Savage Flames

Tears quickly flooding her eyes, she looked up at her Uncle Hiram. “Is…Papa…truly…dead?” she asked weakly.

“Yes, Dorey, he’s dead,” Hiram said thickly. “An Indian did it. I didn’t actually see the attack, but the arrow in your daddy’s chest is proof enough.”

Sobbing frantically, Dorey looked away from both her papa and Uncle Hiram.

Twila ran to Dorey and put her tiny arms around her in a comforting hug, although she knew that such personal contact was forbidden by Massa Hiram.

Still holding Dorey in her tiny arms, Twila dared to look up directly at Hiram.

She had always been afraid of the one-eyed man with his flaming red hair and mean temper. “What ’bout my own pappy?” she gulped out. But she always smiled inwardly every time she recalled how he had lost his eye. She had seen it happen one day while he was whipping another slave. Hiram had momentarily lost control of the whip, and the end of the lash had coiled clumsily around and slapped him in the left eye, instantly blinding it.

“How dare you speak to me!” Hiram spat out. “Don’t you know your place yet?”

Then he shrugged. “Yep, your pappy died, too,” he said, enjoying seeing the misery his words brought to the child’s eyes.

“But…where is my pappy?” she managed to ask between heart-wrenching sobs. “I don’t see him nowhere.”

“And you never will,” Hiram said. He smiled wickedly. “The river took his body away, deep into the Everglades. More’n likely he’s already been eaten by an alligator.”

Twila gasped.

Her eyes widened with fear.

Then she turned and ran toward her mother, who was working in the fields.

Chapter Two

We may affirm absolutely that nothing

Great int he world has been accomplished

Without passion.

—Georg Hegel

As the sun spiraled down through the leaves of the beautiful cypress trees that stood on both sides of the narrow channel of Bone River, Chief Wolf Dancer made his way through the water in his canoe.

He was on his way back to the home he had established amid the swamps, in a place he had named Mystic Island.

The muscles of his arms flexed with each pull of the paddle through the hazy green water, his mind on the vision he had just seen.

The beautiful white woman with golden hair.

He would still be gazing upon her except for the interruption of a white man carrying another white man in his arms. He had seen an arrow lodged in one man’s chest, yet knew that none of his warriors were responsible.

He had taught his people not to do anything that would annoy whites and bring the white man’s soldiers to the Everglade waters.

His Seminole people had learned long ago to of white men, especially those who carried white flags with them, which the whites called “flags of truce.”

All Seminole now knew to call them “flags of deceit,” for most of the Seminole people had been forced off their homeland and sent to what were known as “reservations,” where his people’s pride was stolen from them, as well as their freedom.

His Wind Clan of Seminole had successfully eluded capture and the reservation.

Some white soldiers had tried to reach his island, but none had ever succeeded. As long as he was chief, they would not come and interfere in his people’s lives.

He would think no further about the downed white man, or who he might be.

That was only one more white man who could never do his clan an injustice like so many whites had done to other clans.