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At the little hospital that served Headwater Sheriff Roddy Walker asked if Gabriel saw who it was that messed up him up.

"I don't know, sir. They wore black hoods over their faces."

"Did they tell you why they were doing it?"

"They didn't like me marrying one of 'their' white girls, sir."

"How do you feel, Gabriel?"

"Not any better than the last time it happened, sir."

"The last time? You've been flogged before?"

Gabriel nodded, and stared at Doctor Wahkan, who could confirm.

"It's a Kuwapi thing, Sheriff Walker. The young men of the People camp out on the plains overnight and have at each other to see how much they can stand. But I suppose they grew tired of the game when they found out you were cheating."

"They found a better game they called Peace Pipe."

Three days later Klaus Hansen came to the same hospital. Certainly it was not to visit Gabriel, who had been released the same day he checked in, but instead he came to see Gabriel's attackers. Doctor Wahkan was still muttering about the "animals" who had slowly turned all six of their feet into just so much ruined hamburger, requiring a clean amputation of each one.

Every time the three boys were visited after their operations, first by their parents, then by the sheriff, and later by Klaus, they took to sobbing miserably. It was not so much from the pain they were still suffering but from the memory of the hell they had already suffered. Their tormentors worked day and night, just like Gabriel told them would happen. The perps wore no hoods and used their real names as they went about their bloody business, yet even now their victims refused to identify them at all, other than to say they were "Indians".

"Where's the Golden Gift?"

"Gabriel had it the whole time."

"You searched him, strung him up like a pig, and horsewhipped him, but Gabriel had it on him the entire time? So where did he have it hidden, Johnny, in his asshole?"