"He speaks like a woman," Wolf Paw said. "He says what women tell him to say. Women speak for him. Let him dress like a woman. A pale eyes woman."
Wolf Paw flung the dress over White Bear's head, and the two men who held him pulled it down around him. White Bear felt wrapped in hopelessness as the cloth covered his head.
And he had wanted to be a prophet for the Sauk.
The truer his words, the less they hear him.
He struggled halfheartedly. He no longer cared what they did to him. His own failure and the sure destruction of his people chained him so that he could barely move. The warriors pulled the dress straight down over his arms, pinioning them to his sides. As his head emerged through the collar, laughter battered at him. Teeth gleamed in the firelight.
He saw Sun Woman holding Redbird. Tears squeezed through his wife's tightly shut eyelids. The face of his mother was heavy with woe.
Too despairing to resist, he let Wolf Paw and his men push and drag him away from the council fire and run him through the camp. He was blind to the laughing faces around him, deaf to the mocking cries.
But he saw one sight that all but killed him—looking up at him from somewhere in the crowd, the hurt, bewildered eyes of his son, Eagle Feather.