Read Rose for Free Online Page B

politely, if it was convenient, and if I was between jobs, would I just happen on by a no-account town called Busted Heel and see how his boy was makin’ out as marshal?”
    His boy. Kase crossed his arms over his rib cage. He felt as if he’d just taken a punch to the gut. He wondered if Zach had known the truth all these years.
    A fly buzzed in the stillness. While neither of them spoke, the hot air in the small room seemed to close in around them.
    “You got trouble you can’t handle, Kase?” Zach met his stare straight on.
    “Nothing anyone can help me with, Zach.”
    Used to keeping his own council, Kase hesitated to open up to Zach, even though he knew the man as well as he did anyone. Zachariah Weston Elliot had been a scout for the army at Fort Sully in the Dakotas when Caleb Storm, then an undercover agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, moved Kase and Analisa there in 1871. But Kase knew the longer he kept silent, the more tension and anger would roil inside him. There was only one way to find out.
    “Did you know who my real father was?”
    Zach’s answer was swift, his expression one of unveiled surprise. “No. I always thought it was Caleb.”
    Unable to sit any longer, Kase stood and began to slowly pace the confines of the small office. “My real father,” he began, trailing his splayed fingers through his hair, “was a renegade Sioux who knifed and raped my mother when she was sixteen.”
    “Shit.” Zach worked his tobacco plug and squinted up at Kase. “How’d you find that out?”
    “Caleb told me.” Kase shrugged and turned toward the window.
    “What in the hell for?” Zach shook his head and asked the question more to himself than to Kase.
    But Kase had heard, and turned on the old man with a vengeance. “Because I forced him to. I prodded and pried until he told me.” He turned away again, unable to meet the old man’s questioning stare, and wished to God he had never heard the truth.
    Zach shook his head. “You and Caleb was always two peas in a pod. It was your ma I could never quite figure into the picture.”
    From the window where he stood, Kase watched a man cross the far end of the street, the image wavering like a specter in the heat waves that rose from the dry ground. Like the heat, the knot in his chest would not ease.
    When they finally came, his words were soft-spoken. “My mother’s family had just immigrated from Holland and were attacked as they crossed the plains. Her younger brother and sister were taken captive. Only Opa, my grandfather, and my mother survived. I still remember Opa, and living with him and Mother in a soddie in Iowa. I can even remember the day Caleb married my mother.”
    “Then you knew he wasn’t your real pa.”
    As he recalled the years gone by, Kase smiled wistfully. “Sure, I knew. After they were married I always called him Papa. I remember wishing it to be true, but like any kid, I was always asking questions.” His words brought little G.W. to mind. “Where’s my real pa? What kind of an Indian is he? What happened to him?”
    “And?”
    “They gave me answers that didn’t quite tally, so I kept it up. Why didn’t we live in town after the Indian went away? What was his name? Where did he go? They said he was dead, that he had been a Sioux from the Pine Ridge Reservation, that my mother never knew his Indian name. She called him mijn man, a Dutch term for husband. She never used the more familiar, more endearing echtgenoot, which means husband, too. I used to wonder how they met, how they even communicated, because my mother only spoke Dutch before I was born. Finally, all the questions must have upset her, because one day Caleb took me riding and he told me how sad it made my mother feel to remember the man, because he was dead. If I had any questions, I was to ask him, not Mother. So for a time I stopped asking. But it haunted me more and more.”
    “And in Boston?”
    “They sent me to school.” Unwilling to say more,