“I guess that’s understandable. But now that you’re back where you should be, you’ll see those animals for what they really are.”
“Yes…yes, I’m sure you’re right,” Meadow said as she turned away from the soldier and stared out one of the windows toward the distant horizon. She was constantly feeling as though she were being punched in the stomach.
“Now, let’s start with these files,” Private Jensen said in a tone that suggested he had already forgotten about their previous discussion. “According to everyone’s assumptions, it was approximately 1862 or ’63 when you were taken captive, so I thought we’d start with the battles that occurred in ’62 and work our way up.”
A strange feeling passed through Meadow. She clasped her arms around herself and drew in another deep breath. The stack of files the private had just placed before her looked ominous and foreign. Was it possible that the entire first two years of her life was hidden somewhere in that pile of papers?
Private Jensen looked up from the stack of papers he had been diligently reading though all day when he heard Meadow yawn again. The chore of reading through the files was his sole responsibility, since Meadow had never learned to read. “I suppose it is rather boring for you to watch me reading all day. How about if I finish this file, and then we’ll go for a walk before it’s time to get ready for dinner?”
Meadow eagerly nodded her head in agreement. Maybe they could walk down by the prison area again, and she could get a better look at the layout of the building.
“Oh, I don’t believe it!” The private held one of the papers up in the air. “It’s all here—all of it.” He jumped up from his chair and hurried to Meadow’s side with the paper clutched tightly in his hand.
Since the scribbles on the paper meant nothing to her, Meadow gazed at the paper for only an instant, and then looked up at the soldier for an explanation. “What, what is all there?” she asked. A tight sensation was beginning to form in her breast.
“Here.” The Private pointed enthusiastically at the paper he held in front of her face. “It’s the rec ords from the attack on your family’s wagon train. It occurred in October of 1863 and thirty-six people were killed, seven were taken captive and eleven escaped.”
A strange sensation crept through Meadow’s body as she stared at the document in the private’s hand. How could one piece of yellowed paper hold so much information? “D-does it s-say who d-died and who escaped?” Meadow asked in a quivering voice.
“It has a complete list on the back,” Private Jensen
announced as he turned the paper over and began to read names out loud. “Simon Phillips—dead; Gene Let—”
“Wait!” Meadow called out. This was happening so fast; in less than a day they had already found the proof that Meadow could not even begin to fathom. Now she had to face the reality that there had been a time when she had been part of another family, her real family—her white family. She drew in a trembling breath and gazed into the puzzled face of the soldier and asked in a weak voice, “The ones who were taken by the Sioux…Does it give their ages as well as their names?”
The private’s attention returned to the paper as he carefully read down the lists of names of those who were taken captive on that long-ago day. Beside each name was written the gender, and next to that was the supposed age at the time of the incident. “Yes, although there are a lot of question marks beside the ages, so I suppose they are mostly guesses.”
Unconsciously, Meadow drew the crocheted shawl she had draped around her shoulders tightly around herself. A small scattering of perspiration beads had just broken out on her forehead. “Th-the ones who were captured…Was there a t-two-year-old f-fe-male?” she stammered.
“Mary McBain,” Private Jensen announced without hesitation. Then, more excitedly, he looked up at Meadow. “You are Mary McBain!” He held the paper up for her to see; then, remembering that she couldn’t read, he turned it over so that he could read it again.
Meadow opened her mouth to speak, but no words
escaped as she continued to stare at the single piece of paper that had just changed her entire life. Mary…Her white name was Mary? How strange that name sounded as it echoed through her mind.
“And you are not going to believe this!” Jensen shouted. He did not give Meadow a chance to respond. “You have a brother who escaped, and, oh…” His voice trailed off as he closely studied the paper again.
“What? What were you going to say?” Meadow demanded. Her head felt as if it were spinning off of her body. She had a brother? What else was she about to learn about her past life—a life that she had completely ignored until this moment?
He glanced up at her and shook his head as though he still couldn’t believe what he was reading. “Well, there have been several notations added to the part about you and your brother. It says here that numerous attempts were made to locate you and the others after your capture. And…” He drew in a deep sigh as he paused to glance down at the document once more.
“And what?” Meadow asked in a quiet tone. “What else does it say?” The feeling that her heart was about to pound out of her chest made her words almost a whisper.
“Your brother—your older brother—was raised by a family right here in Montana. After he grew up, he made several more attempts to find you”—the private smiled widely—“before he joined the army. He’s stationed at Fort Custer, less than a hundred miles from here.”
Meadow felt as if a large band had just tightened around her chest, making it nearly impossible for her to breathe. For an instant the private’s face grew blurry
before her eyes, and she felt as though her legs were about to give out from under her. Words were lost to the ocean of emotions she was experiencing.
A brother? Who had obviously loved her and missed her and tried in desperation to find her for all these years.
“You’d better take a deep breath before you pass out,” Private Jensen ordered. He wrapped his arm around her waist and escorted her to the large leather chair at the general’s desk.
“I know what a shock all of this must be to you. To think of the misery and horror you’ve endured all this time at the hands of those savages, when you could have been living a decent life here with your own kin.”
The soldier’s words jumbled together with Mead-ow’s own tormented thoughts of the news he had just given her about her past. It was all more than she could bear. Unfortunately, the young soldier was victim to the rage she could no longer control. “Losing my real family at such a young age was tragic, and yes, it would have been wonderful to know my brother,” she began in a barely controlled voice, with gritted teeth. Her anger began to show itself as she continued. “But those savages that you speak of took me in and loved me as if I was their own flesh and blood. They raised me and nurtured me and kept me safe when enemies—whites and Indians alike—tried to harm me. And I loved them like my own family, too.”
Her fists clenched tightly in her lap as she went on without thinking first about the words that she was about to say. “I also loved a Sioux war chief—I loved him more than life itself, and if he hadn’t been killed by murderous soldiers, I would have been at his side
for the rest of my life. You talk about savages, Private Jensen. I have known many savages in my life, but they weren’t all Indians!”
The private slowly backed away from her as if he could not stand to be close to her. “I see where your sympathy lies, and it is a shame it is not with your parents and your baby sister and other two brothers who were slaughtered during that attack.” The soldier twirled on his heels and walked out of the general’s office without another word or a glance backward.
Meadow remained motionless at she watched the man’s retreat. His parting words left her feeling as though she had just been kicked in the chest. There had been five children in her family, and only two had survived? The realization of how little she knew about her life with her real family overwhelmed her, and for the first time in her life, Meadow cried for the mother, father and siblings that she had never known.
It seemed as though she had been sitting there in the same spot—in the general’s big leather chair—and crying for hours as fuzzy, faceless images of laughing children and loving parents crowded into her shocked mind.
Then, the happy images turned to horror as she kept picturing the unimaginable—the murder of her innocent brothers, a baby sister and her poor parents. Although she would never know exactly what had happened on that October day long ago, Meadow knew that from this day forward she could never allow herself to forget that in another lifetime she had once been Mary McBain.
Meadow had not left her quarters for three days, other than to make necessary trips to the outhouse. Soldiers silently brought her meals and collected the trays afterward. With the exception of a visit from the general two days earlier, she was being shunned by the entire population here at the fort. The general had only come long enough to tell her that arrangements were being made to send her back to Canada now that they had helped her find out about her family.
She cringed every time she thought about the way she had reacted when the private had told her what had happened to her real family. She couldn’t blame the people here at the fort for thinking that she was heartless and crazy.
But leaving before she had learned anything about Black Horse and the other Sioux prisoners made her feel as if she should beg everyone for forgiveness so that she could stay long enough to get the information she needed.
A loud banging on her door interrupted Meadow’s tortured thoughts. She wiped at the tears welling in the corners of her eyes and glanced in the mirror. Her eyes were puffy and red, and her hair hung in long tangled tendrils over her shoulders. She was wearing her wrinkled sleeping gown.
“Who’s there?” she called out as she attempted to smooth her hair back from her forehead.
“Open the door,” came a stern male reply.
The pit of Meadow’s stomach felt like a lead ball. She did not recognize the voice, and the man on the other side of the door did not sound friendly at all. As she slowly took a step forward, another thundering knock echoed from the door.
“Mary McBain?” the man inquired in a loud voice.
Meadow had just reached for the door handle, but when the man asked for her by her white name, her entire body froze. The sound of the man calling her by her white name seemed to strip her of all her identity. She couldn’t breathe for a moment. Finally, she forced her hand to clasp the handle as her other shaking hand undid the latch. With a deep breath, she pulled the door open and looked up at a golden-haired man with green eyes the exact same color as her own.
“Good Lord,” the man gasped as he stared. “You are the spitting image of our mother.”
There was no doubt who this man was, yet Meadow found it inconceivable that she was actually staring into the face of her own brother. Not one coherent thought entered her mind, and her knees began to feel as if they could no longer support the weight of her body. She felt herself sway forward in the doorway, and in the next instant, her brother was scooping her into his arms.
“I’m f-fine,” she stammered as he sat her in the nearby chair. “You’re just—It’s just—” she mumbled, then fell silent as she continued to stare at the man who knelt in front of her.
“I am your brother, Robert McBain—Lieutenant
Robert McBain,” he announced. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
The concern in his voice sounded sincere, which surprised Meadow, since he had sounded so angry when he had been pounding on her door a few moments ago. “My brother,” she repeated slowly. How strange those words felt to her tongue.
“I realize what a shock this must be,” Robert said. “You were so little when you were stolen away that you don’t remember any of us.” He studied her face again, now that he was so close to her. The color of her hair was almost identical to his own golden blond, and the green of their eyes was a perfect match. But it was her uncanny resemblance to their mother that touched Robert to his very core. He had been fourteen years old when their wagon train had been attacked—the oldest of the McBain children. His memory of both of his parents had never dimmed, nor had his memories of his four younger siblings. Now, he found it hard to believe that the chubby, rosy—cheeked toddler that he had toted around on his shoulders was this confused and haggard young woman he saw before him.
“We have a lot to talk about,” Robert said after a long, uncomfortable silence. “I hardly know where we should begin.” His anger when he had first arrived at her room had faded slightly now that he had met her. When he had first received the wire that his sister was alive and at Fort Keogh, he had been so overjoyed and anxious to meet her that he had immediately requested a leave so that he could go there to get her and take her back to Fort Custer to live with him. Then, when he had arrived today, he had been taken to the general’s
office, where he had been informed that his sister was a traitor to her own people and that she was such an Indian sympathizer that no one here at Fort Keogh wanted to be near her.
This information had so enraged him that he planned to come to her and tell her all of the gory details of how their parents and brothers and infant sister had been slaughtered. He wondered how she would feel about her beloved Sioux then. But when she had opened the door and peered up at him from their dead mother’s face, nearly all anger had fled from him. She appeared to be so lost and helpless that Robert wondered if she had been so abused by those savages that she had lost her mind.
“I can never even begin to understand what you must have been through, but as your brother, I promise you that I will do everything in my power to help you forget the past fifteen years of your life.”
Agreeing with him would have been the easiest thing to do, but Meadow refused to let anyone strip away the good memories—the cherished memories—of her time with the Sioux. “I know what happened to our family was horrible and unforgivable, but please try to understand that the Sioux I was raised among treated me with only kindness and unselfish love. I could never forget—” Her words were cut off sharply when her brother grabbed her roughly and pulled her close to him as he yanked her up to her feet. His hands clasped her arms so tightly that she wanted to cry out in pain, but the shock of his actions rendered her silent.
“I don’t ever want to hear that kind of talk coming out of your mouth again. You hear me?”
Meadow stared up at him. She flinched at the way
his mouth was curled into a hateful snarl and his green eyes had drawn into narrow slits. A weak nod of her head was her only response to his demand. The instant he released his tight hold on her arms, she started to back away from him.
Robert shook his head and let his gaze rake over her coolly. “I was told that you seemed to love those dirty redskins more than you did your own kind. I hoped and prayed it wasn’t true, but I can see for myself that you’ve been corrupted by those savages, and now I’ve got to see to it that every one of those filthy thoughts is wiped out of your head for good!”
Meadow continued to step back until she bumped into the wall and could not retreat any farther. Tightness in her throat and chest made speaking impossible, but remembering how her rash words had caused her to be in this situation in the first place, she realized she would be smart to keep her opinions to herself for a change.
“Now…” Robert began in a controlled tone of voice as he straightened up to his full height and drew back his shoulders as if he were standing at attention. “I think it would probably be best for us to head back to Fort Custer first thing in the morning. You can make a fresh start at Fort Custer, and as long as you keep any love you still harbor toward the Sioux to yourself, there should not be any problems.”
He stepped toward the door as he added, “I’ve spent half of my life trying to fulfill two goals: to find you and then to bring our family’s killers to justice. Well, here you are, now. That just leaves wiping out every one of those Sioux bastards so that no other family has to go through the horrors that ours has. You’d do well,
little sister, to think long and hard about where your loyalties need be.”
Meadow’s body grew numb from the cold that raced through her as she watched this stranger walk out of her room. Before he closed the door, he turned to her and said, “Be ready to leave at dawn.” The hardness in his voice and the look on his face made it obvious to Meadow that a third goal had just been added to her brother’s list: to make sure that she became as much of an Indian hater as he was, or rue the day that she had been reunited with him!
With all the energy drained from her, Meadow fell back onto the bed. How had her life ended up so tragic, when just a short year ago she had been the happiest she had ever been in her entire life? With thoughts of Black Horse in her troubled mind once again, she drifted into a restless slumber. Her dreams were beautiful and vivid, of the brief time they had lived and loved among the towering pines. Was it possible to have loved enough in such a short time to last her an entire lifetime?
When Meadow awoke, the sun had not yet risen. She knew she had no choice but to go to Fort Custer today with her brother, but she silently vowed to somehow return to Fort Keogh and learn more about the Sioux prisoners that were incarcerated here.
With an aching head and a body that felt as if it had been run over by a stampede of buffalo, Meadow slowly readied herself for the journey that lay ahead. She did not feel right taking all of the clothes that the women from this fort had given to her, so she picked out a black riding skirt with a tailored jacket and a simple white shirt. The tall, knee-high boots she had
been given for riding were pure torture to her feet. Although she knew she would never be allowed to wear her soft moccasins or loose-fitting buckskin dress at Fort Custer, there was no way she would leave them behind. Carefully, she packed them in the bottom of the small leather bag that Little Squirrel had sewn for her when she was a young girl. The white wedding blanket was also in her bag. She still slept with it every night.
When a loud knock sounded on her door, Meadow was ready but not anxious to begin a life with her newly found brother. She opened the door before he had a chance to pound on it again. He looked surprised to see that she was ready and waiting for him. Meadow noticed that two soldiers sat on horse back beside two other saddled horses, which were apparently for her and Robert.
“These men are under my command at Fort Custer, and they accompanied me here,” Robert offered when he noticed her eyeing them suspiciously. “Let’s ride,” he added. “If time is on our side, we’ll be at Fort Custer by tomorrow night.”
Meadow nodded in agreement and headed for the smaller of the saddled horses. One of the soldiers jumped down to help her mount up, but Meadow had swung up into the saddle before he was able to reach her. She glanced at Robert. The scowl on his face told her that he did not approve of anything she did, and she was certain that he was wishing now that she, too, had been killed in that attack fifteen years ago.
Without another word, the four riders cantered across the wide expanse of the courtyard. The sun was just peeking above the distant horizon, and there was
very little activity anywhere in the fort, which was why Meadow’s attention was diverted to the movement at the prison barricade. A small group of soldiers carrying rifles walked on each side of a row of handcuffed and manacled Indians. The Indian men walked with their heads bowed and moved slowly, as if they were in great agony. Meadow’s heart began to pound like a drum in her breast. These had to be the Sioux prisoners she had been hoping to see, and they were walking right toward them.
Her instinct was to jump off the back of her horse, run up to the men and hug them all and tell them how sorry she was that they were being held here and treated like dogs, but common sense made her remain in her saddle. Still, she could not leave here until she knew if any of these prisoners were men that she might know from her village.
“Robert,” she called out as she pulled on her horse’s reins and came to a halt. The look of annoyance on her brother’s face when he looked back did not deter her. “Could you please wait here for just a moment? I forgot something back in my room.”
The lieutenant gave a curt nod of his head and glanced at his two comrades with a look of aggravation, but Meadow didn’t wait around for him to change his mind. She turned her horse around and trotted back toward the barracks she had just left. Her hope was that the prisoners would be walking past the same area by the time she reached the hitching post and she would be able to get a look at their faces while she was tying up her horse. In her haste to get away from her brother, however, Meadow reached the building where she had been staying too soon. The bedraggled prisoners were
moving at a pace barely more than a crawl, and they were still too far away for her to see any of their faces.
Meadow glanced back at the trio of men who were waiting for her and noticed that they were all looking in her direction. She finished tying her horse to the hitching post and hurried back into the building. Frantically, she looked around for something to grab so that she could stuff it into her saddlebag when she went back outside, since her brother was undoubtedly watching every move she made. A pink gingham dress hung on the back of the chair, so she snatched up the garment, even though that particu lar dress had been her least favorite of the clothes she had been given to wear.
Feeling as if she was about to explode inside, Mead-ow’s sweating hand could barely turn the knob to let her exit from the room again. As panic flooded through her, she grasped the knob with both hands and yanked the door open. The soldiers and the prisoners were moving right past her when she stepped out into the open. From a distance it had been obvious that they were a pitiful lot, but up close the sight of them caused Meadow’s stomach to twist into a heavy knot. There were about a dozen men. Dirt encrusted their dark skin, and their hair hung in heavy clumps down their backs. They wore filthy leggings, loincloths and nothing else, not even moccasins on their cut and bleeding feet. Meadow fought back the urge to cry at the sight of these once-proud men who were now reduced to nothing more than walking skeletons.
As the men moved past her, none of them looked up, so Meadow stepped forward in an effort to see them more clearly. The dirt on their thin faces and
the scraggly strands of hair that hung over their shoulders made it next to impossible to tell who they were, but as the last couple of men stumbled past her, one glanced up. His dark gaze met Meadow’s without hesitation, and even with all the grime covering him there was no denying who he was. A weak gasp escaped from Meadow, but the strangling knot in her throat prevented her from saying anything or crying out. She grasped the railing of the hitching post for support, because her legs felt as if the bones had just dissolved, and the thudding of her heart had expanded up into her head and made her feel as if she was going to lose consciousness.