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“Father, when I talked with the old Indian, he spoke so highly of his nephew, and how he would make a great chief one day,” Candy said solemnly. “And now it seems that day has come.”
“You actually spent time with the old man?” her father said, his eyes filled with sudden rage. “When? Why?”
“You were away from the fort and everyone else’s attention was on other things,” Candy said. “I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk with him. I . . . I . . . felt so sorry for him.”
“Sorry?” he shouted. “Don’t you know how many innocent white people have been slaughtered by Indians?”
“I have heard the Wichita are not among those who slaughter white people,” Candy said. “The old man said that his nephew, who is now chief, is a highly moral man who seeks peace, not war, with whites.”
She swallowed hard. “Father, you know what you did to that old man was wrong,” she said guardedly. “He told me that it would be hard to find any people of a finer nature than is possessed by his people, the Wichita.”
“And will you still say that about them if they decide to get back at us for what we did to that old coot?” her father snapped.
“Surely they won’t retaliate,” Candy murmured, trying to convince herself, while in truth it turned her heart cold to think of what might happen because of her father’s actions.
“Not if what the old man said about the young chief is true,” she added.
“And since when would you believe a savage . . .” her father began, but stopped, alarmed when a spattering of gunfire and barbaric war cries outside interrupted him.
Candy flinched with alarm at the sound.
Her face drained of color as a cold, stabbing fear entered her heart.
And then she screamed wildly when an arrow shattered the dining-room window and pierced her father’s chest. With a look of shock on his face, he clutched his chest and fell to the floor.
Panic and grief filled Candy’s very being as she went and knelt over her father to feel for a pulse. She could hardly believe that only moments ago they’d been eating and talking.
And now?
What her father had most feared, but would not admit to, had come to pass.
&nbs
p; There was no heartbeat, no pulse. He was dead!
“Oh, Father, what am I to do?” Candy cried, staring blankly at the arrow and the blood that oozed from the wound, spreading along his jacket as if the fabric were a sponge soaking up water.
She knew that she couldn’t stay there any longer.
Her father was dead.
She could do nothing for him now.
She had to think of herself and Malvina, for the war cries, the whooping and hollering and shooting, continued outside the cabin.
“Malvina!” she cried as she looked down the corridor toward the kitchen, just in time to see Malvina stumble from the room, clutching an arrow that had pierced her back and was protruding through her chest.
“Go—” Malvina managed to say before she fell to one side, dead.
Candy gasped in horror. In a matter of moments she had lost the only two people left to her to love.
She was now alone.
Or would she die, too, in the next few minutes?
She knew where she must go, if she could only get there quickly enough. At any moment another arrow could slice through a window and claim her own life. Or an Indian could burst into the cabin and drag her away and . . . violate . . . her, then kill her!
All of her positive feelings about the Wichita had just been swept away in a heartbeat, for she had no doubt it was the Wichita who had come to retaliate for what had been done to one of their own.
