“Wait!” called Chance.
The cabin door shut, and Chance could hear the wooden latch snap into place. The door could not be opened from the outside unless the latch string were, from the inside, thrust through the tiny latch hole in the wood.
Chance puzzled for a time and then pulled his horse to the center of the street between the cabins and continued his journey.
Inside the cabin, Winona, the daughter of Old Bear, leaned against the door, her back pressed against it, her head thrown back, the latch string knotted in her left hand.
She was sick with what she had done.
She had jeopardized the lives of one or more of her own people, perhaps even that of Drum, who was to be her husband. But she could not let the white man ride foolishly to his death, not knowing. Why she could not do this she did not know.
To herself she said, “Good-bye, White Man. Good-bye, Friend of Running Horse.”
Lucia Turner shut her eyes to close out the mud walls of her soddy. She ground her fingernails into the cracked palms of her hands. She felt so dirty, always so dirty.
Lucia sat on a wooden kitchen chair on the dusty floor of the mud soddy she shared with Aunt Zita.
Aunt Zita had been called by the Almighty to bring salvation to the heathen.
God bless the heathen, thought Lucia to herself.
In front of Lucia was an unpainted plank table. This morning she had run a splinter into her finger and had dug it out with a needle sterilized in the chip fire in the range against the north wall. Putting her hand on the table it wobbled. On the table there was a cracked coffee cup, turned upside down so as not to catch the dirt that seemed to drop from the ceiling when the wind blew.
Lucia looked about herself.
The sod bricks of the house were flaking, and a thin line of dust lay along the base of the walls, where spiders chased game among the particles.
In one corner, incongruously, there loomed a high walnut china cabinet filled with porcelain from Saint Louis.
It had stood in the dining room of her father’s house on a thick blue and red rug, now sold, which had come from China on a clipper ship more than forty years before.
The only other large memento of the house, that beautiful quiet stone house in Saint Louis, was the huge brass bedstead with its eiderdown mattress, against one wall, on which Aunt Zita slept.
Lucia slept across the room on a military cot, supplied by the agent, the Irishman McLaughlin, and probably obtained from the quartermaster at Fort Yates.
It was not particularly comfortable but it was as far away as possible from Aunt Zita.
Lucia liked that.
Moreover Aunt Zita prayed aloud at irregular hours and occupied not infrequently the intervals between her devotions with noises of righteous, stentorian slumber.
Lucia listened to the wind outside.
It never seemed to stop blowing.
A bit of dust slipped from the ceiling and filtered its way to the planks of the kitchen table. Lucia brushed some of it from her hair.
Lucia’s fists clenched on the table.
She would leave.
She knew she would.
She would win yet.
Aunt Zita, of course, had simply refused to leave, and had ordered Lucia to dismiss the subject from her mind, and rapidly.
It is here that God has placed us, Aunt Zita had said, and it is here that we belong.
He may have placed you here, Lucia thought, but He didn’t place me here, and I’m leaving.
Leaving!
But how could she leave?
Could she simply pack and hitch up the buckboard and drive away?
That didn’t seem possible.
What of Aunt Zita?
My work, had said Aunt Zita, in this forsaken place is not yet done, and you will stay with me until I have finished.
I want to go home, said Lucia to herself. I want to go home.
Chance was riding toward the western borders of Standing Rock but he hadn’t been much out of the settlement on the banks of the Grand River when a small white building, with chipped paint and a wagon box leaning against its north side, caught his eye.
Curious, he rode up and looked at the school.
There was a padlock on the door, some tumbleweeds caught against the building, and under a bench which stood near the door.
He moved his horse away, over a rise, and happened to see a small boy, Indian, about nine years old, digging with a sharpened stick among some rocks and cactus.
The boy did not pay him attention, but he knew the boy had seem him almost immediately, and then had applied himself again to his digging.
Chance rode up to see what he was doing, and looked, but didn’t see. What was the point of it?
The young Indian had torn up the ground in a hole about two feet deep and as much wide, digging well past the frost line.
“What are you doing?” asked Chance.
The boy did not reply.
“What are you doing?” asked Chance again, this time, as well as he could, putting his question in Sioux.
Immediately the boy looked up and the small brown face broke apart in a wide happy grin.