“Your friends better not try their tricks around here tonight,” he called after her grimly.

Stone Girl had halted on the stable stairs.

“Who are my friends?” she asked.

“Your Injun friends,” he said. “Didn’t they tell you in the inn? They’re burning and massacreeing up the North Branch.”

Stone Girl said nothing. She remained stolid under his hard gaze but inside of her a fierce joy rose. So the Great Spirit had not forgotten his red people. He had not been defeated and banished by the god of the white race. He was still powerful, the protector of his chosen ones. He had put iron into the Indian heart to strike back for their stolen homelands, to drive out the invaders of the forest and rivers of the Original People. Then she went up to Otter Boy in his dark room and told him the news.

Already before dawn they heard men’s voices in the stable courtyard, and when she and Otter Boy came down at daylight, Captain Stanton was leaving the back door of the inn. His eyes darkened at the sight of her.

“Claire, I want you to keep that Indian boy of yours out of sight,” he told her. “Somebody around here may hurt him.”

Then he got on his horse and rode away followed by his men, all with rifles, some on horses but most of them on foot.

Stone Girl turned to see Billy the hostler watching them go.

“They’re going to help bury the poor souls your people butchered,” he said to her grimly. “I hope they teach them savages a lesson. Now get up outa here, boy, like the Captain said and see how you stay up.”

In the days that followed, Otter Boy wasted in his stable room. His dark red color faded. His one joy was to hear the news of Indian successes when his mother came back from the inn in the evening. She told him the tales the refugees had brought, of the cabins, barns, and grain patches burned, of flour and other white belongings scattered through the woods, of a Yengwe boy taken bringing in his father’s cattle from the woods, of a pale-haired girl gone back to their abandoned house for something forgotten and never seen again, of bloody clothes found on the trail to a spring that flowed red from battle. There were other tales she did not repeat, such as a baby found in its cradle with the mark of a tomahawk in its small skull. That was a white man’s lie, she told herself. Indian men had children and grandchildren of their own at home. They did not fight babies.

There was much to relate to him. She told what the refugees themselves claimed had started the war. Some believed it dissatisfaction over the land bought last year from the Indians and opened to settlers. Some said a white man, Stump, was the cause. He had murdered five peaceful Indians and burned their bodies in a cabin. The white people had never punished him for his crime and now the Indians were taking the matter into their own hands.