No Other Man

by Shannon Drake

  "I understand I should fight!"

  "The hardest fights are often those we wage within ourselves. Tell me, Thunder Hawk, when a Sioux brave has two ponies and his neighbor has none, what must the brave do?"

  Thunder Hawk frowned. "Give his neighbor his second pony. We must always look after one another; we must always be generous. We are taught this from birth—"

  "Then you must be generous with this man who is your lather. You will always be Sioux. You will also always be white. You cannot be selfish with yourself. You must share your love with your mother, with your people—and with your white father."

  His grandfather's words had heavily influenced him as had his vision and the words of the holy man.

  But in the end, the main reason he had gone to live with Lord David Douglas was because he learned that Flying Sparrow—Kathryn—was ill. She lost weight daily; she could not sew the buffalo hides into a tipi, a garment, or a inirfleche in which to carry things. She couldn't live where i lie smoke sometimes wafted back into the tipi in winter. Where there might be raids by whites or Crows or other enemies, where she might have to run in the cold and the snow. She needed the care that Andrew Douglas longed to give her. Hawk could begrudge David much, but he couldn't deny that the white man loved his mother. That love was apparent in every move that the man made.

  So he came to discover just what the white blood in him meant.

  Life was different. So different.

  He found himself in a huge house with many rooms. He learned to sit on chairs rather than on the floor.

  He met his white brother.

  His brother was named David, like their father. He spent only part of his time in the United States, in the fine house Lord Douglas built near the Black Hills, because he was being groomed to become the next Lord Douglas, and he was being sent to school in England.

  But no matter how hard Hawk tried to dislike his older brother, he could not do so. The younger David was too much like the older David, interested in everything and everyone around him, intrigued by different cultures rather than repulsed by them. He listened avidly to Hawk's boastful stories about counting coup and the Sioux ways of courage. He was eager to ride with Hawk when he went to visit his Sioux relations. He had a smile that could draw anger from the soul, melting it away.

  As they grew older, they grew closer. When Kathryn died soon after Hawk's seventeenth birthday, his brother mourned with him, kneeling by her coffin throughout the night. For once, Hawk was glad to be part white, glad to have a reason to allow the tears to slide down his face.

  His brother shed silent tears along with him.

  In the years to come, they argued about the American Revolution and the War of 1812. They discussed American politics and British. David went to Oxford.

  And ironically, Hawk was sent to West Point. Appointments were not easily acquired. But as a younger son of a British peer, David Douglas had spent a great deal of time in the employ of the United States Army. Hawk was half British and half American Indian, a most unusual candidate for the military academy, but one of David's very good friends, an aide-de-camp to none other than General Win- field Scott, saw to the appointment. David was greatly pleased by the honor for his son. Hawk, who had yet to realize that he loved his father, was anxious to please him. Also, for the benefit of his Sioux chief, he was determined to learn everything he could about the workings of the

  American army. Another factor influenced him. By this time, admittedly, he had gradually become just as white as he was Indian.

  Neither he nor his father realized at the time why the appointment had come so easily.

  The United States government had nothing against Indians battling Indians. Army patrols often used Crow scouts against the Sioux. "Civilized" Cherokees and Creeks had been used against the Seminoles in the Florida wars.

  Such tactics could work both ways.

  Hawk found himself at West Point. He was a natural student, and the world was opened to him in many ways.

  At first, he was taunted for being Indian. Because of that, he went about scoring some of the best grades in his class and excelling in marksmanship, swordsmanship, and strategy. He made a number of very good friends. Just as he had learned to be a Sioux youth, he discovered the pranks that could be played by young white men. He went to dances, attended balls and luncheons. He engaged in his first affairs, all conducted with the proper chivalry of a future officer. He studied white women even as he studied the great military leaders of the past. In the end he knew every campaign Napoleon had ever undertaken and how and why he'd met with his greatest defeat at Waterloo, the movements of Alexander the Great, and how Jackson had gone about winning the Battle of New Orleans. He also knew that white women could be very different from their Indian counterparts. Many were eager for possessions— they were not at all familiar with sharing. They were often determined at all costs to appear prim and innocent and beyond reproach, yet beneath such appearances, they could be complete mistresses of sensuality. Those young ladies who were most fervently—if secretively!—warned about his red blood were often the most eager to know him. Very early on he began to respond to such curiosity with a cool and courteous contempt. He was both careful and discreet himself, not averse to the charms of an entertaining widow, but always aware of his father's pride in him, and deter- mined tie would disgrace neither his father nor his Indian heritage by bringing disgrace down upon himself.

  He graduated with honors and couldn't wait to see David to taunl him with the fact.

  He took his first trip to his father's estates in Scotland not a month after his graduation. He hadn't known until he arrived there just how dearly he had missed his brother, or even the strength of the bond between them. For the first time in his life he had really understood his father's family and his brother's place in a totally different society. He had been steeped in ancient traditions, ridden the vast boundaries of the Douglas lands, discovered that he belonged in a proud and ancient castle as well as in a tipi. "Learn to love it well, baby brother," David had told him gravely one day. "This is yours," Hawk had returned. "Your world."

  "One day, you may be called upon to protect this world in the name of our family."

  Hawk had told him, "I will be chief; you will be lord."

  "Always, we will be brothers."

  In America, the land was breaking apart. Lincoln had been elected president; South Carolina had seceded from the Union. Shots had been fired.

  The war was begun over states' rights, but one of the rights the South sought was the right to keep slaves. Hawk had spent enough time among the great Northern political homes to learn American politics, and despite his concern for his own people and the never-ending battles on the plains, he felt that he had to fight a different war. In his heart, he knew that slavery was wrong.

  There were Union troops in the West—fighting Indians. He didn't want to fight Indians. The Crow were his natural enemies, but only when he was fighting them as a Sioux. He didn't want to fight Indians as a white.

  But he belonged in the war. He and his brother returned to America. David accepted an invitation from the Federal troops to train men, in order to remain close to his brother.

  Hawk was one of the best horsemen to ever graduate from West Point. Numerous wealthy acquaintances asked him to take on command of militia companies with a higher rank than he might receive from the regular army. As a West Point graduate, he had earned a commission as a second lieutenant, but despite his youth, he was offered command of a cavalry company as a full lieutenant in the regular army. He accepted the commission, and he fought through all the long and arduous stages of the war along the eastern front. After four years of war, he had gained the rank of colonel and been brevated as a brigadier general. With the war over, many of the volunteer officers were desperate for regular army commissions. Hawk no longer wanted his.

  He would be sent west, he knew. To fight the Indians.

  He resigned his commission. Worn and weary from the
years of bloodshed, he went first with his brother to his father's ancestral home. But he was restless. David decided one day it was time to return to the raw Dakota territory, and they traveled together back to America. Hawk realized later that it had been his brother's way of sending him back, because David couldn't stay long. The Douglas lands in Scotland were a small empire. For Hawk, the mountains and wilderness were home. David belonged in the ancestral castle.

  Hawk was glad to return to his father's Dakota house, where he could ride the open plains, the sacred Black Hills. He was glad to sit with his grandfather again and listen to his wisdom. He was glad to remember that he was Sioux. Many things had happened in the years of his absence. While he had been engaged in the eastern theater of war, Minnesota Sioux had gone on the warpath, killing settlers, destroying everything in their wake. The army had come after them, and the Minnesota Indians had traveled west for help from their cousins. The army now said that the Indians must live on the reservations the whites had set aside for them.

  Still, they refused to do so. As yet, in the north, the army hadn't a strong enough presence to force its edicts upon the Indian populace. A brief time still remained with them.

  But every day, more stakes were driven into the ground for the railroad to cross the country. More emigrants teemed west. The war in the East was over. The army was now free to fight the Indians.

  Aside from his joy at being among his mother's people again, Hawk was happy to get to know his father. Proud to be his son. His father had created a cattle empire. Together they worked a vast estate. In turn, Hawk was able to see to his family, his band, and his tribe. When hunting was poor, Lord Douglas brought the family cattle. When the wars began to break out and escalate, Hawk found himself a mediator.

  Then came word that his brother had been killed in a fire.

  He had traveled with his father to Scotland, stared numbly at his brother's coffin, watched as it was set upon the slab within the ancient Douglas vault beside their grandfather's coffin. He had attended the inquest with his father; he had demanded full knowledge of his brother's demise; he had been the power and the fury when his father had not had the strength. All of his rage, however, could not change what had happened: the stables had caught fire. David had died. Lord Douglas had been too broken to remain in Scotland. The estates had been left in the care of Lord Douglas's distant kin, and father and remaining son had returned to Sioux lands.

  Hawk had never imagined the grief that seized him at his brother's death. Yet, that did not seem to compare with his father's loss.

  He had respected his father. His pride had made him determined to be a model son. He had even admired his father.

  Yet now, finally, for the first time, he realized he loved him.

  Watching his father grieve, Hawk thought that at last he truly understood the man who'd been a Scottish peer, yet had the courage to tell the world he had taken an Indian bride as his legal wife and would raise an Indian son along with a properly bred heir. And yet, in David's pain, he never grieved for his elder son as his properly bred heir— he grieved for him as his child, for flesh and blood, for laughter, for love. Lord David Douglas, for all his wealth, position—and white skin—was a good man. A father who deserved the love Hawk had withheld from him while giving it first to his mother, then his brother. In trying not to become too white, Hawk realized, he had betrayed all that his grandfather had told him was important about being Sioux. He had given up the generosity that was demanded by his Sioux heritage. No matter what a man had, he shared. Hawk had failed to share the emotion his father needed most. Now he learned to do so.

  He fell in love. She eased the pain of his loss. Her name was Sea-of-Stars, and she was so named for her eyes, which were brilliantly blue and very beautiful. Her mother was a white woman who had been captured at a very young age. Her father was the war chief Burnt Arrow. Her brother was Black Eagle, an old friend and companion who helped explain to him everything that had happened between the whites and the Sioux and the other Indians in the time that he had been gone.

  Hawk married Sea-of-Stars and divided his time between his father's home and his wife's. They had a child, a son, and the boy was the delight of his life. Little Hawk, the Indians called him. The future Lord Douglas, another Andrew, Hawk's father insisted with pleasure.

  Hawk wondered about that future for his Indian son, and for himself as well.

  But he didn't have to wonder long.

  Smallpox killed Sea-of-Stars, his father-in-law—and his son before the boy had been a month old.

  Again, Hawk grieved. The pain had been so great that he had been blind to all else, even his father's concern.

  But he had been among his wife's people when word had come that the white army was about to attack the Indian village along the river.

  That day, he had fought the soldiers. He had been numbed and cold with his grief, ruled by fury, determined only that no one else in the village should die. He didn't care if he was killed in battle, and he was reckless in the extreme. The soldiers were turned back.

  He collapsed. He had lost more blood than he had imagined. When he awoke, he was in his father's house. David had sat by his bed, nursing him, demanding to know, "My son, you have experienced the grief of a father for his child. How could you wish that pain upon me?"

  David had been right. Hawk had healed, a wiser, graver man. He spent long hours with his father, learning to deal with the grief for his own wife and son. Time passed, never erasing Hawk's loss but easing his pain. Gold was discovered in the Black Hills, and one of David Douglas's expeditions claimed one of the most productive veins.

  More settlers—miners, sutlers, shopkeepers, wives, dance-hall girls, and the assorted children of one and all— began to move into what had been Sioux country.

  When the seriousness of the situation escalated, Hawk found himself in an extremely troubling position. Boyhood friends were among the most violent of the hostiles, men he knew well. As a boy, he had ridden with Crazy Horse, who was near his own age. He had listened to the wisdom of Sitting Bull, who was considered not just a great war chief but a very great holy man as well.

  He knew them; he understood them.

  Such had been the situation when his father had gone east.

  David had not yet come home. His body was due soon. In fact, Hawk had gone to Riley's Trading Station early that afternoon with three of his Lakota cousins to find out when his father's body would be arriving for burial.

  And that was when he had first seen her. The stagecoach should have been long gone with the first of morning's light, but a broken wheel had waylaid it.

  He'd seen a vision of golden beauty and radiant youth bedecked in black and heard her claiming his inheritance.

  She'd spent the night at the station, and she'd come downstairs into the kitchen when he'd been sitting at a back table with his cousins, talking with Riley about the army movements and the danger to hostiles that was forthcoming. He'd seen the coachman, Sam Haggerty, come in; heard him addressing her as Lady Douglas. Then she'd asked him how long it was going to take to reach Mayfair—the Douglas home in a valley off the Black Hills. And she'd very sweetly told him that she meant to keep the mine working, to live in the estate, to make it a home. And no, she wasn't afraid of Indians. Lord Douglas had told her that she wouldn't need to be afraid.

  When old Riley himself would have stood and told her that she'd best be looking out for Lord Douglas, Hawk had dragged him down and hushed him.

  One look at her, and he'd been determined to find out for himself just what trick she thought she played to call herself Lady Douglas.

  And just what games she might have played upon his father. By God, she was young: a third his father's age if that! He tried to tell himself that David Douglas had been no man's fool. Yet it plagued and goaded him that the elegantly beautiful young blond woman might have seduced David into marriage and then ...

  Killed him.

  Not with a gun or a knife but with those
heavily lashed silver eyes. That perfect oval face, ruby lips, breathy laugh. Flashing smile. Perfectly rounded breasts. Supple, graceful, seductive movements.

  She might well have caused him to have a heart attack. God knew, the mere sight of her could cause a heart to beat way too hard, cause a man's breath to catch, the whole of him to harden like quickening steel off a blacksmith's fire.

  If she'd been about to claim to be his stepmother, he was damned determined she'd have other thoughts. And if she had somehow hastened David to his death, then ...

  God help her. She had to be either an impostor—or a murderess!

  It had been easy enough for him and his cousins to slip away, bribe old Sam, change to breechclouts and leggings, paint their bodies and their ponies—and go after her.

  What better way to challenge a white woman on the frontier than stage an Indian attack?

  He'd even bribed old Sam Haggerty, the stagecoach driver, who hadn't been happy about them frightening a "sweet young thing" like his passenger, but then, he'd been just as puzzled by her claim to be Lady Douglas as anybody else might be.

  So Sam had helped them stage the attack. It was easy ...

  Except, of course, that he'd expected something more of a desperate surrender from his elegant blond captive. She'd managed to give him a few good wallops, and with his own knife, she'd nearly managed to make herself a widow in truth. And he could still feel her teeth marks in his shoulder. Whatever else she might be, the woman was a fighter.

  Which might stand her well out here, he thought grudgingly.

  But then he wondered again what her relationship had been with his father, and his heart grew cold.

  He didn't know what had happened, but he was going to find out. David Douglas was dead, and she had made claim to the Douglas name, title, and property.

  Well, fine. But she would find he meant to mete out his own justice—for every little clump of earth, for every single blade of grass and speck of gold dust she had come to take.