He let go of my hand, politely setting it back in my lap, which touched me somehow, even as it saddened me. I couldn’t have told you why then, or maybe I didn’t want to admit why. He cleared his throat. “Of course, Blue Mountain Woman will miss you,” he said, then add quickly, “So will I.” I knew he wasn’t serious because he grinned. “I have gotten used to your silly white questions and you have greatly improved my English.”

I could take both a cue and a light tone. “And you and this journey have cured me of complaining.”

“Well?” he prompted.

Well what? Was this a preliminary, granted a clumsy one, to get a compliment, an agreement, or a kiss? Probably not the latter. I had never seen Nimiipuu kissing.

“I don’t know.” I didn’t know anything, from how I felt, to the state of the union, to what happens when you combine ketchup with mayonnaise. I realize now I was experiencing a great shift in my view of everything I had thought of value and useful for a young woman in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. I was changing in unheard of ways, but I didn’t recognize it.

“Don’t you think your folks are worried about you?”

I knew they were. I also knew then and there that this was a moment unlike any other. Whether Hawk knew it or not, and I never asked him, I was taking my first steps toward womanhood, even more than that, personhood. I was growing up in a way I could never have predicted a mere few months ago, when Phil and I plotted our escape from Omaha to Yellowstone National Park.

“I can telegraph my parents from Canada.” I said it quietly and I meant it. This was no time to abandon The People, even though I knew I was no real asset to them.

Hawk regarded me with that long, unflinching gaze that made me nervous at the beginning of this adventure, but which had turned into welcome introspection, compelling a person to think, and not just regurgitate words because it was that person’s time to speak.

“You are strange,” he said.

“Strange in a bad way or a good way?” I asked impulsively.

“A good way, I think,” he replied quickly, too. “Listen to me, Liz. I can tell you that Joseph wants you in safer hands than ours.”

Well, that was final. What about you, I wanted to ask, but felt too shy. Hawk released my hand and left. Saddened, I stayed there alone. With my chin on my knees, I watched the Nimiipuu sharpshooters keep their army counterparts across the river busy earning their thirteen dollars a month. The firing slowed on both sides and The People began filing back to their campsites. Some carried bolts of cloth, though what they planned to do with them I couldn’t fathom.