The Arrow Keeper’s Song Read Online Free PDF Page B

children.
    Seth closed his eyes and sucked in his breath. He could still hear the pounding hooves of the cavalry, still smell the gunsmoke and hear the screams of the dying as the troopers fired into throngs of women and children. Seth waited for his chance and leaped astride a trooper’s back, dragging a fresh-faced youth (who looked no older than his attacker) from the saddle and plunging his knife into the startled trooper’s chest. He grabbed the dying man’s Springfield carbine as a second bluecoat charged him with pistol blazing. Seth snapped the carbine to his shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The carbine roared. The trooper straightened in the saddle and fired into the air, then toppled backward and rolled across the rump of his horse and onto the ground.
    The advantage was Custer’s that day. The tribe, having lived in peace with the whites, had not expected trouble and was unprepared for such an attack. But when the shooting started and the Seventh Cavalry charged the camp, both men and women fought tenaciously as they struggled to escape. In the confusion of the melee, young Seth managed to lead several families to safety. Hidden among the wooded hillsides, they watched as Yellow Hair and the Seventh Cavalry burned the village and drove off the horses and assembled those stunned stragglers the troopers had taken prisoner.
    Seth wrinkled his nostrils. Even now the stench of death assailed him from the crucible of his memories. He would never forget crouching in the shadow of the white oaks while the soldiers destroyed the lodges. His father, Strong Fox, crawled up beside his son and there in the emerald shadows removed the Sacred Arrows from the bundle. Seth remembered how his father had pointed the Arrows at the soldiers and begun to softly sing. His words could have been spoken by the wind, they came so softly. Words of vengeance and words of death. When Strong Fox had finished, Seth knew that Custer was doomed. Yellow Hair would pay for what had happened on the banks of the Washita, as would the troopers of the Seventh Cavalry. Eight years later he wasn’t surprised to learn how the carrion birds feasted on the bones of the Seventh where they lay, butchered along with Custer in the valley of the Little Big Horn.
    â€œMr. Sandcrane?”
    Seth turned and fixed Willem Tangle Hair in a steel-eyed stare. The tribal policeman looked fit for burying in his frock coat and black trousers, his red hair slicked down and blousy white shirt freshly washed. He nervously fumbled with his flat-crowned black hat as he sat astride a nimble-looking mare.
    â€œI was looking for Tom,” Willem explained.
    Whenever Tom was in Cross Timbers and not working for Allyn Benedict and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he stayed home with his father. A bedroom off either side of a main living room afforded both father and son their privacy.
    Willem could feel the tension. For eight and a half months the former Arrow Keeper’s disappointment and wounded pride had festered. Seth could be as hard and unforgiving as the land itself. “He’s already gone on to church.”
    â€œOh. We were going to ride over together,” Willem replied. He suspected Tom and his father had started off the morning with a quarrel and his friend had left rather than continue the fight.
    â€œWhy don’t you come along with me?” Willem suggested, hoping to bridge the gap between father and son. “You have friends over at St. Joachim’s.”
    â€œThe path of the white man is not my path. The white man’s god does not call me by name,” Seth retorted, then shrugged. “Anyway, I’m a mite dry.” He walked up to the freckle-faced breed, the offspring of an Irish father and Cheyenne mother. Seth winked, patted Willem’s horse, and continued on toward the split-rail corral beyond his house. Within the corral a piebald gelding thrust its muzzle through the rails to nibble at a few blades