A shadow crossed Drum’s eyes, and he lowered the hatchet. “Holy woman?” he asked.
Lucia shook her head vigorously. “Yes,” she said, “Holy Woman! Holy Woman!”
Drum shrugged. It did not matter to him one way or another whether he killed the old woman.
He released Aunt Zita and with the hatchet in his hand gestured across the prairie.
“Run, Holy Woman,” he said. “Run!”
Aunt Zita struggled to her feet and, terrified, her face opened and blistering even under the butter, fled across the prairie.
She did not look back.
Stumbling and screaming she ran from the small group by the burning soddy.
She did not look back.
Drum regarded Lucia, who was staring numbly after the fleeing figure of Aunt Zita.
Drum spoke rapidly in Sioux to his men. They brought Lucia’s horse, the horse which Lucia and Aunt Zita used with the buckboard.
The roof of the soddy, with an angry roar, fell between the dirt walls.
Drum now looked again at Lucia, who was still held tightly by the arms by the brave who had torn her from Aunt Zita.
Drum spoke in Sioux to the brave and he released her, and Lucia stood alone, among the Indians. They mounted, except for Drum and two braves.
He looked at Lucia.
“Are you a Holy Woman?” he asked.
Lucia looked up at him, calmly. “No,” she said, “I am not a Holy Woman.”
Lucia watched Drum’s hatchet. It was fastened to his right wrist with a leather thong. He held it in his hand lightly, the blade swinging a bit a few inches above his ankle.
Then she saw him replace the hatchet in his belt, and she felt as if she might faint with relief.
She hardly heard for a moment what he had said as he had replaced the hatchet. Then, she seemed to hear it after he had said it, not when he had actually spoken the words. “Yesterday,” had said Drum, “a white man took a woman of the Hunkpapa.”
Suddenly Lucia screamed and turned to run, but his hands were on her.
She struggled as he took her and threw her to the back of her horse. It wore no saddle. She was held on the animal’s back by the two braves who had not mounted.
Numbly, she felt Drum tearing off her high shoes. She must not be able to slip from them. Then his hands were at her legs, pulling off her long cotton stockings. He shoved up her dress and petticoats. They must not interfere with her being fastened to the horse. Using one of the cotton stockings, Drum twisted it and bound her ankles under the horse’s belly. He twisted the other stocking and bound her wrists together in front of her. Precarious on the unsaddled horse, Lucia’s bound hands, when the braves released her, clutched desperately in the animal’s mane.
She looked at Drum, frightened, but would ask for nothing.
The two braves mounted their ponies.
She was proud, Lucia Turner.
But, too, the girl knew that begging would make no difference, that her pleading or cries, or tears, would have been unavailing.
This young man, now at war, had not made her his captive to release her if she might weep or whine.
He had said that a woman of the Hunkpapa had been taken by a white man.
Lucia knew nothing of this but did know that her body, though innocent, had been selected by Drum to expiate the crime that had been committed against one of his people.
Drum had decided that the penalty was hers to pay. He would make her pay it, dearly, a thousand times over.
But why she?
Was it simply because she was at hand? Might it as well have been another?
Lucia felt sick to her stomach; she knew that it could not as well, in Drum’s eyes, have been another.
She closed her eyes, holding the mane of the horse.
She knew then he would have come for her in any case.
This was a man in whose eyes she had seen, long ago, that she had been wanted, coveted as a possession, like a rifle or a horse; this she had known as long ago as that terrifying morning at the school; this was the man who had not forgotten the terrified girl who had so abjectly, unworthily, cringed from him; this was a man who remembered her well, and scorned her, and who in accord with ugly permissions of war as he understood it, had chosen to return for her, claiming her by warrior’s right because it pleased him to do so, claiming her by the right of the warrior to choose among the undefended, desirable females of the enemy, to slay them, or if he cares, to spare them for his pleasure.
Sick, Lucia knew that it was no accident that Drum and his braves had come to the soddy. It had not been just guns, or food, or the urge to kill and burn; it had been, as much or more than all these things, for her. They had come to fetch her, to bind her and take her away with them.
She opened her eyes and lifted her head.
She would not beg.
And had she done so, what might it have accomplished? It might have amused Drum, or irritated him, and if he were irritated, or when he ceased to be amused, she would be punished, beaten by his own hand or given to Indian women to be taught discipline. A white squaw, Lucia knew, learned obedience quickly at the hands of Indian masters.
Already she felt her fingers growing numb from the stocking that bound her wrists. She moved her ankles, trying to pull free. The knots tightened. She could feel on the interior of her legs the warmth of the horse, the oil of its hair, the scrub of its winter coat.
Drum placed his hand on her thigh, and she shivered, looking down at him.
He looked up into her face. “White teacher,” said Drum, “you belong to the Hunkpapa now.”
Drum mounted easily and, with his six warriors, and his captive, rode from the burned soddy.
They rode first to the school, which was still flaming, the smoke rising and staining the gray sky.
They waited there until the roof had fallen, and the north wall, where the flames were most fierce, collapsed, even the wagon box which had been leaning against it tumbling into the flaming timbers and planks.
It was there only that Lucia, for no reason she clearly understood, wept.
Drum’s hand, holding a rope attached to the halter of her horse, jerked the animal’s head away from the building, and he kicked his mount in the flanks and took his way from the hill, followed perforce by his captive, then six braves. They rode southwest, toward the Bad Lands.
Chapter Fifteen
It was Christmas Eve, in the Bad Lands of South Dakota as well as elsewhere.
Chance blew on his numb fingers, and fumbled with the stone pipe, fearing that he might drop and break it. He thumbed his last pinch of tobacco into the bowl, giving himself the small present he had saved until this night. He struck a match on the bottom of his boot and lit the pipe, and sucked the welcome fire through the dry tobacco, deeply until his tongue burned and he remembered there was such a thing as heat in the world.
Chance couldn’t remember being as cold ever as he had been in the last few days, and the closely guarded cooking fires of Old Bear’s band had scarcely seemed to heat the meat, let alone warm the air. On the way to the Bad Lands two cattle had been killed. These “spotted buffalo” as Old Bear called them, even in English, had been cut into strips and on the march, these strips of meat hung from the necks of the ponies.
Chance took a sweet puff.
Some homesteader, or rancher, he supposed, would send a bill for a herd of cattle to the U.S. Government.
Chance pulled the blanket more closely about his shoulders. He had no coat and the blanket was his only wrap, and that he owed to Running Horse and Winona. He’d even lost his hat somewhere-where he didn’t know-maybe at the Turner soddy, maybe in the run to the school. The teacher hadn’t given it to Running Horse with the medicine kit.