Chieftain (Historical Romance) Read Free

tepees dotted the rolling hills and windswept prairie that bordered the Wichita Mountains.
    At the center of the reservation, stone buildings surrounded the large post quadrangle. The Indians called the post “the soldier house at Medicine Bluffs.” The garrison called it Fort Sill.
    Maggie Bankhead called it home.
    The twenty-two-year-old red-haired, blue-eyed Maggie Bankhead had been born and raised in Tidewater, Virginia, the youngest of four girls and a child of privilege. Hers had been a life of luxury and ease with a loving family and a houseful of dutiful servants.
    Maggie’s father was a prominent banker from an old southern family of prerevolutionary Irish stock. Her mother, the refined Abigail, boasted an equally impeccable lineage. Many of the foremost Confederate heroes, including Robert E. Lee, were part of Abigail’s extended family.
    Dotingparents, the Bankheads’ wish for all their beautiful daughters was successful marriages to suitable gentlemen. It was not a wish shared by the spirited Maggie. Rebellious by nature, inquisitive to a fault, determined to think for herself and do as she saw fit, Maggie, unlike her sisters, had gone against her parents’ wishes.
    Maggie had, six months ago, left her childhood home and traveled west to teach English to the reservation Indians. Her parents had been horrified but not surprised. Maggie had consistently turned a deaf ear to her mother’s cajoling to allow suitable young men to call on her. Maggie had blithely ignored her older sisters’ warning that she was going to wind up a lonely old maid. Maggie’s father had long ago given up on expecting his youngest, and secretly favorite, child to fit into a specific mold and behave like his other children. Maggie had—from the cradle—been a handful. Lively. Stubborn. Opinionated. Fearless.
    An enthusiastic Maggie had moved to the Oklahoma Territory and hadn’t looked back, had not regretted her decision for a minute. From the day she had arrived—a beautiful spring day in late April—she had known she was where she belonged.
    While she missed her parents, her sisters and her many friends back in Virginia, she found her simple life at the fort to be, for the most part, fulfilling. She liked being independent, liked living alone in the little one-room cottage assigned her, liked taking care of herself.
    Blessedwith a self-deprecating sense of humor, she often laughed at herself as she tackled elemental tasks like making the bed or brewing hot tea or sweeping the rough plank floors. She had never once—in her twenty-two years—lifted a hand to help with such menial chores. She was having to learn to be self-reliant as surely as the reservation Indians were having to learn the English she taught.
    Maggie found it rather rewarding to polish the battered furniture or pick wildflowers for the table or to tuck freshly laundered sheets over the edges of the bed’s feather mattress.
    Only occasionally, at day’s end when she was alone and sitting on the porch gazing at the sun setting over the low Oklahoma hills, did her heart ache dully for something she could not name.
    She didn’t know what she yearned for. She was not overly homesick, nor was she particularly lonely. She was, in fact, happier in Oklahoma than anywhere ever before and she felt that her life had real meaning. She was convinced that if the displaced Indians were to have any chance in the white man’s world, they had to learn to read, write and speak English.
    She was eager to teach them, and to her delight, many were eager to learn. They crowded into her classroom each morning, their dark eyes shining, copper faces well scrubbed. Respectful and ready to be taught.
    The littleones in class had come to love Maggie.
    Maggie, in turn, loved them.
    She had grown fond of all her students but couldn’t keep from having favorites. One was the tiny Bright Feather, an adorable orphaned Kiowa boy who, sadly, had been lame since birth. The other was an aged