Long Knife Read Online Free PDF

ready, even eager, to die, he thought when he heard those cheers: I can’t let all these people think a little thing like a leg could do me in. And so he returned as he had so often in his life to draw upon that reserve of fortitude which lay beyond the known mortal limits, and steeled himself once again for the grim business of enduring.
    The fifes and drums played on, for still another hour, as the surgeon continued his slicing and sawing, his suturing, his tying-off, and the hideous, hissing cauterizing with its roast-meat smell, and his assistant carried off basins of blood. The general no longer let himself consider this phenomenon of being dismembered; he concentrated on the rhythm of the drums, and on the formidable task of remaining conscious, fearing somehow that if he slipped away he would never be able to come back. It’s nought but pain, he thought. You can’t let people think you’d die of pain. If this butcher bleeds me to death, then that’s out of my control, and so be it. But pain, now, I’m responsible for that … He would look up at Lucy from time to time, and verify her presence. If he did not look at her for a while, his roiling mind would play a trick on him, and he would begin to imagine that the feminine hand that was soothing his brow was not hers but instead the shapely small hand he had held in his own so long ago, the hand of his betrothed, the shy-eyed Teresa de Leyba. Where is she now? he thought. Is she even alive? In this wilderness lives are just swallowed up by distance, and names remembered like myths. Like de Leyba, like Vigo, like Father Gibault, like Bowman and Kenton and Boone ….
    Two Lives stood by himself on the fringe of the crowd outside. The brisk, measured music of the fifes and drums went on. Shadows had lengthened in the time the Long Knife had been in the house with the white medicine man.
    It is a long time to have pain, Two Lives thought.
    He looked around at the people who were watching the house: the settlers, the hunters, the black men, the Indians. People he recognized as relatives of Long Knife came out and sat on the porch, talked to those in the crowd, returned to the house, looking grave but calm.
    Standing among these people, Two Lives marveled to rememberthat there had been a time, up until thirty summers ago, when he and most of the other Northwest Indians had not even known that there was this person, Clark, the Long Knife. In those days before the Long Knife came, the tribes had believed what they had been warned of by the British: that the Virginians and Kentuckians were all bad, that they were mad to own all the hunting grounds above the Ohio, and that they should all be killed and scalped and driven out.
    That was what Two Lives had believed in his first life.
    And now indeed the Americans
were
moving in over the Wilderness Road from the mountains of the East and coming in boats every day down the big river, and were building deeper and deeper into the great hunting grounds. So in those warnings the British had been right, too.
    I do not understand how there can be two truths, the chieftain thought. I know only that the Americans were greater than the British and Long Knife is the greatest of them.
    After a while some of the white men came out of the house of the Long Knife. One of them was carrying something wrapped in a sheet. He put it in the back of the medicine man’s wagon.
    Two Lives swung onto his pony and rode from the meadow into the shade of the trees along the road down toward the river. He stopped halfway down the hill and sat on his pony in the humid green shade where the ferns grew, and he waited. Soon he heard the wagon coming down.
    He held up his hand. The two medicine men looked at each other and spoke. The young one with yellow eyelashes pulled the reins and stopped the wagon.
    The older medicine man stood up in the wagon and waited for the Indian to speak.
    “I am Two Lives, of the Puan Winnebago.”
    “I know. It was you that