Lynch Read Free

and hard work.
    He could take no credit for his rebirth; it was all Katie’s doing. She was the one who had given him the strength and incentive to turn his feet from the destructive path he had walked so long. Her love had raised him up from the shadows, just as Jesus brought Lazarus back from the Land of the Dead. Pearl had given himself up for lost, but she still managed to guide him back to the land of the living, the land of hope. She was a miracle worker, that woman.
    Although there was no proper preacher to be had, Johnny Pearl considered Katie joined to him as surely as Eve had been to Adam. Since there was no preacher to be had, they had ridden into the foothills one day, and, when their horses had climbed as high as they could go, Pearl took her hand in his and shouted up at the sky: “Lord! This here’s Johnny Pearl! I’m taking Katie Small Dove for my wife!” He figured that was probably as official as they could get, given the circumstances.
    Now that Katie was carrying their first child, Pearl felt as if he had been blessed by God Himself. For the first time since the war had come into his life, he could look to the future and see something besides smoke and ashes. As a symbol of his rebirth, he took his old clothes and the pearl-handled pistol and buried them underneath the cabin’s flagstones.
    When Katie asked him why he didn’t just burn the clothes and throw the gun in the river, he shook his head. “I’m not proud of what I used to be, but there’s no denying it, either. I need to be reminded of what I was once was so I won’t turn back into it again.”
    He and Katie made their home in a cabin abandoned by a faint-hearted settler, and their closest neighbor was ten miles away, the nearest town nearly a hundred. All of which was fine and dandy, as far as Pearl was concerned. Their existence was humble but adequate; Katie tended a small garden near the cabin—mostly corn and squash—while he ranged for antelope, shorthorn and rabbit. For those few items they couldn’t make themselves, Pearl took bear, coyote and panther skins with him on his rare trips into town.
    However, just because their nearest white neighbor was a two-hour ride away, that didn’t mean they were total recluses. They received occasional visits from some of Katie’s Indian relatives, one of her favorites being her elder cousin, Ohkom Kakit, known to the whites as Little Wolf.
    Little Wolf was a respected war chief among the Cheyenne, which guaranteed the Pearls a certain amount of protection—at least from the natives. It wasn’t an easy life, but it was a free one, and for that Johnny Pearl was thankful. He had never thought he would settle down the way he had, but damned if every evening he couldn’t be found sitting on the modest porch of his cabin, enjoying a quiet smoke as he contemplated the land as the sun went down.
    He had the river running at his door, the rolling expanse of the plains on one hand, the mountains stretched out like sleeping giants on the other, and a sky like a great blue bowl turned upside down overhead. How could he not look out on all that and not think that this was indeed the best of all worlds, these the finest of all days, and that it would never end?
    He was wrong, of course.
    They appeared without warning—a neat trick, given the terrain—while Pearl was busy chopping wood. One minute he was by himself, the next he was surrounded by snorting, stamping ponies. Normally a settler on the high plains would be alarmed by the sight of several armed Cheyenne warriors, but Johnny Pearl merely smiled in recognition.
    â€œGreetings, cousin,” he said, setting aside his axe so none of the braves accompanying his wife’s kinsman might get the wrong idea.
    â€œGreetings, Johnny Pearl,” Little Wolf responded.
    There was something in the old chief’s voice that gave him pause. Pearl glanced at the assembled