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Her breath stopped in her throat when she caught sight of a magnificent golden eagle soaring overhead, its beauty highlighted as the sun’s rays backlit its wings.
She watched the eagle until it flew from sight, then she turned to George. “I do believe in dreams,” she blurted out. “My mother is surely out there somewhere, alive. I know it, for I feel her presence strongly in my heart.”
“Shoshana, I know how badly you want to believe that,” George said, reaching a gentle hand to her cheek. “But it was her spirit that came to you in that dream, nothing more.”
Shoshana said no more about it. She didn’t want to argue with him.
She was almost certain that her mother was alive. And if George Whaley didn’t want to believe her, so be it.
But she would not give up her hope of finding her mother. Not now that she was in her homeland, where she had been a child running free with the wind and holding her mother’s love near to her heart.
“Do not fret so much over me,” Shoshana murmured as she gave him a soft smile. “I am a grown woman. I can make decisions on my own, and you know that I am very capable of taking care of myself. I learned that from living at so many forts.”
She gave him one last smile, then left him alone to his thoughts and worries.
George looked out the window. He couldn’t believe that this fort had no stockade. It was not fortified at all.
It was simply a few adobe houses scattered around a dusty square.
He hadn’t felt safe since his and Shoshana’s arrival there. And now that Shoshana was determined to search for her mother, he felt even more vulnerable for her. He couldn’t trust her restlessness.
As soon as possible, he must take her back to Missouri, where they made their home in a huge mansion on the outskirts of Saint Louis.
Until then, he would assign someone to her.
As long as she was with a soldier, he would feel safe enough to allow her some freedom, but he would warn her again about wandering too far and trusting too much in strangers.
If he lost her, he would be only half alive.
“I must get Shoshana back where she truly belongs,” George whispered heatedly to himself. “Missouri, yes, Missouri. We’ll be there again soon!”
His wooden leg and cane thumping against the oak floor, he went toward the door to go and tell Colonel Hawkins, the commander in charge of this fort, his decision to leave.
Chapter Four
Her glorious fancies come from far,
Beneath the silver evening star.
—James Russell Lowell
Chief Storm stood at the entrance of his tepee, watching with much sadness as the children of his Piñaleno River Band of Apache romped and played.
He understood why they did so without smiles today. The sadness in their eyes was caused by the absence of two of their friends, a brother and sister, who were mauled yesterday by a panther while they were playing outside the village.
“The animal responsible must be found and destroyed,” he whispered to himself as he doubled his hands into tight fists at his sides.
Storm, now twenty-five, a man with a square jaw and keen dark eyes, was justly proud of his impregnable stronghold in the Piñaleno Mountains.
It was concealed in a lofty lookout where he and the warriors of their band could scan the valleys and mesas below.
He knew that all saw him as a very able chieftain, for he had kept his people out of the reservations where many other Apache were now confined.
Storm and his warriors were so elusive, the United States Government had given up on capturing them, or perhaps it was because he was known to be a man of peace that the authorities had chosen not to seek him and his people out.
However it was that Storm had kept his people out of the clutches of the white-eyes, he knew that his duties were centered on only one thing: his people’s safety and freedom.
Because of those duties, Storm had not sought a wife. Besides, he remembered too well the hurt his father had felt at losing not only one wife, but two.
