Chapter 1

Dakota Territory, June 1878

A mob surged across the wooden bridge like a primordial organism in search of food. Torchlight punched flickering holes in the black night as people with the look of farmers and merchants and housewives and mothers churned restlessly in front of a cabin on the north bank of Turtle Crick. Moments later, a white-stockinged blue roan pulled a buckboard into their midst.

A hook-nosed man clad in black bellowed from the driver’s bench in a deep, sonorous voice belying his skeletal frame, “Come out, sinners. Atone to these good people and the Lord God Almighty!”

The cabin door opened, flooding the porch with lantern glow. A tall man with thumbs hooked into his braces walked out to face the group. “What’s going on here? Why’re you tromping around in my yard this time of night? You there, get out of that flower bed.”

“You are an abomination in the sight of God!” the man in the buckboard thundered. “The judgment of Leviticus 20:13 shall be upon you this night.”

“I have sinned against no one, Preacher. Your words are farts in the wind.”

“Did you hear? Profanity! Yes, you have sinned, brother. Grievously. ‘Mankind shall not lie with mankind as he lieth with womankind,’” the preacher intoned. “Confess and beg forgiveness lest the Almighty rain fire and brimstone upon us all.”

“Stop acting the fool and get out of here. Go home and leave me in peace.” He turned and started back into the cabin.

“He’s goin’ for a gun!” someone yelled.

As the man turned to protest, a bullet caught him in the chest. He stumbled against the doorjamb. A second slug broke his shoulder and propelled him through the cabin’s threshold. He managed to close the door and drop the bar to barricade it behind him before collapsing onto the floor.

When demands to fire the building rose, the black-frocked preacher flicked his reins and turned the rig around, scattering members of his flock. Torches hurled against the cabin walls had little effect, but brands landing on the roof kindled a hungry fire.

A pinto charged out of the tree line into the pack, the rider yelling and firing his rifle into the air. After a shocked silence, the mob rushed the newcomer. Hands snatched him from the saddle before he could bring his weapon to bear.

By the time the maddened horde hoisted a rope over a cottonwood branch and left the horseman kicking and gasping his life away, the buckboard raced for Yanube City. 1

Yanube City, Dakota Territory, one year earlier

The anvil clanged like the Main Street Methodist Church’s Sunday bell, spitting red-orange sparks with each blow of Timo Bowers’s hammer. Made me think of a chorus of angels with fiery wings. When the blacksmith thrust tongs gripping a glowing ingot of iron into the fire pit, he nodded, and I applied bellows until the metal glowed to his satisfaction. Then he placed it on the anvil and began conducting his choir all over again.

The smith’s name was really Timothy, but he’d held onto Timo ever since my great uncle Cut Hand slapped it on him when his family wintered at Teacher’s Mead after the Sioux killed the rest of their small wagon train. Ten-year-old Timo and his little sister were terrified of Cut Hand, a pure-blood Yanube Indian, so he spent the long snowbound months easing the children’s fears and becoming their best friend. My grandpa, Billy Strobaw, had advantaged the winter to teach Timo and his sister to read and write and calculate.

All this Timo had told me many times, usually starting with, “John, you’re the spittin’ image of Cut Hand. It’s like he was standing here in front of me after all these years.”

Better’n forty of them. The smith had to be a mite past fifty now. In the three weeks I’d been apprenticing at the forge with Timo, I’d heard the story until it was boresome. He’d always end up by saying how much I looked like Cut. Not my grandpa, but Cut Hand.

“Well, he was my grandmother’s brother,” I’d say. “So I guess I come by it naturally.”

“Finest-looking man I ever seen,” Timo always came back at me.

I already knew a good deal about smithing. Crow Johnson, the Absaroka Pa’d hired to handle our forge at Teacher’s Mead fifty miles to the east, had taught me a lot. But he’d left us for Crow Indian country after his father, a retired army scout, had fallen ill. So here I was, trying to learn all I could from the best blacksmith and farrier in the territory.

“That’s enough for today, John,” he said. “Let’s go in and clean up. I got a pepper stew on the stove to pad our breadbaskets. Something special for your last night here. You glad to be going home tomorrow?”

“Yes, sir. I miss it. But I sure learned a lot from you.”

He waved away my claim as he closed the doors to the shop and turned toward his home a hippity-hop off to the east. “Wasn’t much for me to do. That Crow Indian taught you pretty good.”

“He and my pa gave me the basics, but you let me know the why, not just the what. And Otter always says knowing why the what is…that’s what’s important.”

“That Otter’s about the smartest Indian I ever knowed.” Timo unlatched the door to the house, and I followed him inside. This morning, he’d banked coals in the kitchen stove to take the chill off the pots of water left on top. It was high summer, so the water didn’t need much warming.