Edge of the Wilderness - By Stephanie Grace Whitson Page 0,7
of the cabin. He sat down on the straw cot eschewed by the men as the probable residence of a few thousand fleas. Glancing behind him to make sure no one was watching, he leaned toward the wall and pulled the mattress up, disturbing a field mouse. As the mouse scampered across the floor, Daniel withdrew the book he had left there in the ancient past. He stroked the smooth leather cover, remembering the day he and Otter had come here seeking Etienne LaCroix to give him news of his daughter down at the mission school. They had found him dead and buried him on the hillside outside the stockade next to his Dakota wife, Good Song Woman. And then they had returned south to the mission school where Daniel told the young woman with the huge blue eyes that her father was dead. It was the first time he had held her in his arms. Even now he could remember how right it had felt.
He opened the book and turned the pages, finally concentrating on one illustration, a sketch of Blue Eyes as a girl. Her father had drawn a tangle of dark brown hair falling across one shoulder. His sketch captured the slight dimple in her chin, the featherlight eyebrows arching over those unforgettable eyes. Her expression in the drawing was defiant. Daniel had seen that look more than once. He knew just how she looked when she was afraid too.
A cold draft blew through the room, and he reached up and rubbed his left shoulder. It always seemed to ache worse when the weather changed. He looked down at the scar running from his elbow to his wrist, remembering when, half-crazed with pain from a gunshot wound to his shoulder and the ensuing fever, he had awakened in a missionary’s barn. When a girl came in to milk a cow, he had grabbed her ankle in a desperate, wordless plea for help. That was when the missionary’s white dog slashed his arm open. He remembered little else of that day until he woke beneath a warm blanket beside the fireplace in the missionary’s cabin. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he had begun to call the girl Blue Eyes. He had continued to do so even when he realized she was Genevieve LaCroix, the daughter of the trader up north.
As he sat on the edge of the now dead trader’s cot staring down at Genevieve LaCroix’s face, Daniel closed, his eyes, relishing the emotion that welled up inside him. The longing was so intense it was almost physically painful, and yet it was the first thing that had sliced through the dullness that had overtaken him in the recent weeks. Perhaps, he thought, he could come alive again, after all.
Looking down at the drawing he reminded himself, You are dead to her now. Sacred Lodge had told him his name was on the list of the men to be hanged. Blue Eyes would probably have heard that. She would think him dead. It was probably for the best, he told himself. The children they had protected during the uprising would give her life new meaning. The missionary Simon Dane would want her. His wife was dead. His children loved Blue Eyes.
Daniel turned his thoughts away from the idea of a union between Reverend Dane and his Blue Eyes. He thought about the white baby they had rescued from a deserted cabin during the uprising. If no one claimed the child, her presence would provide a link between them that would transcend everything that kept them apart. Even if Blue Eyes thought him dead, she would look at the child and remember him. That would have to be enough.
She has friends and children who love her. She is safe somewhere far away from all this trouble. You have no home and no future beyond tomorrow. You are dead to her . . . and that is good.
Still, when he got up to return to his pallet by the fire, Daniel tucked the book that held her image into the wide blue sash wrapped around his waist.
Two
LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is.
—Psalm 39:4
“Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma.” The blonde-haired child they had come to call Hope pulled herself up to the kitchen chair where Genevieve LaCroix sat shelling peas.
“Ma-ma-ma-ma,” Hope said a little louder, rocking back and forth on her bare feet and patting Gen’s yellow calico skirt with one dimpled hand.