The Whippoorwill Trilogy - Sharon Sala Page 0,207

from falling down around her knees again, and grinned.

“Here!” he said, and handed her a small leather pouch. “I been savin’ this for our first find. I reckon this is it.”

Letty opened the bag and dropped in the gold, then handed it back to Eulis. Her eyes were shining and there was a look in her eyes he’d never seen before.

A funny feeling came in the pit of his stomach—a kind of knotting, drawing pain that made him want to cry and laugh all at the same time. A feeling that swelled his heart and caused him to choke on whatever he’d been going to say next.

“You did good,” she said softly. “You did real good.”

He swallowed nervously and turned loose of her pants. Letty grabbed them before they fell again, and by the time she was buttoned back up, he’d put the pouch in his pocket, buttoned the flap, and the moment had passed.

That had been then, and this was now. Weeks later, their tiny pouch was only about half full. Enough to know that they would be able to afford food for the winter, but not enough to buy them a decent place to stay.

Little Bird was sad. She’d been sad for many moons now—ever since the spider people had come to Cherry Creek. Before, it had been a joyous place to be. Game had been plentiful, and the chokecherry bushes for which Cherry Creek had been named were always heavily laden with the bitter-sweet cherries. Now everything was wrong. This season the chokecherries had been sparse and the ones that had ripened were small, with a tendency to rot on the bush. The deer that had survived the white men’s indiscriminate hunting practices had gone up to a higher elevation, and the pure water of Cheery Creek that had sustained The People for so long had been fouled by the spider people and their thirst for gold. But what bothered Little Bird even more was that she no longer felt safe in her own tipi.

White men came into their camp almost every night wanting a woman to lie with. Because it was the custom of The People to share their women from time to time, the warriors obliged. But Little Bird hated the white men and their ways. They were brutal and hairy, and smelled foul, as if their bodies were rotting, although they had yet to die.

And today was no different. The morning had dawned cold and gray. Her man was still sleeping beneath his blankets and her cooking fire had gone out. When she got up to relieve herself, she’d been accosted by a white man walking into the camp. He staggered as he walked, and smelled of the white man’s drink. Before she knew it, she was flat on her back with her legs spread and he was fumbling with his breeches.

Little Bird pushed at the man, trying to get him off of her, but he wouldn’t budge, so she reached for the nearest weapon, which happened to be a large rock, and swung it at him as hard as she could. There was a sound, not unlike that of a clay pot breaking, and then he was still.

Little Bird pushed him off her then crawled to her feet. To her surprise, she was still alone. Afraid of the backlash that might occur between the spider people and the Arapaho, she grabbed the man by the arms and began dragging him into the trees.

It quit raining before sunrise. Letty watched the first gray fingers of light pulling aside the curtain of night. As soon as she could distinguish shape and substance, she put on her boots, and crawled out of the tent, leaving Eulis still asleep in his blankets.

After a quick trip to the bushes, she began gathering some dry wood for the fire, although the chore took longer and longer each morning, due to the fact that they were quickly using up all the dead fall. The next time they went into town, they were going to have to buy something larger than their hatchet to cut wood.

Letty didn’t realize how far she’d gone from camp until she heard a twig snap in the bushes. She looked up and then spun around, only to come face to face with a young Arapaho woman.

The woman gasped.

Letty took a step backward and dropped the wood in her arms, just as the woman dropped the man she’d been dragging.

Letty eyed the man, taking in the fact