Yellow Rock by Elle Marlow Page B

We fell in love and I had to engage in a physical fight with her brothers to earn the right to marry her. They beat me to test my worthiness and I survived. I found out later their intent was to actually kill me, so against they were over a white man living amongst them. They tried several other things over the course of a few months and I survived it all. That’s why they think I have medicine. They’re convinced something protects me and I can’t die. Then bad things started happening to their tribe, and a bunch of them became sick. Later, a few had started dying from freak accidents, and again, they’d reached the conclusion that I had caused the bad fortune as some kind of pay back for all the suffering they’d put me through. It got to the point they stayed away from me, fearing that I was the favorite of some type of vengeful god.
    Hoping to change their luck, they agreed for Birdie and I to have our wedding ceremony. To be honest, by that point I was beginning to re-think my relationship with Birdie since she seemed to think about me in the same way that they did. She was afraid of me, afraid if she angered me, something bad would happen. Well, one-day Birdie and I were walking along a running creek when I found my first gold nugget. Gold was the reason why I came out west to begin with. I got really excited, and told Birdie I wanted to enough to buy a ranch. But she didn’t understand, since the Apaches have no use for gold and she nor the tribe were too happy about my wanting to take Birdie to live away from them. Her brothers tried one last time to kill me. One, who goes by the name of Crow Face, had never held a gun before. But, he stole my rifle and waited for me to look for my nuggets by that same creek. Only it wasn’t me. On that day Birdie went to the creek hoping to remove all the gold to keep me from leaving, and Crow Face accidentally shot and killed her. With her gone, there was no reason for me to stay so I left after that, and their tribe continues to experience even more death, suffering and accidents. Then you were captured. When they saw your beauty and your golden hair, they must have figured you were a gift, and they could offer you to me as a way to make things right, as a way to replace the woman they took from me. And now that you’re here, they think we are even and now want me to leave. To once and for all get off this mountain with the hopes their lives will find some peace and normalcy. So convinced that the whites bring more misfortune with them, they will kill anyone one comes near these rocks.”
    “That’s incredible…” Willow whispered, truly stunned by his story. Even more surprised to feel some empathy for the Apaches, to understand Birdie’s fear of losing Dutch, and even more so, to be able to sympathize with the fact that the invasion of their culture wasn’t much different than what the Union had done to the south.
    “I’ve gotten away with mining here and staying, because they owed me something. But now that the debt is paid, they have no fear of killing me if I refuse to go. I’m guessing those lances are the number of days we have left.”
    “So much to think about,” she whispered.
    “There’s one more thing; my name isn’t Dutch, or Yellow Rock by the way.”
    “It isn’t?”
    “No.”
    “What’s your name?”
    “Lucas Rayburn.”
    Willow pondered that for a moment. All this time, she’d put her trust him and she didn’t even know his rightful name—and here he was a high ranking Yankee who’d lived as an Indian. The fact that she wasn’t running, screaming for her life out his door, must have meant she was gaining a foothold on her thinking. Hope began to spring a well inside of her. Maybe she’d be alright after all.
    “How did you get the name Dutch?”
    “Ilene down at the Agave Saloon. I told her my family originally migrated from Deutschland, and she mistakenly thinks I’m Dutch. Ilene is soiled dove, Willow. But I’ve never, not