I stared at Hawk. I opened my mouth to scream again, but he took my bloody face in his hands and pressed his forehead against mine. “Shh, shh, shh,” he crooned, doing a fine imitation of the Nimiipuu mothers who rode so patiently day after day with hungry little ones.

When I was silent and breathing regularly again, he turned his back to me. He looked toward the wrangler, who was making horrible gargling noises. “I could kill him, but he’s doing such a fine job right now that I will let him continue,” he told me in a most conversational tone.

Hawk gave me time to pull my skirt down the rest of the way and try to cover my bare front before he turned around again. I might have been more successful at covering my breasts, but my hands shook too much. Silently, he took off his blue shirt and helped me into it. He did up the buttons as I shivered, then rolled up the shirtsleeves. He brushed the hair out of my eyes, and tied it back again with the rawhide strip that had fallen out in my struggle.

I flinched and drew back when he gently touched my swollen eye that throbbed and pounded. The blood started to dry up where I had bitten through my lip, but the pain, oh the pain. The wrangler lay still now. Hawk tore off a hunk of the dead man’s shirt, and soaked it in the stream.

“Wipe your face, little one.” He could have been Blue Mountain Woman, speaking to a child.

After I did as he said, he returned to the stream, washed out the blood, then put the cool cloth over my eye, swollen shut. He gently tugged my hand to my eye so I could hold the cloth in place.

Poker Joe galloped into the clearing then. He leaped off his horse while it still moved, and ran to us. For you readers (if anyone reads this except my Stuart relatives) who might have been nourished in the myth that Indians never show emotion, I wish you could have seen Poker Joe. I feared he would burst into tears. He went to his knees and whispered, “Liz, I thought he was a good man. I thought…”

I made a clumsy attempt to pat his shoulder. “Oh, Poker Joe,” was all I said. My throat hurt as much as my eye and my knees, where he had dragged me down with his rope.

I knew it was no consolation, so he stood up and kicked the wrangler’s body. Poker Joe turned him over. I gasped and looked away at the gory sight of a man disemboweled. Hawk put his arm around me and turned my face into his chest.