im where Raoul's bullet had pierced him. He
did not want to stop hurting himself, but he could not hit his chest
anymore. His head hung down and he sobbed brokenly.

He had sacrificed too much. He had given up everything he really loved
to become a prisoner of this place. He was trapped on this land. The
ancient wealth of the de Marions held him in golden chains.

_I could ride away from all this, even now. I could take a horse and
swim it across the Mississippi--the Great River--and I could find the
Sauk and live with them again. I could be free._

Redbird had said she had become Wolf Paw's woman. Anger boiled him at
the thought of that. But he knew it was the healer in her who had chosen
that path. As she had said, Wolf Paw was one of the last braves of the
British Band, and by healing him she healed the people.

And was he not lying to himself to think he could do anything for the
Sauk here? How could he resist the immense power of men like Sharp
Knife, who, he was sure, were bent on exterminating the Sauk, on
exterminating all the red people on this continent?

To make the de Marion estate prosper he would have to learn to perform a
thousand tasks about which he knew almost nothing. He must give all his
heart and mind and strength to this domain if it was to flourish. That
was the burden Star Arrow, Pierre de Marion, had laid on him. In taking
up that burden, might he not forget his other tie, to the Sauk, so far
away?

But it was his being a Sauk that chained him so irrevocably to
Victoire--the afternoon he smoked the calumet with Star Arrow--the
Turtle calling on him to be guardian of this land.

Somehow he must try both to be master of Victoire and to fulfill his
destiny as a Sauk.

_This land, right here, once belonged to my people. If I leave it, it
will never belong to them again._

_I will dedicate my possessions to them. I will send them what they
need. I will use the influence my wealth gives me with the lawyers and
politicians to protect them, so they will never be driven from their
land again, never be massacred again._

He stood up and walked away from the charred wreckage of Victoire into
the fields that surrounded it. The farmhands had planted corn last
spring, but the Sauk raiders had burned it, and some prairie grass had
come back. It had only had time to grow chest high before the frost
killed it, and as he pushed his way through it he could see fields
beyond, where the yellow horizon me