Sundancer (Cheyenne Series) by Shirl Henke Page B

mountain men did, and lived with us. But he went away often and I was left for High-Backed Wolf and his friends to torment whenever my mother wasn't looking. Sees Much was good to me, but it wasn't the same as having a father to teach me to become a warrior. I lived for the times my father would return, but as I grew older those times were further and further apart. You see, he had a city wife, a white woman and another son, a white heir who counted. I was nothing to him.”
           The bitterness in those words made her wince in empathy. For all her loneliness since the war, Roxanna had spent a happy childhood surrounded by parents and a brother who doted upon her. She waited and he resumed his story, staring into the fire as the twilight thickened.
           “Finally when I was ten years old my father returned. He had been gone for years. Some vestige of conscience, maybe, but I think it was because he couldn't let the savages have something that belonged to him...even if he didn't want it himself. He took me to be educated at a mission over on Big Sandy Creek in Colorado Territory. It was run by a man named Enoch Sterling...the kindest, gentlest soul who ever lived. He'd been a Methodist missionary in Canton, China, for many years. Then something drew him to minister to the Indians. The Cheyenne called him Good Heart, a fitting name.”
           “And you found a father to replace the one who deserted you.”
           Her flash of intuition took Cain by surprise. He nodded. “He never converted me, but he did give me the benefit of his considerable classical education. I can read Latin, even speak Cantonese, the former not very practical out West but the latter quite useful. I stayed with Enoch at his mission for nine years. All the while I kept writing to my father and Enoch saw to it that he answered back now and then, but he never returned to visit me.”
           “What brought you back to the Cheyenne, then?”
           “My mother fell ill the winter I turned twenty. As she lay dying, she sent word that she wanted to see me...I hadn't been much better about visiting her than my father was about me. I came to Leather Shirt's camp while my brother and his friends were off raiding.
           “There had been trouble building between the whites and the Cheyenne during the late fifties. Increasing numbers of whites started pouring across the immigrant trail, settlers bound for Oregon, miners for Montana and California. A detachment of soldiers from Fort Lyon rode down on a camp of Cheyenne where some of our kinsmen lived and massacred them. High-Backed Wolf whipped up a bunch of hotheads in the Dog Soldier Society to take revenge. Weasel Bear was one of them.
           “My mother died the day after I arrived. I felt good that I had come back to see her one last time...until I returned to the mission and found the smoldering ruins. Enoch…” He struggled to say the words, the images still choking him with horror even after nearly eight years.
           “Enoch wasn't dead. They'd tortured him and left him for me to find... My brother's war lance was driven up inside his belly. With his dying breath he pleaded for me not to kill High-Backed Wolf.” His voice broke, but he was so lost in the telling now that he did not realize how it affected the white woman. “I swore revenge on his grave.
           “High-Backed Wolf knew I'd come after him, but he made me work to find him, rampaging across the plains, burning and killing from the Bozeman Trail down to the Staked Plains in Texas. I caught up with him—or he let me finally find him, I was never sure which—when he had returned to visit Leather Shirt's band.
           “Sees Much tried to reason with me. Leather Shirt threatened to kill me, but they both knew neither of us would rest until one was dead.” At length he looked up from the fire and met her eyes. “After I'd killed him, the tribal elders