Free Powder River by S.K. Salzer

Dillard had dengue fever, Lorna, and yes, it’s treated with quinine and laudanum. Those are dangerous drugs, the laudanum especially. We don’t know what’s making the Indians sick, and anyhow, stealing is wrong. You know that.”
    Do they ? Have I taught them not to steal, lie, cheat, take advantage of the less fortunate? Have I taught them to be kind? In truth, Dixon didn’t remember imparting those or any other life lesson to these two. He assumed Mrs. MacGill was taking care of those things.
    Billy Sun returned with his arms full of wood. Dixon noticed how Lorna’s eyes brightened when he walked in, how they followed him as he tossed bits of the old stockade into the flames.
    After a hot meal of cornmeal, water, and salt, boiled over the fire, along with coffee and canned milk, Billy and Dixon pitched the tent, a relic of Dixon’s army days. Caleb and Lorna spread their blankets on the oilcloth floor and fell immediately into a deep, untroubled sleep. Despite the cold, Dixon and Billy lingered by the fire.
    â€œWhy were you on the road today, Billy, in this weather?” Dixon said.
    Billy stirred the embers with a long stick and threw more wood on the fire. “I was coming for you,” he said. “The sickness is spreading quickly, and it respects no one; the strong and healthy die just as fast as the old and frail. I had been away from the village, so I knew nothing of it until my cousin came for me.” He prodded the flames. “The healers go without food and water for days, they hold the eagle fan and baaxpee bundle to the chests of the sick, but the people die anyway. Like I said, the sickness respects no one.”
    Dixon suspected the village had fallen on hard and hungry times, which weakened the people and left them vulnerable to illness. Even Billy showed signs of poverty. He was thin and his buffalo coat bedraggled and moth-eaten, something he or one of his relatives must have bought or taken from a soldier years before. Nowadays, because of the dwindling of the buffalo herds, such a coat in a new condition was hard to come by.
    â€œHow many are afflicted?” Dixon said.
    â€œHalf the village, maybe more.”
    â€œWhat are their symptoms?”
    â€œSymptoms?”
    â€œHow does the sickness take them? Do they cough? How do they look?”
    â€œThey shake with cold though the skin burns, and their muscles tighten and bunch. At the end their skin goes blue and when they cough, there’s a sound of water here.” He touched his chest. “A man fights to breathe, like he’s drowning.”
    Influenza, Dixon said to himself, and death by pneumonia. Such a contagion could wipe out an entire village, and the accumulation of unburied corpses could lead to other problems. He had heard of cases where the villagers fled in terror, leaving the dead to rot on the ground and in their lodges.
    â€œWhat happens to the dead?” Dixon said.
    Billy hesitated, surprised by the question. This seemed a strange time for discussion of such matters. “After a period of time, the spirit moves on, to the world behind this one.”
    â€œNo,” Dixon said. “I mean, what do your people do with the bodies?”
    â€œOh.” Billy smiled, despite the grimness of the topic. “The dead person is wrapped in a blanket and removed by wagon to the burial ground. When I left this morning, there was a long line of wagons. Because they are so many, the people are talking of resting the bodies in the trees and burying the bones later.”
    Dixon and Billy joined the twins in the tent, settling in their bedrolls on the crowded floor. The two men took the outside of the circle, affording the children the warmth of the center. The four bodies generated some heat, but even so the breaths of the sleepers produced little white clouds of vapor.
    Tired as Dixon was, sleep would not come. He lay on his back, staring at the sloping canvas ceiling. In his