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his throat. He’d known his parents were dead the minute they fell.
    Well, he wasn’t that horrified, helpless boy anymore. He was known throughout the Nation, and over the United States border in Arkansas, too, as a fearless, ruthless bringer of justice, the most famous Cherokee Lighthorseman of them all.
    Black Fox’s fame came from several jobs he’d done that people still talked about. He had trailed William Emmit, who never robbed a man he didn’t kill, all the way to Klo Kotcha in the Creek Nation, and had brought him in alive. He had tracked James Morley, a notorious horsethief, for thirty days, long after the posse and the federal marshal from Fort Smith had given up, and he had caught him alive, too. He had faced down Mose Fourkiller as he openly boasted of his treachery in killing his neighbor and had shot the man dead.
    But the exploit that had sealed his reputation and made him the most prominent Lighthorse-man of all had happened when he’d stopped the jailbreak at the old Tahlequah jail. He had rushed Buckskin Adair knowing the murderer held a smuggled gun and had already freed two other prisoners to overpower the guard. All three of them had been giving him the turkey-gobble death threat and coming at him, Adair shooting, when Black Fox had hit two of them with his first two shots and the third had thrown up his hands in surrender.
    He shook his head in wonder as he remembered. God had been with him, and Adair had been a lousy shot or he would not be here tonight.
    Black Fox got to his feet and stretched, walked to the edge of the woods where he could stand in the shadows and look out across the vague outlines of the wooded hills. All that was past and he must think about the present.
    Now he had captured his first woman outlaw and she was wounded. What was he going to do with her?
    She was not able to ride and she would not be able until that wound had healed sufficiently. She’d lost so much blood that she’d be weak for quite a while before he could start on the long trail to Fort Smith without killing her.
    He wasn’t carrying enough supplies to stay here for the days it would take before she was near normal strength again. He couldn’t leave her long enough to hunt for food, not so much because she might try to escape—in her weakened state, she wouldn’t be up to hiding her tracks and he’d be able to track her—but because she might overdo herself and start the bleeding again. She’d already done that once.
    Black Fox felt his mouth curve at the memory of her and the long gun she’d fired at Becker. She had enough spunk for two people her size.
    There was no place else to take her but to his home, where Aunt Sally and Uncle Muskrat would be on hand to help if he needed it. Though he really didn’t want to get them involved if he could help it, it would be good to be close to them in case The Cat’s condition should worsen, because Aunt Sally was an herb doctor who had treated many a gunshot wound and many a fever.
    But Aunt Sally was also very admiring of The Cat, and for that reason Black Fox didn’t want her to know that he had the Cherokee Robin Hood in custody. He grinned at the thought of the brisk, bossy woman who had raised him. It was amazing, come to think of it, that he had become a Lighthorseman wanting to enforce the law, because Sally had her own very definite opinions about right and wrong, justice and punishment. She didn’t see one thing wrong with The Cat’s stealing from the rich to give to the poor.
    Yes, he would take her home with him. It’d be a fairly long ride, but he had no choice. Cathleen had too much courage to let herself die on thetrail.
    And she had the same sorrow he did, having seen her people murdered before her eyes.

Chapter 3
    B lack Fox still hadn’t closed his eyes when the first streaks of pink tinged the sky. And he still hadn’t figured out what to believe about the