Chapter 12 #3
At the sight of Wade’s bowed head, something far away and faint trickled into Abby’s head.
The image of her father. He’d had a way about him of protecting her, sheltering her.
A flash of his face, browned from the sun, came to her mind.
He was tall and wore a hat as battered as Wade’s.
Blond hair instead of Wade’s darker shade.
Then the memory widened and Abby saw her mother, too, her parents together in the kitchen smiling at each other across a table.
And one other child sitting in a high chair near her mother.
“Lind. I…I think my name is Abby Lind.” Abby straightened as more memories flooded in.
“We lived far from here, I believe. I traveled a long way with the Flatheads. It seemed that we traveled for days on end, but I’m not sure.
When their hunting party found me, my family was dead. ” Abby’s voice broke.
“And the hunting party came…” Wade urged her to continue, saving her from that most horrible memory of being alone with her father’s body. “And…”
“My father, my tribal father, took me to live with his people. Walter Lind, maybe. I think that’s right.
” Abby looked up. “I could find them, I believe, now that I know my father’s name.
And maybe I have family somewhere back East. I had an older brother.
He was grown up and gone—married, I think—when we moved West.” Abby closed her eyes as she tried to force the memory.
“Why can’t I remember? I wasn’t that young. ”
“I suppose your life with the Flathead people was so completely different than what you’d had before, there was nothing to remind you of your early years.”
Frustrated, Abby exhaled hard. “Maybe that’s it, but it seems wrong, sinful, that I forgot my family.”
“You want to search for your brother? Maybe go back East and live with him?”
The tone of Wade’s voice told Abby that he was dismayed at that news. It pulled her out of her discouragement at the blank wall where her memories ought to be.
She couldn’t quite manage a smile, but her heart lightened.
“I have no place in the East. Montana is too settled to suit me. There were great cities back there. I don’t remember living in one, but I was told.
No, I have no wish to go, but I might want to learn of my white family, let them know I am alive. ”
“I can help you with that. I’ll send some telegraphs the next time I’m in town. If your pa bought land, or homesteaded, there’d be a record of it.” Wade settled his hat back on his head firmly. “So your Flathead father took you to his village and raised you as his daughter?”
“He was a good man. But I remember now that my white father was a good man too. I remember I loved him and my ma and little brother. It’s all so vague, though…the memories and feelings.”
“You’ll remember more with time, I reckon. For now, let it go. It’s just upsetting you. Let’s see if we can find any evidence to identify our attacker.”
Abby pointed to an outcropping of rock. “He must have been up there.”
“How do you figure that?” Wade lifted his hat with one hand and smoothed down his hair with the other.
Even after Belle Harding took her scissors to it, his hair was past his collar.
Not as long as Wild Eagle’s, but neither was Wade shorn like so many whites.
He’d been living in the mountains all winter.
Near enough to her to hear gunshots. Roughing it nearly as much as…
maybe more than…the people in their winter hunting grounds in the Bitterroot Valley.
“The arrow was slanted downward, but not arcing down. He couldn’t have been higher or lower than that ledge.”
Scowling, Wade turned from where she pointed. “You got all that while you were under my horse’s hooves?”
Abby snorted. “How do you whites survive in the West?”
“So were they shooting at you or me? Whoever put those burrs under my saddle couldn’t have known where you’d be standing, so maybe he was hoping?—”
“Hoping to blame it on the Flathead people?”
“Or hoping in the distraction of the rearing horse he’d get us both at once.”
“I have done nothing to deserve murder.”
“Oh, well I suppose I have,” Wade said sarcastically.
“You’ve come home. It looks to me as if some among your people might have thought this ranch was free for the claiming with your father hurt and maybe dying.”
“It’s a fine welcome, isn’t it? I’ve only been back one day.”
“And someone’s already trying to kill you.”
“No one tries to kill a man with a few burrs under a saddle. I’ve been thrown off many a horse in my day while breaking broncs. Sure, a man could die, but it’s not a reliable way to kill. Most often, you just get up and walk away.”
“Your father didn’t. And when that happened, my people were far from here.”
Freezing where he stood, Wade seemed to look beyond what lay in front of him. “True. Someone could finish me off and make it look like a fall killed me.”
“But that would only work if there were no witnesses.”
“Like you.” Wade pulled the burrs and stones from his shirt pocket and glared at them. “Someone tried to kill my pa.”