“Are you the sheriff in Elkhorn?”she asked, startling him.
She was looking at his chest.He’d pinned the tin star the judge had given him to his brown wool shirt.It was showing from under his leather vest.
“No.A special deputy, I guess.Only wearing this thing till I find Doc and your husband and the outlaws who took them.”
“You’re doing it alone?”
“That’s my way.”
“I know you are a tracker.”
“Spent a few years working at it.”
“When my husband was in the army, before we were together, he worked with the Indian scouts.That was long before we came here.”
“You’ve known him a long time?”As he asked it, Caleb realized he was prying.But this claim and the cabin were not a situation he ran into every day, and she seemed to want to talk.
“When I was young and still living among my people, I had a husband.We lived east of here on the plains near the river you call the Arkansas.We lived in peace and followed the buffalo.It was a good life.”
Imala looked at the door, and Caleb knew her mind was far away.The Arapaho lived the life of nomads, traveling where the food was plentiful.With the Lakota keeping to the lands farther north and the Cheyenne to the west, her people found themselves facing the hard push of settlers sooner than those other tribes.And they paid a heavy price.
“My family was all killed at Sand Creek.My parents and grandparents.My husband.”
Damn.Everyone knew about Sand Creek.When it happened, most folks back East at the time were sick of bloodshed.The soldiers of the Union and the Confederacy had gone home, bone-tired from fighting.Lincoln was dead.The rebel states were still smoldering, and everywhere, mothers were still grieving.And then word spread of the massacre of women and children and old people out here.
The army said what happened was a disgrace.The colonel—a dog named Chivington—was relieved of his duties.He’d led his troops against a camp of friendly Arapaho and Cheyenne people down by Fort Lyons.Cannon fire and a cavalry charge.The butchery that followed was sheer madness.
There were stories Caleb wished were lies.This was one of them.
“Soon after the attack started, our chief, Left Hand, sent me and some others off with as many horses as we could drive away.If not, I would be dead too.Many times at night, I think of everyone that I left behind, of all those people who were left behind.”
Her face was grim.She was trying to keep her emotions in check, but he saw her clenched fist pressing hard against the tabletop.
“The soldiers attacking our camp were pure evil.”Her voice was strained.“Afterward, I went back and saw what they did.The whites call us savages, but what they did was true savagery.Old women and men.Young women with their babies beside them.Children scalped.Mutilated.Cut to pieces.No one was left.All dead and left in their blood.”
Her eyes flashed at him, and she pounded her fist once on the table.
“The white man is my enemy.I will never forget what they did to my people.”
Fourteen years had not eased the memory or the burning emotion.How could it, Caleb thought.The pain of that loss had carved great slashes deep into Imala’s heart, into her soul.A hundred years would not erase it.
He understood exactly why Smith kept her from town.It was not so much to protect her as to protect some fool who thought the color of his skin made him better.
Caleb knew he was very fortunate he hadn’t taken both barrels of that Greener the moment he pushed that door open.
And he knew better than to offer her easy words.Some wrongs were too deep for comfort handed across a table by a stranger.
They sat in silence for a while as she made a visible effort to compose herself.Finally, she turned her dark eyes to him.
“But you asked about me and Smith.”
Just saying her husband’s name had a gentling effect on her.Softness replaced the tension of her jaw.
“We have been together almost ten years.I went to Wyoming with the survivors of my people.A few years later, when the prospectors came for gold, Smith was among them.He was finished with the army and went to the gold fields but lost his claim when he became sick.”
“What was wrong with him?”
She shrugged.“Sometimes, bad things in life drive out a person’s spirit.The two of us were very much the same.”
