Chapter 13: Vengeance Declared
Gray Wolf remained on his white-faced roan and watched while two of his braves
cut down his son from the limb of the cottonwood.
"Yah-ik-tee."
He muttered the word meaning 'dead' and ignored the drizzling rain soaking his
vermilion shirt and beaded, leather loincloth and rawhide boots. Around his
waist, he wore two Colts and two more in saddle holsters hung from the pommel. A
Henry rifle in a rawhide sheath was fixed to the side of his saddle.
Two Mexican women slaves wrapped the body in a blanket and placed it on a
travois.
Gray Wolf's dark eyes glowed with hatred, hatred for the pin-dah-lickoyee, the
white eye. His chiseled face remained passive except for a tightening of the
thin lips.
From the top of a rise, a brave, by the name of Klo-sen, naked but for a
loincloth, motioned to him and he nudged his horse forward around the rock
ledges and boulders covering the hillside, and, in a minute or two, he came up
beside Klo-sen, who jerked his broad-jawed head toward the east. There Gray Wolf
could see a column of thick smoke rising from a hill top miles beyond Red Rock.
In a few moments the column became a series of confused puffs. The message made
no sense. Gray Wolf glanced at Klo-sen who merely shrugged his broad shoulders.
Only the Apache used smoke signals, but this was not the work of any Apache. It
would have to be investigated. Something was wrong.
He looked back over his shoulder at the thirty warriors waiting around the
travois that carried his dead son.
"The white eyes will pay," he swore solemnly.
Klo-sen nodded.
