Swift Horse

Chapter 2

No more be grieved at that

which thou hast done.

—William Shakespeare

Swift Horse sat in his saddle as he gazed down at the tall, thin white man whose hair was gone, yet whose face was covered with a thick red beard.

“Take your cows,” Swift Horse said flatly, his hand on the rifle in his gunboot. “But this is my last warning to you. Keep your cows from our crops, or else I—”

“Or else what?” Alan Burton, the cowkeeper, said, his right hand resting on a holstered pistol at his right side. “You don’t own the land. It’s free. My cows can run free, and you ain’t gonna do nothin’ about it or you’d have already tried.”

He glared up at Swift Horse. “You’re yeller through and through or else you would have done more than talk when you get so riled about my cows bein’ where you say they shouldn’t be.”

Alan went and untied his cows from Swift Horse’s horse, then waved his right hand in the direction of Swift Horse’s village. “Get on with you, Injun,” he snarled. “Go back to where you belong.”

He started walking the cows toward a part of his land that he had fenced off for them, used only at milking time. He looked over his shoulder at Swift Horse. “Remember this, savage,” he shouted. “This land is free. There ain’t nothin’ you can do about me—or my animals—being on it.”

“You do not know the true interpretation of ‘free,’” Swift Horse shouted back, watching Alan Burton walking away from him. “Let me explain some of the meaning to you, Cowkeeper. If you continue allowing your cows to run free and destroy my people’s crops, you will soon know the true lack of freedom. You will lose the freedom of being able to enter our village to purchase supplies at the trading post. You will be a prisoner of your own making because there are no more trading posts in this area. You are at the mercy of this one that sits amidst my Creek village.”

Alan stopped and turned and glared at Swift Horse. “Your threats mean nothing to me,” he snarled. “I will go to Fort Hill and tell them that you threatened me.”

“Go there,” Swift Horse said with mischief in his eyes. “The soldiers there, under the command of Colonel Harris, have been my people’s ardent friends and allies since my Creek people helped the Americans against the British in the War of 1776.”

Alan glowered, for he did feel alone, more than ever before since his move to Kentucky from Missouri. Not all that long ago his wife and children had been slain by a renegade. He hadn’t found a woman to replace his wife, for there weren’t any settlers close by who had unwed women among them.

Swift Horse wheeled his horse around and rode away, assured this time that he had gotten his point across and that he surely had nothing to be concerned about from the cowkeeper.

Chapter 3

My brain is wild

My breath comes quick,

The blood is listening in my frame.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

It was another autumn day, in which strange strings of cobwebs floated through the

air, attaching themselves to anything and anybody.

Marsha Jane Eveland was fussing to herself as she removed some of those cobwebs from her long golden hair as she came into her cabin after hanging clothes on a line outside the back of her home. Sighing heavily to herself, she turned and looked around at the cabin that until recently had been occupied by only her older brother Edward James.

Upon her arrival, she had stepped into a masculine setting, but she had placed the pretty doilies that she had crocheted on the end tables and on the back and arms of the couch that sat before the fire. She had also placed braided rugs here and there on the oak floor, rugs that she had helped make with her mother while they had lived in Georgia.

“Mama,” she whispered, a sob lodging in her throat at the remembrance of that horrible day when renegades had attacked the wagon that had carried her and her mother and father, as they had been traveling from Georgia to Kentucky. They had left the only home that Marsha had ever known to be near Edward James.

Her father, who had a strange crippling disease, no longer had the strength to keep up their farm, and had thought it best to get the family together again. Marsha knew that her father had agreed to the move for her mother’s sake—“worry wart,” her father had called her mother. Her mother hadn’t been able to get Edward James off her mind from the moment he had left for Kentucky to be a storekeeper at a trading post established in an Indian village.

They had almost arrived at the Creek village when a band of renegades had attacked. Her parents had been killed immediately, but Marsha had managed to survive the attack when what was left of the cavalry, who had been escorting them to Kentucky, managed to chase off the attackers.

But before they fled, Marsha had seen the one-eyed renegade who was solely responsible for her parents’ death. A shudder shook Marsha when she recalled how often she had dreamed of that man and how her dreams of him haunted her.

She turned again and gazed into the rolling flames of the fire as they caressed the huge logs, her heart aching anew after recalling that wretched day. Slowly she turned her eyes upward and found herself gazing at herself in the large mirror that hung above the mantel. It had belonged to her mother, and had originally hung above the lovely mantel in their Georgia home.

How often had her mother brushed Marsha’s waist-length hair for her in front of that mirror as she stood before the fire, warming herself before her day’s activities had begun? She lifted her hand to her hair and ran her fingers through the golden, thick tresses.