"No, I don't know that. Clarissa was all I had in the world. I kept hoping you'd find it in your heart to marry her, but you never treated her decent. Never cared enough for them kids to give them your name. Your brother, he did more for that half-Injun son of his than you did for your two that was all white." _All white they were, but half Puke_, Raoul thought, feeling his disdain for the man who stood slumped before him. Puke, a good nickname for Greenglove's breed. Missouri puked up the worst of its people, and they landed in Illinois. Clarissa's breasts flattening and sagging, her shoulders round, her teeth stained by pipe smoke. So slatternly she'd gotten to be, he hardly cared to take her to bed. And Phil and Andy growing up with that same washed-out, weak-boned Greenglove look. _How could I think that way about my own kids? What kind of a man am I? And now they've been murdered, and I'm still despising them._ He had to quit this. He was torturing himself. Wasn't it bad enough? It was the goddamned Indians he should be hating. "We'll have our revenge, Eli. We'll kill a hundred Indians for each of ours who died." "Like you murdered them three at Old Man's Creek. I warned you not to do that. That was what got Clarissa and her kids killed. I won't be helping you get your vengeance, Colonel Raoul de Marion. Because if I did stay around you, sooner or later I'd want blood for blood of mine that's been spilled." Raoul felt a chill, facing Greenglove's implacable, dull-eyed hatred. But he was damned if he'd back down before this human weed. "You'll leave this company when your term of enlistment is up and not one damned day sooner. You're captain of the Smith County company." Greenglove's mouth curled in a cold smile. "By tomorrow there won't be any company. The Smith County boys heard about what happened at Victor. Most of them'll be quitting." Raoul felt the heat rising in his neck and head. "The hell they will! My Smith County boys will want Indian blood just like I do. And just like you would if you hadn't taken a notion to blame Clarissa's death on me." Auguste. The half-breed. Raoul felt his blood boiling as he saw the olive-skinned face mingling Pierre's features with Indian looks. The face he'd never stopped hating from the moment he first saw it. Auguste was dead. Eli, here, had shot him. His body was rotting away somewhere on the prairie behind them. But the Indians of the British Band were alive--Auguste's people. They snuck up on Victoire, Raoul's home. Burned it to the ground. Tomahawked his woman. Chopped his children, his two boys, Andy and Phil, to pieces. To pieces. He saw that, for a moment, too vividly, and almost screamed. He grabbed the jug and burned the bloody picture out of his mind with a swallow. Auguste's band, skulking around up the river somewhere.