The Color of Lightning Read Online Free PDF Page A

begun and then abandoned and gone to ruin.
    They stood at the top in the rain, looking north. The rain streamed down out of heaven, obscuring and filling every crevice, dripping from their hats, pouring down the fractured stones, de- stroying the tracks they had been following for two days. They had come nearly a hundred miles with only a brief rest at night in a fire- less camp. They had no more food and the rain was washing away all sign. The horses below were trembling and had trouble walking. Out there in the flatlands and the low swaley valleys the Comanche and the Kiowa could be waiting in ambush and so they could go no farther.
    Along the way they had found remnants of the flesh of Susan Durgan’s scalp and hair where someone had trimmed the scalp into a small round thing to be fitted onto a hoop. To be tanned and decorated with beads and small hawk bells, carried on a pole like a decoration, a heraldic banner.
    “We have to turn back,” said Britt. He felt himself subject to a rage he had never known. It was like a strong fever that burned his lips and forehead but left him poised and still. Contained like some kind of unignited explosive. He turned and slid down from the top of the Stone Houses from rock to rock, smeared with yellow and red clay mud. The others followed him.
    He walked through the heavy, wet grass to his bay horse and for a moment he was outlined against a gray wall of rain. He put his hand across the saddle seat and leaned his head on his forearm.
    “It was Comanche,” he said. “The ones they call Comanche.” “Probably.” Old man Peveler nodded.
    Rain drifted to the south in long columns. Then the sun came clear of the eastern horizon, reluctantly, as if its red light somehow adhered to the level earth. With full light a flock of great birds came up out of the valley of the Red River to the north, their calling noisy and joyful. Hundreds of sandhill cranes lifted from their feeding places out in the flooded bottoms, kiting in the updrafts with labo- rious upstrokes.
    Britt watched them, streaming overhead, towing their insubstan- tial shadows behind them, and he heard the low, flat call of their
    archaic voices as they sailed along some million-year-old migration path. With long necks stretched out they skimmed overhead and called out in their hoarse voices of the joy of air and light and their simple lives of clouds and wind and death by predator at every hand and still they soared and sang. Then there were only a few stragglers and then they disappeared toward the south.

    Chapter 3 ‌
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    h e m e n w h o decided the fate of the Red Indians lived in the east, under roofs of slate and shingle. There were win-
    dows paned with large sheets of glass that looked out comfortably on a dense and busy world. The roofs lined up in slanting layers of coal smoke on each side of narrow streets and these streets were full of hurrying people and vehicles at all hours. Around these great cit- ies, fields like chessboards in snowy whites and tans and the orderly drift of orchards with naked winter limbs. The bells of Philadelphia called out daily in measured peals of the arrival of important ships on the Delaware River. January of 1865 and four degrees of frost. The ice was thick enough on the Schuylkill River at Lemon Hill to support skaters and sleighs and fires made of scrap lumber. Quaker ladies moved across the ice in sweeping skirts. The skates gave them the treasured illusion that they had no legs. They were afflicted with a sort of shy and happy vanity with their own gliding in the smoky snow.
    One of the younger Quaker girls waved at Samuel Hammond, whom she had last seen at the Orange Street Meeting in a trance of praying with his eyes open or thinking of something secular. He did
    not see her and stalked on through the snow with his collar up and a tall, cold silk hat pulled low on his forehead.
    Samuel Hammond was a small man who had just come back from the war. He walked on and caught