12, and then they required me to stay with them. You
were already two years old. After the war, and after I left them, I sent
the Sauk and Fox chiefs what they asked for--thirty thousand dollars,
partly in coin and partly in trade goods, knives, steel axes, tin pots
and kettles, blankets and bolts of cloth, rifles and barrels of
gunpowder, bags of bullets. So, we paid for this land twice over.
Despite that, I think it is far more valuable still than all the money
we spent for it. The chiefs recognize our right to live on the land and
use it. And Jumping Fish gave me this calumet, and I gave him a fine
Kentucky long rifle with brass and silver inlay on the barrel and
stock."

Auguste nodded eagerly. "Yes, yes, I've seen it. Jumping Fish uses it to
shoot the first buffalo every winter to start the hunt."

"And I gave Black Hawk the compass your war chief still treasures, from
which I received my Sauk name."

"Yes."

Auguste looked across Pierre's bed and out the windows, of costly clear
glass shipped from Philadelphia, that gave a view south across
grass-covered prairie. Once all that prairie belonged to my people, he
thought.

As if knowing his thoughts, Pierre said, "I did not say the Sauk and Fox
sold us the land. I said they recognized our right to use it. Do you
understand?"

Auguste nodded, repeating what he had so often heard Black Hawk say in
the tribal meetings. "Land is not something to be bought and sold. So we
believe."

Pierre closed his eyes wearily, his fingertips still resting on the
calumet that lay across his chest. Auguste grieved. The father who had
left him when he was a little boy and then come back for him was leaving
him again, slipping away. Marchette wiped Pierre's face with a damp
cloth.

Nicole's lower lip trembled as she said, "My big brother. You've always
been here for me."

Elysee's face was crumpled by an unbearable sadness. He wishes, Auguste
thought, that it was him lying there dying, instead of his son.

Pierre opened his eyes and lifted his head to look at Auguste. Auguste
gently pressed his hand against his father's balding brow.

"Rest, Father, rest."

"Not till we are done. You know that your grandfather turned the estate
over to me when I was forty years of age. Now I must pass it on. Until
recent years I had thought that the land would go to Raoul when I died.

"But the enmity between me and Raoul has grown deeper and deeper. A few
times he and I and Papa have me