Chapter 2

He awoke with an urgent need to relieve himself. He sat up in the bed and found that he was feeling a lot better. When he got to his feet, he discovered he was able to walk without help. He made it to the outhouse and was just exiting when he heard the girl coming back to the house leading a horse and softly talking to it.

She saw him and asked how he felt. He told her that he felt amazing considering that he had been shot the day before. She made eggs with a tin of beef from his gear for their breakfast as she explained that her mother had learned English from the Catholic priests that taught at the school on the reservation. Her mother had taught it to her but not to her brothers. She had told her not to let anyone know that she could speak English. That’s why she had never spoken to him when he had passed by on his patrols.

As they were finishing breakfast she asked about my grandfather and what his plans were for his future. He told her that he was getting out of the army the next week and that he was planning on going back to Mississippi. He had always dreamed of owning a farm. He knew of one he would like to buy but he thought he did not have enough savings to purchase it. She said it was time to bury her family. She had already hauled the bodies to where she wanted to bury them. It was a place down by the river where the ground was not as hard as up by the house.

As they walked around the back of the house, he noticed the bodies of the men he had killed. They were all laid out side by side. He had seen plenty of dead men before and that did not bother him. What did startle him was the fact that each man had been scalped!!

“You scalped the men I killed!” he exclaimed.

“I dragged them all out of the house last night while you slept. You killed four of them. The one you shot in the back was alive but could not move. I let him lay there all night wondering what was going to happen to him.

This morning I let him watch as I scalped his friends for you. Then I cut his throat and scalped him while he bled to death. His scalp is mine since I killed him. I will put them on our lodge pole. Let us not talk about this now, we have four graves to dig.”

They dug the graves and placed the bodies in. They were shallow graves and after they were covered with dirt, they placed rocks from the river over them to keep the animals from digging them up.

It was lunch time when they were done at the grave site. He opened another tin of beef as she made the frybread. She told him she did not know much about money or buying things as she had never been to a town, much less inside a store. She wondered how much money “they” would need to buy the farm he wanted back in Mississippi. He thought he would humor her and said it would take about $10,000. to purchase it. That is when she said that she had not counted ‘it’ but she thought “we” might have more than that in the barn. Grandfather jumped up and told her to show him what she was talking about.

In the barn he saw that she had all the pistols and rifles of the ‘bad men’ laid out on a blanket next to their saddles and bridles. On another horse blanket were four sacks with U. S. Army stamped on them. Clearly the stolen payroll! Alongside that was another sack of paper money that had come from a bank the men had robbed. It took over an hour to separate and count it. In all they had over $40,000 in $20 gold coins and almost $10,000 in paper money.

She looked at him with those big doe eyes of hers and asked if it was enough. He found himself lost in those eyes. Her left eye was black from where one of the men had slapped her. She had bruises on her arms and legs where the men had held her while they raped her. But at that moment she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen! He knew he was in love with her and wanted her with him for the rest of his life.

He told her where the money had come from and that they were going to keep it for themselves. They would have to keep it hidden until they got to Mississippi.