The Holy Road

up ahead.

What might be taking place was no clearer when they pulled up at the fringes of the crowd, whose animation was strangely muted. Men sat their horses in little groups, gangs of children roosted on wagons, while others milled aimlessly through a considerable crowd of pedestrians who had gathered in front of a strange edifice which provided the center of attention.

Traders moved through the throng, promoting the sale of drinks, fans, and colorful flags, but their excitement was strangely muted, too, and it occurred to Dances With Wolves that the people were like children at play, fearful of raising their voices lest they wake some powerful entity sleeping nearby.

The hushed buzzing of the crowd rose as a small group of men ascended a flight of steps attached to the platform and faced the onlookers. One of them, a huge man with black skin, stood still as the others, who were white, scurried about performing small chores of readiness.

A white man wearing a metal star on his breast stepped forward, and, looking at a sheet of paper in his hand, began a short talk which silenced the audience.

The man with the star was quickly followed by another man, dressed in black, who clutched a book of the same color. As he spoke, a loop at the end of a stout rope hanging from a beam was slipped over the black-skinned man's head and tightened against his neck. The white man who did this stepped back a few paces, gripped a lever and, at a signal from the man with the star, depressed the long stick.

Suddenly the black-skinned man fell straight down, and when his feet were just inches from the ground, the rope went taut. As he had dropped the crowd moaned, but as his neck broke with an audible crack, all breath seemed to go out of the audience. Spontaneous cheers erupted from some of the watchers as the black-skinned man hung lifeless. Others broke into applause, and shortly after the casual chatter of friends and neighbors filled the air as a handful of somber men, working in the shade beneath the wooden platform, fussed around the body of the black-skinned man.

It had happened too fast for Dances With Wolves to analyze, but as he watched the incongruous scene before him he remembered the thing called hanging. It repulsed him to see men, women, and children kill a man without fighting him, and he instinctively turned to his children. They were sitting, ashen-faced, on their horses, their expressions helpless, and at that instant Dances With Wolves decided they should go home.

But before he could move, something extraordinary happened. The breeze, which had been lifting and falling all day as if it could not decide what to do, suddenly made up its mind in the spectacular form of a titanic surge that knocked both children off their horses and nearly sent Dances With Wolves to the ground.

For a split second he saw his children up and chasing their horses, but he was already in the air and, as he pitched to and fro on the bouncing, stiff-legged pony, the refuse that the audience had scattered over the ground filled the space about his head.

At the same moment he got his pony under control the wind inexplicably died, and when Dances With Wolves looked up, trash was still flying, the crowd was gathering itself in stunned disbelief, and the children had recovered their ponies. He was as dazed as anyone and was wondering where such a wind could come from when a stiff aftergust shuddered past.

Again refuse swirled up and a broadsheet of newsprint wrapped itself around his pony's face. Before the pony could explode, however, Dances With Wolves reflexively snatched the paper off his animal's eyes and was about to toss it into the breeze when his glance fixed momentarily on the paper.

A drawing of a woman stared up at him. It was Stands With A Fist. Stays Quiet was sitting on her lap.

Chapter XXXI

For the next three days, Dances With Wolves ruminated over what to do. He studied the article under the drawing of his wife and daughter, reading it constantly in hope that he could fully understand it.

But eleven years had elapsed since he had read words. The jumble of names and places and events tumbled like confetti in his mind, and he could make little sense of what was written. Though he could not be certain, he felt reasonably sure that the writing did not tell where she was and, with no other option than to risk discovery he decided to step forward.

After bathing and grooming themselves to present the most convincing front possible, the three rode into Vernon at mid-afternoon and tied their ponies in front of the town constable's office.

Dances With Wolves whispered a final reminder to Snake In Hands and Always Walking. They should stay near at all times and under no circumstances utter a word. Then he climbed a few steps to the uneven boardwalk and knocked at the door.

It opened and a scruffy-looking white man with a puzzled expression asked, 'What?'

'I want to see the constable,' Dances With Wolves stated.

As soon as the word came out he knew it was somehow wrong. But he could not remember how to make it right.

'Wait here,' the man said, receding into the darkness of the office.

Inside, the constable, his feet propped up on his desk as he reclined to enjoy a good chew, peered up at his deputy.

'There's a fella standing outside with two kids who says he wants to see the constable. He knocked at the door. .'

The constable stopped chewing when he heard the odd pronunciation of his tide and was interested enough to rock his chair forward when he was informed that the visitor had knocked on a public door instead of coming inside. Something strange was afoot.

Unlike his peers on the frontier, the constable of Vernon was constantly on the alert for the tiniest ripple of intrigue that might cross his path. He had held his position for several seasons and performed the duties of his office well, but his true ambition was to master what he called the 'science of criminality.' He considered himself to be rather more intellectual than the average frontier lawman, and prided himself on being the only man within a hundred miles to possess a subscription to The Police Gazette. Normally, he read each issue from cover to cover, embracing the most lurid aspects of crime in his quest for expertise. The magazines were so precious to him that they were secured with lock and key and read by others only within view of the owner.

The constable shifted the tobacco in his mouth and resumed chewing. Folding his hands together on the desktop, he briefly drifted off in thought.

'Have them come in,' he said at last, too consumed in the mechanism of weighing clues to make eye contact with his deputy.

A moment later, Dances With Wolves came inside with the children in tow and was ushered to the constable's desk, where he met the lawman's look with his implacable, unsettling Comanche gaze.

The constable, faced with an unknown presence, narrowed his eyes slyly.

'What can I do for you today?'

Dances With Wolves reached into his white man pocket and pulled out the sheet of crumpled newsprint.

'I am looking for. .”

He spread the paper on the constable's desk, flattened it, and jabbed a weathered finger at the image of Stands With A Fist.

'The white captive.'

The constable leaned forward and stared down at the drawing for a long time. Of course he knew about the woman in the paper, but he wanted a few extra seconds to think. The man before him was quite out of the ordinary and the constable, ever eager to throw light on darkness, was already turning suppositions around in his active mind. The most obvious explanation was that the man standing on the other side of the desk was a family member of some kind. But there was something so odd about his visitor that the constable decided to conduct a careful, yet casual, interrogation.

'Christine Gunther,' he said with the lightest touch he could manage. 'What do you want with her?'

'I want to find. . Christine Gunther.'