Two days later, the prairie sun burned hot and relentless, dry air baking the golden grass until it crackled like dry paper underfoot. It was an Indian summer day, breathless and heavy with the scent of dust and drying vegetation.
Thomas was working alone at the eastern boundary of his farm, near a small, trickling creek that fed into the main river channel. He was repairing a stretch of split-rail fence that a stray bull had pushed over earlier in the week. His shirt was soaked with sweat, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows as he pounded a cedar post into the dry earth with a heavy wooden mallet.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The rhythmic sound echoed across the silent meadow.
Suddenly, Barnum, tethered to a nearby willow tree, snorted loudly and threw his head into the air, his ears pinned back in alarm.
Thomas stopped swinging the mallet instantly. Years of living on the frontier had trained him to trust the instincts of his livestock. He stood up straight, wiping sweat from his eyes, and scanned the horizon.
To the west, the tall grass—standing nearly five feet high in the low marshy spots near the creek—was moving. It was not the gentle, rippling motion caused by the prairie breeze. It was a sharp, erratic parting, as if something heavy was dragging itself through the dense stalks.
Thomas laid his hand on the wooden mallet handle, his heart beating a fast, steady rhythm against his ribs. He reached slowly into his pocket for his folding knife, though he knew how useless such a small blade would be against any real danger.
"Who’s there?" Thomas called out, his voice strong and clear across the open grass.
There was no answer, only the dry rustle of golden stems snapping under weight.
Thomas stepped away from the fence line, moving cautiously toward the edge of the tall grass. He parted the thick, feathery seed-heads with his hands.
Five feet inside the thicket, lying face down in the dark loam, was a human figure.
Thomas gasped, stepping back instinctively.
It was a Lakota woman. She was clad in a simple buckskin dress, decorated around the collar with faded glass beads and quillwork. Her long, black hair was matted with burrs and dried mud, sprawling across her shoulders like tangled roots.
For a long moment, Thomas stood frozen. He looked back toward his cabin, a quarter-mile away. The prairie was quiet. No other figures were visible on the surrounding ridges.
Cautiously, Thomas knelt beside her. "Ma'am?" he asked softly, reaching out a hesitant hand to touch her shoulder.
The woman groaned—a sound so thin, hollow, and full of agonizing pain that it chilled Thomas to the bone. She rolled slowly onto her side, her body trembling violently under the warm sun.
When Thomas saw her face, he caught his breath. She was young, perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three, but her cheeks were sunken, her lips cracked and bleeding from severe dehydration. Across her abdomen was a long, jagged gash—a terrible wound that had cut through her buckskin dress. The fabric around it was stiff and black with dried blood, and the distinct, sickening odor of gangrene hung in the warm air around her.
She had clearly been crawling for miles. The skin on her elbows and knees was scraped raw, her fingernails split and caked with dirt.
She opened her eyes slowly. They were dark, clouded with fever and the near presence of death. When she saw Thomas—a white man standing over her—a look of sheer, helpless terror flashed across her face. She tried to pull herself backward, her hands clawing futilely at the grass, but the effort exhausted the last reserve of her strength. Her head thudded back onto the earth, a faint, agonizing sigh escaping her cracked lips.
She rasped a single word in her native language, her voice barely a whisper: "Mni..."
Thomas did not speak Dakota, but he recognized the word. He had heard Dakota hunters use it at the trading post during dry summers.
Water.
She was asking for water.
Thomas looked down at her festering wound. In 1862, on the isolated frontier, a wound of that severity, infected and untreated for days in the summer heat, was a death sentence. There was no doctor within thirty miles, and even if there were, it was doubtful any surgeon could clean such a deeply septic injury. She had only hours to live, perhaps less.
A dark voice of self-preservation whispered in the back of Thomas’s mind. Leave her. Walk away. If her people find her here on your land, they will blame you for her death. If settlers see you helping an Indian, they will call you a traitor. Mind your own business.
The woman’s hand twitched in the grass. Her dark eyes, glazed with fever, met his once more. There was no hostility in them, no grand political conflict, no racial hatred. There was only a human spirit, terrifyingly alone, begging for a single drop of mercy before crossing into the dark.
Thomas closed his eyes for a second, taking a deep, shuddering breath. He thought of Clara. He thought of little Abigail. If his daughter were ever lost, cold, and dying in the dark, what would he pray for a stranger to do?
"Hold on," Thomas whispered softly, though he did not know if she could understand his words. "Just hold on."
He turned and ran at a full sprint toward the creek. He unclipped his tin canteen from Barnum’s saddle, plunged it into the cool, clear flowing water, and waited impatiently as it filled with a loud, gurgling sound.
Sprinting back into the tall grass, he knelt beside the fallen woman. Gently, reverently, he placed his left arm behind her shoulders, lifting her head and upper body off the hard ground. She felt impossibly light, as frail as a bundle of dried twigs.
"Easy now," Thomas said softly.
He brought the lip of the tin canteen to her cracked, swollen lips. He tilted it slowly, letting a tiny stream of cool water trickle into her mouth.
She swallowed greedily, her entire body shuddering at the moisture. A few drops ran down her chin, washing clean white tracks through the dirt on her face. Thomas held the canteen steady, letting her drink in slow, controlled sips so she would not choke.
When she had taken four or five slow swallows, she leaned her head back against his arm, resting her eyes closed. The fever heat radiating from her skin felt like a hot iron against his sleeve.
Thomas pulled his clean cotton handkerchief from his pocket. He wetted it with the remaining water from the canteen and gently wiped her forehead, clearing away the sweat, dirt, and dried blood. He cleaned the dust from her eyes and smoothed back her matted black hair.