“She will survive this,” Abraham reassured. “Just you wait and see. Then you can teach her as you have taught everyone else of this village what is dangerous and what is not.” Abraham stepped closer to Swift Horse and placed a hand on his shoulder. “You are a wise man,” he said seriously. “You are a kind-hearted, gentle, wise man.”
“Thank you,” Swift Horse said, smiling at Abraham. He then reached out and stroked the fawn’s back as the tiny animal gazed trustingly back at him. “Take the animal,” he said. “It has trust in its eyes and heart for you.”
“It will be the first thing that I have been free to love,” Abraham said, tears filling his eyes. He gave Swift Horse a humble look. “Again, thank you.”
Swift Horse only nodded and then watched Abraham take the fawn away to his cabin. He looked over his shoulder again at the trading post, his thoughts now again filled with Marsha. Had he not come along and stopped the cowkeeper from taking her, perhaps no one would have ever seen her again.
He knew how scheming a man Alan Burton was, and being now without a wife, who was to say what his plans had been for Marsha? Even thinking of the possibility of that man having taken her to his home with plans of keeping her made a flash of heated hate rush through him. He would make certain that the cowkeeper wouldn’t come close to Marsha again, and he would also do what he could to make her well.
He would send Bright Moon to Marsha. Bright Moon would do his magic, and the beautiful woman Swift Horse now knew that he loved would soon be well again.
His heart warmed as he thought of that moment when she had said thank you through her parched throat and smiled so sweetly at him. The thing that he must do was try to make this up to her by finding the one-eyed man who was truly guilty and at the same time prove that his friend was innocent of such crimes!
Chapter 11
Up, to thy wonted work! come, trace
The epitaph of glory fled;
For now the Earth has changed its face,
A frown is on the Heaven’s brow.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
One Eye had been ready to leave the village when he saw Marsha being brought home in Swift Horse’s arms.
“I must find a way to silence her forever, but cast the guilt elsewhere,” he whispered to himself, glowering as he now watched Swift Horse hurry to his shaman’s cabin. If One Eye had his way, he would kill the shaman so that he could not help the woman.
A sudden thought came to him that made him grin. He shifted himself in his saddle and rode away from the village, smiling even more broadly.
Yes, he had a plan. It would surely work!
He knew how much the cowkeeper was hated by Swift Horse and his people, and even Edward James Eveland, the village storekeeper. The cowkeeper was presently without a wife. Perhaps the cowkeeper could be the person the woman’s brother, as well as Swift Horse, would suspect, if Marsha came up missing. They would think that Alan Burton had taken her!
One Eye would kill Marsha and then plant her dead body in the cowkeeper’s house after he killed Alan Burton.
One Eye would make it appear as though the cowkeeper and Marsha had struggled and that she had been able to stab the cowkeeper with his knife after he had inflicted a deadly wound on her. They would be found dead, together, at the cowkeeper’s house.
Smiling wickedly, One Eye rode from the village. He knew to avoid the area where the hunt was in progress.
While the woman lived, she was too much of a threat to One Eye’s existence, for although no one believed her, she knew that it was he who had killed her parents, and it was apparent that she would stop at nothing to prove his guilt!
He laughed throatily, thinking how stupid Swift Horse was to believe that his one-eyed friend, the chief of the Wolf Clan of Creek, could never do anything as evil as the ambushes and murders that he had done.
One Eye even had the blood of Swift Horse’s very own parents on his hands! He killed for the fun of it, not for what he gained from it otherwise.
Chapter 12
O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!
That shape, that fairness....
—John Keats
“Sis!” Edward James said as she meandered into his store several days later.
He rushed to her as she stopped and teetered somewhat, grabbing for her and holding her steady. “Sis, I told you not to leave your bed today,” he said thickly. “I can do whatever needs to be done.”