“Partly,” Brian Brave Walker said, lowering his eyes with shame to ever have to admit to being part white. His little, thin legs gave way beneath him. He sucked in a quavering breath when Dancing Cloud caught him, preventing the fall.
“How long has it been since you have eaten?” Lauralee asked, reaching a hand to the child’s face to smooth a fallen lock of coal-black hair back from his eyes.
She gasped when he flinched at her touch, wondering how he could hate her so quickly?
“I have fed off berries,” Brian Brave Walker said, looking up at Dancing Cloud as though he had asked the question. He wanted to ignore Lauralee as though she were not there. “My stomach hurts from the berries. I . . . I . . .”
He jerked himself away from Dancing Cloud and stumbled behind some bushes.
Dancing Cloud and Lauralee exchanged quick glances when they realized what the child was doing in private. The single diet of berries had caused him to have a bad bout of dysentery.
Lauralee’s heart went out to the child when she heard him groan with pain as he continued to stay behind the bushes.
Dancing Cloud was torn with what to do. He wanted to go to the boy and comfort him. Yet he did not want to embarrass him while he was in such a terrible state.
Then they heard no more noises. Everything had become stone quiet. The boy no longer groaned and moaned. There was no more sounds of his overactive bowels. There was a sudden strained silence.
“Child?” Lauralee said, trying to get the boy’s response. “Are you all right, child?”
When he did not respond nor reappear, Dancing Cloud and Lauralee ran behind the bushes.
Lauralee felt faint at what she saw.
Dancing Cloud saw the danger of the boy’s condition.
“He’s unconscious,” Lauralee cried, placing her hands to her throat at the sight of the small child lying in the filthy mess, his breeches wrapped around his ankles.
“We must see to him quickly,” Dancing Cloud said, grabbing the boy up into his arms. He looked around, searching with his eyes. Through a break in the trees a short distance away the shine of a rushing stream caught his quick attention.
“O-ge-ye, get one of my shirts from my saddlebag,” he said in a rush of words. “The child will wear that once he is bathed. You will bathe him while I search the forest for the skullcap herbal plant that can be used to better his condition.”
“Dancing Cloud, I’m afraid that he is already too dehydrated to . . . to . . . possibly survive,” Lauralee cried.
Breathless and fear gripping her heart for the child, she ran to Dancing Cloud’s stallion and grabbed a shirt from the saddlebag. She also yanked a blanket out of the bag.
Then she ran and caught up with Dancing Cloud just as he broke through the denseness of the trees and reached the stream. She was glad that the ground leveled off somewhat beside the water. She would be able to minister to the child more easily.
Dancing Cloud lay Brian Brave Walker beside the stream, then turned and left without saying another word.
Lauralee removed the child’s soiled clothes and pitched them into the weeds. She recalled the inner strength that she had learned to grasp onto when she had taken care of the men at the veterans hospital, and drew from it today as she bathed the child and dressed him.
She scooted away from Brian Brave Walker when Dancing Cloud returned and managed to force some of the herbs that he had smashed into a fine powder down the boy’s throat. He followed that with small trickles of water, stopping when the child coughed or sputtered.
Lauralee’s heart skipped a beat when Brian Brave Walker began coughing more earnestly, his arms flailing wildly in the air. “Oh, Lord, he’s choking,” she cried.
She went to him an
d lay him over her lap and hit his back with the palm of her hand. When he began crying and speaking incoherently to her, she knew that at least he was finally awake and that the herbal mixture had made its way on down to his stomach.
“Help,” Brian Brave Walker cried weakly, dizzying even more as he tried to open his eyes. “Help me.”
Dancing Cloud placed his hands beneath the young brave’s arms and drew him over onto his lap. “You are going to be all right,” he said, slowly rocking Brian Brave Walker back and forth. “We will make you well. Then you can tell us where you came from and where your parents are.”
Lauralee jumped with a start when the mention of his parents caused the child’s eyes to open wide and wild.
“No,” Brian Brave Walker cried. “I do not talk . . . about . . . parents . . . ever to you.”
Brian Brave Walker was still afraid to draw any attention to his mother. He always had to remember that her life was in danger so long as the threat of his father was there.