TC44

Here Smalley got his T crossed. Forty soldiers rode single file up the river. Ten Kuwapi hunters waited at the mouth of the canyon firing arrows as they came up serially. So Smalley ordered a countermarch, which was an even worse tactic. The other ten Kuwapi hunters rolled boulders down on them from the rim of the defile and broke the legs of their horses. After that it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Takoda left Lieutenant Robert Welles alive, tied to a tree, with his hat on and one hand free to scoop up river water to drink. The knot was too far away for him to unravel but he’d live long enough to be found. The officer witnessed Takoda wielding the Shahar Haruach to clean up the bodies of the fallen soldiers, living and dead, as well as their screaming horses.

There were five soldiers on the sick list who didn’t make the raid but were supposed to hold the fort. Surrounded by twenty warriors of the People they delivered up ten Kuwapi women they held as sex slaves and the People were entreated. But while the women were being set upon horses Jashen began to smell something strange, as did Leliel who stood beside him.

After that he grew filled with wonder when he saw the ten wagons of the pilgrims of the Five Corners Free Congregation plodding west along the north bank of the Squaw River. They were close enough to smell but still too far away to identify.

“It’s not a respectable wilderness anymore!” Jashen’s wife muttered to herself in the language and idiom of the whites when she saw how exasperated her husband was over what seemed to be a sudden infestation of white cattlemen and white soldiers and now white settlers.

The Stiffnecks saw the Kuwapi approach and pointed rifles at them, but Jashen saw the lead wagon was driven by a man he recognized from three years prior. Jashen smiled, dismounted, took off his headdress and was recognized in turn. “We meet again, Pastor Joshua Lange,” he said, “just as the Teacher once foretold.”

And the settlers were entirely thrilled by his words, even as they had been when Leliel and and Elin first met them in Missouri.

“Jashen! Leliel!” Joshua brought his own wagon to a halt and jumped down to embrace the young man. The rifles among the wagon train were all lowered and put out of sight. “We have reached our destination!” Lange told them triumphantly. He gave thanks to God not a single member of his flock had been lost to disease or misadventure.

Jashen said, “The army of the whites have taken to hunting the People, but now the hunters have become the hunted. I must hasten to see if my father is well, but I bid you to continue upstream until the river divides in two. When we meet again, Joshua Lange, we shall make you and your people more than welcome.”

That was far more than Jashen ever said to Lange when they first met in Kemen. Joshua was astonished at how well-spoken the young man now was.

The pilgrims of Five Corners Free Congregation first arrived at the future townsite of Headwater at dusk on the last day of August in 1866. There, with their journey finally at an end, they saw four fallen warriors of the People, Left Hand, Half Yellow Face, Kill Eagle, and Hairy Moccasin, lying on a bier of branches taken from woody shrubs. And it was on this solemn occasion when the Kuwapi people and the settlers of Joshua Lange’s group were first gathered all together.

In full view of everyone Chief Takoda spoke words of reverence for Wakan Tanka. Then he struck off the Golden Gift and made the bodies of his dead men disappear. The Stiffnecks were struck speechless.