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He held his chin high and squared his back. “Busy yourselves at making many travois,” he instructed. “Go and find the dogs and horses that were scattered during the raid. The dead and most seriously injured will travel by travois.”
Soon this was done and the slow journey began to Chief Silver Wing’s village. To prove his worth to his people, Echohawk had chosen to travel on foot, only occasionally accepting Yellow Wolf’s and Helping Bear’s assistance as they walked beside him.
As Echohawk took each step, his weakness worsening, his hate for the raiders deepened inside his heart. Hate was etched inside his heart for all mankind, it seemed. How could he forget that white man who, those many winters ago, raided, killed, and maimed so many of his father’s people? How could he forget the cowardly “Yellow Eyes,” who had recently taken so much from Echohawk and his people?
And now there was another white man whose heart was as evil and black, and whose face troubled Echohawk. Although smeared with ash, he had seen something familiar in his features, yet he could not put his finger on just what.
His thoughts went to a white man that stood out from all of the rest, a man who was everyone’s friend. If not for the kindness of Colonel Snelling, and of the honest traders that Echohawk had become acquainted with at Fort Snelling, he would believe that all people with the white skin were bad.
But he knew that this was not so. It was just a few that he vowed to kill. In time vengeance would be his. One by one the evil men would die. Even if Echohawk had to learn how to fight without his eyesight!
Echohawk’s troubled thoughts went to the youngest of the raiders today. There had been something different about the young lad. Strange, how through the smeared ash he had seen such feminine features.
And there had been some hidden mystery in those dark eyes.
An intense bitterness seized Echohawk, and he vowed that this lad, also, must die. No one involved in the raids on his people would be spared his vengeance.
No one!
The sound of the horses’ hooves behind him made another cause for sadness enter Echohawk’s heart. His beloved horse, Blaze, had been among the missing horses today, and he felt that a man without a horse was only half a man.
This, also, gave him reason to hate—to plan a terrible vengeance.
Chapter 4
Think that the day lost whose low descending sun
views from thy hand no noble action done.
—Bobart
As Mariah drove her mustang endlessly onward, feeling as wild as the breeze that blew, she tilted her face toward the dark night sky. She inhaled a quavering breath, so glad that she was finally free of her tyrant father.
Wearily she lowered her eyes, momentarily closing them. Oh, how they burned from lack of sleep! Her head would nod, and then just as quickly she would become alert again as to why she had not taken the time to sleep in her flight from her father. She must get to Fort Snelling. The colonel would send assistance to the Chippewa as soon as he was aware of their needs.
Oh, God, she lamented to herself, she felt as responsible as her father for the Indians’ desolation, yet she reminded herself that she had been forced to ride with him and his men.
Knowing that, however, did not lessen her guilt. Perhaps it would lessen once she was able to get assistance for the Indians.
“But is it too late for Echohawk?” she despaired aloud. The instant his chieftain father had died, he had become chief of his people. His people needed him, for if he died, they would have lost two chiefs in one attack.
To think of that possibility, and to know that she had been a part of it, though an unwilling participant, made Mariah thrust her heels into her horse’s flanks, urging him faster, into a harder gallop across the land.
Then her spine stiffened as she became aware of the stench that was troubling her nostrils, and soon she caught sight of a black pall of smoke that lay heavily in the air through the break in the trees a short distance away. Clearly she was not far from the ravaged Indian village.
She yanked her reins, causing the mustang to come to a sudden shuddering halt. She studied the low-hanging clouds of smoke, seeing in her mind’s eye what was hiding behind it, the scene of the Indian village having been etched onto her consciousness like a leaf fossilized in stone. She knew that she should make a wide swing around it, to avoid the survivors seeing her and possibly killing her.
But some unseen force made her snap her reins and nudge her steed with her knees, sending her mustang into a slow trot, until she was through the smoke and near enough to the village to see that it was deserted.
Her mustang slowly loped into the village, and she was torn by what to do. Even if she did arrive at Fort Snelling as planned, how could the colonel help the Indians if he didn’t know where they were?
“He’ll know where to look for them,” she whispered to herself.
She urged her horse into a hard gallop away from the burned-out village, knowing that she must get to the fort in haste. The Indians must be found quickly and offered assistance in their time of need and sorrow! And she was anxious to see if Echohawk was among the survivors.
She gazed heavenward. “Oh, God, please let him be alive,” she prayed softly. “Please. . . .”
She rode hard across straight stretches of meadows, then was forced to wind her way through forest land, still fighting the urge to sleep, hunger now joining her miseries, gnawing at the pit of her stomach.
