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"Will you go to the fort with me?"
She hung her head. "I'll go, only because you ask me. I would do anything for you."
He smiled, "Thanks… "
"Aiden?"
She called him back as he was about to leave.
"You're the only link I have to the white world. The only real link I want to have. You know my story. You know how I feel inside. Not many know that. I try not to let others see. But… please do not judge me, I couldn’t stand that from you. I do not seek or want your pity, only your understanding."
He nodded. "You've got that."
He came to stand beside her once more. "Lucy, I've got an idea that might make it easier for you. If you'll listen."
"I will listen," she nodded.
"Good, let's get back to camp. We'll talk of it later." He encouraged her.
She nodded and walked back with him.
Gloria came closer to her as the others were eating. "My child is well, you say?"
"Yes, she is happy," Lucy admitted.
"What does she do in their camp?"
"Like all children, she makes friends, she plays and eats and sleeps. Red Feather watches over her all the time, she is the one that lost a child when the soldiers came and killed many of the women and children. She still mourns for her child, but she already loves yours. It will be hard to take her away from her, but I will talk with her."
"It never occurred to me that women and children were killed in your camps. That our soldiers would do such a thing."
"What Custer did was murder, not war. He wages a very sad kind of war. It is the yellow hair one, Custer. It goes both ways. Men like the yellow hair don't think twice about it. He hated the Indians, and the Indians hate him. It is justice, in a strange way. The killings I cannot stop, it will go on until the Indian is no more, but what the white make of him."
"I appreciate anything you can do for her. And…" she reached a hand to touch hers. "I'm sorry they never came for you. But Lucy, there could be an explanation."
"I would go through the gates of hell itself to hear it." She swallowed hard and nodded. "Thank you. It is not that so much as sometimes… I feel white. I am white, but most of the time I do not feel it. I do not think it. But when I am around the whites, I do."
"How old were you?"
"Six."
"Old enough to know what was happening, to know they didn't come, to miss them… "
Lucy stared into her eyes, "Yes… "
Lucy stared at her a moment. "I prayed they would come. I prayed I would be rescued. And then one day I stopped praying and accepted my fate. I found love where I least expected, with them. I became one of them, part of them. I cannot change that. I am not ashamed of it, either. They've been good to me. They never judged me, they were never harsh or unfeeling. They understood somehow, and they waited."
"For what?"
"For me to understand that they loved me."
"I'm very sorry. It must have been very hard for you."
"It was hard for me at first, then it got better. I made friends with other children there, no one looked down on me, or called me white. And now, for some reason… it is hard again. Sometimes… when I am around white people, women mainly, I wonder what I might have missed. I wondered how my world would have been so different, if I'd have liked it or not."
"I can't imagine… "
"It is life." She said sadly.
