Winter Wind by Nancy Morse

Author:Nancy Morse
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2015-04-14T12:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

“All you can do is hope to forget. Not him, but the pain.”

Jasper Gillette’s words haunted Katie as they rode away from the Oglala village. There were times when she felt herself dissolving into tears, but she dared not let her weakness show. To never touch Black Moon or see his dark eyes again was a torment to her aching soul. It seemed so impossible. One moment he was telling her he loved her, his voice deep and thrilling, and then…

He was gone. Vanished into the snowy wilderness.

It was a slow and arduous journey across the snow-filled prairie, sticking to little-traveled trails just off the Holy Road. At night they made camp in whatever sheltered places they could find and sat close to the fire huddled beneath their buffalo robes.

On the third day the adobe walls of Fort Laramie appeared in the distance. There was always the chance that the soldiers had captured Black Moon and thrown him into a cell as they had done once before when, if she had not rescued him, they would have hanged him.

When they neared the wooden gates of the fort, Katie drew back. “I’ll wait here,” she said.

As Gillette trotted on ahead, she reined her pony toward the lodges that were pitched within bow shot of the fort, inhabited by Lakotas who had come to rely on the white-man. Dismounting, she took a piece of pemmican from her saddle bag and munched on it as the memories flooded back.

It seemed a lifetime ago that her father used to come to the fort to do a little trading and would return to their cabin on the Laramie with ribbons for her hair or a new calico dress. Or when she would accompany him and see the officers’ wives in their fancy lace-trimmed dresses and dream of the day when she could wear such finery. That was before the Army had begun to wage its war against the Sioux. Before the attack on Blue Water Creek that set her on this turbulent path. Before she went east and discovered that all the silks and satins in the world could not compare to feel of elk skin tanned to whiteness. Before this wild country became one big battlefield. Blue Water. Box Elder. Sand Creek. Was there to be no end?

She waited tense and alert until the gates swung open and Gillette rode out.

“He ain’t there.”

Katie sank into deep relief, knowing that Black Moon would prefer death as a free man rather than to be caged like a wild animal in a dank prison cell. Still, the alternative was heart-wrenching. It was customary for the bodies of warriors killed in battle to be left on the battlefield so that the wolves and coyotes and eagles and other animals might feed from their flesh, but as much as it would have honored him to die in a manner befitting a warrior, she could not bear the thought of his bones scattered far and wide over the prairie.

The days passed in a blur of snow-blindness and despair.

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