My baby!
Auguste felt as heavy as if he had turned to stone. He sat hunched over on the plank bed covered with a corn-husk mattress, in his cell in Victor's village hall, clutching his stomach as tears ran from his eyes.
After what Frank Hopkins had just told him, he no longer cared what happened to him here in Victor. These people had killed Floating Lily. Let them kill him too. He did not want to live in a world that had killed his baby daughter.
He felt a comforting hand on his shoulder. He glanced at it and saw Frank's ink-blackened fingers pressing into the blue calico shirt his captors at Fort Crawford had given him.
He looked up to see lawyer Thomas Ford's sad eyes on him, but kindly gestures and looks meant nothing to him now. How could people tear a baby girl from her mother's arms and beat her to death?
But the Sauk war parties killed children too. All people are cruel, white and red.
"I would be better off on the Trail of Souls," he said in a low voice.
My mother and my daughter, Sun Woman and Floating Lily, both dead.
"Nancy and Nicole and I tried to stop them," Frank said, his eyes moist, "but the crowd was too big. We couldn't get through until it was too late. Nancy told us the baby was your daughter. Nicole and Nancy tried as best they could to comfort your wife."
For all he knew, Redbird might think him dead. He had asked his guards at Fort Crawford to pass word to her that he was alive, but he had no idea whether any of his messages had reached her.