[@Sterling]

Hanz felt the cool compressions upon his skin, drifting in and out of consciousness with increasing rapidity, his bright blue eyes sometimes fluttering open to take in the plain but kindly face of a kneeling woman. Framed by the bright blue Texan sky, she was certainly ordinary and no real beauty, but those brown eyes of hers were full of warmth and genuine concern, genuine concern which must have been for him. Feeling the cloth against him bought the feeling of dryness within his mouth back to him, like a scorched desert parched of much needed rains.

At first he said nothing, bodily unable to form any words, his mind processing what he had heard and the words his father had told him...were they alive? Dead? Scalped and lef to rot? He did not know, but he knew the sound of Indians, and his father had spoken enough on the subject of the native savages. Within the state of Texas there lived a number of them, each split into further bands, but he had never been able to tell them apart.

Eventually he heard more voices about him, at a distance, most hushed and at least one or two women began weeping to look upon him.

"Eltern ... tot ... meine ganze Familie ist tot, helfen Sie mir ... helfen Sie mir."

He had spoken in his native tongue, not realising that this gentle lady probably spoke English, but quickly rectifying his mistake.

"My...family," he managed to croak, a thick accent making his words clog up his mouth, "river, attacked, hear...hear Indians..."

A cough and a wheeze were all that followed, one thin and sunburnt arm reaching out to point back the way he had come, before Hanz once more slipped into the blackness of unconsciousness, back to the place where his thirst and pain were meaningless and the toils of the waking world were completely absent.