way through the stalks as the Bird led her.

On and on flew her spirit guide. Redbird did not tire either, as she would have in the ordinary world, trudging through the grass. She could not see the sun, but the light seemed never to change. And no matter how long she walked, the same bit of cloudless sky remained overhead.

Then White Bear stood before her.

He was wearing only a deerskin loincloth and moccasins. His long hair was bound with a beaded band. The scar on his cheek stood out white against his tan skin. She looked at his naked chest and saw the five shining claw marks, and the small navel-like opening of the bullet wound.

She looked deep into his dark eyes. His love flowed out to her, and she bathed in it, as in a warm river. She knew his thoughts, how happy and surprised he was to see her.

_I was lost out here. You have come for me._

He held out his arms, and she rushed into them. She felt his arms around her even though he was a spirit and she was a spirit. She laid her head against his scarred chest and listened to his beating heart. Would she ever again, back in the world of flesh, hold him like this?

A huge white-furred head crashed through the wall of grass around them, and enormous golden eyes looked at her. White Bear had described his guardian spirit to her, but she had never realized the Bear was so big. She looked at black lips that bared yellow teeth longer than her fingers, she stared down at claws that crushed the grass and sank into the prairie sod. She shivered at the thought of what might happen to White Bear's uncle if this spirit found him.

Perched on the head of the Bear was the tiny red spirit Bird.

_We are looking for my father's brother_, came White Bear's thought. _He killed my mother and many brothers and sisters of yours and mine. He shot me._

The Bird sang to Redbird, "I know where the uncle is, but I can only lead the Bear to him if you say I must do it."

"I say you must, then," she said, just above a whisper. Whatever was needed to save White Bear's life, she had to do it. Whatever she must give up in return.

The Bird leaped into the air, his crest a bloody spearpoint. The Bear lifted a black nose the size of Redbird's fist, and the white body turned to follow, passing before her like a mountain of snow.

Hand in hand White Bear and Redbird followed. The Bird flew far ahead, and they could not see him, but the Bear trampled down the grass and left a path that was easy to follow.

Loving thoughts passed between White Bear and Redbird. If they always met like this, Redbird thought, they could know what was in each other's heart and their love would be deeper.

Then she remembered Wolf Paw and the new life that she alone knew was growing in her belly. The life that fulfilled Wolf Paw's wish to have a child with her.

She felt like a statue carved in ice. And at that very moment White Bear let go of her hand. Somehow she knew that he was withdrawing from her, not because he had sensed her thought about Wolf Paw, but because he was troubled by some thought of his own. But instantly there was a space between them, and she no longer knew his mind.

He was still walking beside her. He walked straight ahead, not looking at her. She turned her head to the front and did the same.

She felt as if she had been pushed away, hard, and it hurt.

It seemed to her that they walked for days through the unchanging grass, but the sun remained fixed somewhere beyond the tasseled curtain.

Yellow and blue, yellow and blue, the whole world had been reduced to those colors. And to one sound, whispering grass.

The Bear stopped walking. Redbird and White Bear went around the huge animal, Redbird to the right and White Bear to the left.

She found herself on the edge of a great crack in the ground, so deep that its bottom lay in shadow. It zigzagged from somewhere, appearing out of grass, and continued toward somewhere, vanishing back into the prairie. A stream of bright blue water wound through the dark bottom of the ravine; water had cut this wound in the prairie. The Bird spirit swooped and darted in the crack like a living fire arrow.

"White Bear's uncle hides there," the Bird trilled.

She heard a growl beside her deep as distant thunder, and the ground seemed to tremble.

The Bird flew up, swooped to hover over the Bear's head, then dove down into the canyon. Down to an entrance into the earth framed by two upright wooden posts and a beam laid across them.

Beside the square of darkness were abandoned wooden carts and a hill of gray gravel that partly blocked the stream. This was a mine, Redbird understood, where the pale eyes dug metal out of the ground.

The Bear spirit put one paw in front of the other and, with grace and balance astonishing in a creature so huge, walked down a narrow path Redbird had not noticed before to the shadowy bottom of the ravine. Then it lumbered up to the mine mouth.

She opened her mouth to cry out in fear, but the Bear was gone.

_There is a man in there._

And her spirit helper, the Redbird, had led that giant Bear to him. She had commanded it. She had not wanted to use her shaman's powers to hurt anyone, not even one she hated as much as this uncle of White Bear's. White Bear had saved many lives and never killed anyone.

Even though she was a spirit and this great grassland was sunny, she felt cold, and her stomach knotted.

_I will lose something because I did this. I only did it to bring White Bear back to his body. But I will suffer for it, even so._

_And so will White Bear._

_Only let White Bear live_, she prayed to the powers that brought life into the world.

White Bear turned to her. _It is done_, said his spirit voice. _My other self has found Raoul de Marion._

_Now you can come with me_, she answered him. _Back to your body._

_Back to my home_, came his whisper, and she shuddered even as she turned, following the Bird spirit as he fluttered over her head. When he thought of his home, he meant the great lodge the pale eyes called Victoire.

Redbird opened her eyes in the room where White Bear lay, to find herself once again sitting on the floor beside the bed. The three people were looking at her, Yellow Hair with tears running down her cheeks, the grandfather's withered face paler than the fur of White Bear's guardian spirit, the old servant's bloodshot eyes wide.

She remembered that the sun had been low in the west when she came to this house. Sunlight still slanted through the paper-covered west window and fell on the layer of leaves that covered White Bear's bed.

But when she tried to move, pain struck her like knives driven into her knees and elbows, as if she had been sitting in the same position for days.

"His eyes!" Yellow Hair cried, pointing at White Bear. From the floor Redbird could not see what Yellow Hair was seeing. She forced her aching legs to lift her.

White Bear looked at Redbird, then at Yellow Hair. He smiled faintly.

She had done it. He was back in his body.

A spring of pure, sweet joy burst up inside her. A sob welled from her lips. She stumbled toward Yellow Hair and felt that she was going to fall. Yellow Hair's arms held her up.

She saw his mouth open, heard him whisper to her, "You brought me back. I will always love you."

"And I will always love you," Redbird said. Her voice was a croak, as if she had not spoken in days.

She turned to Yellow Hair. "Now he will live."

Laughing and crying at once, Yellow Hair thanked Redbird again and again in their common language, calling on her God to bless Redbird.

_Bless me? But what of that man in the mine?_

"Give White Bear the tea of elm bark now. Later, little food, only little," Redbird said. "Easy-eat food. Hominy good. Later, soup with meat."

Yellow Hair eagerly agreed.

"Must sleep," said Redbird. She slurred her words, too worn out to speak clearly.

She could lie down in another room, Yellow Hair said, leading her away from the canopied bed where the weeping grandfather bent over White Bear, holding him by his shoulders.

"I gone many days?" Redbird asked.

Yellow Hair's deep blue eyes widened. She shook her head at the word "days." She assured Redbird that she had been silent only for an instant. She had been singing, then she closed her eyes, and a moment later when she opened them again, White Bear had opened his. Yellow Hair hugged her so hard it hurt her.

_Just an instant?_ Every time Redbird went on a shaman's journey she learned something new.

Yellow Hair, her arm around Redbird's shoulders, led her to a bed in another room. Redbird had never lain on a pale eyes' bed, but she sat down on the edge and fell back. If she was not so tired she would not have been able to sleep in this bed. It was too soft. Yellow Hair lifted her legs onto the bed for her.

That was the last thing Redbird remembered.

* * * * *

After a day and a night of sleep, Redbird woke refreshed. And hungry. A cure for that was quickly produced for her; and now she was sitting on a pale eyes' chair at a pale eyes' table, devouring slices of fried pig meat and fluffy cakes brought to her by the old servant.

Seated across from her was a fat, smiling woman she had met once before. This woman had tried to comfort her the day Floating Lily was killed. This, she knew, was White Bear's aunt.

Yellow Hair, tears streaming from her turquoise eyes, appeared in the doorway of the room where White Bear lay.

White Bear, she said, wanted Redbird to come to him.

Redbird's hunger vanished. She went rigid.

_Yellow Hair weeps now, but I will weep forever after._

She heard the suffering in Yellow Hair's voice and knew that her heart was hurting because she believed Redbird was going to take White Bear away from her.

Redbird knew better. She had defiled her powers by using them to destroy White Bear's uncle, and now she must pay for it.

The lance twisted in her heart as she stood up at the table.

The fat woman stood up when Redbird did, came around the table and hugged her. She smelled of fresh-baked bread.

Redbird walked past Yellow Hair to enter the bedroom. White Bear was reclining with pillows behind his head in the bed where he had lain for so many days. His chest was bare except for the white bindings that protected his wound. The wrappings made his olive skin look darker, and above the cloth Redbird could see the start of the five shining scars that ran down his chest.

The leaves had been cleared away from the quilt that covered him. His bundle of talking papers telling the story of the first man and woman and how they lost their land of happiness was on the table beside his bed. Next to it lay the knife Star Arrow had given him when he was a small boy.

When he saw her his face glowed and he held out his arms to her. She rushed to him, and heard a cry of pain behind her. The door of the bedroom shut softly.

She threw herself across the bed, longing to hold White Bear. His arms around her were not as strong as she remembered them, but his embrace was firm.

"You came to me while my spirit wandered on the prairie," he said.

"The Redbird guided me to you."

"Before you came I saw many things."

"What things?"

He said, "The pale eyes will spread across the Great River and even into the Great Desert. There will be no place left for our people."

"If we go far enough west--" she began.

"No," he said. "They will go as far as the western ocean. The Turtle warned me about this." He stroked her hair lightly, and she rested her head on his shoulder.

She had a heart-crushing feeling that she would never lie like this with him again.

"You are so much better today," she said.

"You, too, know the way of the shaman now. You healed me."

She lifted her head and looked into his eyes. This was the moment when they must decide.

"I am the only shaman our people have now," she forced herself to say. "The few who are left need me. I must go back to them."

His eyes shut tight suddenly, as if his wound was paining him.

"Stay here with me," he said.

His words struck her and tore through her, as his uncle's bullet had torn through him.

"I could never stay here. When you are well enough, will you not come back to your people?"

He shook his head. "We cannot fight the pale eyes and we cannot run from them. They will destroy us. Unless we learn to live as the pale eyes do."

"That destroys us too."

"That saves us!" His nostrils flared and his dark eyes glowed. "I can use the power this wealth and this land gives me to fight for our people. And you can do it with me. And Eagle Feather. I will show the people how to make use of pale eyes' ways. I will share my land with them."

Her heart felt as if it were being ground between stones. This, she understood, was what she must suffer because she had used her shaman's powers to hurt another. She was going to lose White Bear. She had saved him from death. He was going to live, but not with her.

The claws of that giant Bear that was his other self seemed to stab into her chest and tear her in two. She could not live with this pain. She must surrender to White Bear.

_Yes, I must stay with him. I cannot leave him. Eagle Feather needs him. We will be safe here, and comfortable, and at peace._

She would send for Eagle Feather. The fat aunt and the grandfather would love them and care for them.

She tried to see herself living here with White Bear. For a moment the picture was clear in her mind. Then it dissolved in blackness as she realized that taking herself out of the Sauk tribe would be like pulling a medicine plant up by its roots without its consent.

She would die. It would be a slow death that would be worse than the pain she was suffering now.

And then another thought struck her.

_Children!_

Her heart felt heavy as a mountain.

She remembered how Owl Carver had said, after Eagle Feather smoked the peace pipe with the Winnebago, that he could be a greater shaman than any of them. But that would happen only if he was raised as a Sauk.

Floating Lily was dead. Redbird could not live with the people who had murdered her.

And--she touched her belly--this was not White Bear's child.

She began to cry aloud.

She sobbed till she thought her ribs would crack. Her throat burned; her voice rasped. She pressed her forehead against his chest. She heard him groan in pain, but he was hurting her more than she could ever hurt him.

"How can you ask me to stay where they killed Floating Lily? How can _you_ stay here?"

"What would you have me do?"

A sudden thought occurred to her. "The pale eyes give gold for land. Take pale eyes gold for this land, and you can take the gold with you to the Ioway country and share it with our people."

"No, Redbird," he said sadly. "What could we do with gold, out there in Ioway? Sometimes the long knives have given our chiefs gold in return for land, yes. In no time the gold melted away. Gold by itself is like seed corn. Without the right ground to plant it in, it is soon used up and gone. The only way I can use the wealth my father Star Arrow left to me is to stay here and work with it."

She had stopped crying. This hurt too much for tears. Only when Floating Lily was killed had she felt more pain than this.

For a moment she could not bring herself to say the words she had to say.

From somewhere she summoned the strength to speak.

"Then I must leave you."

Each word, she felt, was an arrow fired into him.

His arms tightened around her. "I beg you to stay."

_Spirit of the Redbird, help me to do what I must._

It would hurt less if she acted at once. She pushed herself away from him. She stood up and crossed the room to the closed door.

"May you walk always in honor, White Bear."

"No, Redbird, no!" _He_ was crying bitterly now, and he rolled over and buried his head in his pillows, beating the bed with his clenched fists.

She could not bear to leave him weeping like this, like a child she was abandoning. She would rather see him angry.

Then the spirit Bird, whom she had called on for help, sent her a message. She saw Wolf Paw, as he had looked when he was proud and undefeated, with the red crest on his head, a red blanket wrapped around him and black paint around his eyes.

_Why did I never see it before?_

Wolf Paw wore the markings of the Bird she was named after, the Bird that was her spirit guide. Neither she nor he had been aware of it. But it must mean that they were destined for each other, and that what had already happened between herself and Wolf Paw _had_ to happen.

To live out her life with Wolf Paw and never to see White Bear again was like being told she would never again see a day with sunlight.

But it was as the spirit Bird had sung to her-- _What must happen, must happen_.

She breathed deeply. She hated having to tell White Bear about Wolf Paw. If he had been willing to come with her, she would not have had to say anything. Wolf Paw would not have tried to hold her. And if she gave birth a moon or two too soon, White Bear would have forgiven her. But now she had to use Wolf Paw to hurt White Bear.

To hurt him so as to heal him.

_But when I am gone from here, who will heal me? Must the shaman suffer wounds that can never be healed?_

_Yes, if she has dealt such wounds._

"You would not want me anymore, White Bear," she said. "These past moons since you left us I have been Wolf Paw's woman."

He raised his tear-streaked face from the pillow and stared at her. "What are you saying?"

"Wolf Paw lost his wives and his children at the Bad Axe. He was like a dead man. I wanted to heal him, and I will heal him, by living with him."

His eyes widened. She could see anger darkening his cheeks.

He said, "After my father took me to live here, you waited six summers for me while Wolf Paw courted you. Could you not keep him off for a few moons?"

She held out her hands imploringly. "Before, when he was an honored warrior and had his family, he had no need of me. He wanted me as he wanted another feather to hang in his hair. But now he needs me. Without me he would be as good as dead. And he is the last brave in our band."

"I need you."

She put her hands over her belly. It was still flat, but she knew what was there.

"I am carrying Wolf Paw's child."

He pushed against the bed till he was sitting bolt upright, and he pounded his fist on his knee. He was still badly wounded. He could hurt himself. What if he tried to get out of bed, and tore the wound open?

But when he looked up at her his eyes were large and dark with sadness.

"I still love you, whatever you did with Wolf Paw. And I will love _any_ baby you bear."

She felt his hands seize her heart, tearing it out of her chest, crushing it. She cried out with the pain and staggered backward.

She cried, "You offer me everything but the one thing I want--for you to come back to our people."

"What I do, I do for our people." His voice was so low that she could barely hear him. "One Sauk, at least, will take back land the pale eyes stole from us."

The world grew darker and darker for her. With every word he spoke she was losing him a little more.

She made the flat-handed "no" gesture. "The pale eyes here in this land are too strong for the red people. And in you there is both pale eyes and red man, and the pale eyes is stronger than the red."

His shoulders slumped. She saw a dullness in his eyes that made her think of Wolf Paw as he had looked after the people of Victor had killed Floating Lily.

_Have I hurt White Bear so badly that he will get sick again?_ Sudden fear rippled through her.

But then he lifted his head and looked at her, and there was strength in his gaunt face.

"I will always love you. And as long as this place is mine, there will be a home here for you, for Eagle Feather, for any child of yours. For any Sauk. When you go back, tell them that."

Grief crushed her as she gazed at the man she loved, knowing that they were parting forever.

He reached out to her, and she went back to lie beside him on the bed. It felt so good to be held by him, and it hurt so much to know that this was the last time they would ever lie heart against heart, she thought she would scream at the agony of it.

* * * * *

_Good-bye, Floating Lily, my daughter. I may never be able to come back here again. I hope you have begun your journey West. But if your spirit lingers here, know that your father is close by._

Redbird stood a moment looking down at the mound of earth, now covered with leaves, the strip of red blanket tied to the willow wand now faded. She rocked back and forth in the pale eyes shoes made of heavy leather that Yellow Hair had given her. She wailed softly in her sorrow for Floating Lily.

Then she turned to Yellow Hair, who stood under a nearby maple.

"You take White Bear here and show him."

Yellow Hair nodded.

They went back to Yellow Hair's carriage. The buggy was laden with food and blankets, and Redbird carried with her a heavy bag of gold coins given her by White Bear's grandfather. Used wisely, the gold would buy blankets and food, rifles and ammunition from the traders to help the Sauk get through the winter. Now they would not have to winter over at Fort Armstrong, but could cross over at once to join the rest of the tribe in Ioway.

The wound in Redbird's heart ached constantly, and she sat bent forward on the buggy seat, her hands gripping her knees. As they rattled down the road to Fort Armstrong she felt some small relief at leaving the place where she had lost so much. She tried to tell herself that she was on the way to a new life.

Yellow Hair said she didn't understand why White Bear was not with them. She wanted to know if he would follow Redbird when he got better.

_She understands, but she does not dare believe he is going to stay with her. She thinks it is too much to hope for._

Redbird said, "He still your husband, Yellow Hair. You want him?"

Yellow Hair's lips quivered as she asked, would Redbird not come back to be with White Bear?

Redbird gritted her teeth. It hurt to have to explain to Yellow Hair.

Redbird made the flat-hand motion. "He not follow me. I never come back here."

Now Yellow Hair's eyes were glowing like turquoise set in silver. But she put a comforting hand on Redbird's arm.

She wanted to know why. How could Redbird part from White Bear and he from her? Did it not hurt too much?

"Yes, hurt much," said Redbird softly, watching the rutted dirt road pass under the wheels of the buggy.

But Yellow Hair pressed her. How could White Bear tear himself away from the Sauk?

"Pale eyes family now his people."

But his son--how could he give up his son?

Redbird struggled to find words and gestures to explain this. "Maybe some day White Bear come for Eagle Feather, like Star Arrow once come for White Bear." She remembered how White Bear had wept when Sun Woman told him he must go to live with the pale eyes. "That day, I not say Eagle Feather must go or must not go. Eagle Feather do what he want."

Yellow Hair shook her head, her braids lashing. She repeated over and over again an English word Redbird understood, but it asked a question she could never answer.

"_Why?_"

Again Redbird wrestled with the English words. "Land of his father and grandfather holds him. He not want to leave."

But what about the uncle who nearly killed him?

"That uncle no more trouble," said Redbird.

_And because of that, I must lose him._

Then when would Redbird see White Bear again? Yellow Hair's question buried itself in Redbird's heart like a steel arrowhead.

"Never!" she screamed.

Yellow Hair shrank back, her eyes wide with shock. Redbird sighed and let her body droop.

They drove on in silence. Redbird heard small sounds beside her that told her Yellow Hair was weeping.

Redbird reached over and took Yellow Hair's hand.

"Make him happy."

Yellow Hair uttered a sob and turned her head away.

But Redbird was no longer crying. Dry-eyed, she stared ahead at the road south. Her sorrow was too deep for tears.

26

Blood on the Land

Raoul François Philippe Charles de Marion woke trembling in damp blackness, wondering whether it was day or night outside. His heart was beating so hard that it ached. For a moment he couldn't think what had scared him so badly. Then he remembered the dream.

He struggled out of the old blanket he'd wrapped around himself and sat up, panting.

A white bear coming at him down here in the mine. Why in hell would he dream about a creature like that? There were white bears up in Canada, he'd heard, but he'd never even seen one.

White Bear--that was Auguste's Indian name. Was he dreaming about Auguste coming after him?

_Well, Auguste is rotting in the ground now. I killed him._

He still hated Auguste even after his death. Because of Auguste he had to stay holed up here, blackness pressing on his eyeballs. His eyes were wide open and he stared till they hurt, but he could see nothing, nothing at all. It was like being blind.

He wished he had told just one of his men where to find him. He badly wanted news of what was going on back at Victor. But if he'd told anyone it would have been Armand, and he couldn't trust the bastard. Armand might stupidly let himself be followed here. Or give way to threats, or even sell him out, if Papa offered a big enough reward.

_Armand would. Sure he would. I could see in his eyes how he resented me. He hated Pierre and he hated me too._

Raoul only had two candles left. Should he light one now? He could spare it, because he was going to get out of this mine today--or tonight. He'd waited long enough.

He wasn't sure anymore how long he'd been hiding down here in the dark. When he slept, he had no idea how long he slept. A watch was one of the many things he had forgotten to bring with him, leaving in such a hurry. And yet he'd stupidly brought the silver case with Pierre's spectacles in it. Stuck it in his pocket when he left the trading post to get the mongrel. He felt it now, a hard oval in his coat pocket.

How long?

The men pursuing him had searched the mine, as he figured they would. Days had passed, he was sure, since he'd heard their voices in the mine, footsteps echoing. He was certain he was the only man in Victor who knew about the tunnel he was hiding in, its entrance, just big enough to crawl through, covered by a pile of gravel that appeared to have nothing but wall behind it. He'd tried to disturb the gravel as little as possible while crawling in, and had carefully replaced what he'd pushed aside.

But he might have left some trace on the other side. He'd sat in the blackness, waiting to hear the sounds of digging, his back pressed against the damp rock wall, knees drawn up to his chin. His hands, cold as if they'd been plunged into a snowdrift, had rested on his loaded rifle and his pistol. And he'd drawn his Bowie knife and laid it beside him. They'd pay dearly to take him. If there were no more than four or five of them, he might manage to kill them all and get away.

But the sounds of the search party had faded away. He'd welcomed the black cotton silence that had followed. He would stay down here as long as he could. He'd found a place in his tunnel where underground water had seeped in, and was able to keep refilling his canteen from that. He found another small branch tunnel some distance from where he slept, where he could piss and shit. But he'd come into the mine with only six candles, and he was afraid to use them up, so he spent most of the time sitting in the dark feeling as if he was going mad with alternating worry and boredom.

He had brought his canteen of whiskey down here with him, and it had made time pass easier for a while. But now it was all gone. Seemed like a hell of a long time since he'd had a drink.

He made a flame with flint, steel and cotton wool, lit his next to last candle and set it in a pool of its own wax. The light hurt his eyes for a moment, and the sight of his own shadow moving on the dark gray rock walls frightened him.

His hollow belly kept squealing and grumbling, and visions of beef and turkey and duck and pork tormented him. Out of one of his saddlebags he took the bundle of corn biscuits and dried beef he'd thrown together at the trading post in his flight. He bit into a biscuit as hard and dry as a lump of wood and rolled it around in his mouth until his saliva softened it enough to chew and swallow.

Now he'd go up to the mine entrance, and if it was nighttime he'd leave. The Flemings had their cabin about a mile from here. Their men had joined the Regulators, so they deserved to have him take a horse from them. Then he'd ride north to Galena.

He hefted the other saddlebag, loaded with gold and silver coins and Bank of Illinois paper. He'd had to leave a lot behind in his office safe, and they'd probably steal it from him. But he'd get it all back.

Because this was enough to buy him an army.

Galena would be crowded with the roughest men in the Northwest Territory right now. Surely more men than could make a living in the mines around there, boom or no boom. Rough and hungry, just what he needed.

_I'll yet see that high-and-mighty Cooper swinging from a tree. And I'll piss on Auguste's grave._

He bit into a slice of dried beef. It was tough as rawhide, but he forced it down.

_When I'm running things in Smith County again, Nicole and Frank and that pack of squalling brats are leaving. I've put up with Frank and his damned newspaper long enough, just because he's married to my sister._

If Frank gave any trouble, his new press, the one Papa helped him buy, would end up at the bottom of the Mississippi. Or maybe he'd even be Cooper's dancing partner on that tree.

_I've knocked my father down. I've killed my brother's squaw and his mongrel bastard son. Why put up with my sister and her husband? What have they ever done, except hate me?_

And the old man would have to go, too, if he was still alive, and that brandy-pickled bag of bones, Guichard. Time to be rid of them all. De Marion would still be the foremost name in Smith County, but it would be a new de Marion family, not this old Injun-loving bunch that understood nothing.

Nancy. What about her?

The teacher needed to be taught a lesson or two. If she hadn't let Auguste service her when she was captured by the Injuns, then she'd probably never had a man's cock up inside her. Once she found out what pleasure he could give her, she'd forget about Auguste. She was still young enough for children, good-looking children, and smart.

That brat Woodrow that she had living with her. Imagine him saying in court that the redskins treated him better than his parents did. Send him packing, just like the Hopkinses.

With Smith County and with Nancy all his, it would be time to rebuild Victoire.

He'd put that off because he wanted to do it right. And he'd left the ruin till now to remind himself and everyone in Victor why the Sauk had to be driven out of Illinois.

No, that was a damned lie.

Alone here in the dark he could not keep the truth from pecking at his brain like a buzzard's beak: Every time he went near the ruin of the château, he thought of Clarissa and the boys, and guilt stabbed him without mercy. He'd looked down on Clarissa, and he had not felt for the boys as a father should.

He'd left them unprotected, let them die horribly, just as Helene had died.

_I did to Andy and Phil just what Papa and Pierre did to me. When my boys needed me most, I wasn't there._

_And the Sauk never would have attacked Victor if I hadn't shot Auguste and the other two redskins at Old Man's Creek._

He forced himself to stop thinking about the family he'd made without wanting to and then had lost. Their blood was spilled, and nothing would bring them back. He'd shed plenty of Indian blood to avenge them.

He remembered the Indian witch woman, Auguste's mother, the Bowie knife slicing open her throat, her blood warm on his hand. What curse had she laid on him before he killed her?

He put her out of his mind and thought of Victoire. When he rebuilt Victoire it would not be just another blockhouse, but a stone mansion that could be seen from the river. It would be the center of Raoul de Marion's new empire--steamships, railroads, cattle, farmlands, mines. Now that the Indians were gone for good, now that Pierre's bastard was dead, there was no limit to what Raoul could make of the family's wealth.

The dreams heartened him. Time to move. He stuffed the little bundle of beef and biscuit into one saddlebag. He slung the saddlebags over his shoulder, the light one with food hanging down his front, the heavy one with the money in it on his back. He loosened the Bowie knife in its sheath on his left hip. He checked the loads in his pistol and his rifle again.

As he pushed back his coat to holster his pistol, he felt Pierre's spectacle case in his pocket.

_What the hell am I carrying that around for?_

At times he'd suspected that he kept Pierre's spectacles because he really did love his older brother, in spite of everything Pierre had done to him.

The silver case, he told himself, was valuable. But the spectacles were worthless. The eyes that had needed them had stopped seeing a year ago.

_Had they?_

He opened the case. The lenses glinted in the candlelight as if there were eyes behind them.

"Goddamn it!" he shouted, and turned the case over, dropping the spectacles to the stone floor. They shattered with a crack that sounded loud as a pistol shot. He stamped on them for good measure, crushing the glass to glittering splinters and twisting the frames out of shape under the sole of his boot.

He threw the case into a pile of rock shards. Valuable or not, he didn't want the damned thing anymore.

"I hope you're in Hell, Pierre!"

He didn't love Pierre. He hated him. He'd never loved him. He'd always hated him, ever since Fort Dearborn.

Holding the bit of candle high in his left hand, his rifle in his right, he started up the sloping tunnel. It was a long climb; the sacks of coins in the saddlebag on his back weighed him down.

He stopped at the gravel pile that blocked entry to this tunnel. He listened, and heard nothing but his blood hissing in his ears. He scraped chunks of stone away from the pile until he could crawl through.

After more walking and climbing through tunnels and shafts, he no longer had any notion how long it had been since he left his hideout. He saw ahead a little square of gray, in the center of the black all around him. And then he could make out the walls and floor of the tunnel. Moonlight or starlight must be illuminating the mine entrance. Night, then. Good, he could leave at once.

About twenty feet from the entrance he saw up ahead an opening where another tunnel branched off from this one. He remembered it. This was the side tunnel where the Indian he'd killed seven years ago had hidden.

As he came close to that opening he heard a rumbling sound.

The growl of an animal.

He felt as if he'd been doused with ice-cold water.

He took a few steps back from the branch tunnel opening, curled his finger around the trigger of his rifle and raised it, one-handed. He didn't want to let go of the candle.

It hadn't just been a dream. There _was_ something in this mine.

Maybe a wolf. Or a bear would like a deserted mine like this for a den.

He heard snuffling, grunting noises. Then a growl so deep it seemed to shake the stone under his feet. He felt his stomach clench, and he nearly lost his grip on his bowels.

Claws scraped on rock. With trembling fingers he set the candle in one of the wall niches the miners had carved for their lanterns and raised his rifle to his shoulder.

The bear came out of the branch tunnel. He saw the huge, pointed white head from the side at first, with a golden eye that glared at him. A perfectly white bear.

Like his dream.

The head swung toward him, a gaping mouth lined with teeth like ivory daggers.

The whole white body emerged, bigger than a bull bison.

It roared, deafening as a cannon blast. It reared up on its hind legs, filling the tunnel like a white avalanche. After the roar, it rumbled steadily, deep in its chest. Though it was more than ten feet away, he could smell its rotten-meat breath.

He squeezed the trigger. His rifle thundered, echoes slamming the sides of his head. Smoke obscured the vast white body. His ears jangled.

He felt a sudden terror that the shot might start a cave-in.

But it didn't.

It didn't stop the bear either. It came on, padded feet scraping on the tunnel floor, swinging claws like rows of sickles.

_I couldn't have missed. Oh Jesus, oh God, I couldn't have._

He threw the rifle down, snatched his pistol out of his holster and fired again.

Blinding flash, deafening blast, stinking smoke.

And the bear kept coming.

It was so close, the lead balls _must_ have gone into it. It must be just so damned big it would take more than two shots to kill it.

But there was no time to reload. The bear towered over him, white body filling the whole world, eyes, claws, teeth, all shining in the glow of that pitiful little candle that somehow had stayed lit.

He screamed and sobbed like a little boy in his terror, but he managed to get his Bowie knife out. He'd killed a big Indian with this knife.

A paw the size of his head knocked the knife from his hand.

"Oh, please don't kill me!" he wept. "For the love of Jesus!"

The other paw hit his chest like a sledgehammer. He felt his ribs cave in. He felt the claws stab into his lungs.

His breath flew from his body. His strength drained away. He couldn't scream anymore. He couldn't beg for his life. His voice was gone. Only blood came out of his throat. The last thing he saw was an enormous mouth gaping, full of yellow-white pointed teeth coming at him. He felt claws rip again through his chest and belly and knew that he was going.

* * * * *

The pale eyes' smoke boat was a frightening thing, shooting black clouds and sparks from two black-painted iron tubes that rose up from a big lodge in its middle. On each side of the boat was a wheel with wooden boards attached, and the wheels and boards pushed the boat through the water. Standing on the floor of wood planks at the front end of the boat, Redbird tried to understand how fire in the boat's belly could make wheels turn. She felt the monstrous thing tremble under her as it swam across the river.

About a hundred women and children with a few men were crowded at the front of the boat, watching the Ioway shore of the Great River come closer. By unspoken agreement they kept their backs turned to the land that had once been so good to them, the land they had forever lost.

_The happy land that was lost_, Redbird thought.

At the memory of White Bear, grief stabbed her, and she had to rest against the railing of the boat. She felt an aching hollow as if she had been gutted like a butchered deer.

In their midst rose a little mountain of boxes, barrels, sacks and bales, the supplies they had bought with White Bear's grandfather's gold. But they had no horses, and when they got to the Ioway shore they would have to carry these goods on their backs, a journey of probably four days across the strip of land by the river that He Who Moves Alertly had surrendered to the long knives. Somewhere beyond that land they would find the Sauk and Fox who had been wise enough not to follow Black Hawk. She hoped it would not start to snow before they reached the camps of their people.

Wolf Paw said, "I have heard that this is the very boat that killed so many of our people at the Bad Axe."

This boat had killed his wives and his children, then, thought Redbird. She rested her hand on his arm.

"See there," he said, pointing to holes and black marks on the wood at the very front end. "A thunder gun was set there. It fired at our people and tore them to pieces. Like the one that killed so many of our warriors at the pale eyes town." Through his worn buckskin shirt he touched the silver coin that still hung around his neck on a leather thong. Redbird remembered the day White Bear had dug the coin out of Wolf Paw's body, claiming he had changed a lead ball into a coin.

She put her hand on her aching heart. Would things ever stop reminding her of White Bear?

She stared down at the gray-green water rushing by the side of the boat, and it made her dizzy. A canoe could never travel this fast, even a big one paddled by many men. And a canoe could never go straight across the river, without being pushed downstream by the current, as this smoke-belching boat was doing.

Had she been wrong not to stay with White Bear, as he had begged her to? She missed him so much. Tears came to her eyes. She hoped Wolf Paw and Eagle Feather would not see her crying, and she wiped her eyes quickly.

She felt like jumping from this boat and swimming back to shore. If she drowned in the Great River, even that would be better than being carried away from White Bear.

She told herself she had made up her mind. She was determined to be a Sauk for the rest of her days. And Eagle Feather would be a Sauk.

_White Bear is wrong to stay behind, even for all that land._

Eagle Feather gripped her arm. "Do not be afraid, Mother. The pale eyes will not hurt us today." His blue eyes were sad. He must have noticed her misery.

Wolf Paw smiled faintly. "No, today they only want to be rid of us."

Eagle Feather said, "One day Earthmaker will give us a medicine so strong that the long knives' guns will not hurt us."

Redbird smiled at her son. "May it be you who finds that medicine."

_We can hope for that. Now that we have lost so much, the spirits might grant us new powers that will help us to resist the pale eyes._

Of one thing she was sure, White Bear's way was not a trail that the people should travel. For a Sauk to become a pale eyes was a kind of death.

_We are Sauk, or we are nothing. White Bear is no longer a Sauk. My husband is dead._

She turned back to Wolf Paw and Eagle Feather. She did not like to see Wolf Paw's hair hanging loose around his head, his slumped shoulders. He had always stood so straight. Before the people at Victor killed Floating Lily.

She put her hand on his back and stroked it with a circular motion, and he straightened his shoulders. As he looked at her a light dawned in his eyes.

She must get him to shave his head again, to put the red crest back in place. The people needed a new leader, a true leader. Black Hawk had been wrong too many times, and He Who Moves Alertly would do whatever the pale eyes told him to do. Wolf Paw would help her heal the people.

_How I hated him the night he mocked White Bear, putting a woman's dress on him. But he has suffered much since then, and he is a wiser man now._

Eagle Feather was standing at the rail looking across the purple river at the winter-gray hills on the Ioway shore. Redbird moved to stand behind him and put her hands on his small, square shoulders. He held himself very straight.

Eagle Feather said suddenly, "I wish I could have seen my father one last time." She could barely hear him above the noise of the smoke boat and the rushing water.

She closed her eyes against the pain of that and bit her lower lip to keep it from trembling.

When she was able to speak she said, "I think that one day you will see him again."

But for now Eagle Feather and White Bear must be parted. Because Eagle Feather must grow up as a Sauk. The people would need him, too, in summers and winters to come.

But until Eagle Feather was grown, the people would turn to her. The men, like Wolf Paw, had lost heart. She would give them heart again.

In spite of the pale eyes, the Sauk would find a good trail.

* * * * *

The walk from Grandpapa's house to the ruins of Victoire seemed to Auguste to take all morning. By the time he stood facing the blackened chimney that towered over him like some ancient idol, his legs hurt. He was panting, but the crisp winter air infused vigor into his nostrils and lungs. He sat down to rest on a broken beam that had once held up the ceiling of the great hall.

He was still weak from having been so badly wounded and from lying in bed recovering. And even now his left lung was still not able to fill itself full with air, and probably never would be.

This was the farthest he had ever walked. Too far, really. But the bright December day invited him out of doors, and he wanted to see his land.

_My land._

It was his now, without question. Now that Raoul's body had been found.

He was glad there had been no marks on the body. Glad that the Fleming children, who had found it day before yesterday while playing down in the gorge, hadn't had to see a human body torn to pieces, as he feared Raoul might be found.

Ginnie, the middle Fleming girl, had followed a cardinal into the mine entrance; once the child had seen the body, the little redbird had flown out again and disappeared.

Raoul's rifle and his pistol, both of which he apparently had fired just before he died, lay beside him. His Bowie knife had fallen a short distance away, as if he had thrown it.

When Auguste and Grandpapa had gone to see the body laid out in Dr. Surrey's examining room, Auguste had been shocked to see the grimace of terror frozen on Raoul's face--jaws wide apart, lips drawn back from his teeth, eyes bulging. A good thing the light in the mine had been dim and the Fleming girl hadn't gotten a good look at that face.

Auguste and Dr. Surrey had both carefully examined the body and could find no cause of death. Surrey opined that Raoul had gone mad hiding in the mine and had been frightened to death by his own hallucinations.

Auguste knew what had killed Raoul. He vividly remembered his wanderings in the other world, in that endless prairie, with Redbird.

Auguste could only imagine what the encounter between Raoul and the White Bear had been like. It had taken place in the other world. The White Bear spirit must have attacked and destroyed Raoul's soul--if a soul could be destroyed. Like the men on spirit journeys who died because their souls never returned to their bodies, Raoul's body had been deprived of life. The White Bear could leave its mark in this world when it chose, but usually it left tangible signs as a mark of favor. This time the only mark it had left was that look of terror on Raoul's dead face.

And Auguste had paid the price for having sent the White Bear against Raoul: he had lost Redbird.

_For the rest of my life I will never see a cardinal without my heart breaking all over again._

They would bury Raoul, with a mass, in the little cemetery overlooking the river, just like any other member of the de Marion family. There would be no revenge after death. Père Isaac was coming up from Kaskaskia to officiate.

_And I'm afraid it will not be long before Grandpapa lies down to rest not far from Raoul._

Even as Auguste had begun to get out of bed and walk about, Elysée seemed to be spending more and more time sleeping. One day, Auguste expected, he would simply not wake up at all. Though he mourned in expectation of the old man's passing, it was with a warm feeling that Elysée had done much, had walked a long trail with honor. It was now right that his spirit move on and his body return to the earth.

_I am thinking like a Sauk._

And then it all swept over him in a wave of anguish. He saw the happiness he had lost. He saw the gardens and long houses of Saukenuk, cool and pleasant in the summer, the snow-covered, warm winter wickiups in Ioway. The hunting and fishing, the feasts, the dances. The beloved faces drew close before his eyes--Sun Woman, Floating Lily, Eagle Feather, Owl Carver, Black Hawk.

Redbird.

He gave an agonized shout that reverberated in the stone chimney that towered over him. He beat his chest with his fist again and again, until a bolt of pain shot through him where Raoul's bullet had pierced him. He did not want to stop hurting himself, but he could not hit his chest anymore. His head hung down and he sobbed brokenly.

He had sacrificed too much. He had given up everything he really loved to become a prisoner of this place. He was trapped on this land. The ancient wealth of the de Marions held him in golden chains.

_I could ride away from all this, even now. I could take a horse and swim it across the Mississippi--the Great River--and I could find the Sauk and live with them again. I could be free._

Redbird had said she had become Wolf Paw's woman. Anger boiled him at the thought of that. But he knew it was the healer in her who had chosen that path. As she had said, Wolf Paw was one of the last braves of the British Band, and by healing him she healed the people.

And was he not lying to himself to think he could do anything for the Sauk here? How could he resist the immense power of men like Sharp Knife, who, he was sure, were bent on exterminating the Sauk, on exterminating all the red people on this continent?

To make the de Marion estate prosper he would have to learn to perform a thousand tasks about which he knew almost nothing. He must give all his heart and mind and strength to this domain if it was to flourish. That was the burden Star Arrow, Pierre de Marion, had laid on him. In taking up that burden, might he not forget his other tie, to the Sauk, so far away?

But it was his being a Sauk that chained him so irrevocably to Victoire--the afternoon he smoked the calumet with Star Arrow--the Turtle calling on him to be guardian of this land.

Somehow he must try both to be master of Victoire and to fulfill his destiny as a Sauk.

_This land, right here, once belonged to my people. If I leave it, it will never belong to them again._

_I will dedicate my possessions to them. I will send them what they need. I will use the influence my wealth gives me with the lawyers and politicians to protect them, so they will never be driven from their land again, never be massacred again._

He stood up and walked away from the charred wreckage of Victoire into the fields that surrounded it. The farmhands had planted corn last spring, but the Sauk raiders had burned it, and some prairie grass had come back. It had only had time to grow chest high before the frost killed it, and as he pushed his way through it he could see fields beyond, where the yellow horizon met the sky.

Nancy would share this land with him. She would love him, and they would raise Woodrow together and have children of their own. He loved Nancy, though there were places in him that only Redbird could touch. Those places would be sealed off now. Hand in hand Nancy and he would walk their path together.

The World was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.

But he would never stop missing Redbird and Eagle Feather.

And he would never stop wishing he could live out his life as a Sauk. Inwardly he would always be a Sauk. The Bear spirit would always be with him to guide him.

_I failed the Sauk when they needed me. I warned them not to go to war, but I could not make them listen. They need a shaman who will make them listen._

He thought of the many, more than a thousand, who had died following Black Hawk, and a sudden, crushing grief struck him to his knees.

"Hu-hu-hu-u-u-u-u," he wailed, stretching his arms wide and lifting his face up to look at long, faint streaks of cloud that stretched across the sky. "Whu-whu-whu-u-u-u-u."

He tore open his coat and his shirt. Kneeling, he could see only a patch of blue directly overhead, framed by the tassels of the prairie grass that rose up all around him. Staring up into the blue he wailed for the dead for a long time.

He felt something wet running down his chest. He felt the cold grip of fear on his heart. When he had struck his breast before, had he reopened the hole Raoul's bullet made?

He looked down. Beads of dark red were pushing their way through the five claw scars. Further down his chest they ran together as rivulets. Five streams of blood trickled down his stomach.

The sight of flowing blood lifted his heart. It was a sign that the Bear spirit was still with him. He bent forward and put out his hands to grip the land at the roots of the prairie grass. His fingers dug into the ashes of corn stalks and the roots of grass. A bright red spot appeared on the ground between his hands and knees, and then another.

_My blood drips into the soil. I give myself to this land._

"I hold this land for the Sauk nation," he said. First he said it in Sauk, then he repeated it again in English.

He pushed himself to his feet and drew from its sheath at his waist the knife Star Arrow had left him long ago.

Standing, he could see over the waving grass. He flourished the knife blade at the vast dome of sky covering the prairie. He faced toward the east, whence came those waves of pale eyes that had driven his people from their homes. Whence, too, had come his father and one of his grandfathers.

The last Sauk shaman this side of the Great River held up his knife so the sun glinted from it.

"I will defend this land!" he shouted.

As long as he lived, he would give his blood to this earth.

Afterword

The reader may suspect the author of a bit of frontier-style exaggeration, with one President and three future Presidents--two of the United States and one of the Confederacy--playing parts in this novel. But it's a historic fact that Colonel Zachary Taylor and Lieutenant Jefferson Davis were among the regular Army officers who pursued Black Hawk's people. The two ultimately drew even closer, when Davis married Taylor's daughter Sarah. Davis resigned from the military and took his new bride back to Mississippi, where they settled on a plantation. But the daughter of U.S. President Zachary Taylor was not to be First Lady of the Confederacy; she died of malaria a few months after the wedding. And after the Civil War Jefferson Davis saw the inside of Fort Monroe once again--as a prisoner.

The meeting of Andrew Jackson and Black Hawk in the President's House--as the White House was known in 1832--is also an actual historical incident. When Sharp Knife sent the Sauk leaders on a tour of major Eastern cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, the crowds that came to see Black Hawk greeted him as if he was a conquering hero, somewhat to Jackson's chagrin. But "King Andrew," as his political opponents called him, handily won the election of 1832. During the second four years of his reign Congress enacted into law his policy of forcing all Native American tribes in the U.S. to move west of the Mississippi. Even though the Winnebago and the Potawatomi remained neutral or actively helped the Americans, they also had to give up their land in Illinois and Wisconsin and move westward.

Abraham Lincoln, aged twenty-three, joined the Illinois militia in April 1832, and was promptly elected captain of the Sangamon County company of volunteers. In May, Lincoln was one of those who helped bury the slain militiamen at Old Man's Creek. When his company was disbanded, the men having served their four weeks' enlistment, Lincoln signed up for two more short hitches. He served them as a private, and was finally mustered out in July. His horse was stolen, and he and a friend walked and canoed 250 miles southward to their home, in New Salem, Illinois. Though Black Hawk War veterans tended to make much of their exploits, Lincoln was content to say afterward that the only combat he saw was against flies and mosquitoes. Thomas Ford, Auguste's attorney, served as governor of Illinois from 1842 to 1846. His _History of Illinois_, written in 1847, is one of the sources for this novel.

Other than Black Hawk himself, the most historically prominent Sauk in these pages is He Who Moves Alertly. For the sake of consistency I've translated all the Native American names in the novel into English. Otherwise you'd have met He Who Moves Alertly under the name he's better known by--Keokuk. And I would have referred to Shooting Star, the Shawnee war chief mentioned in Chapters Five and Sixteen, as Tecumseh. But then I'd have had to call Black Hawk by his Sauk name, Makataimeshekiakiak. No wonder Emerson called consistency a hobgoblin.

Also an unfamiliar name today is Michigan Territory as a term for the land north of Illinois through which Black Hawk and his people made their final trek from the Trembling Lands to the mouth of the Bad Axe. That land would soon become the state of Wisconsin. After achieving statehood in 1848, Wisconsin promptly laid claim to the prosperous northern portion of Illinois, including Chicago; but Illinois politicians knew all about clout even then, and beat the Badgers back.

Large parts of Illinois and Wisconsin were lands previously occupied by the Sauk and Fox. In the seventeenth century the Sauk migrated from Canada, driven by wars with the Iroquois, down into what is today eastern Wisconsin. During the eighteenth century they formed a confederacy with the Fox and moved into the southwestern part of Wisconsin and northern Illinois. In Black Hawk's time there were about four thousand Sauk and sixteen hundred Fox, living in villages along the Wisconsin (earlier spelled Ouisconsin) and Mississippi rivers and at the mouth of the Rock River.

With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the U.S. took charge of the Sauk and Fox homeland. In 1804 white settlers attacked a party of Sauk men, women and children, and three whites were killed. As territorial Governor William Henry Harrison demanded, a delegation of five Sauk and Fox chiefs brought one of the accused killers to St. Louis. Harrison used the occasion to negotiate a treaty in which the Sauk and Fox ceded to the U.S. all their land east of the Mississippi, including what is today northwestern Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin, as well as a portion of Missouri. All together the Sauk gave up 51 million acres. For this they got $2234.50 and an annual payment of $1000 worth of goods. Later one of the chiefs who had signed the treaty said that the delegation had been drunk most of the time they were in St. Louis. The prisoner the chiefs had delivered to Harrison was "killed while trying to escape."

Black Hawk never recognized this treaty or later confirmations of it. In defiance, he led his people back to Saukenuk every spring.

There is a gaudy rural playground area in south-central Wisconsin known as the Wisconsin Dells, where local folks will show tourists a cave in which, they swear, Black Hawk was hiding when captured by two Winnebago warriors named Chaetar and One Eye Decorah. But Dr. Nancy O. Lurie of the Milwaukee Public Museum has unearthed a different account of Black Hawk's surrender, written by John Blackhawk, grandson of a Winnebago chief and no relation to the Sauk leader. I find the John Blackhawk version much more probable than the Wisconsin Dells story, and it's the one I've followed, adding, inevitably, my own fictional elaborations. Be it noted that the incident of the small boy who commits Black Hawk's party to surrendering by smoking Wave's peace pipe is not my invention, but is reported in the John Blackhawk manuscript. Tobacco was that sacred to the Native Americans of those times.

Another matter on which historians disagree is the origin of the expression "O.K.," which made its appearance in the American language in the 1830s. Here I propose an explanation (see page 239) that I haven't seen anywhere else, but that, like John Blackhawk's story, makes sense to me. People at that time attached the adjective "old" to anyone or anything they felt affectionate about--Old Glory, Old Ironsides, Old Hickory. By the time he got around to running for President, Zachary Taylor was "Old Rough and Ready." The most popular alcoholic beverage in early nineteenth-century America was whiskey, and the best whiskey was distilled in Kentucky and widely known as Old Kaintuck. It was a jug of Old Kaintuck that Raoul grudgingly shared with Abe Lincoln. It seems likely enough that the nickname Old Kaintuck would in time be shortened to "O.K."--easier to say after you've had a few--and come to mean the good stuff in any area of life.

About the Author

Robert Shea is the co-author of the epic fantasy _The Illuminatus! Trilogy_ and author of the two-volume _Shike_, among other novels. For many years he worked for magazines, and he has been writing novels full-time since 1977. He lives in Glencoe, Illinois.

SHAMAN A man of potent magic and mystical vision

SHAMAN Healer, future-teller, initiate into the mysteries of the spirit world

SHAMAN A story of sacred Indian rites and the land-greed of an expanding new nation

It was a time of bloody confrontation between the white man and the red man, a time when the pioneers of a new nation were pushing out across the Great Plains and yet the powerful spirits of an ancient mystical religion still held sway over the Indians. In this troubled, dangerous time, there is a man who has the privilege--and the curse--of belonging to both worlds. He is Gray Cloud, a disciple of the aging shaman Owl Carver. A handsome young half-breed, he is chosen by the Great Turtle to become the mystical leader of the Sauk people ... and summoned by his French-born aristocratic father to inherit the vast estate of Victoire.

Here is the riveting drama of Gray Cloud's transformation into the powerful shaman White Bear, and his desperate struggle to reconcile the opposing forces of his white and Indian heritage. It is a sweeping epic of mysticism and history, of bitter love and brutal warfare, and of the tragic fate of an ancient people.