, _now you would kill the memory
of her_.

But he held his tongue and hated himself for even thinking what he had
almost said. What an evil thought! How could he blame Raoul because
Maman died giving birth to him?

_Think what you are doing!_ Papa had cried. That was precisely what
Raoul never did. Thought was for afterward, for escaping the
consequences of his actions. Now he had worked himself into a rage, lost
all governing of himself, because, somehow, he had heard about Sun Woman
and Gray Cloud.

Pierre had to try to win Raoul over, to find a way to break through the
anger that divided him from his younger brother. Raoul had to be
persuaded that it was only right that Sun Woman and the boy be brought
here to Victoire. If Raoul did not accept that, his rage would tear
their family apart.

But how, in one afternoon, batter down a wall that had been building
over the past dozen years?

Pierre realized that he was still standing with his hand held out to
Raoul. He lowered it slowly, feeling his shoulders slump at the same
time. He had been reading with Papa when Raoul came in. Now he took off
his spectacles, put them in the silver case that hung from his neck by a
velvet cord and dropped the case in his vest pocket.

Elysee de Marion clutched the arms of his leather wing chair with
clawlike hands, half rising from it. Raoul stood staring at the two of
them, panting and trembling.

Elysee said quietly, "Why did you do that, Raoul?"

"To make you listen." Raoul's voice was deep and strong, and it
resounded powerfully against the beamed ceiling and stone walls of the
great hall. But in its tones Pierre heard the screams of that hysterical
boy whose tantrums and nightmares, after they'd finally succeeded in
ransoming him from the Potawatomi, had wrenched the hearts of the whole
household and renewed their grief over the loss of Helene.

But now that painfully thin, frightened child was a broad-shouldered man
over six feet tall with a knife as big as a broadsword and a pistol
strapped to his waist. A very dangerous man. A man who, they said, had
killed half a dozen or more opponents in fights up and down the
Mississippi.

"We have been listening," Elysee said.

"Pierre hasn't," Raoul said resentfully. "_You_ tell him, Papa. Tell
him he'd better leave his damned squaw in the woods where she belongs."

_Damned squaw._ The words pierced Pierre's chest like arrows.

Elysee sat back down in his wing chair and st