Read Online The Outsider by Ann H. Gabhart - Free Book Online Page B

picked up his coffee and took another drink. “But they’re good enough people. Maybe a little curious to us, Hope, but they’ll bring no harm to anyone.”
    “In my mind they’re harming my girl already by shutting her away out there. She ought to be married with babes of her own by now. She’s nigh on twenty. Instead she’s stuck in there to spend her life as a barren old maid.”
    Brice looked straight at the man. “You have to let your daughter choose the kind of life she wants.”
    Hope stared back at him. “I’m willing to do that, Doc, but I don’t know as to whether these Shaker people are. They’ve got her closed up in that little town of theirs till she can’t see what life might be like anywhere else.”
    “Go, talk to her then, Hope. Tell her she has a choice.”
    “I’ve thought about that, but I’m dead to her now. I can’t just sashay in there and say, ‘Howdy, here’s your pa back from the dead’ after all these years.”
    “Then I guess that’s your choice.” Brice started to stand up. “I don’t see how I can be of any help to you.”
    “You don’t remember me, do you, boy?” Hope smiled and shook his head. “Of course, you don’t. It’s been a pile of years.”
    Brice sank back down in his chair and stared hard at the man. A long-closed door creaked open in his mind. He was a boy again fetching firewood for the squaws. Brice heard the men before he saw them. Speaking white men’s words. His words. The hunters looked thunderstruck when he stepped in front of them and spoke his white name. This was one of those faces he’d thought he would never forget. “You were one of the hunters.”
    “That’s right, boy. And you were just a little white boy who’d almost turned pure Injun.”
    “I did what I had to do and learned the Indian way, but I wasn’t Indian.”
    “And you were grateful that we got you away?”
    Brice met the man’s eyes. “I’d have left in time anyway, but I suppose I am beholden to you. I’ve got some money here.” Brice pulled out the little sack of coins the elder had given him. “I’ll pay you for the booty you traded for me.”
    “I don’t want your money, Doc. You know that. I want your help. Help just like I give you back then.”
    Brice kept the money there between them in hopes the man would take it still.
    But Hope didn’t reach for it as he went on. “The way I see it, my little girl is in sort of the same fix you was in. You liked it there with the Injuns, but once we got you away, you liked it better. She thinks she’s one of these Shakers now, but she ain’t. I want you to get her away from there so she’ll know that.”
    “How? I can’t trade for her the way you did for me.”
    “I don’t know how. But at least you can let her know she can leave. That she’s got a friend out here waiting for her. Tell her whatever you want. Just let her know she don’t have to stay with them Shakers.”
    “But what if she wants to stay?”
    “She won’t. A place like that is for old women like Martha who never did like living. Gabrielle’s not like that. I’ve seen her sing to little butterflies and whirl around to a secret tune nobody could hear but her. She’ll come away when she sees that she can.”
    Brice stared at the man a long time before he spoke. He didn’t want to do it. The young sister had already disturbed a part of him that he’d thought was long dead. But the man was right. He did owe him. There was no denying that, in spite of what he’d said about leaving the Indians on his own. They’d brought him away from the Indians while he was still white. In another few years he might have forgotten too many of the white man’s ways.
    Brice slowly nodded. “I’ll talk to the young sister if I can. But I’m not sure it will do any good. She not only lives among the Shakers. She is a Shaker.”

6
    Gabrielle saw the doctor when he came to treat Nathan, but she stayed back in the shadows so he wouldn’t notice her.