Free Ghost Warrior by Lucia St. Clair Robson Page B

He moistened the wool and wound it onto the upper end of the spindle. He laid the shaft across his thigh with the point of the short end resting on the ground. With his free hand he tugged at the hair, stretching it gently as with the palm of his hand he rolled the spindle along his thigh to his knee. He slid it to the top of his leg to start the process again. When most of the first strand had wound itself onto the spindle, he worked another clump into the tail end of it. Spinning never failed to soothe him.
    â€œWhere did you learn to do that?” Absalom asked.
    â€œA Navajo taught me.”
    Rafe didn’t add that the Navajo had been a velvet-voiced woman and that the year he had spent with her had been the happiest of his life. That year defined contentment for him, a concept with which he would otherwise have been unfamiliar. His memories of her included her spinning, always spinning. With a small weighted drop spindle and a bowl of carded wool, she spun while walking. The yarn would lengthen like spider’s silk at the ends of her fingers.
    She had died in his arms, killed between sunup and sundown by the cholera that the gold rushers hauled west along with their iron stoves and millstones, their pianofortes, family portraits, and the good china. He didn’t mention to Absalom that he had wept when he saw the light in her eyes extinguished like a candle, or that for months afterward when he lay at night in his blankets, tears angled across his cheeks until they dampened the pale hair curled around his ears. Even now, almost two years later, sorrow as unavoidable as a desert sandstorm swept over him from time to time.
    She didn’t tell him her real name. Indians had odd notions about the power of names. But in the dark, when he whispered in her ear, he called her Dream Weaver. To tease her he had sometimes called her Spider Woman, the holy being who gave the knowledge of weaving to her people. To honor Spider Woman, she always left a hole in the middle of each
blanket she made, like the hole at the center of a spider’s web.
    He had one of her blankets with him still. When he saw the hole, it reminded him of her absence. The spindle had belonged to her, and when he held it he imagined the warmth of her small brown hand.
    She hadn’t taught him to knit, though. In Texas when he was young, he and his sister would gather snagged clumps of buffalo hair from the bushes. His mother had taught him to make stockings from them.
    â€œAren’t stockings of buffalo wool on the rough side?” asked Absalom.
    â€œYep.”
    Rough but substantial, he thought. These might last long enough to keep my feet warm until a bullet or an arrow or a rattler sends me to the place where warm stockings aren’t necessary. Given the prevailing moral wind in this territory, that might not be so long from now.
    A full moon and a sky spangled with stars supplied almost enough light for Rafe to see his work without the campfire. The Apaches’ fires twinkled on the mountainside above them. A cool breeze carried the sound of their laughter, flurries of it at first, then gusts, then finally a full-out gale.
    â€œDo you suppose they’re laughing about that joke they played on Caesar and me?” Absalom asked. “Them presenting their posteriors for our inspection and making off with our mounts to boot.”
    â€œMaybe so,” Rafe said. “Apaches do like a joke.”
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    A HUNDRED OR MORE PEOPLE FROM SKINNY’S AND RED Sleeves’ bands gathered at Broken Foot’s fire to hear his stories. The warriors sat in front, then the apprentice boys, and finally the women and children. Sister sat with her arm around her cousin, the one called Dazsii, Stands Alone. She pressed against her, as though to make up for the two years she hadn’t been able to touch her or see her, as though to keep her from being stolen again.

    Stands Alone stared toward the fire, but Sister had the