g his face in Helene's side. Around him the other
prisoners, men and women, sobbed and prayed.

The Indians took another soldier. They tied him to a stake and cut away
bits of his flesh with the sharpened edges of clam shells. They worked
at him for hours, until he bled to death.

The warriors came back for their next victim, sauntering among the
prisoners, eyes aglow, painted faces like masks of monsters, stinking of
the whiskey they'd been drinking all night. This time he was sure they
were coming for him.

But they took Helene.

He had never forgotten her last words to him, spoken serenely as the
Potawatomi seized her arms.

"I am going to join Henri. Pray to the Mother of God for me, Raoul."

The Indians dragged Helene into the woods. They took another woman as
well.

The Potawatomi squaws, seated around a nearby campfire, chattered among
themselves. They laughed whenever one of the women in the woods
screamed. Raoul could not believe that any of those sounds were coming
from his sister's throat.

The helpless white prisoners covered their faces and prayed and
wept--and the men cursed.

He had hated himself for not trying to help Helene, but he was too
frightened to move. Too frightened even to cry out. Brooding about it
now, nearly thirteen years later, he told himself once again that if
he'd tried to help Helene the Indians would have clubbed him to death.
He told himself that he had been only ten years old. That did not make
any difference to the shame he felt when he remembered that night. He
should have gone to her. He should have fought to the death for her. He
could never forgive himself.

_Why didn't we all fight and die? Wouldn't it have been better to attack
the Indians barehanded and be killed than to let that happen?_

But neither could he forgive Papa and Pierre. His father and brother had
left Raoul in Helene's care at Fort Dearborn, where her husband, Henri
Vaillancourt, ran the trading post of Papa's Illinois Fur Company. When
it became apparent that a second war between England and the United
States was about to break out, Papa declared that land prices in
Illinois were now as low as they would ever be, and he set off in search
of likely land to buy for a family seat. Pierre had gone to the Sauk and
Fox Indians on the Rock River to talk about trade and land purchases
with them. Raoul had been happy enough to be left with Helene, who had
been a mother to him as far back as he could reme