Savage Courage (3 page)

“It is truly the right thing that you are doing,” Two Stones said. “But hurry, my son. Hurry. Do not take time to make deep graves. Bury the dead just deep enough so that rocks can cover them and protect them.”

Storm nodded. He gathered together the young braves who were all that remained of his band. Some hurried around collecting rocks, while others began digging shallow graves.

After all were buried, a travois was made for
Storm’s father and they set out, pulling him behind them.

Before long they had found the young girls and Dancing Willow and were telling them what had happened. Then together they started the long journey up the mountainside.

After going only a short distance, Storm’s father passed to the other side. Storm’s heart ached anew at this latest loss.

Remembering that his father had wanted to be with his mother, Storm risked returning to the place of death and buried his father alongside his beloved white wife.

Then Storm returned to the others.

They traveled onward.

Storm was filled with such grief, he found it hard to bear.

“I vow to find vengeance for my people, especially my father and mother,” he whispered to himself. “Some day I shall find the man who killed them . . . that Colonel Whaley!”

Yes, when he was older and strong and ready, he would search for and kill the man responsible for the tragedy today. If he could find the man who was responsible for removing his mother’s beautiful golden hair, he would bring it back and bury it with her!

His mother’s hair had been so lovely . . . like golden silk.

Ho
, yes, Storm might be a half-breed, but inside
his heart and in everything he did, he was one hundred-percent Apache!

He most certainly was not a
pindah-lickoyee
, and today he was no longer an
ish-kay-nay
, a boy.

He was a man with a man’s duties and responsibilities.

His eyes narrowed angrily, he spoke a solemn vow to himself, swearing eternal vengeance against this man called Colonel Whaley.

Should Storm ever get the opportunity, he would make Colonel Whaley pay for what he had taken from Storm today!

I never saw so sweet a face,
as that I stood before.

—John Clare

Arizona, 1888

A bugle blared, sounding officer’s call, awakening Shoshana with a start. Her eyes were wild, her heart pounding.

Again she had dreamed of her mother, whose beloved face she now remembered so vividly, even though for many years it would not come to her.

For so long, everything about that dreadful day fifteen long years ago had been wiped from her mind.

But now, at age twenty, she did remember, and in
this recurring dream Shoshana was once again in the arms of the cavalryman as he carried her on his horse away from the death scene of those she loved.

But the dream was different this time.

In it, as Shoshana turned once again to see the body of her mother one last time, her mother was being carried away by a large and beautiful golden eagle, its huge talons gently, lovingly, gripping her.

The eagle had turned its golden eyes to Shoshana and seemed to have been telling her that he was carrying her mother to safety, that she was alive, and that she would be waiting for Shoshana to find her so that they could be reunited.

“It seemed so real,” Shoshana said, scurrying from her bed. “The dream did . . . seem . . . so real!”

She pulled on a robe and slid her feet into soft slippers, then hurried from her room and went to George Whaley’s bedroom door, where she knocked softly.

After learning so much about her past and George Whaley’s role in it, Shoshana could no longer call him father as she had done until the truth of her background had been disclosed to her.

When she was lost in another world, when she could not recall anything of her past, she had called George Whaley father.

But not now!

Never again would she address him as father!

But she, who had had so much love and respect
for her adoptive mother, still thought of her as the woman who’d taken her in and raised her with all the love of a mother.

Although Shoshana remembered her true mother so very clearly now, she still thought of Dorothea Whaley with the same affection as always.

And even though her adoptive mother had died a year ago from a heart attack, it still seemed strange that she was not there each day with her sweet smile and hugs that always prompted Shoshana to start her own day with a smile.

Today Shoshana was too confused by the dream to smile even if Dorothea had been there.

The dream. What could it mean? It seemed so real!

When she heard a click-clack sound from beyond the door where she now stood with a pounding heart, she knew that George Whaley was coming to the door.

He had a wooden leg, from the knee down.

His right leg had been damaged irreparably by an arrow a few days after he had saved Shoshana and taken her to raise as his own with his wife, who had never been able to have children.

Shoshana and George were now at Fort Chance near the Piñaleno Mountains, a place of beauty so enchanting, it had taken Shoshana’s breath away the first time she had laid eyes on it.

The mountain had a mystical, haunting quality about it, as though—

Her thoughts were interrupted when the door opened and she saw George Whaley standing there, staring down at her with his pale blue eyes. He leaned his weight on a fancy, pearl-handled cane.

Shoshana was struck again by how much he had changed since the death of his wife. His face was lean. His lips had a purplish hue from his own weak heart.

And instead of the thick crop of red hair that she had first noticed that day when he had swept her up onto his horse with him, he was now bald. His frame was no longer large, but instead shrunken and bent.

But in his eyes, Shoshana saw the same love for her that she had seen from as far back as she could remember. His feelings for her surely could not be any more genuine than if he were her true father.

And she had called him father, up until she discovered truths that made him more a stranger than a father.

Now, no matter the hurt it caused him, she only called him father when she was forced to do so.

Suddenly she was again overwhelmed by the dream that had only moments ago awakened her. She felt tears building in her eyes as George took her gently by an arm and ushered her into his bedroom.

“Shoshana, tell me what’s wrong,” he said, turning to gaze intently into her dark eyes.

More and more these days he was struck by her
loveliness. It would be difficult to find anyone who displayed more grace, dignity, and self-possession.

And not only that . . . she was blessed by innate good sense.

She was petite in stature.

Her hair was like her Apache people’s, black and glossy.

Her eyes were very large, dark, and lustrous.

He knew that if she had remained with her people, she would have been the pet of her tribe, who were called “Stately Ones.”

Almost in one breath, Shoshana told him about the dream. “What can it mean?” she asked when she had related the most intriguing part of the dream . . . about the eagle carrying her Apache mother away, then telling her that her mother, Fawn, was still alive.

“Could it be real?” she asked, her eyes anxiously searching his. “Could she be alive? You know how my dreams have often foretold things that later happen. Can this dream mean that my mother is alive?”

She went to a window and gazed from it into the distance, at the vast mountain that stood near the fort.

She had been told that a band of Apache were holed up there, high up in a stronghold, under the leadership of a young chief, Chief Storm.

She
was Apache.

She was keenly aware of the silence behind her, and realized that again George did not wish to speak of the past, especially about that horrible day which she now recalled as though it had happened only yesterday.

She turned to him again. “I know that you would rather not know these things,” she said, her voice breaking. “But as I told you, I felt an eeriness from the very first day of our arrival at my birthplace here in Arizona. It is as though someone is calling to me, especially when I look toward the mountain. It seems that someone is beckoning me there. Might . . . it . . . be my true mother? Can she feel my presence even now?”

She went to George. She gazed into his faded eyes. “Do you hear what I am saying?” she murmured. “Or . . . are you trying to ignore it, thinking I will soon forget these feelings and continue on with my life as I have known it?”

“It is just that I do not know exactly what to say,” George said, uneasy under her close scrutiny and the questions he wished would not be asked.

He walked past her, the cane and his wooden leg making an ominous ringing sound against the oak floor, then sank down into a thickly cushioned chair before a huge stone fireplace.

In his maroon satin robe with his initials monogrammed on its one pocket, he gazed at the slowly burning fire on the grate.

“All that I do know is that I should never have brought you here,” he said ruefully. “I don’t know what I was thinking.” He looked over at her as she sat down on a chair across from him. “I truly thought you would . . .
had
. . . gotten past these feelings. But now I doubt that you ever shall.”

“No, I never shall, and . . . I don’t want to,” Shoshana said, nervously combing her long, slender fingers through her thick, black hair, positioning it over her shoulders. “Since our arrival here, I have felt many, many things. I have felt my Apache people calling to me inside my heart. I feel different from the people here at the fort, even more strongly than that day when I learned just how different I was from the children I was growing up with in Missouri.”

“Yes, and what happened there was unfortunate,” George said thickly. “I should have prepared you for such a situation.”

“Yes, you should have,” she said, recalling that day as though it had happened yesterday. “When that boy called me a savage squaw and held me down on the ground and cut off the tail end of my braids, I knew how much white people, even children my own age, despise people of any skin color but their own. It is so unfair . . . so
evil
.”

“Yes, I shall never forget how you came home crying,” George said, sighing heavily. “Your questions that day came so fast and furious, I found it hard to follow you. You wanted to know why those who you
thought were your friends treated you in such a way, and why you would be called such a name. I know how it hurt you inside when that child cut off the ends of your braids.”

“And you told me that, yes, my skin was different, and to go and look in a mirror so that I would see what everyone else saw when they looked at me,” Shoshana said. “I did. I looked into a mirror. I saw nothing different about myself that day than any other day when I played with those children. And I knew long ago that my skin was different from those other children’s, but I was never treated differently. I knew that I was an Indian, but until that day, no one approached me with prejudice. I was happy. I . . . I . . . felt loved.”

“When I first brought you home, Dorothea and I wanted you to feel loved and to be happy. We especially hoped that you could forgive the wrongs and injustices done to your people on that day,” George said softly. “We always felt such love for you. We . . . I . . . especially, felt I owed you so much. You brought something into our lives that we could never have had otherwise.”

“After that incident at school, I was afraid what else the children might do to me,” she murmured. “I . . . I . . . was afraid to go to school the next day.”

“I didn’t know that,” George said, feeling a sudden sharp pain in his gut to know she had felt such
fear. “I’m sorry, Shoshana. I had hoped that it would never come to that.”

“But you surely knew that it would,” Shoshana murmured. “You were raising an Indian child.”

“As I explained before, I saved your life, Shoshana, while others around you were dying,” George said thickly. “I wish I could paint a better picture of that day in your mind, but I can’t. What happened . . . happened. It was the way of the military back then to—”

“Please don’t say any more about it,” Shoshana said, interrupting him. She did know that he had saved her, yet moments before he had done that, he had been killing her people.

And, yes, it was the way of the military to do those things back then; just as now the army was forcing her people off their land and into reservation life.

After finally remembering the truth about everything, Shoshana had begun to question her loyalty to a man who had had a role in the slaying of so many people of her own kind.

That day he had come into her village with gunfire splattering all around Shoshana and her mother, she had thought that she had been the sole survivor. But now? She truly believed that her mother had somehow survived as well.

Had her mother been injured that day, badly
enough to have been rendered unconscious, yet alive, after all? Had someone found her and taken her to safety and cared for her wounds? Could she be thinking about Shoshana even now, hungering to have her in her arms as Shoshana now hungered for her true mother’s embrace?

Now, so close to where it had all happened, Shoshana knew she must seek answers to the questions that plagued her.

George saw something in Shoshana’s expression and eyes that troubled him. He rose from the chair and took her hands, urging her to her feet.

He did not want to feel how she tensed as he drew her into his embrace, something that happened often now that they were in the land of her ancestors.

He cursed the day he had decided to come to Arizona. He should have known something like this might happen.

But what had happened to her was so far in the past, he had thought it could not affect the present.

When she gently pushed him away from her, his heart skipped a beat, but he tried to put aside his own pain in order to reason with her.