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Filled with a deep, cold panic, Mary Beth breathed hard as she grabbed up the rifle she had just uncovered.
She rushed to the front of the wagon, her eyes on her son as he fought the Indian who held him in his arms as he continued riding away from the fight.
“David. . . . David . . .” she whispered as she took aim at the Indian’s broad, copper back.
But before she could fire the rifle, her breath was stolen away as she caught sight of an Indian coming up alongside her wagon. He swept an arm out and grabbed her, causing her to drop her rifle.
“Help me!” she cried as the Indian slammed her across the horse in front of him, his strong hand holding her there on her belly as he rode away from the wagon train. “Oh, please, someone, help . . . Help!”
She could hear bullets whizzing past and knew that someone was trying to save her, but to no avail. The Indian rode at a furious pace and soon had her far from the wagons and riding along that same ridge where she had watched the warriors appear and disappear for most of the day.
She was so terrified, she could scarcely breathe. She was so afraid, she could not even find the strength to fight back.
She just lay there at the mercy of the scarcely clothed man. His face was streaked with red and black paint, his eyes filled with an anger she could feel deep within her soul.
She thought of David.
Some hope came into her heart that she might be reunited with him when she arrived wherever she was being taken, for surely the two who’d abducted them were from the same tribe.
Unless they were renegades, she thought quickly to herself.
She had heard that renegades came from all different tribes.
If David was taken to one renegade’s hideout and she to another, then she might never see her son again.
“Please take me back!” she screamed. “My son! I must find my son!”
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When the Indian spoke back to her, it was in his language, but she did not have to understand the words to know that he was a man who would not listen to reason.
His words were forceful and angry.
Tears filled her eyes and her body flinched when in the distance she still heard gunfire, and then a strange, even morbid . . . silence.
She could only assume who was the victor again.
The Indians, for they had far outnumbered the soldiers.
Mary Beth began repeating scripture from her Bible, murmuring a prayer she had been taught as a child . . . one that she had taught her little son.
“Yea, though I shall walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”
Chapter Four
Terminate torment of love unsatisfied,
The greater torment of love satisfied.
—Eliot
Sharp stars burned in the heavens. Coyotes howled in the distance and an owl called from a smooth-skinned aspen tree. Frogs serenaded the night along the creek beds, and the lonesome song of a loon came to Brave Wolf as he continued onward on his mother’s behalf.
The moon was full, and the night was filled with its milky light, making a path of white along the ground as Brave Wolf and his warriors rode forward on their muscled steeds. Most carried sinew-backed bows of mountain ash, their arrows carried in quivers of otter skin, embroidered in a quill pattern.
In order to conclude this chore as quickly as possible, he and his men stopped only long enough to take brief rests. They slept for only short periods of time, making no exception whether it was day or night.
Brave Wolf hated to waste even another minute searching for the brother who had fought alongside Yellow Hair. As a scout for the white cavalrymen, Night Horse must have led the pony soldiers to where his people had their villages, where the women and children awakened every morning with fear in their hearts, knowing that the pony soldiers might come any day and slaughter them.
