"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?