e Bear said, "There is nothing I can do for
you. You need to get back to your own people."

Wegner's eyes widened. "You would let me go?"

"I have to. Or else kill you. If our warriors got you I couldn't stop
them from killing you. Climb into this hollow in the tree and stay there
till morning. By then, I think, our braves will be far from here."

He helped Wegner to stand and boosted him up into his hiding place.
Wegner let out a groan as he drew his wounded leg inside the opening.

_Take care of this pale eyes, Grandfather Oak._

"I will never forget this," said Wegner.

"Then remember my people."

He took Wegner's knife and rifle. He might have left the Prussian a
weapon to defend himself, but he thought that would be going beyond
kindness into foolishness.

He heard Sauk victory shouts coming from the other side of Old Man's
Creek, where Raoul's camp had been. Little though he wanted to go back
there, it seemed the surest way to safety. Carrying the rifle with one
hand, the knife in his belt, he made his way through the woods to the
creek.

* * * * *

Soon he was back in the center of what had been the long knives' camp,
at the place where he had nearly been killed. A small fire burned here.
Near it lay two bodies stretched out. The head of one was covered with a
cloth. That, White Bear thought, must be Little Crow. Beside him lay
Three Horses, a blanket draped over his short body, his face with its
flattened nose uncovered. Standing around the bodies were half a dozen
warriors.

By all rights he ought to be lying there too. He put a hand up to his
ear, forgotten in the excitement of the encounter with Otto Wegner. The
pain had settled to a dull pulsing. Gingerly, he felt the wound. The
middle part of the ear was gone. The intact upper and lower parts were
covered with crusted blood. He had washed the wound once in the creek.
He must wash it again and bandage it.

_Greenglove did that so blood would flow and it would seem to anyone who
looked at me in the twilight that I'd been shot in the head. He was
trying to save my life. Why?_

One day, White Bear hoped, he would meet Greenglove and find out why he
had spared him.

_And that other time--when he hit me with his rifle just as Raoul was
about to shoot me--did he do that, too, to save my life?_

A solitary warrior sat before the fire, a long scalplock adorned with
feathers hanging down the side of his head. The fire