Thunder Moon and the Sky People

Book excerpt: The Thunder Moon series represents some of Max Brand?s best work, originally published in 1927?28 as a series of interlocking stories. The University of Nebraska Press is now republishing these stories uncut and in the sequence Faust intended, with careful reference to the original typescripts. In order, the works appear in four volumes as The Legend of Thunder Moon, Red Wind and Thunder Moon, Thunder Moon and the Sky People, and Farewell, Thunder Moon. Thunder Moon and the Sky People originally appeared as stories in 1927 issues of Western Story Magazine. In this work, Thunder Moon undertakes his greatest quest, seeking the long-forgotten home from which he was abducted as a child by Big Hard Face, chief of the Suhtai band of the Cheyennes. Betrayed by and alienated from the people among whom he was raised and whom he had led so successfully in war upon their traditional enemies the Comanches and the Pawnees, Thunder Moon is accompanied only by his faithful friend Standing Antelope. What he finds among the unfamiliar whites is much more than he expected, but much less than the consternation the strange Cheyenne hero brings to those he has not seen since he was an infant. Yet on all his travels and during all his perils, he cannot escape the spell cast on him by the enigmatic Indian beauty Red Wind.