Shaman by Robert Shea (nice books to read TXT) 📖

They was a few scouts that come to watch what happened to the peace party. Most of our men were carrying a right powerful load of whiskey. Some of the men saw the scouts hiding in the woods and got excited. Colonel Raoul, he used that as an excuse to order us to finish off the Injuns with the white flag."

"And you shot Auguste?" Ford asked.

"I give him that ear." Greenglove pointed in the general direction of Auguste's right ear. "Hoped he'd be smart enough to play possum after he was hit."

"Why did you choose not to kill Auguste? Did you think it would be murder?"

Greenglove cackled scornfully. "Hell, that never stopped me before. No, it was real simple." He paused, and the courtroom was still. "I saved that boy's life because I wanted Colonel Raoul to marry my daughter, Clarissa."

And suddenly Eli Greenglove started to cry. Tears ran down his bony cheeks and sobs shook his lean frame.

Ford stood looking wide-eyed, turned to stare at Auguste, who himself was dumbfounded, having never seen a man like Eli Greenglove cry.

Bennett broke the embarrassed silence. "Your Honor, I don't see what this man's daughter has to do with the case."[437]

Greenglove's moist eyes narrowed to angry slits. "Just shut up a minute, lawyer, and I'll tell you. My daughter lived with Raoul de Marion for seven years and bore him two kids, but he wouldn't marry her because she weren't good enough for him. No, he had to have the preacher's daughter. That lady, Miss Hale." He pointed toward the spectators. "But she was sweet on Mr. Pierre's boy, Auguste, and I could see he had an eye for her too. As long as Auguste was alive, I figured there'd be a chance that Miss Hale would run off with him. So I made sure to keep him alive."

Auguste's heart sank. If the jury believed what Greenglove was saying now, wouldn't that make them think that there must have been something between him and Nancy when she was kidnapped by the Sauk?

Greenglove's lips drew back from his stained teeth. "But then that sonofabitch Raoul had to go and kill Black Hawk's men that brought the white flag. There weren't no real war before that happened. If he'd sent them messengers on to General Atkinson, the whole thing would've been over in May. Every one of them white people, soldiers and farmers, men, women and children, was killed by that man there." He pointed a skinny finger in Raoul's direction. "Meanin' my daughter Clarissa and my two grandkids."

"Your daughter was a slut, Greenglove," Raoul shouted. "I'd've never married her if she lived to be a hundred." Auguste turned and saw him standing in the back of the courtroom, Perrault and a few more of his bully boys flanking him.

"Oh?" said Greenglove in a whisper that somehow was loud enough for the whole court to hear. "You are very lucky they took my rifle away from me, Colonel Raoul."

Ford said, "I think that's all. Mr. Bennett, do you wish to cross-examine?"

Raoul, from the back, cut in, "Judge, this man is a deserter from my militia battalion. He's been on the run for the past three months. What he's said here is worth nothing."

Cooper frowned at Greenglove, then at Raoul. "I don't see what difference that makes. They bring convicted criminals out of prison cells to testify."

Ford said, "In fact, if this man risked arrest to come here, that makes his testimony all the more believable. To say nothing of going all the way to New Orleans to bring Mr. Wegner back."[438]

"No, it doesn't show him any more honest," Bennett spoke up. "It just means he wants revenge against Raoul de Marion."

Cooper rapped with his mallet. "The testimony can stand. The jury'll decide what it's worth. Lieutenant Davis, have your corporals see that Mr. Wegner and Mr. Greenglove reach the town limits safely. And then, Lieutenant, I'd like a word with you. Meanwhile, the lawyers for each side can sum up."

Flanked by the two blue-coated corporals, Greenglove and Otto Wegner started side by side toward the courtroom door, Wegner's peg leg thumping on the plank floor.

"You go to Hell, Eli!" Raoul snarled as Greenglove passed him.

Greenglove laughed. "I got a better idea from ol' Otto here. I'm a-going to Texas!"

The two men walked out the door as a silence fell over the courtroom.

Auguste wondered, had their testimony saved him? They had told the truth about what happened at Old Man's Creek, but since when had truth meant anything to the pale eyes? If those twelve men sitting in church pews on the right side of the courtroom decided they wanted to hang him, they would hang him even if their Jesus spirit himself came into the courtroom and told the truth about him.

And after seeing the slaughter at the Bad Axe, could Auguste doubt that killing all red people was what all pale eyes most wanted to do?

Cooper and the lieutenant talked quietly at the judge's table. When Cooper called on Bennett to sum up, the prosecutor rose and sidled over to the jury.

"About the supposed adoption papers and Pierre de Marion's alleged will, Mrs. Russell's claim that Mr. Raoul de Marion ordered these papers destroyed is hearsay. She has no direct knowledge that Mr. de Marion gave any such instructions to her husband. More important—if Pierre de Marion adopted Auguste, that makes Auguste a U.S. citizen, and his participating in acts of war by the Sauk nation against the United States is treason. Auguste made war on his own flag.

"Whether Raoul de Marion did right or wrong in running his nephew off Victoire, gentlemen, one thing is sure. Auguste went back to the British Band carrying a powerful grudge against this[439] place and these people. So, I put it to you, he decided that if he could not be a white landowner, he would destroy the white landowners.

"And he had the power to do it, because the Indians would listen to him. They knew him as a witch doctor, and they also knew that he had been educated among whites. And so he used his power to push Black Hawk toward war. He is an accomplice to the murder of every white man, woman and child killed by his fellow tribesmen.

"Auguste de Marion or White Bear or whatever he chooses to call himself"—Bennett pointed an accusing finger at Auguste—"should be hanged as a traitor and a butcher of his own people."

Auguste heard mutterings of approval from around the courtroom and a loud "Damned right!" from Raoul. His feeling that this trial was hopeless grew deeper. Bennett had told the jury what they wanted to hear—the version of the truth that would let them do what they wanted to him.

Ford stood up, wiping his brow. The room was hot for late September. He crossed the front of the courtroom to stand before the two rows of jurymen in their borrowed church pews.

"Gentlemen of the jury, I took up arms against the Sauk and Fox Indians under General Edmund Gaines in 1831. I am not prejudiced in favor of Indians. I only ask that you try to understand this man whose life is in your hands.

"You have to decide two questions: One, by traveling and living with the British Band of the Sauk and Fox from September 1831 to August 1832, did Auguste de Marion commit treason against the United States? Two, is Auguste de Marion guilty of the murder of any citizens of the United States or the state of Illinois?

"Is Auguste a traitor to his country? Well, it seems to me that if anything, Auguste holds dual citizenship in the United States and in the Sauk and Fox nation. And, far from being a traitor to either, he tried to make peace between them. The only thing he ever carried against the United States was a white flag.

"Has Auguste committed murder? All we know for a fact is that no one has seen him raise a violent hand against another human being. Otto Wegner told you how Auguste had a chance to kill him, and instead helped him escape. At great peril to himself.

"You've heard Pierre de Marion's will, which explains why Raoul[440] de Marion, who illegally seized the great house known as Victoire, has been so eager to hound this young man to his death.

"This man has lost everything a man holds dear. His father and mother. His home here in Victor. His home among the Sauk.

"Almost all of his people, his loved ones and the friends of his youth, have been killed. Everyone who lives in Victor knows to their sorrow what happened to his infant daughter. His wife and son are captives, too, and he cannot be with them or provide for them. Which of you, having had so much taken from him so cruelly, would not go mad with grief?

"He has lost so much. All he has left is his life. Let us not, I beg of you, take that from him as well."

Ford sat down in the midst of a heavy silence. Auguste tried to send his shaman's sense forward into the future to tell him how the jury would decide, but his spirit met a blank wall.

He glanced out a nearby unshuttered window and saw a blue afternoon sky with a few white clouds. Within the wooden walls of this courtroom, sky and sun, prairie and river, seemed very far away.

Judge Cooper said, "Gentlemen of the jury, we have prepared a room upstairs for you. We'll send food and drink to you as you require. There are cots in case you can't make up your minds today."

As he watched the twelve men file up the stairs behind the judge's table, Auguste could not stop his mind from wandering to the worst. He thought about what it would be like to be hanged, the rough grip of the rope on his neck, the blood bursting in his head, the world going black, his body jerking in hopeless struggle, breath cut off, lungs aching, the final silencing of his heart.

He heard a harsh laugh in the back of the room. He turned and saw Raoul in the midst of a group of men standing near the doorway of the courtroom. Beside Raoul was Armand Perrault. Raoul looked at Auguste and smiled. Auguste knew what that smile meant.

Whatever the jury decided, for him there would be no escape from death.

[441]

23
Sharp Knife

Late that afternoon, Lieutenant Davis called Auguste from his cell and took him down to the courtroom.

"Judge said send for you. I think maybe the jury's reached a verdict."

Entering through the rear door of the courtroom, Auguste met Raoul's eyes and his longing for vengeance made his blood feel like molten metal in his veins.

The jurymen came in through a side door. Robert McAllister, foreman of the jury, glanced at Auguste, then handed David Cooper a folded piece of paper.

"He looked at you," Ford whispered. "It's an old tale among lawyers that if members of the jury have found the defendant guilty, they don't look at him."

Cooper read the note and sighed loudly, as if he found the message burdensome. Then he took goose quill and ink and wrote a note of his own. McAllister watched him write, looking over his shoulder, sighed as heavily as Cooper had, looked at Auguste again. After a moment he nodded and took the judge's note back upstairs.

"Well," said Judge Cooper to the courtroom at large, "it seems the jury's a pretty fair distance from a verdict. They can't agree on a lot of things. So, I've given orders that they stay upstairs and keep at it. It looks like we won't have a guilty or not guilty until tomorrow. The prisoner will go back upstairs to his cell. Court will open at nine o'clock in the morning."

Auguste heard the rear door of the courtroom slam and knew without looking around that Raoul had left.[442]

That night Auguste lay on his corn-husk mattress wondering whether he should try to run away when they took him out. To be shot while trying to escape might be more honorable than hanging. He wished he could see Redbird and Eagle Feather one last time. He wished Nancy would come to visit him. Or at least Nicole, Grandpapa or Frank. But Lieutenant Davis said that for the prisoner's safety no one would be allowed into the village hall tonight.

He heard a key turning in his door lock. He climbed to his feet.

"Come on," said Davis quickly. "We're taking you out of here."

They've come to kill me, Auguste thought. It would not be the first time an inconvenient Indian was "shot while trying to escape." But his shaman's insight told him Davis was as trustworthy as any Sauk.

"Why? Before the verdict?"

"They did