The pale-eyed one looked down into the young man’s face with a kind smile. “Perhaps you have touched more truth than you know. Perhaps, in a way, you and I do belong to the same people. Yes.”
“Your mother?”
“You know of her?” He grinned. “Yes, of course you do. The others have told you, of course.” Then he turned away as a cloud of something dark passed over his face, gazing up at the cloudless spring sky above them as he spoke sadly. “Winter before last, I learned that my mother was dead.
“We knew she had been captured by the Rangers, knew they returned her to the white-tongues, the Pah-kuhs, the ones she lived with before my father captured her to live with the Kwahadi.
“The
Tall One’s eyes wandered to that cloudless spring sky above them too. He could more than imagine how it must feel to be so lonely for your people, filled with so much yearning that your heart seemed as empty as that cloudless sky overhead. How the woman must have mourned, yearning to be returned to the people she loved. There were times when Tall One had imagined he knew just how great such grief was.
But that was before he had come to this life with the Antelope People.
The war chief gazed down at Tall One. “Tell me, my friend—if the white-tongues come for you, will your heart be glad to go back to what you had before?”
The words stabbed him with panic. “No—”
“Or will you find your heart truly broken when they take you back, find yourself missing the rain and wind in your face, the smell of many fires on your skin, the feel of a pony’s muscles at the chase beneath your thighs? Will you long for the feel of this freedom no other man knows?”
“Yes. Yes!” he repeated eagerly. “I would remember. But—I am not going anywhere—”
He interrupted the boy by gently placing his fingertips on the youth’s lips. “I wanted to know. For my own heart. For, you see, Tall One—the soldiers did roam across this country all winter long.”
Tall One tugged the war chief’s hand from his mouth. “I know that as well as any. Our skill in hiding kept us far from the wandering soldier columns all through the winter, even after the camp of Kiowa-Apache and Honey-Eaters was attacked and driven from their lodges, forced to abandon everything they owned.”
“The soldiers are coming, Tall One. I want you to know that. Come a day soon, their Tonkawa eyes will find our village and the soldiers will attack. Come that day, what side will you be on?”
“The People!” Tall One answered strongly.
“Will you fight—and die alongside Antelope warriors—die to protect our women and children?”
“I will! I will!”
“There is nothing in your heart—no remembrance of your time among the white-tongues, nothing that will change what your heart feels now?”
“Nothing.” And then Tall One gazed steadily up into the pale eyes. “If the white-tongues take me by force, then—like your mother—I too will die of a broken heart. Knowing that I have been ripped from my true people, Quanah Pah-kuh. Unlike you, I alone will know that great pain your mother knew. Like her, I too will die of a broken heart.”
For much of last autumn and winter, he had journeyed far, hoping to discover word of the one who had fathered him, perhaps some whisper of where his mother had gone. But from the Little Dried River far to the south, to the Powder River country in the north, no one had heard of Shell Woman, or her daughter, Pipe Woman. More important, no one knew the whereabouts of the tall heads-above white man who had long ago hunted for beaver in the snowy mountains, the one who they said now scouted for the white man’s army in these troublesome days.
This hunt for him would take time, for Bull knew the man he hunted could disappear among the whites like a big fish diving through endless clusters of minnows.
With the coming of spring and the rising of the short-grass like a green blanket spread across the breast of the prairie, Bull had come across Porcupine and all his old friends. This season they rode with the Dog Soldier camps of Tall Bull and White Horse after last summer’s death of Roman Nose and the infuriating standoff on the Plum River. The winter was spent preparing for their new raiding season. As the Kiowa of Satanta and the Brule of Pawnee Killer had raided last summer, as they themselves had raided across the length and breadth of Kan-sas, the Dog Soldiers vowed they would again make the buffalo ground run red with the blood of white men. This year they would push even farther north, push into the country the enemy called Ne-bras-kas, sweeping wider, ranging farther east, before they finally cut south as summer’s long days waned and autumn made its coming known.
