"He speaks like a woman," Wolf Paw said. "He says what women tell him to say. Women speak for him. Let him dress like a woman. A pale eyes woman." Wolf Paw flung the dress over White Bear's head, and the two men who held him pulled it down around him. White Bear felt wrapped in hopelessness as the cloth covered his head. And he had wanted to be a prophet for the Sauk. _The truer his words, the less they hear him._ He struggled halfheartedly. He no longer cared what they did to him. His own failure and the sure destruction of his people chained him so that he could barely move. The warriors pulled the dress straight down over his arms, pinioning them to his sides. As his head emerged through the collar, laughter battered at him. Teeth gleamed in the firelight. He saw Sun Woman holding Redbird. Tears squeezed through his wife's tightly shut eyelids. The face of his mother was heavy with woe. Too despairing to resist, he let Wolf Paw and his men push and drag him away from the council fire and run him through the camp. He was blind to the laughing faces around him, deaf to the mocking cries. But he saw one sight that all but killed him--looking up at him from somewhere in the crowd, the hurt, bewildered eyes of his son, Eagle Feather. 13 The Volunteers Nicole and Frank had walked halfway across the main room of the trading post blockhouse when Nicole heard Raoul's voice thundering from the stone-walled counting office in the far corner. "You and the boys will stay at Victoire!" Nicole touched Frank's arm, and they stopped and drew back a little, standing beside the long black barrel of the six-pounder naval cannon Raoul had set up in the blockhouse. It would be best not to intrude on Raoul when he was in the midst of a quarrel. "But none of them French people there like me," a woman answered, high, nasal, with a Missouri twang. "It's downright lonesome." Nicole recognized Clarissa Greenglove's voice. "I'm going to be gone and your father's coming with me. Where the hell else would you stay?" "With my Aunt Melinda in St. Louis. That'd be a perfect place. You could send me down on the _Victory_.'" "Of course I could." Raoul's voice was creamy with sarcasm. "And then do you know what would happen? Half those men who are out in the courtyard now volunteering for my militia company would quit. Because if I send you and Phil and Andy away, it means _their_ families aren't safe. And so they'd insist on staying home to protect them." His voice rose to a shout. "Do you understand now, goddamn it? Then get the hell out of here." A moment later Clarissa scurried out past the iron-reinforced door of Raoul's counting room. The two small boys she'd borne to Raoul ran beside her floor-length calico skirt. She'd gotten to be round-shouldered, Nicole saw. Clarissa nodded. "Mister, Miz Hopkins."