Read A Cold Day in Hell for Free Online Page A

he is, Sam. He’s just fine. Got allthe right equipment, if that’s what you mean. All his fingers and toes. Everything else. Just one thing.”
    “W-what?” Seamus asked in a gasp, twisting about suddenly, frightened at the sound of that.
    The child began to squall, high-pitched and rhythmic, like nothing he had ever heard before. Now he was worried. Truly worried.
    “Don’t know what his folks are going to do,” Elizabeth said gravely, but a smile betrayed her face, eyes twinkling, “seeing how he’s come out about as homely as his father.”
    With a reassuring gush all three midwives chuckled at that and went back to their duties at the foot of the bed as Seamus bent low, helping Sam tug the blanket back from the child’s face all the more.
    “Lemme have a look, Sam,” he whispered as he planted another kiss on her lips glistening with her tears.
    He straightened slightly and began to slowly peel back the folds of the blanket. Beneath it lay the red, squealing, wriggling child—all arms and legs and mouth. The child clenched his eyes in that crimson face as he bellowed in protest.
    “It’s a boy, Sam,” he cried, sensing his own tears begin to sting his eyes.
    “Yes!” Elizabeth Burt exclaimed with genuine joy as she gathered more of the bloody sheets into her arms and passed them on to Nettie Capron. “Just listen to the set of lungs this’un has! My, my—never have I ever heard such caterwauling!”
    Seamus repeated over and over, almost unbelieving how beautiful such a tiny creature could be, “A boy, Sam. A b-boy!”
    Tears welled from his eyes now, his lower lip quivering as it never had before, even as it had in those last few minutes of bachelorhood before he stepped beneath that sheltering oak tree in Sharp Grover’s yard near the Texas panhandle country, prepared to take this woman to his side forevermore.
    She asked him, “You approve, Seamus?”
    “Oh, yes—yes! A girl, a boy,” he answered in a rush, leaning over to kiss the tiny infant’s wrinkled forehead, gently brushing that thick crop of hair with his lips. “Anything—long as you both made it through, Sam.”
    “We made it through,” she whimpered wearily beneath him, her eyes thickly pooling with tears, her lips smiling as she cried in joy. “We both made it through just fine.”
    “He’s beautiful,” Seamus explained as he glanced up at thethree midwives. “Don’t you think he’s just about the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”
    “Yes, he certainly is at that, Mr. Donegan,” Elizabeth Burt said, still at work there at the foot of the bed. “And if I know anything about his father, Sam: I’ll bet that little one is going to be a real hellion before you know it!”

Chapter 2
Canapekasna Wi

Moon When the Leaves Fall

    S itting Bull’s Hunkpapa called him “Big Leggings.”
    Among the white man he carried the name Johnny Bruguier.
    And ever since the last days of summer Johnny had been running from the whites. They wanted to hang him for murder.
    In the crisp chill of autumn Bruguier stirred the fire before him at the center of the huge lodge he shared with Sitting Bull’s family. The old man and everyone else still slept this morning, exhausted from yesterday’s crossing of the Elk River. *
    But Johnny could not sleep. It had been like this nearly every night since he’d fled the Standing Rock Agency, † Each time he closed his eyes the nightmares returned to haunt him. He awoke in a sweat. Afraid to close his eyes, afraid of those awful dreams, he instead sat up and tended the fire through much of the night, thinking. Brooding on all manner of things. Mostly on the white men who would hang him. And hating his mother for hooking up with a drunken white trader at the agency more than two decades ago.
    Life had been tough for a half-breed at Standing Rock. So many times while he was growing up had he felt pushed outside the Hunkpapa band. At the same time the whites closed theirarms and cloaked