by Regina Scott
“That sounds like a good barter to me,” Elijah said.
It had been an eventful day for Elijah, starting with his triumphant return to chapel that morning. He’d felt a little shaky as he had walked in, but he supposed that was normal. After all, he’d survived an illness that had killed many others. His spirits had been buoyed by the entire congregation’s evident joy in seeing him.
“Preechah, Dakota comes!”
Elijah looked up and saw Dakota trotting toward him, with the Gilberts following at a slower pace. The boy’s eyes were bright, his face full of the joy of living that he seemed to carry with him everywhere these days.
Elijah took a deep breath as he exchanged a look with Alice. It was time to tell Dakota about his father. Give me the right words, Lord.
Alice drew near and took a seat beside him while the Gilberts sat on a bench borrowed from the chapel. Dakota assumed a cross-legged position at Elijah’s and Alice’s feet.
“Dakota, Miss Alice and I want to tell you what we were able to learn about your father,” he told the boy.
Dakota’s face grew solemn, probably sensing from Elijah’s tone that the news would not be happy. “Dakota listen.”
Lars translated while Elijah and Alice gently and carefully told Dakota what they’d learned from the colonel who’d known his father, watching all the while for the boy’s reaction. Elijah could see that the Gilberts were worried, too.
Dakota was unblinking and somber at the news of his father’s fate. He paled beneath his light coppery skin, though, and Elijah saw the boy’s hands clench at his sides.
“Lars,” Alice whispered. “Tell him it’s all right to cry.”
“It’s not the Cheyenne way to weep,” Lars said. “I don’t think he feels free to cry.”
“But he’s just a little boy, far from all that is familiar.” Her blue eyes were full of compassion. “Tell him his father would understand.”
Lars did so, and Dakota murmured something in Cheyenne. Lars then translated back to the others what he’d said. “I have no mother. I have no father. I am an orphan.”
Cassie got up and knelt by the boy. Keith followed his wife and put his hand on Dakota’s head. “You tell Dakota he’s no orphan,” he said, “not as long as he has us.”
Dakota threw his arms around Cassie and gave way to his tears.
After a few minutes, when the boy’s sobs had subsided, the Gilberts took him back to their campsite.
Lars, Elijah and Alice watched them go. “He’ll be all right, I think,” Lars said, “once he has time to adjust to the news.”
Elijah agreed. Lawson had never taken an interest in the boy that he had fathered, so he was little more than an idea to Dakota in any case.
“But I probably ought to ride to the Cheyenne reservation in a day or so,” Lars said, “to see if I can find the aunt who raised him.”
Elijah and Alice exchanged another look, wondering if having to give the boy up would break the Gilberts’ hearts.
“Dakota! Dakota!”
The three of them straightened in their chairs and listened. It was a female voice calling the Cheyenne boy, but then whoever was calling added some words in an unfamiliar tongue.
There it was again—“Dakota!”—but softly pitched, as if the caller did not want to call attention to herself. And then they saw her, skirting the alleyway behind their tent—a Cheyenne woman, leading a paint pony, her hand cupped around her mouth to project the voice, but not its volume.
The woman spotted them a heartbeat later and leaped onto her mount, clearly intending to flee. She was quick, but Lars was quicker and caught hold of the paint’s reins before she could drum her heels into the horse’s flank.
Elijah heard him say some quick words in Cheyenne, clearly a reassurance by tone. At the sound of her language in his mouth—a startling thing, Elijah imagined, given Lars’s most un-Cheyenne pale blond hair and light eyes—her eyes grew large as silver dollars. She stared from Lars to Elijah and Alice and back at Lars again.
Lars spoke to her again, his voice calm, as if he were speaking to a wild creature. “I told her I spent much time among the Tsitsistas, learning to track, learning their ways,” he translated for Elijah and Alice.
The woman wore a long buckskin dress, and her feet were shod with fringed leather boots—typical clothing for a Cheyenne woman. She was perhaps a few years younger than Lars—not newly a woman grown but certainly at the height of her attractiveness, with long, loose hair black as the deepest hour of the night and eyes to match, her high cheekbones proclaiming her proud heritage.
“I told her my name is Lars, or Gaurang, as a band of her people called me,” Lars went on, after he spoke to the Cheyenne woman again. “She will know it means ‘Man of Fair Skin.’ I won’t tell her the other name they called me, ‘Corn Hair,’” he added with a grin. He didn’t bother with his surname, as his was too complicated and cumbersome.
The woman pointed to herself and spoke. “I am Winona Eaglefeather,” Lars translated for her. “She named a band of Cheyenne that I knew of from the reservation but that had lived at some distance from the one I stayed with. She says she seeks Dakota, her nephew, who has run away from her village.”
Alice gasped.
Lars allowed his smile to broaden as he nodded. “I will tell her that he is here in this tent city.”
Her relief was obvious, but unlike a white woman, she did not weep or cry out with joy. Her eyes shone like polished obsidian as she spoke.
“She says her heart rejoices,” Lars translated, “and begs that we will take her to him.”
Alice jumped up. “Please, may I fetch the Gilberts back here?”
Elijah knew she wanted to spare him the quick walk to the Gilberts’ campsite. He was tired, he admitted to himself.
As Alice dashed away, Lars explained to Winona what was happening. He told her Dakota had been caught stealing food by one of the townspeople.
Elijah saw the Cheyenne woman’s eyes flash with fury at being told that the man had struck Dakota, but Lars assured her that Elijah and Alice had quickly intervened to stop the beating.
Winona flashed Elijah a look of gratitude and said something.
“She says some whites are good to the Indian, but some are not,” Lars explained. “I will tell her about the Gilberts and that Dakota has been staying with them, and how the older couple loves him. And I will tell her about Dakota’s father’s fate.”
Elijah watched a succession of emotions flash across Winona’s eyes, and when Lars had finished explaining, she spoke again, her tone angry.
“She says the earth has lost nothing without Richard Lawson walking in it,” he said.
Inwardly Elijah had to agree, though he regretted the man’s wasted life.
“Lars, please tell Winona that Dakota will need her now more than ever and that he will be very glad to see her.”
They heard footsteps, and looked up to see Alice and the Gilberts returning, with Dakota leading the way, a curious expression on his face.
Recognition between the woman and the boy was instantaneous. He dashed into her embrace.
Her eyes tightly shut, Winona ran her fingers over the boy’s skinny back and stroked his hair, speaking in a voice hoarse with emotion.
“She says ‘Dakota, where have you been?’” Lars said. “‘I have been searching everywhere for you! I was so worried. Why did you leave, saying nothing to me?’”
Dakota uttered a spate of words.
“He said, ‘I’m sorry, Aunt Winona, I did not mean to distress you. I had to find my father! Four Bears taunted me that I had no father—at least not one who would claim me—that my father was nothing but a white smoke that floated wherever the wind blew. I thought I must prove him wrong.’”
Elijah saw the boy shudder and bury his face against her waist as he said something more.
“He is telling her that he found out today that Captain Richard Lawson is dead.”
Winona bent low, murmuring some
thing comforting to the boy.
The boy’s face cleared a moment later, and he caressed Winona’s cheek as he spoke again.
“He assures her that he is well, though, because the preacher placed him with these people he calls Aunt Cassie and Uncle Keith, and they are very nice to him,” Lars said, pointing to the older couple. “He is telling Winona that Aunt Cassie made the shirt he wears.” The boy, obviously proud, showed it off. “He said, ‘They feed me so I am not hungered as I was when I found my way here. I have good shelter.’”
Elijah looked above the embracing Cheyenne woman and boy, and saw the confusion and distress in the Gilberts’ faces. Elijah knew this was the very thing they had feared, that someone would arrive to claim the boy they had come to care for so much in just a few days.
Winona raised her head then and spoke, and a moment later, Lars translated, “Please tell this man and his wife I appreciate their care for my nephew until I could arrive. I am in their debt. I will take him home now.”
As soon as her words were spoken, though, Dakota erupted like a young cougar suddenly let out of a small box, his voice angry and passionate.
“He says he will not go,” Lars translated. “He says he will never return to the village where they despise him.”
Elijah heard the Dane give Dakota a terse command, and guessed he was commanding that Dakota hold his tongue.
Even with the language barrier, Elijah could tell that Lars was speaking to the boy as if he were an elder male of the boy’s tribe, whom Dakota would automatically respect. He was counting on the strength of the relationship he had built with the boy thus far.
Obediently Dakota hushed, and Lars spoke to Winona in low, urgent Cheyenne.
“I asked her to give the boy a few days,” he said. “He’s had some very bad news today, and he’s still adjusting. Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert, I hope it’s all right, but I told her that you would let her stay with you while she decides what would be the best course and that you’re very good people.”
“Of course we will let her,” Cassie Gilbert said.
Winona crossed her arms and spoke again.
“She says she will sleep by the campfire with Dakota, and she will decide what should be done. She says she would like to talk to the Black Robe and the medicine woman also—she means you, Elijah, and you, Alice.”
Elijah knew Black Robe was a term Indians used to refer to any Christian minister or priest. Alice looked bemused, he saw, at being called a “medicine woman.”
He saw the tension leave Cassie’s face. “Please tell Winona she is very welcome,” Cassie told Lars. “We have food left from lunch, if she is hungry. I imagine she is, since she’s been traveling.”
Lars repeated Cassie’s words to Winona, and Elijah saw a bit of the wariness fade from the Cheyenne woman’s features. Dakota relaxed, too, now that he knew he wouldn’t be wrenched away from the Gilberts—for now, at least.
Keith Gilbert spoke to Lars. “Elijah’s nearly ready to start to lead the service again. Maybe you and the boy could talk Winona into coming? If she sees that Dakota has landed among good people, maybe she’d be more apt to stay with the boy here, instead of taking him back where he’s looked at as something ‘less.’”
Lars nodded. “I’ll see if she’s willing.”
*
Saturday morning there was no chapel service, but Elijah sneaked out of the Thornton tent and walked to the chapel tent for a bit of exercise—and to review the past few days and take stock of what had happened. It was the first time he’d been alone since the lung fever had struck him down.
How You have blessed me, Father, Elijah thought as he looked out over the empty benches. Thank You for restoring my health. Oh, he still tired easily, and Alice continued to watch over him like a hen with one chick, but he could practically feel strength trickling back into his muscles. I am more grateful than I can ever express. I only hope I can bring many others into Your kingdom, since You have left me here to serve You.
He was thankful, too, that the Lord had reunited Dakota and his aunt, just when the boy had needed her the most. Surely only God could have helped Winona find her way to the right tent camp and caused Lars, the only man in Boomer Town who could speak both English and Cheyenne, to be the one to hear her calling her nephew.
God is so good.
Winona had come to the Friday chapel service, with Lars sitting by her to translate Elijah’s words. The Cheyenne woman wasn’t a Christian, and she had told Lars that she was willing to come to the chapel only because her nephew wanted to. But she seemed to enjoy the singing just as Dakota did. Truly music was the universal language, even if the tunes were very different from what Winona must be used to.
He and Lars had devised a plan whereby the two of them would teach Winona and Dakota English in the afternoons, for both had expressed an eagerness to learn. This afternoon was to be the first lesson. It was a good sign that Winona was thinking of staying, wasn’t it, if she wanted to learn their tongue?
Elijah had great hopes that, by learning English, Dakota’s aunt would come to feel at home among the inhabitants of Boomer Town and decide to stay with the Gilberts after the Land Rush. And if the book Winona used to read English was the Bible, so much the better. Perhaps in discussing the meaning of what she read, she would come to share their beliefs, too. He would plant the seeds, and God willing, they would grow and prosper into faith.
More and more inhabitants were pouring into Boomer Town every day, now that the Land Rush was only nine days away. With nothing to confine it, the tent town was expanding. Soon it would blur into the next tent cities north and south of them. Elijah rejoiced that there had been a dozen or more newcomers in the service yesterday.
He and Alice had recommenced their medical and pastoral calls last evening. Fortunately there had been little serious illness after old Mrs. Collins had died, and he had come down with pneumonia—just a few lacerations, an upset stomach or two, a toothache and a few folks who felt increasing anxiety about how they’d fare on the day of the Rush.
Of course, he couldn’t promise any of them they’d be able to stake a prime piece of land with water and excellent land for grazing and putting in crops, but he prayed with each one and urged them to “cast your cares upon Him, for He careth for you,” as the Good Book said. He did assure them that, whatever happened, if they kept close to the Lord, He would bless them according to His will.
Everyone who’d been attending his chapel services assured him that they were going to try to end up near the south bank of the Cimarron where Elijah and his brothers were heading, for they wanted to settle near him and help him build the church.
It occurred to Elijah to wonder about the Chaucers. Hadn’t Horace LeMaster, that fellow who’d denounced him as a hypocrite after the service over a week ago, said the Chaucers were in the territory? He hadn’t run into them around Boomer Town, and neither had Gideon or Clint, so they must be in some other tent city along the border—perhaps the next one in either direction.
Bless them, Father. Help them to let go of the grudge they apparently still nurse toward Gideon, Clint and me, and help them find good claims. But if it’s all the same to You, let them settle somewhere far from us.
Perhaps he’d better get going, he thought, after consulting his pocket watch. Alice had invited him and his brothers to lunch, and he couldn’t wait to see her.
*
Full from their noonday meal, they’d agreed to make their rounds first and meet up with Gideon and Clint at Mrs. Murphy’s tent for supper. A talkative old man had kept them later than they’d intended, and now it was almost eight. They’d have to hurry or they’d be too late to get a meal. As they walked, Elijah had been entertaining her with an account of Winona and Dakota’s first English lesson.
“They’re both very quick to pick up words,” he said. “Winona, especially. I’m guessing she’s already had considerable exposure to English when soldiers such as Dakota’s father visited their camp. And where one of
them doesn’t understand, the other often does and can help. Dakota can name all of the things around the tent. I’m sure it won’t seem like any time at all until they’re fluent—”
His voice trailed off, and Alice looked up to see what had interrupted him as they approached the tent diner.
Folks were milling around outside the tent, talking, while others walked away. From inside the tent came the sound of a woman keening.
“No supper tonight, Reverend,” a man told them as they drew near. “Mrs. Murphy was robbed just before she was to open. Both she an’ her boy got knocked out and all their money from the day before taken—plus a goodly bit of the supper she was goin’ t’ serve.”
“In broad daylight?” Elijah asked, incredulous. “Did anyone see anything?”
“One couple who’d lined up early for supper said they heard a commotion inside, then the sound a’ runnin’ feet away from th’ far side a’ the tent. The man ran around the side of the tent, but all’s he saw was several men runnin’ away with black bandannas on their faces an’ hats pulled down low. He gave chase, but he lost ’em among all the wagons and tents and whatnot. Your brother’s in there, Reverend, talkin’ to Mrs. Murphy and her son.”
“What about the Security Patrol?” Alice asked. “Did anyone report this to them? Are they searching for the men responsible?”
“They come and took a report, said they’d go lookin’ for anyone matchin’ the description of those men that done the robbin’, Miss Hawthorne. But land sakes, once those fellows took their bandannas off, no one would know they were the culprits. It coulda been anyone. Maybe you oughta go on in and see what you can do for Mrs. Murphy, ma’am,” he told her. “I just caught a glimpse, but she’s got a right wicked cut on her forehead.”
“I’ll do that,” Alice said, a sinking feeling swamping her. Everything had been going so well…
*
Elijah followed her. Inside the tent, all was chaos, with tables and benches overturned, tin plates and silverware scattered amid the sawdust shavings on the ground. In the cooking area, pots lay on their sides, with what might have been stew congealed on the sawdust and the sides of the pan. Mrs. Murphy sat in one of the chairs, her son, Sean, holding a cloth to her head and trying to console her, but it was doubtless she could hear her son over her wails of despair.