Colonel Miles said goodbye to me and Muskrat on the morning we left, traveling down the Tongue to the Yellowstone on a mackinaw boat, accompanied by a highly skeptical Fair One, of course. Miles declared he had no hard feelings. He took me aside to whisper than he and his fellow officers had agreed never to mention that I was part of the flight of the Nez Perce. In other words, if I played my cards right, my weeks of degradation and shame could be swept right under the rug and forgotten. Apparently he was thorough. I doubt any of you have heard of the Everett party of tourists, have you? I didn’t think so.

I knew he expected me to be grateful for this piece of nonsense, so I thanked him prettily, then shook the dust off my moccasins before I boarded the mackinaw boat. (The Nez Perce would follow a week later.) Aside from my morals and my wardrobe, the only other thing the good women of Fort Keogh had been unable to remedy was my shoe size.

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-five

And so I came home to Omaha, accompanied by Muskrat Watkins, a beautiful Appaloosa, and the growing conviction that Elizabeth Ann Everett had powerful wyakim, indeed.

Everything looked the same: the sheltering cottonwoods, the brass door knocked shaped like a hand, the deep front porch. The geraniums blooming madly when we left in July were dead now, but the dried-up stalks still nodded in the window boxes, silent testimony to Mother’s state of mind. She ordinarily would have had them uprooted and gone after the first frost.

I don’t know what I expected, but I saw things differently. My first though when the house came in view was, “Gracious, do the five of us really need all that room?” After a season with my Mother the Earth, three stories plus servants’ quarters in the attic seemed pretentious.

My parents were relatively the same, which surprised me at first until I considered the matter. They had no more idea how to deal with my return from the grave than I did. They didn’t know the new Elizabeth Ann, and I was still getting used to her.

Father folded me in his arms and patted my back. He held me out at arm’s length and said, “Let’s go see what there is to eat in the kitchen.” Poor Father. He always thought he could solve the world’s problems with a leg of lamb.

Mother took me in her arms, too, a special event for both of us. She hung on longer and tighter than I thought she would, then released me. Her hands went to her hair. She patted it back in place, looked at me and sighed. “Elizabeth, you’re so brown. Almost like an Indian.”