WORLDS OF SUN AND SHADOW

Two years had passed since the Great Race, as Chief Eagle Horn liked to call it, and Frank had spent a considerable amount of that time on the Lakota reservation reclaiming his history, his life. The reservation had proved true to it's name, Frank had not received welcome from his Indian brothers, he had to earn it. Frank's fame and his relationship with Chief Eagle Horn had admitted him into their camp, but not into their lives and certainly not into their hearts. Frank understood, his past was bloody with their tragedies and while he was not blamed for the slaughter at Wounded Knee Creek, he had carried the orders, and later insulted the memory in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. They were facts Frank had added time and again, and he knew the total, the feeling of guilt and disgust in himself. So, he couldn't blame his brothers for sharing his own feelings. Chief Eagle Horn had also been in Buffalo Bill's show, but he was Lakota and it made the difference.

Eventually with the Chief's counsel and Frank's victory in the Great Race, his purchase of the mustangs, and the acceptance of his heritage, Frank found his footing, his place among his people. He was no longer Blue Child, or even Far Rider, for while the land had been taken away from them, their traditions never were. Not long after Frank's arrival at the reservation Chief Eagle Horn stopped calling him Far Rider, but Son From Shadows. Frank acknowledged the new name, but clung to Blue Child, Hok'shel'ato. When he tried to look past the shadows of his life, he could hear the gentle rhythm of his mother's voice speaking his name. Only, sometimes it was not his mother's voice he heard, but that soft, gentle voice from the desert, Jazira's voice, calling him Blue Child.

When the reservation was no longer enough for him, when his past finally merged with his present and the two could live as one inside of him, then he ached to be gone from his brothers, from the Chief. It was then he remembered and dreamed of the strange, hostile world he once knew in Arabia. That desert of compassion, except for that voice from the only person other than his mother who called him by his name. He dreamed of that world, that race, the Sheik, Al-Hattal, the sand storm, the locusts, and of dark expressive eyes above a veil penetrating him. It was enough to urge him awake, and out of his tent to walk along the edge of the settlement, longing to be away. It was time to go, for the cowboy to ride into the next sunset, but not the same cowboy.