The Warrior's Path

*

Chapter I

What I hoped for was a fat bear, and what I came up with was a skinny Indian.

It was lonely on the mountain, and I had been watching the sun crest the peaks with light. There was some mist lying in the valleys, and all around me the rhododendrons were in bloom, covering the flanks of the Blue Ridge and the mountains nearby. Seated among them, their petals falling across my shoulders and into my hair, I watched the path below.

It was an old, old path, old before the coming of the Cherokees, old before the Shawnees hunted these hills, as old as the first men on these mountains.

All through the afternoon there had been no sound but the twittering of birds, but I knew something was coming up the trail yonder, for I'd seen birds fly up from time to time, marking its progress along the path, which was visible only at intervals.

What I wanted was a fat bear, for we were needful of grease, and my ribs were showing. When a body lives off the country around, fat is the hardest thing to come by. Fresh meat was no problem, but it was lean, mighty lean.

An Indian was the last thing I was wishful of seeing. We had good friends among them, but when a body becomes friendly with one nation, he naturally becomes an enemy of their enemies whether he is wishful for it or not. Moreover, a friendly Indian could eat us out of house and home, and we were shy of meat and corn flour. Next to a fat bear it was Yance I was most anxious to see, for he was coming across the hills with fur, which we would soon be packing for trade in the settlements.

This Indian was old, and he was hurt. When I put my glass on him, I could see that. It was pa's glass, one used by him during his seafaring days and a right handy contrivance.

Sitting among the blooms of rhododenron, all pink, purple, and white, and scattered among them the pink of mountain laurel, I watched him come. Scrooched down in the brush the way I was, it was unlikely he'd see me.

The old man was reaching for the end of his rope. He was worn out and in need of help, but I'd had dealings with redskins since I was knee-high to a short duck, and Indians could be mighty sly. That old Indian might be a decoy to get me to show myself so's I could be bow shot or lanced, and I was wishful for neither.

He seemed to be in perishing bad shape. Coming to my feet, I must needs take the shortest way, which meant right down the steep cliff through the rhododendrons. It was all of three hundred paces back to where our path turned off, and that old man was hurting.

This here was our country, leaving out a few Indians who might argue the point, but I'd see no man die whom I had not personally shot. He was still a-coming when I slid into the trail before him, but he was weaving a mighty weird path and was ready to drop in his tracks. I was close enough to catch him.

He wasn't only worn down from travel, he was gun shot.

Getting an arm around him to keep him from falling, I took time to slip his knife from its sheath for safety's sake. Then I walked him to where I could lead him through the brush to our cabin.

We'd built, Yance and I, well back in a niche among the rocks with a cliff overhanging from above. We had a fine field of fire on three sides in case of attack, which happened whenever a passing war party took the notion. This was the place we built after the Senecas killed pa and Tom Watkins in the mountains above Crab Orchard.

When I put that Indian down on the bed, he just naturally passed out. Putting water on to boil, I unlaced the top of his hunting shirt and found he'd been shot through the top of the shoulder with a musket ball. The ball was still there, pressed against the skin at the back of his shoulder. Taking my hunting knife, I slit the skin and oozed it out. The wound was several days old but wasn't in bad shape.

Sakim often commented on the fact that wounds in high country did not fester as often as they did in crowded cities. Sakim had come to America with pa, but he had been a physician and surgeon in central Asia, a descendant of a long line of scholars from the great age of medicine. Pa had met him after pa was kidnapped aboard Nick Bardle's ship where Sakim was also a sailor. He'd come aboard Bardle's pirate craft by shipwreck or capture, and when pa made his escape, Sakim was one of the two who chose to leave with him.

When we were youngsters at our small settlement on Shooting Creek, he had been our teacher. A noted scholar among his own people, his education far surpassed any available in Europe at the time. He taught us much of the sciences and of history but also of sickness and the treating of wounds, but for all his teaching, I was wishing him with us now.

The old man opened his eyes while I bathed his wound. "You are Sack-ett?"

"I am."

"I come Penney."

The only Penney I knew was Yance's wife, whose name had been Temperance Penney when he took her to be wed. She was back on Shooting Creek, waiting our return.

"Miz Penney say me come Sack-ett. Much trouble. Carrie gone."

Carrie? That would be Temp's baby sister, of whom I'd heard her speak.

"Gone? Gone where?"

"Pequots take him. Bad Indian. All much afraid of Pequot."

Right now I was beginning to regret this old Indian. Had it not been for him, I'd have been shagging it down the Cherokee Path to find ol' Yance, who was behind time in his coming. There was always the chance that he'd rounded up too many Indians.

Of course it took a few to be too many for Yance, and I had mercy for anybody who cornered him. I'd done it a couple of times when we were youngsters and was lucky to get away with my hair. Yance was bull strong, bear tough, and he could fight like a cornered catamount.

Yance was casual about most things, but pa had pressed it upon us to be prompt. It was a rule amongst us to be where we were supposed to be and no nonsense about it. We knew it was often the difference between life and death.

"Miz Penney say you come. Much bad Indian. Take two girls."

Taking up my musket, I moved to the door, standing where I could watch the path to our clearing. If Yance came running and was hard pressed, I might take down at least one of them. I mind the time he came to the door with a big she-bear about two jumps behind him. It was a nip-and-tuck thing getting him in the door and keeping the bear out, and just having freshly mopped the floor, I was almost minded to shut the door and let them fight it out.

"All we want is the hide and the tallow," I advised him later, "not the whole bear."

"Did you ever tote a fresh-killed bear or even a bear hide and its tallow over three ridges in a boiling hot sun? I figured to let him bring it right to the doorstep."

"What happened to your musket?"

He blushed. "I was fixin' for a shot when he came for me. I'd no choice but to allow for distance betwixt us, so I taken out running."

This time Yance would be a-horseback with pack horses, which would hold him to the trace and no chance to take to the woods. He was an almighty stubborn man and I knew he'd not leave his horses and furs for some Indian.

"You wife Penney?"

It took me a minute to realize he'd mistook me for Yance. What had he said before? Two girls gone? Taken by Indians?

He'd come a far piece if he'd come from Cape Ann or the nearby country, and those girls were long gone now. Still, I'd heard of a swap being made, goods for girls, or whatever. Anyway, she was kin by marriage to Yance. We'd never let them down. Whatever we could do would be done.

It must have taken that Indian a week to get here. Even more, it was likely. I'd never been up north, for it was Yance who'd gone girlin' up there to find himself a wife. Only I think he was just looking around when he saw her and took to her first sight.

Putting my musket close to hand, I put water on and began slicing meat into it for a stew. I added some wild onions and other herbs from the forest, for we did with whatever was to hand.

There was no question of not going. My corn crop would suffer from lack of cultivation and from varmints, but crops were a chancy thing in this country. There'd have to be grub got ready and packs. Whilst the stew was shaping up, I set to gathering what we'd need.

The old Warrior's Path would be the fastest route even though we might encounter war parties along the trail. Yet we must travel fast. Indians were notional about prisoners. They might want them for slaves, for torture, or for trade. They might want them simply to exhibit and then kill, but if they whined and carried on or got weak so they could not travel, the Indians would surely kill them out of hand. It had happened before.

Temperance Penney had been living in a settlement nigh to Cape Ann when Yance found her. We Sacketts were a free-roving folk, and now and again we boys would take off across the country to see what might be seen. Often one of us went alone, or sometimes two or three would venture together.

We had visited Jamestown a time or two, and Kane O'Hara from our settlement had gone down to the Spanish villages to the south. It was there he found his wife. We'd heard tell of the Pilgrim folk to the north, but Yance was the first to traipse off thataway.

Yance was curious as an Indian as to how other folks managed, and he lay up there in the woods watching their village until he had seen Temperance.

She was sixteen then, pert as a kitten and feisty, with the woman in her beginning to show. Already her good spirits had gotten her into trouble. Her neighbors were good folk but serious minded and with a set way about them and not much time for play or merrymaking.

Yance had only to look one time to know what he'd come north for, and come night, he'd taken a quarter of venison down, hung it outside her door, and rapped sharply on the door; then he skedaddled and laid low.

Now few of those northern settlers were hunters. In the England of their time all the game belonged to the king or ran on a few of the great estates, and unless they poached, they got none of it. Nor had they weapons about except during time of war. Fresh meat was hard to come by, and when they reached America where game abounded, they had no skill as hunters and were uneasy about taking game, for here, too, the game was said to belong to the king. A haunch of venison outside the door was a likely treat, so they took it in and were grateful.

If Temperance herself had any ideas, she wasn't talking about them, just going about her churning, weaving, and gathering as though she paid no mind to anything. After they were married, she told me she'd seen Yance on the slope and in the woods a time or two from a distance, so she had her own ideas where that venison came from.

A few night later Yance came down from the trees bearing another haunch and was made welcome. He was a bearer of news and from another colony as well, although, being one of us, I don't imagine he was too free about saying just where he came from. Yance was a good talker, that being the Welsh in him, for the Welsh are like the Irish in having a feel for the language and a liking for the sound of their own voices. He done a sight of tale telling, but he never once looked at Temperance, but she needed no telling to know whom he was talking to, and for.

Now a pert and feisty girl like Temp, with a shape like hers, had taken the eye of every man in the settlement, not to mention occasional peddlers and linkers who passed. Some of the local sprouts had ideas about her, and then here comes this stranger in wide-brimmed hat and buckskins. They liked nothing about him.

Moreover, Yance had been brought up like all of us, free thinking and free speaking. Pa had believed in us using our minds, and he believed in freedom and in expressing ideas, nor was Yance one to keep his mouth shut. He stayed on, a-courting Temperance, and it wasn't long until he had crossed the ways of the folk, and he found himself in the stocks.

It was the way of the time to pitch rotten fruit or clods at whoever was in stocks, and as the boys and men cared little for Yance, and as he was a stranger in buckskins, like an Indian, he caught more than his share, good though he was at ducking. He had taken it, biding his time. He knew he would not be there forever; moreover, he had a good idea what Temp would do, and she did it.

Somehow or other she contrived to get the keys, unlock the stocks, and set Yance free. Being wise for his years, Yance just naturally left the country; being doubly wise, he had taken Temperance with him.

He might not have taken her, having respect for her family and all, but she wasn't to be left behind. Moreover, she had been doing some thinking beforehand and led him down the country where they could rout out a preaching man. He wasn't of a mind to read over them until she told him she'd go with Yance without it, and he got right to it.

From time to time after she came to us, she sent word home by traders or travelers, so they knew she was honestly wed and cared for. Now they were in trouble, and they'd sent for Yance. This was 1630, and folks had been living in that Massachusetts Bay colony for ten years or so, but most of them were latecomers, innocent as babes about Indians and such.

Nobody needed to tell us about Pequots. We'd had no doings with them, but word is carried on the wind, and other Indians had told us of them. They were a strong, fierce people, unfriendly to the whites.

It was in my thoughts that it was Temp's mother who sent for Yance. She was a righteous, churchgoing woman, but she knew a man with hair on his chest when she saw him.

"Who took those girls?" I asked the old Indian again.

"Pequots."

Had he hesitated there just a mite? Or was that my imagination? If they were not already dead, trying to get prisoners away from the Pequots would be a hard-bought thing. Yance was suddenly in the yard, astride that big red horse he favored, his pack animals loaded down with fur. It took only a minute or two for me to lay it down to him.

"I'll go. No need for you to lose your crop."

Well, I just looked at him, and then I said, "Pa always said, 'I want it understood that no Sackett is ever alone as long as another Sackett lives.' Besides," I added, "you will need me to keep those Pilgrim folk off your back whilst you take out after the Indians."

"Don't figure the Pequots will be easy. Any time you take after them, you've bought yourself a packet, Sackett."

"What about him?" I gestured toward the Indian. "He's old, and he's hurt."

"I go." The Indian spoke quickly. "You go, I go. You no go, I go, anyway."

"You fall behind," Yance warned, "and we leave you."

"Huh." He glared at Yance. "You fall behind, I leave you!"

Yance put up his horses and then went to eating. On horseback, we would make good time up the Warrior's Path. We had meat, and we had cold flour, so there would be no need to stop for hunting.

"That other girl," I asked, "the one with the Penney girl, who was she?"

It was a full minute before he spoke. "She Mack-lin girl. She plant woman."

Why the hesitation? What had happened up there, anyway? What was wrong with their own men? Of course, few of them were woodsmen, if any at all. In the old country they had been craftsmen, weavers, woodworkers, and their like, and the Penneys knew Yance was a woodsman, knowing the ways of wilderness travel and of Indians.

A plant woman? What did that imply? That she gathered herbs, perhaps, or was knowing about them. Such a girl would be at home in the forest.

"We'd better hurry, Kin. I think we'll have this to do alone. Those folks aren't going to look for Diana Macklin."

Something in his tone made me look up from the packing. "No? Why not?"

"Because they do be saying she's a witch woman. They'll be saying 'good riddance,' and they'll just walk away."

"But what about the Penney girl?" I protested.

"Too bad for her that she was in such company. I tell you, Kin, they will do nothing. Unless it be us, the girls be lost--lost, I say."

Chapter II

Come daylight, we had distance behind us. We took a back trail up through the rocks behind our cabin so no chance watcher would know we had gone, winding through the rocks and the rhododendron. We were all mounted, and it was the first time I'd ever seen an Indian a-horseback. The old Indian's name was Tenaco.

Horses were scarce in the colonies, and we had bought ours from a Spanish man who wished to return to Spain and had to sell what horses he owned. The Spanish men of Florida were not permitted to trade with the English, but people will be people, and we had much they wished for, so the trading was done. We paid in gold, of which we had found a little, and had more we kept by us from pa's dealings.

There was Indian country before, behind, and all about us, and any stranger was fair game for any Indian. Yet some of them were moved by curiosity and the desire for trade, and we were wishful of no trouble.

It was far we had to go, through terrain wild with strange trees and vines, a country of lonely paths, and the awareness of death rode with us, Tenaco no less than we, for Indian forever killed Indian long before the coming of the white man. We rode the Warrior's Path, three mounted men and a pack horse to carry our necessaries.

A witch woman, they said! Well, I put no faith in witches, although both Welsh and English had stories enough of witches, elves, gnomes, and haunts and such. Pa had the gift, it was said, and to some it was the same thing, but not to pa or to me or to Lila, who was said to have it, too.

Yet being thought of as a witch would be held against her, and it was unlikely any would wish to go to the rescue of a witch even if the child with her was liked. It was likely they'd feel the Indians got what they deserved when they took her.

We saw no fresh track of moccasin or boot. We passed among the dark leaning poles of the pines into the shadows and beyond, wondering what memories these slopes held and what peoples might have been here and gone before our coming.

Half of our teaching had been from Sakim, the scholar from far-off Asia, and Sakim lived with the awareness of lives he had lived before.

We carried long bows made English style, for pa and several of the others amongst our lot had understood the bow. It was a saving of lead and powder, which now we mined for ourselves or made. Also, it was silent hunting and left no echo upon the hills for unfriendly ears.

How lonely were these silent hills! How reaching out for the sounds of men, for I believe a land needs people to nurse its flesh and bring from it the goodness of crops.

As we looked upon the shadowing hills, I saw a red bird fly up, a bit of the sunset thrown off by a soundless explosion, and then there were a dozen flying, then gone.

"It is an omen," Tenaco said. "There will be blood."

"Not ours," Yance replied grimly. "It is Temperance's sister they have taken."

"Do you recall her, then?" I asked.

"Aye, and a lovely lass. She would be ten now, I think, perhaps eleven. Gentle, sweet, and graceful as the wind. She was the first of them to accept me--after Temperance, of course."

"You knew the other girl?"

"Ah, she is almost a woman, that one! A woman? But of course! She was strong, quiet, remote." He looked at me. "You would like her, Kin, witch or no."

"I put no stock in witches."

"You will when you see her. There's a strangeness about her and a difference. A kind of stillness and poise. She has a way of looking at you that makes you uneasy, as if she could see all you were and were meant to be. Yet there's a wildness in her, too."

He chuckled suddenly. "The young men are afraid of her. She sews well, spins well, does all things well, but she looks on them with no interest, and lovely as she is, they become speechless when with her."

At night we left our cooking fire and went on, then bedded down to a cold camp in the woods, not all together so we might not all be taken at once if the worst came.

Day after day retired behind us, and night after night we gave our smoke to the sky. We left tracks and dead fires behind us, moving on into the days, knowing there was little time and at the end, the Pequots.

We had fought other Indians, but these had a bloody name, a reputation for fierceness. Yet a man cannot think of death at such a time; he simply tries to do what needs to be done. Women of our kind had been taken, women of our family, since Yance was wed to Temperance.

I thought of the other one. The silent one who stands alone in the wind. There was something in the way Yance looked at me when he spoke of her.

We wore buckskins and wide-brimmed hats and Indian moccasins, for they were best for the woods, and we had not been back to Shooting Creek for some time. There was one of us there who could make boots, but we thought them not as well for the forest.

In a moccasin a man can feel a twig that might crack before he puts his weight upon it; he can feel the rocks with his feet, take a grip with his toes if need be. And each of us was skilled, as were the Indians, in the making of moccasins, which was essential, for they wore out quickly.

Each night we plied Tenaco with questions about Plymouth, but he knew little of it. He had been there but spent most of his time with white men at Cape Ann or some of the outlying settlements or farms.

There was peact with his people, the Massachusetts. Before there was any settlement in his country, there had come a terrible sickness, which men called the plague, and it swept away most of his tribe, leaving them helpless before the attacks of their deadly enemies, the Narragansetts. Knowing their lands would be taken from them bit by bit by the Narragansetts and that his people would be destroyed, the chief of Tenaco's people went to the white men and invited them to come and settle in his land, and he gave them choice land between his people and the Narragansetts.

It was a cool, clear night when we came at last to the edge of the settlement. There were only a few cabins. "Show me their house," I said to Tenaco. "I will speak with them."

He showed me the house. It looked square, strong. "It's built of stone," Yance said. "Her father was a stonemason in England."

"Watch for me, but stay out of sight. I don't want you back in the stocks again." A thought occurred to me. "Tenaco? Do the others in the settlement know they sent for us?"

He shrugged.

We squatted on our heels, watching the houses. Our horses were well back in the forest, picketed on meadow grass.

All was still. Nobody moved. It was not a good thing to go among such houses at night, particularly wearing buckskins, which Indians wore up here but no white man. It was a risk to be taken.

"All right," I said, and was gone.

The Penney house was the garrison house, built with a slight overhang to fire upon Indians who came to the doors or windows or tried to fire the house. Here was where the others would gather if trouble came.

A few chinks of light showed where other houses were. Doors were barred now, shutters closed against the night. I saw few corrals, a few fenced gardens. Walking swiftly, I came to the door and stepped lightly on the two boards that did for a stoop. I tapped lightly.

There had been a murmur within, suddenly stilled. Behind me in the woods an owl hooted. Nothing moved, then a fault rustle of clothing.

The latchstring was not out, nor had I expected it to be. I waited, then tapped again.

"Who comes?" A man's voice, low and a little shaken.

"Sackett," I said, and I heard the bar lifted. The door opened a crack, and I stepped quickly in.

"You be not Yance." The man was heavyset, not tall but a solid-looking man with an honest, open face.

"He waits," I said, "with Tenaco."

"Ah!" The man let his breath out, in relief, I thought. "We heard he was dead. Killed by the Pequot."

"He was shot," I said, "I cut out the musket ball myself. Do your Indians have muskets, then?"

"Not many." He turned, gesturing toward a bench by the table. "Sit you. Will you have something?"

"Whatever," I said.

"We expected Yance," the woman said. She was a pleasant-faced woman, but there were lines of worry on her face now.

"He came, but we suspected all might not make him welcome, so I came down."

"There would be risk for you, too, if they knew you were here."

"I shall not be long," I said, "if you will tell me what has happened."

"They went to the woods," the woman said. "Carrie was much with Diana Macklin. Diana was teaching her the herbs for medicine, and they went a-gathering.

"It is only a little way, a meadow yon. Diana often went to the woods and meadows and was not afeared, and Carrie was much with her."

"I never wished it," Penny said irritably. "That you know."

"I don't care what they say!" Mother Penney replied somewhat sharply. "I like her. It's just that she is independent and speaks her own mind."

"It is not that alone," Penney said. "There's the dark look of her, the knowledge of herbs, and the books she reads."

"Macklin reads. You do not speak of that!"

"He's a man. It is right for a man to read, although I speak no favor of the books he reads. Blasphemous, they are."

"Let's get on with it!" I spoke irritably, for they wasted time. "They went a-gathering, and they did not come back, is that it?"

"Aye," Penney said, "and the bloody Pequots have them. Dead they are by now, or worse."

"Maybe not," I replied. "This Diana you speak of sounds to be a shrewd woman. Such a one might find a way to survive, and for your daughter, also ... Carrie, is it?"

"It is."

"And Pequots, you say? Were they seen? Or their tracks?"

"No, but--"

"Then why Pequots? There are other Indians about and white men, too."

He stared at me, aghast. "White men? You wouldn't for the world suspect--?"

"I would," I said. "I know not your people, but there are ships along the shore, and all of their sailors be not angels from heaven. It may be Pequots, but if we are to find them, we must know."

"Pittingel was sure. He said it had to be Pequots. He is a man with much knowledge of the world."

"Good!" I replied. "Does he also know Indians?"

Penney looked uncomfortable. "He is a very important man. A trader," he said, "a man with ships of his own and a place on the council."

"Good!" I said. "Why haven't you gone to him?"

"Well, we did. He tried to help. He looked, and he had his men out in the woods, searching high and low. They found nothing."

And tramped over every track or bit of sign, I told myself, but then I said, "There was an organized search, then? The village turned out?"

Penney flushed. "Well--"

"Tell him the truth!" Mother Penney spoke sharply. "Nary a bit would they do but talk, talk, talk! And all they would say was 'good riddance,' and not for my Carrie, mind you, but for Diana Macklin!"

"We had better know each other," I said. "I am Kin Ring Sackett, brother to Yance."

"I am Tom Penney--my wife Anna." He paused, looking uneasy. "Others are coming."

"Others?"

"Joseph Pittingel will come here himself. And Robert Macklin."

Anna Penney looked at me. "Carrie has been gone for days upon days. We know not if she be alive or dead."

"If she is alive," I said, "we will bring her home. If she be dead, we will find where she lies."

"I believe you will. When Carrie disappeared, it was Yance Sackett of whom I thought."

Tom Penney interrupted, a shade of irritation in his voice, which led me to believe this had been much discussed and that he had not approved. "No doubt he is a hunter. But he is only a man. What can he do that we have not done?"

Ignoring him, I said to her, "You have had Indian trouble?"

"No, not recently. You see, Joseph Pittingel has much influence with the savages, and he has kept them from us."

"Then he is the man to get them back, and by peaceful means. A voice lifted in their councils might be all that is needed. Or, failing that, a ransom of goods."

"We would pay," Penney said, "although we have little to offer."

"Oh!" Anna Penney put a hand to her mouth. "How awful of me! You have not eaten!"

"I am hungry," I replied, "and the others are, also. If you could put something up, I'd carry it to them."

She began putting dishes on the table. A bowl of hot stew and a mug of cider with fresh-made bread. I fell to, listening to Penney as he grumbled. Even as he talked, I could sense the fear in the man, fear for his daughter coupled with the helplessness of a man who knows not which way to turn.

There was a sharp rap at the door and an exchange of words, and the door opened. I felt the draught but did not look up.

Two men had come in, and I identified them at once by their voices. Pittingel's was that of authority, of a man assured of his position and a little contemptuous of those about him of lesser station or what he conceived to be so. The other man's voice was quiet, his accents those of an educated man.

"Sackett?" I looked up, then stood up. "This is Joseph Pittingel and Robert Macklin."

"Kin Sackett," I said, "up from Carolina."

"A brother to Yance Sackett, I believe," Pittingel said. "A difficult man, your brother."

"A very able man," I replied coolly, "with perhaps ways that are different than yours."

"It is regrettable," Pittingel said, "that you have had your long march for nothing. All that could be done has been done. We made every effort, but by now they are far, far away, and the Pequots, well, they are a hard and bloody people."

"I hear much talk of Pequots," I said, sitting down again, "but nobody seems to have seen them."

"Of course, they were here. I am told one does not often see Indians."

"Too true," I agreed. "And it might have been them."

"A frightful people!" Pittingel said. "A vicious, murderous lot!"

"Nothing seems to prevail," Macklin said quietly. "I am afraid our daughters will never be found, as the others were not."

"There have been others?"

"I see no connection." Pittingel dismissed the idea with a gesture. "No doubt they wandered off into the woods and were lost. There are swamps. Even hunters have been lost. And the last one was almost a year ago."

"How many others?" I insisted.

"Three," Macklin replied.

"All were maids?"

"True," Penney said, "although I had not thought of it so. I thought of them as children--"

"Tomorrow," I said, "I would like to be taken to where they were last seen."

"They were gathering herbs," Macklin said. "Diana knew much of herbs and their worth as food, medicine, or dyes. She was teaching the young miss--"

"It was a mistake," Pittingel said sharply, "for which you have yourself to blame. You were warned. The Macklin girl was not fit company."

Robert Macklin turned sharply around. "Joseph," he said quietly, "you speak of my daughter."

Pittingel flushed angrily. "Aye! Your daughter, Macklin, yours by birth, but whose in reality? The devil's own, I say, spawned in your wife's womb, but the devil's own!"

Macklin's features had stiffened. "Pittingel, you have no right--"

"Here, here!" Penney interrupted. "Let's not become heated over this. Argument will not get our girls back, and Joseph Pittingel turned out his whole lot, every mother's son of them to search! We owe him that, Macklin."

"You are right, of course," Macklin said quietly. "If you will excuse me--"

"No, it is I who must leave," Pittingel interrupted. "I have business elsewhere. Sackett, if there's aught I can do, call on me. I have many men here and a ship due in any day now with her full crew. Anything I can do for my good friend Penney will be done."

He went out, and the door closed behind him. For a moment there was silence.

"You should not incur his anger, Robert," Penney warned. "He is a man of much influence with both the church and the council. It was only he who prevented them from having Diana up before the assizes. And with the evidence they have against her, it would mean burning."

"Evidence!" Macklin scoffed. "They have not a paltry bit of evidence. Diana is a good girl, and a God-fearing one."

"She was seen gathering mandrake," Penney reminded, "and she walks alone by night. How much do they need? Did not Brother Gardner's cow go dry after he spoke angrily to Diana? Did not--?"

"Nonsense!" Macklin said. "Purely nonsense!"

"Nevertheless," Penney said sharply, "that is why they will not look, Macklin, and you know it! They do not wish to find Diana, and my Carrie must suffer because of it! I was a fool to--!"

"Talk will not bring her back," Anna Penney interrupted.

Pushing back my empty bowl, I got to my feet and drank off the last of the cider.

"If they can be found, Mistress Penney," I said, "I shall bring them back, with Yance's help." I put down the mug. "One more thing. Do the Pequots have muskets?"

Penney looked around. "Muskets? I think not, although there was talk of some selling of arms to them. Why do you ask?"

"Tenaco," I said, "the messenger Mistress Penney sent for us, was shot. He was shot only just after he left here, shot by someone who both had a musket and who did not want him bringing help."

I lifted the latch. "Now who do you suppose would do that?"

I stepped out into the night and pulled the door shut quickly behind me. Instantly I rounded the edge of the house and stood quiet to let my eyes grow accustomed to the darkness.

A moment I listened. Someone, something was out there. Out there in the darkness, waiting or watching.

Chapter III

The night was a secret place, but the keys to the secrets were the senses. Edging a little along the cabin wall, feeling the rough stone at my back, I listened.

There was a pile of cut wood stacked in cords nearby; beyond it was a lean-to. Crossing swiftly to the stack of cordwood, I waited an instant, then moved to the lean-to and around it. Nothing.

In a moment I was at the edge of the woods, and there I waited, listening. Whoever was watching, and I was sure someone had been, was back along the path to the woods down which I'd come. Somebody had laid out in the woods, watching for me.

The night would be none too long, and I was wearied with travel, so I made out to pass through the woods, stepping light and easy. We boys had played so much in the woods and hunted with Indians back yonder that we'd become like ghosts when in the forest.

It had taken an hour, but I was back in the woods, and Yance came out from nowhere.

"Tenaco's gone."

"Gone?"

"I was rustling cooking wood, and next thing I knew he had disappeared."

"He'd done his job. He found us, brought us here. It's no fight of his."

We moved off together to where the horses were. The moment Tenaco was gone, Yance had shifted camp. Not far, but far enough for safety, or whatever safety there was in a hostile land where even the white people would be against us.

We slept, trusting to our horses to warn us and to our own senses. At dawn we ate some of the meat I'd brought from the Penneys' and drank some of their cider. Then we moved the horses to a hidden meadow, a small place cozied down among the oaks; then I went back to watch for Penney.

When they came, Penney and Macklin, there were two other men with them. I looked to my priming. One of them was a powerful big man, and it was not a thing that pleased me, for I'd expected them to come alone.

The night before there had been much talk while I was at table, and taking no part in it, I listened nonetheless, for a trail is followed not only upon the earth but in the minds of those one pursues or the minds of those whose thinking is similar.

It had been talk of local affairs and happenings, events or persons of which I had no knowledge. There was much talk of sermons, also, and I gathered from this, as well as what Yance had told me, that sermons had much to do with shaping of thinking. These were a stiff-necked, proud folk, not easily persuaded to any course not dictated by conscience, yet conscience could be a poor guide if accompanied by lack of knowledge.

Yet now I thought of what must be done. Lack of knowledge of the Pequots was my greatest problem, for little as I knew of Indians, I had learned from dealings with those I knew that there were great differences in them, and to speak of a redskin as being Indian was like speaking of a Frenchman or an Italian as a European.

If I knew little, I at least knew that I knew little. My experience had been largely with the Eno, Catawba, Occaneechi, Seneca, and Cherokee. There were differences, and the differences were important.

They came up the path together, Penney and Macklin in the lead.

The house Tom Penney built indicated much of his character: solid, built for security and comfort, not a hasty habitation thrown together for mere shelter. It had two rooms, the large kitchen-living room and a bedroom adjoining. There was a loft where the girls slept, warmer because of the rising heat. Everything in the house showed the hand of a man with a love for work and for his materials.

Diana Macklin, seventeen and unmarried, was obviously a maid of independent mind, accustomed to the woods and the search for herbs. Not likely that she would wander off with a child and become lost, although even woods-wise men occasionally did.

When they were near, I stepped into their path. "You can take me to where they were last seen?"

"I can." Penney pointed. "It is ten minutes. No farther."

Macklin said, "Diana would not become lost. She had played in the forest as a child."

"This knowledge of herbs? She had it from Indians?"

He hesitated ever so slightly, and I wondered why, "She learned it in England, and more from a woman here, and some from the Indians, also."

"She spoke their tongue?"

"She did. She had a gift for languages."

Surely an unusual girl and one who, if she kept her wits about her, might make a place for herself even among Indians and could protect herself and Carrie.

The big man was Max Bauer, and he was both wide and thick. There was about him an air of command that surprised me. He did not appear to be a man who would be second to Joseph Pittingel, which had me wondering if I had not underestimated Pittingel himself.

"Ho!" Bauer thrust out a huge hand. "So this is the woodsman!"

The instant our hands met I knew he meant to crush mine to show me who was master, so I met him grip for grip and saw his confidence fade to irritation, then to anger.

"You have come far? From Virginia, mayhap?"

"Far," I said.

"You will find nothing! The earth has been trampled so that no tracks are left!"

"Not even on the first day?"

He brushed off the suggestion. "I was not here the first day. When my boat came in, I went to study the ground. It was hopeless."

The hollow where the girls had come to gather herbs was a pleasant little place, a meadow beside a small pool with reeds all about the pool's edge and forest encircling the hollow itself. There was a wide variety of plant life and a well-chosen place in which to look for herbs.

The earth had been badly trampled, the grass pressed down, reeds parted where men had gone to the water's edge. Any sign one might have found had long since been destroyed.

"There's nothing here," I said.

"Agreed!" Bauer spoke loudly. "It is a waste of time! In any event, by now the Pequots are far from here."

"Pequots? You saw them?"

"I did not. But they were here. I have a feel for them. They were here."

We had seen nothing of Yance, nor did I expect him, but I knew he was out there, watching and listening. We had been so much together that each knew the other and his thinking, and right now he was beginning to do what I would have done in his place. He was casting about in a wide circle to pick up sign farther out, where the grass had not been trampled.

Now we had to place ourselves in the minds of the maids or their captors and try to decide what they must have done. The search would not have progressed far on that first attempt, for undoubtedly few of them were armed; fewer still would know anything about tracking.

These people were city folk or from good-sized towns. In England they had been craftsmen for the most part, gentry some of them, and the parks or woodlands of England were vastly different from these primeval forests, or so I heard from my father, Jeremy Ring, and the others at our settlement on Shooting Creek.

We went back to the settlement. The man with Max Bauer was a small, quick-moving man with sandy, tufted eyebrows and a quick, ratlike way about him. His name was not mentioned, and I deemed him judged of no consequence, yet I did not feel so myself. It is such men of whom one must be forever wary, for they live in the shadow of greater or seemingly greater men, often eaten by jealousy or hatred, not necessarily of those whom they serve.

We stopped at the Penney's, and the rest went on, but Macklin and I went in and sat down to a glass of cider, cold from hanging in the well.

Anna Penney was filled with questions about Temperance, so I told her much of our life at Shooting Creek. "Our settlement is at the foot of the mountains. The water is very clear, cold, and good there. We have a dozen cabins, a stockade, and several of us are good farmers. So far the crops have been good, and there are berries in the forest and many roots. All of our men are hunters, and there is much game."

"Your family is there?"

"My father was killed by the Senecas, and my mother is in England. She was wishful that my sister not grow up in the wilderness, and my brother Brian wished to read for the law.

"You must not worry about Temperance. She is much loved and is one of us. We do not have a church, for services have always been conducted in our homes. I fear by your standards ours are not much. Rarely do they last longer than half an hour.

"She has good friends amongst us. Jeremy and Lila Ring are there. They came with my family. Jeremy was a soldier and a gentleman."

"I have heard of Jamestown. It was to Virginia the first settlers here were going, but they came ashore sooner than expected."

"Jamestown is far from us. We came up the rivers through Carolina."

She left the house, and Macklin and I sat alone. He seemed uneasy. Several times he cleared his throat as if to speak. He was a tall, quiet, scholarly-looking man.

Putting down my glass, I said, "Tell me about your daughter."

He looked at me strangely, but he did not speak for a moment. Then he said, "Why? What is it you wish to know?"

"To find them I must understand them. A track is not only marks upon the earth. If she is a prisoner, she must do what she is told, but if she is not, or if she gets away, I must understand her thinking. She may have been taken. We know nothing."

"Do you doubt it?"

"All is surmise. Nobody saw Indians take her."

He took a swallow from his mug, then wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. "She is a fine girl," he said, "a fine, honest girl."

"Most maids of her years are already wed," I commented.

He looked straight at me, his eyes hard. "She had many offers. Why Joseph Pittingel himself--"

"He wished to marry her?"

"He spoke of it. Joseph Pittingel is a wealthy man."

"She refused him?"

"She did, in a way. She just, well, she just looked at him and walked away."

I decided I liked Diana Macklin. "Yet there was little search made for them. Was something wrong?"

He sat silent, his lips firming in a stubborn line. He liked not the trend of the conversation but seemed to realize my need to know. "After all, you will hear it soon or late." He looked around at me. "There is always talk in these small settlements when someone is different. She liked none of the young men, although she was gracious and sweet to the older ones. I suspect it was that only which saved her from being called up. Some said she was a witch! My daughter, a witch!"

"I have no faith in witches," I replied, "nor in the devil, for that matter."

"Be careful of what you say," Macklin warned. "It is well nigh as sinful not to believe in the devil as not to believe in God!"

"Could she have gone away of her own free will? Seeing the attitude around her--and she seems a girl of uncommon intelligence--could she have decided to go and simply not return?"

He considered that, then shook his head. "No. Had she been alone, she might have gone away, but she would not take Carrie with her.

"Carrie loved her like a sister, and they were much together, but Diana would never have taken her from her family. Also," he added, "Diana would have waited until spring. Midsummer is not a good time to begin such a journey, and Diana is a girl to think of such things. She was never impulsive but very cool. She thought things through to their conclusion."

"What of Diana's mother?"

"Diana's mother is dead. She died in England when Diana was a small child."

Someone approached the door. Anna Penney returning from wherever she had been. I got up. "Shall we go to your place? We must talk more of this."

Reluctantly, he got to his feet as Anna entered. She came at once to me. "You will find my Carrie for me? You and Yance? When she was gone, the others would not look, and I knew what they believed, yet I have always loved Diana. I never believed any of the things they said. It was just that she--"

"She what?"

"She loved the night. Our parson has said that witches love the night, that they meet in the forest in old caves, ruined buildings, and that they keep to darkness and the shadows."

We crossed the lane to Macklin's cabin, spotless in its neatness. We sat at the table, and he looked out the open door.

"Our house is empty without her," he said. "I have been much alone, and she cared for me. I have some small skill with tools, but I am happier with my books. She read them, also, and we talked long hours."

My eyes went to the small row of books. The Complete Gentleman, by Peacham, stood beside Barrough's Method of Physic and Michael Dalton's Country Justice. Although I knew them by name only, I had seen them in Jamestown. Bacon's Essays and his Advancement of Learning I knew well. They had been among the last batch of books brought up from the coast. "I see some old friends yonder," I said.

His expression changed. "You have read them?"

"Bacon," I said, "and much else. My father was a reader of books, and our teacher was a very great scholar. He was Sakim."

"An infidel?"

"Some would call him so. I would not."

"How can you hope to find them? Not even Max Bauer could, and he is our best in the woods."

Slowly I got to my feet. I knew much that I had wished to know. If Pequots had the girls, they might be dead by now, but I did not believe it.

"Those others who disappeared? All were girls?"

"Yes, but that means nothing. A lad would have found his way back. But a girl?" He shrugged.

"Diana, they say, was very much at home in the woods."

"She was different."

I walked to the door. "I will find them, Macklin, but what of you? Should you stay on here? There is suspicion, and if what I hear of your people is true, she would be risking much to return."

He looked at me, then shook his head. "How far can one go? And where can one stop? Is there no place in which to rest?"

"You've been through this before?"

He shrugged. "It is ever the same. And it is my fault. She was reared by me. I could have made her another way, and she would have been like other girls." He frowned suddenly. "But I was a fool. I did not want her like others. I wanted her to be like herself."

"And like her mother?" I asked.

The eyes he turned toward me were the eyes of a man who had been through hell. There was pain there and fear, anger, resignation--I knew not what, only that he was a man suddenly without hope.

"So you know? I guess I always knew there would be a time. I knew someone would come who knew."

He stared at me, then the floor. "My God, what will we do now?"

Chapter IV

Thunderous knocking on the door interrupted whatever might have been said. Macklin went to the door, and I stood back, expecting anything.

There were four men, and they brushed by Macklin to face me. "You are Sackett?"

"I am."

"You are to leave--now. We do not need your godless kind in this place. You are to go, and you are not to return."

"I have come only to help," I said coolly.

"We do not need your help. You must go--or suffer the consequences."

"It seems that help is needed whether you believe it or not. Two girls have disappeared. Perhaps they have been taken by Indians, and you do nothing to find them."

"That is our affair. It is none of yours. One of you was here and ended in the stocks. Make sure that does not happen to you."

I smiled at them. My musket was in my hand, and in my belt were two pistols. "I must ask your pardon, gentlemen, but be sure I do not end there. If I should be put in your stocks for no more than coming to your town, I can promise it would cost you much.

"I have come only to do what you yourselves should have done. I shall not leave until I have accomplished what I have begun. You are, no doubt, good enough men in your ways, but those ways are not mine. Two girls are missing. I understand others have disappeared before this."

"Others?" They looked startled. "But that was long ago. It was--"

"Last year," I answered. "Are you so careless, then? Have you not asked yourself why it is girls who vanish?" I knew nothing myself. I was but giving them that on which to think. "The forests are wide and deep, but are they selective?"

"I do not know what you mean," the speaker said. Yet he was disturbed. Had he, perhaps, thought of this, also? "It is true--"

"You have suggested I leave. Very well, I go. But I shall not leave until I know what has happened here. You no doubt think of yourselves as Christians, as God-fearing men, yet you call off a search and condemn those girls to death in the wilds, perhaps, just because of your foolish superstition."

"Be careful!" The spokesman's face lost its look of indecision. "You do not speak of superstition here! What we have seen is the work of the devil!"

I shrugged. "I go now." I stepped around them but did not put my back to them. "I shall do what I can do and what you did not do."

"We could not." One of the others spoke for the first time. "There were no tracks."

"There were tracks, but badly trampled tracks, yet any Indian could have found the trail. Any tracker could find it."

"We have one of the best. He could not!"

"Could not? Or did not?"

Stepping through the door, I closed it behind me. I was angry, and I knew the folly of that. Anger can blind one too easily, and thoughtlessly and foolishly I stepped away from the wall. There was a sudden whoosh in the night and a thud. A knife quivered in the log wall behind me.

I lay on the ground. I had dropped a moment too late, for I had been narrowly missed by a thrown knife but in time to avoid a second. I had not merely hit the ground but had moved swiftly off to one side, then farther. I could see nothing.

The night was dark, but there was starlight, and already my eyes were growing accustomed to it. An attempt to kill me because I was here? Or had somebody listened to what was said inside?

Ghosting away, I reached the forest and slid into its dark accepting depths. In less than an hour I was near where our camp had been; it was there no longer.

Yance was there.

"Had trouble?" At my assent he added, "I figured so. There was some coming an' going in the woods about, but I moved my camp yonder.

"I found tracks," he added, "far out where nobody took time to look."

"Indians?"

"White men, wearin' moccasins, like you an' me." We moved off into the darkness, traveling swiftly for some minutes. When we slowed down again to listen, he said, "You see that Pittingel again?"

"Others."

"When I was in the stocks, there was a sailor man in them right beside me. He'd been drunk and roisterin' about, but he was sober enough in the night, and we talked some.

"I've been recallin' things he said, like this Pittingel now. He owns a couple of ships, sends timber to England, corn to the West Indies, and he brings back sugar, rum, and coffee, but that wasn't all.

"After everybody was asleep, we talked a good deal. It wasn't very nice, settin' in those stocks, unable to move more than a mite. He told me Pittingel was a trickster. He said Pittingel had some of his ships lay off the coast until they were all scrubbed down and aired out, but that wouldn't fool him. He knew a slaver when he smelled it."

"Slaver?"

"Blackamoors. From Africa. They buy them from the Arabs. Most of the slave dealers are Arabs and some Portuguese. He sells them in the Indies. Folks here don't take to slaving, so Pittingel lets nobody hereabouts guess, but he's slaving, all right."

We were quiet, each thinking his own thoughts. Yance said suddenly, "Macklin will miss her. According to what Temp had to say and from what I saw, Diana spent most of her time with her pa. She read from his books, and they talked about what they read."

Anna Penney had put by a little food for us, and Yance ate, taking time out, here and there, for the cider. We talked a little in low voices about the country around, and then we moved off to a place he'd found, and there we bedded down for the night. Yance was soon asleep.

A long time after he slept, I lay awake, looking up at the stars through the leaves and listening to the horses tagging at the grass. The woods were quiet, and the town, if such it could be called, was far enough away that we heard nothing. Yet the settlement would be quiet after dark; anyone out after dark would be suspect.

It was but ten minutes" walk to the hollow from which the girls had vanished. It was plain enough that many men had been here, for the grass was trampled. It was no more than we expected.

It was a pleasant enough place, a small meadow surrounded by woods, and on the edge of the woods a small pond of an acre or more. Reeds grew about, and a few marsh marigolds grew here and there. On the pond floated lily pads. On the shore, back at the edge of the trees, there were violets. It must have been an idyllic spot before the searching parties trampled it out of shape.

The east side of the hollow I dismissed at once, for there was a dense thicket of blackberries there. No man in his right mind would have attempted to get through that mass of thorns when other ways remained.

We stood still, looking all around, trying to take in the complete scene, trying to picture what must have happened here. Yet as we stood looking and listening, there was a sound of men coming along the path from the settlement. Yance vanished.

The first I saw was Max Bauer. "Miles away by now," he was saying. "An army would be needed for the searching, and it is sad, for they were so young. Yet we can try an approach to the Pequots. I am sure that Joseph Pittingel..."

Deep within the forest, an owl hooted. My eyes were on Bauer, and I saw him pause, head turning slightly toward the sound. It was no owl, and I believed he guessed as much, although the difference was subtle.

Yance, telling me had found something.

Penney left Bauer's side and crossed the meadow to me. "You will seek them, then?"

"I will. You go home now, and leave it to Yance and to me. Remember, Yance is wed to Temperance, and although we are not of one blood, their children will be. Kinship is a strong thing between us, Penney."

"Sackett, we, Anna and I, we thank you. We--" He choked up, and I turned my eyes from his embarrassment.

My hand touched his shoulder. "Go, man, go home to your Anna, and trust in us. If she be alive, we will find her."

He turned back to them. Macklin hesitated as if he would speak, then turned away with Penney. Bauer lingered. "If there is aught I can do, call upon me, but I fear you waste your time."

"It is only a trail," I said, looking straight at him, "and we have followed many such from boyhood. Where a hound can follow, or an Indian, there we can follow, too."

There was a dark look upon him, and I liked it not, but the man nettled me with his assurance. Of Max Bauer I knew nothing but that he was employed by, or seemed to be employed by Pittingel, but I trusted him none at all. There was power in the man but evil, also. I knew a little of fear as I watched him go, and it angered me. Why should I fear? Or Yance? Who had ever defeated us?

Yet all men can fail, and each man must somewhere find his master, with whatever strength, whatever weapon. So we must be wary, we must use what guile we had, for it was upon my shoulders that nothing we had ever attempted or done was so fearsome a thing as this we now would try.

I knew not why I believed so, yet believe it I did.

Through the dappled light and shadow of the forest I walked on gentle feet, knowing only that Yance had come upon something. Of course, it would be no great thing. If the ground is trampled, one has only to cast about in a great circle, an ever-widening circle, for when those who were here left this place, they did not make tracks only in the meadow but in the leaving of it.

Yance was squatted at the foot of a huge old chestnut awaiting me. When I squatted beside him, he said, "Old tracks." He paused. "Five or six men ... two of them barefooted."

"Barefooted?"

"Aye, an' they've gone barefooted a lot. Feet spread wide." He paused again, throwing down the twig on which he was chewing. "Looked to be carrying heavy. Deep prints."

We were silent together, each thinking it over. "It ain't likely," Yance said, "that any folks native to this country would go barefoot. The Indians didn't, and certainly those Puritan folk or Separatists or whatever they are, they hold to boots."

We straightened up, looked carefully about, and listened; then we moved off. He pointed the trail, and it was as he said. Five men, two of them barefoot.

The trail was not an easy one, but we hung to it. At times, rains had washed it away entirely, but we were helped by the fact that these folks did little hunting, and most were afeared to go into the woods alone, so after the meadow nobody had messed up what tracks there were.

We saw deer tracks, too. There was game here if a man were to hunt it down.

We lost the trail.

In the morning we found it again, just a few tracks where they had crossed a stream and one of the barefooted men had slipped. A few hours later we found what we both had been watching for. A camp.

We studied it carefully before we moved in, and then it was only I who went in, and Yance began hunting the tracks made when they left.

He came up to the edge of camp. "Still going north," he said. "Find anything?"

"All three have muskets," I said.

"Three?"

"Two of them, the barefooted ones, are not armed."

"Slaves," he said.

"Maybe ... likely," I added.

"That Pittingel now ... that man I was in the stocks with ... he thought Pittingel was a slaver."

"He thought. We know nothing, Yance, and it doesn't pay to decide anything without we've evidence for it. The man may be a fine Christian gentleman."

Yance snorted. Then I said, "What else?"

"It's the girls, all right. I found their tracks, only a couple of them, for they weren't allowed to walk about. One set of smaller tracks, the others a shade larger. Then they were tied up and dumped on the ground. There was some cooking done."

"Slave?"

"No, one of the others." We sat together in the dappled shade of a tree, alert for sound. "It's an old camp, Yance. Been used two, three times before. Several times, I think.

"They had more than one fire, some old smoke-blackened stones, some fresh. Found where ashes had been beaten down by rain, then a fire laid atop that. Not so large a fire."

We rested, chewing on venison jerky. "No Indians made this trail, an' those girls were carried in a litter, looks like. No Indian ever done that."

Yance looked across his shoulder at me. "What do you make of it, Kin?"

"Same as you do. Somebody else has taken those girls and blamed it on Indians."

"Slaves?"

"Why not? Read the Bible. There'd been whites held as slaves for several thousand years before the blacks were enslaved. The Egyptians had Hebrew slaves as well as others. The Romans had Greek slaves as well as slaves from England and Gaul.

"Jeremy told me about raids on the coast of England and Ireland by slavers from Africa. One whole village, Baltimore, on the Irish coast, was carried off in one raid."

After a moment I said, "Young, pretty girls, they'd bring a price in Africa or to some planter in the West Indies."

"They'd have to have a way, a ship. They'd need a ship."

"And the ship would need a cove or a bay, somewhere to come in either to tie up or lie at anchor."

Yance got to his feet suddenly. "Let's get away from here!"

We had no need to talk of it, for each had the same realization. If the men who had taken the girls were slavers, then they must be careful not to be found, and we were searching for them. That meant they must find us, and that meant we must be killed.

Once within the woods, we moved swiftly, keeping a few yards apart to leave a less distinct trail. We found an open meadow and skirted it, running swiftly. We had left our horses, and we had to approach them now with care. We would have been better served had we left them with Penney, for in these woods and along the shore that lay not far off upon our right there was little need of them.

We found the horses alone and safe, and we moved, riding swiftly away and putting miles behind us, turning away from the shore and into the deepest forest. When we slept that night, I lay long awake, listening to Yance's easy breathing.

I thought of my sister Noelle, far away now, in England, and I thought of her being a prisoner, as they were, hoping but scarcely daring to hope.

Frightened they would be, and Diana Macklin trying to give courage to little Carrie, and those strange men close by. As they lay bound, they could look into the future only with dark, trembling fear. They could not believe they would be found.

"Yance?" I whispered.

He was suddenly awake. "Aye?"

"We've got to find them, Yance."

"We will." He turned on his back. "You think of something, Kin? That Joseph Pittingel? He had a ship. It was overdue."

Chapter V

Diana Macklin opened her eyes and looked up into the leafy pattern above. It was not yet day, but already she heard one of the slaves stirring about. They were the first black Africans she had seen, and at first she had not known how to think of them or speak to them. Indians she had known, but these were different.

So far there had been little opportunity, for the three white men were always about, always suspicious, trusting nobody, yet one of the slaves, she sensed, was at least sympathetic. The two slaves, although both were black, were utterly different in nature and appearance.

She had no illusions. Nobody at the Cove would try very hard to find her. Carrie was another question, for the Penneys would try. Her father would do what he could, but he knew less of the woods than she, and the people of the Cove would promise, but they would not carry out much of a search. If she and Carrie were to escape, they must do so themselves, and there was little time left.

Her captors were irritable and frightened. She had sensed that as the days went by they grew more and more worried. Obviously they were frightened at the prospect of holding two white girls prisoner on this shore. Although few of the Puritan folk of Plymouth, Cape Ann, or the scattering of small settlements in their vicinity were given to wandering in the forest, there were a few who were looking for new sites with commercial advantages, and that meant somewhere along the shore. And the ship that was to have picked up the girls and themselves was already overdue.

Lying quietly, Diana thought of what she must do. Her only hope was the slave they called Henry.

He was a tall, strongly built young man with regular features. That he had been a warrior was obvious both in the way he carried himself and in a few scars she had noticed. The other slave was shorter, stockier, more subservient, but she had gathered from talk among the others that he was an excellent fisherman and boatman.

She sat up and began brushing herself off and arranging her hair. Henry passed near her, gathering twigs. "Soon," she said softly, "it must be soon."

He made no reply. Had he heard? Had he understood? If he had understood, would he help? Or would she fall into even worse hands? She thought not, but was that only hopeful thinking? No matter where they went, what they did, one of the three white men was always present, always watchful.

Henry, she was sure, planned to escape. Yet in all the time they had traveled together, she had heard him use but one or two English words. He usually spoke in Portuguese to one of the white men, the tall, thin one, who spoke it well.

"If you helped us," she spoke softly again as he came to her side of the fire, "you would be welcomed."

The fat, dirty-looking white man sat up, staring at her. "You talkin' to him?" he demanded.

"What?" Her face was innocent. "If you must know, I was complaining. I am tired of sleeping on this dusty earth."

He leered at her. "Aye, but ye'll be sleepin' elsewhere soon, y' can bank on that."

The camp stirred to life, yet within her was developed the resolution. No matter what, it must be today, or at the latest, tonight or tomorrow.

She bathed her face and hands in the stream. After their capture they had walked westward for two days. Twenty miles? Possibly. Then for two more days they had walked north, following an old Indian trading path, and then they had walked east, toward the coast.

They were within a short distance of the seashore now. She could smell the salt air. The stream flowed east. Washing her face, she tasted the water. It was tidal water, she was sure. Not fresh water, certainly.

They were awaiting a ship, a slave ship. Very coolly she considered that. Once aboard a ship there would be small chance of escape. And the ship would come, so it must be soon.

She had risked speaking to Henry because it was a time for risks. So far they had not complained, not made any attempt at escape. They thought she was frightened, and they knew Carrie was. Somewhere along the coast to the north of Cape Ann, that was as close as she could guess.

Once free, they must go south--south. Or west, for they would pursue, they must pursue. They would expect them to go south.

West.

Diana Macklin was seventeen at a time when most girls of fifteen and sixteen were wed. She could scarcely recall a time when she had not known responsibility, and long since she had learned that a certain coolness, aloofness, bred respect and some hesitation on the part of too aggressive males.

Their capture had been simple. She had knelt to pick some leaves from a plant and arose to see a man holding Carrie with a knife at her throat. Now, looking back, she wished she had just screamed. There was a good chance the men would have fled, but she was not the screaming type, and by the time she thought of it, a man had a hand over her mouth, and it was too late.

For three days they were hurried, almost running, until when night came they could only fall to the earth, utterly tired, utterly whipped. Very quickly she decided they could not escape by running away, for their captors could run faster and longer. Nor would crying and pleading help. Carrie tried that.

They must first escape; then they must hide, and once free, they must never again be caught. Meanwhile, she thought, planned, and discarded plans, watching every chance, noticing everything. What she wanted most of all was a hiding place, somewhere they could go immediately and keep out of sight and just wait. She saw hollows under fallen trees, overhangs half hidden by brush, hollows among the rocks, and caves. None looked right; on none dared they take a chance.

Carrie got up and bathed her hands and face, then straightened her clothing, brushing off the dust and fragments of dried leaves and bark. Then she straightened her hair, and Diana combed it for her and helped her braid it again

"Never," Diana had warned her, "give up, and never let down. Keep youself just as neat as you can, for if you respect yourself, they will respect you, also."

"Do you no good," Lashan had said. "Whoever gits you will fix you up the way he likes."

She had not replied, ignoring him, which was far better than exchanging comments in a war she could not win. She must seem to be going along, seem to accept until the moment came.

Now she watched Lashan as he stood by the fire. He was tall, thin, almost emaciated, yet she knew he was strong, with a strength far beyond what it seemed possible he could have.

Suddenly he looked up at her. "Be you a witch?"

Carrie turned her head, half frightened, to look at her.

"They say that I am," she said. Suddenly she knew all present were looking at her. Both the blacks had looked around. Henry was curious; Feebro stared at her, suddenly arrested in movement.

"Ain't much of a witch," Porney commented, hitching his pants to a more secure position with hands that needed washing, "or we'd never ha' taken you."

She turned her head and looked right at him. "It isn't over yet, is it? Give it time to work."

Suddenly frightened, Porney came to his feet and moved back from her. "Give what time to work? What? What've you done?"

"Be still!" Lashan's voice was a whip. "She's making a fool of you."

"No pains yet? None at all?" She was still looking at Porney. "I thought you looked a little stiff when you got up this morning." She was smiling. "But give it time."

"All right! Be still!" Lashan held a willow switch in his hand. "Any more such talk, and I'll..."

Diana merely looked at him. "You, too, Lashan. You, too."

He struck with the switch, a vicious cut across the shoulders. She stood very still, her face white. "If I am damaged, Lashan, there will be questions. He who buys us will wish us unblemished."

Lashan stared at her, his eyes ugly. "You're not aboard ship yet, lass, an' don't y' forget it. Many a bit can happen afore we make it, with Injuns about an' such. Y' push me too far and I may sell y' to the Injuns m'self."

There were no more words, but she had done what she wished and had made the others, at least, wary of her. She put her hand on Carrie's shoulder and felt her cringe a little. That was the worst of it; she had frightened the child. Of one thing she was sure. The others might be wary of crossing her, but Henry was the only one who might help; because he was thinking of escape for himself.

Under the trees they waited another long, slow afternoon. Lashan paced restlessly, irritably. At any moment some Indian or some men out searching for good land on which to locate might discover them. Even a fisherman along the shore, for it was nearby. Already the ship was two weeks overdue.

"You must not be afraid, Carrie. Not of them or of me. I am no witch, but let them think so if they wish. It may frighten them."

She spoke very softly that they might not hear, yet her words did not allay her own fears. And she was frightened. No matter how much she might reassure Carrie, she knew that nobody was coming; there would be no rescue.

Vern went away through the trees again. He was a small, well-made man with a narrow face and a pointed chin. He wore a stocking cap with a tassel, and a wide leather belt held up his canvas pants. The others she had not seen before, but she remembered Vern, for she had seen him one day at Shawmut when he came ashore from a shallop.

He had not been among the group that kidnapped them but had been waiting for them here, probably with the news the ship was delayed, for Lashan had cursed viciously after they talked.

She had seen him an instant before he saw her, so she had let her eyes sweep past him with no sign of recognition. Yet he had recognized her, and his eyes lingered on her from time to time.

None of them talked to her but Lashan. The fat one, whose name she had heard but could not remember, had spoken to her but once, that very morning. Lashan did not like it, and she was sure he was under orders to permit no such thing.

They slept, awakened, let the fire burn down. Vern came back, helped himself to a swallow of cider, then went away again.

It was very still.

She was good in the woods. She could move quietly, and she had endurance beyond most of the men she knew, but none of them were woodsmen. She could escape, but what of Carrie? Could the little girl run fast enough, keep quiet enough, endure enough? Yet there was no choice. They must try. With or without the help of Henry.

He was quiet, respectful, and well-mannered. He carried himself with dignity and with some assurance. Moreover, she had noticed him in the woods, and he moved like a woodsman.

Slowly the afternoon waned away. Vern came in, sat by the fire, and dished up food for himself from the pot Feebro had prepared; it was some kind of stew of wild plants and wild meat. She had seen turtle meat, some pieces of rabbit, and some bits of fish go into it. It was good, very good.

They would soon be fed, and then they would be tied up for the night. She had already seen the sharp points of a broken stump where the tree had blown down, breaking off to leave the ragged stump. It was close by. If she could get close to it, she could use those sharp points to pick at the ropes that bound her wrists; she could pick the strands apart, given time. And it would take time.

She had chosen her route out of camp, between two close-growing trees--no brush there, no leaves, no small twigs that might break.

Vern lay down to sleep. The fat man went away to watch by the shore. Wind and wave being what they were, ships were often overdue, sometimes for weeks. And sometimes they never appeared.

Lashan had settled down. He had lit his pipe and was smoking. Henry got two bowls, filled them with the stew, and brought them over. As he handed one first to Carrie, then to her, he whispered without looking at her, "Ship's coming. I saw the tops'ls."

The ship was coming! It was here! Then--

"Tonight," he whispered, rising from his knees to return to the fire.

Lashan was staring at them. He could not have heard, but had he guessed?

Tonight? How?

Chapter VI

The silver of moonlight lay upon the leaves; overhead a few fluffs of cloud drifted behind an etching of treetops. We lay among the maples, listening to the night.

"We're nigh the sea," Yance whispered. "There's a taste of salt on the air."

"Aye, and a ship offshore. I hope we be not too late."

"She's not up to anchor yet."

"I see that. Do we fight the whole crew of them, then?" Yance inquired irritably.

"She's your kin," I replied coolly, "but if we must fight them, we will. She has no more than twelve guns, and we have two."

Yance snorted his disgust. He was about to speak when we heard an angry shout, then another and a deal of cursing. "Gone!" Somebody shouted the word. "Gone, you fools! Who was on watch?"

There was a murmur of talk. "Get after them, then!" The voice was strident and angry. "They cannot have gone far! Get them, or by the Lord Harry, I'll--!"

"They've gotten away," Yance said complacently. "Ah, she's a broth of a lass, that one! She'll be backing up for no man."

"How far will they get? A lass and a child, and in skirts, yet? In the forest?"

"They'll get far enough, I'm thinking, and there will be us to help."

"To help, I'm willing," I said, "but how? They will be off into the woods, and those men will go tramping after, breaking down the brush, trampling the tracks. Ah, they be a pack of fools, then, and they'll see what they have done when morning comes. Far better they'd be to sit tight by the fire until day breaks. How far can two girls go?"

Standing up, I listened for small sounds, for the great oafs down there were crashing about like so many cows drunk from corn squeezings.

A soft wind stirred the leaves, and I tried to set myself in her shoes to figure what she might do, but nothing came to me. She was a canny one, they said, and that might help, but she'd not travel so far with a youngster to hand.

Away from the sea. That was as much as I could guess. Along the shore they'd be seen from the ship and would be out in the open too much. Inland there were Indians to fear, and these girls had been raised up with Indians always a threat. We moved back, deeper into the woods, holding to a fairly straight line away from the sea.

For an hour or two we heard them threshing about in the woods, frightening the game, causing the birds to fly up, and never a thing did they find. We kept our weapons convenient lest they come upon us, but somehow they did not, and with morning we had a problem.

Where would they go now? The girls had fled, but to where?

We moved away from our camp at first light, and keeping a short distance apart, we began hunting sign. Nobody needed to tell us we were in trouble, for there was no telling where those girls would go.

"Look," Yance said, squatting nigh a tree, "we got to give them credit for brains. They ain't simply going to run wild in the woods. That Macklin girl is smart, real smart. She'll head inland."

"It's closer to help if they go south," I suggested, but I agreed with Yance.

"Closer to help but surely the way they'll be expected to go. The way I see it, they'll head north, hoping not to meet Indians, and when they are well back from shore, they'll circle around."

"So what do we do?"

Yance shrugged. "We can try to pick up their trail, but that way we might lead those who are following right to them. I say we strike inland. We go due west, and after the first day we start working north."

It was what I had been thinking, and it offered our best chance. I had no wish to get into a shooting fight if I could avoid it even though the people who had been holding those girls supposedly knew nothing about us.

We started fast, hitting a dim trail and taking it at a dog trot. We'd been hunting the woods our lives long; like the Indians, we could run all day if need be and often had.

As we ran, I was doing some thinking. The girls must have escaped some time after midnight. Say one or two in the morning. That meant they had been gone anywhere from a few minutes to an hour when their escape was discovered.

They would have fled straightaway, then hidden until the immediate search was over. Then they would have taken off again. Traveling in the woods by night would not be easy, but having much at stake, they'd try to keep going.

Give them, to use a figure, two miles before discovery of their escape, maybe four since then. I slowed down.

"Yance? We better listen. They should be turning south soon."

He drew up. "How do you figure?"

"I've been remembering that big river we heard tell of. Remember? He told us that river came down from the north, took a big bend, and flowed kind of east-northeast to the sea? That river mouth was a natural harbor, kind of protected from the sea by sandy islands just like the sounds back in Carolina. The way I see it, those girls are headed west, and they are going to come to that river or sight it, and then they'll have to turn south.

"Remember that sailor man we talked to in Jamestown? He drew us a diagram in the dust about that river, said it was a natural trade route to the Indians up country without being bothered by those folks around the settlements."

We ran no more. The forest was of oak and maple, with hillsides here and there covered with the graceful white trunks of the birch. It was very still. A woodpecker tapped busily somewhere not far off, and we saw a small flight of birds holding close to the ground, flying into the brush around a small meadow.

On moccasined feet we moved with no sound, and at brief intervals we paused to listen. Sound carries for some distance, and our ears were now attuned to the natural sounds of the wilderness, so we would quickly detect any sound foreign to the forest.

We came up the side of a knoll, moving among the trees. Leading the way, I topped out between some oaks alongside a clear space. We were high enough to have a view all around, and my eyes caught the movement just as Yance's did.

"Kin?"

"I see 'em."

Merging our bodies with the trunks of trees beside which we stood, we watched six men coming along a trail behind us. There was no mistaking the man in the lead, for surely there could be no two men of that size who moved as he did. It was Max Bauer.

"Well, what d' you know?" Yance whispered. "Would you guess they was coming to help?"

"Not much."

"Trailin' us," Yance said. "I got a notion--"

"No," I said, "but we can make it hard for them. Not all at once or they'll know we've seen them. Let's just let our trail kind of fade out."

Several miles ahead we could see another such knoll. "See that? We'll meet there."

Yance was gone into the grass like a ghost. I swear, that brother of mine could move soft as a cougar, and he was just as mean to tangle with. I let him go, then slipped off on the other side of the hill, leaving plain enough prints. Then I saw a hard old deadfall lying across some others like it. The bark had peeled off this one leaving the surface bare and smooth as a naked limb. I stepped up on it and walked its length, switched to another, then to a couple of rocks. From there I went into a stream and walked for a quarter of a mile in the water, which was murky from rain runoff higher up.

Coming out on a shelf of rock, I stood still to let most of the water run off me, then followed the rock along the shore. Coming up on several deer, I threw a stick at them, and they ran across a small meadow into the trees, leaving a trail for each. Chuckling, I circled one side of the clearing. They would have to check out each deer's trail to be sure it had not been made by or followed by a man. It would not hold them long, but it would slow them down.

Reaching the knoll almost an hour later, I scrooched down close to a tree and gave study to the country about. Far off to the west and north I could see there was a sort of gap in the trees, which must have been that river that came into the sea up the coast from Cape Ann. That it curved around some, I already knew.

By now, if the maids were still moving, they would be somewhere only a few miles to the north or west of us if we'd been guessing right. Yet the men who were following our trail were tracking us, not the girls. Yance joined me.

"Wonder if they know about that river?"

"Doubt it. They wouldn't meet up with many hunters or the like. Wouldn't be fit company. Of course, that Macklin girl was a listener. What I mean is, she paid attention to folks when they talked, and when I was tellin' Temperance about our country, she asked a passel of questions, all of them right canny. Still, not many of those folks get far from the settlements, and she might not."

It was a worrisome thing, for in the thickness of the forest we might pass them within a few yards and know naught of it, for knowing nothing of our presence, they would be still if they heard us, suspecting we were enemies.

Near as we could figure it was about fifteen miles from the shore of the sea to the river at the point where we now were. Yet the maids seemed to have headed west and then would turn south, and the area in which they now could do that could be less than five miles, probably less than three.

We gave study to the country, trying to figure how they might travel. Yance gestured toward it. "Hard to believe, with folks needing land that all this lies empty and still."

"I like it wild," I said, knowing he did, too. "But think of all the poor back in the old country who would like to have even a small bit of it."

"Aye." Yance swept bis eyes across the country, alert for any sign of movement, any suggestion of travel. "And I am thinking they will come, Kin. They will come. It is a vast and lonely land now, but it will not be so long."

We came to our feet and moved away. "You work slowly across to the westward," I suggested. "I shall go swiftly west and scout the country toward the great river."

We parted. It was our way to do so when hunting, and we had bird calls or sounds we could use to signal one another; we often worked apart, but we worked as a team. We must work swiftly now, for those coming behind us would soon know their slaves had escaped and would be coming for them, seeking them out, and us. What happened within these woods no man would know, and many had died here, unmourned and unknown, and so would it be with us if we erred even slightly.

I had gone scarcely a mile and had paused to listen when I heard the faintest sound; turning my head, I looked into the eyes of a girl, and she into mine.

For a moment neither moved or spoke. She stood slim and graceful as a tall young birch tree, and she looked straight at me, and then she smiled. Others came up behind her, a smaller, younger girl and a tall young black man. He carried a spear and, at his belt, a knife.

"It is all right, Henry," she said. "He is a Sackett."

"What," the black man asked, "is a Sackett?"

She smiled with sudden humor. "Who knows, Henry? It is some strange sort of beast that comes up from the south and brings fresh meat and steals young girls from their homes."

"I can see," I said quietly, "why one might steal a girl, although the idea had never occurred to me before."

"All girls are not easily stolen," she replied. "But we have been, and now we try to return again home. You will help us, sir?"

"Your mother sent for my brother," I said. "We both came. But we had best move. Others are behind us who would keep us from helping you."

"There are those behind us, also," she said. "You are alone?"

"Yance is here. He will join us soon, I think."

My eyes went to Henry. "I was also a prisoner," he said.

"He helped us," Diana said. "Without him we might not have been able."

Turning southward then, I led the way into the forest, but first I paused and sent into the sky the call of a lone wolf hunting. There would be no answer, but Yance would know, and he would come.

The black man, and Diana as well, looked lean and fit. Carrie Penney looked a little drawn, a little pale, but there was no time now to think of that. Nor was I worried about Yance. By now Yance would be moving south to join us.

I led off swiftly, moving like a ghost through the close-standing trees and thick brush. Behind me, Diana was astonished by the way I found openings in the brush where there seemed to be none and how I automatically chose those routes calculated to leave the fewest tracks.

During our frequent pauses she studied Kin Sackett, for this was the man who suddenly had all their lives in the hollow of his palm, up to a point. Diana looked upon him with some skepticism despite the confidence she felt, for she was not one to trust easily. She had liked Yance when she first met him, and her sympathies had been completely with Temperance when she fled the community with him. This new Sackett was taller, quieter, and an altogether more thoughtful man, one, she suspected, of cooler judgment. Despite that, she was wary. Diana Macklin was not one to give herself completely into the hands of anyone.

At the same time she knew her danger and, moreover, the danger the Sacketts entailed by helping. If captured, they would be killed. She and Carrie would be enslaved, but the Sacketts would be killed, and they had nothing to gain.

They started on and had been going but a short distance when Carrie stumbled and fell. She got up, frightened. "Di! Don't leave me!"

"We won't leave you," I said. "Here, let me give you a lift." I swung her to my back. "Put your legs around my waist and hang to my shoulders."

I started off again, walking as if unburdened, and they followed.

Yance was hanging back, bringing up the rear, keeping his eyes open for trouble. I did not look around, knowing he would be there; if there was trouble, Yance would give me a signal.

We were deeper into the forest now. All about us were huge old maples and clusters of oaks, some of them seven or eight feet in diameter. Here there was less undergrowth, and we could move with greater speed. I was almost running now, weaving a swift way through the forest.

She watched me constantly, and well I knew her reasons, for he is naught but a fool who trusts himself too lightly to a stranger. Now the land was changing; there were more low, rolling hills, and suddenly we topped out on a rise and caught a glimpse of blue beyond.

The river? No. The look of the water was not right. A lake, then, or large pond. We came down to the shore among the willows, and I let Carrie slide from my back. She was not heavy, yet even with my strength the carrying of her was thing.

Yance came in. "Had a glimpse back there. They gained on us."

Carrie looked up at me. "Can't we go home now? Is it far?"

"Not far, Carrie," I said, resting a hand on her shoulder, "but we cannot go there now. There are men close upon us. They are between us and your village."

Yance disappeared in the woods, scouting a way. I lay down, resting, letting all my muscles relax completely and giving way to complete rest. It was something I had learned to do to conserve strength. Through the willows I could see the water, hear it lapping.

Resting, I was. Yet thinking as well. From the glimpse I had, the lake was a large one, and we had to go back to the east and then south.

Diana came up beside me and sank to the ground nearby. "We are due east of the Cape, I think?" she suggested.

"We are."

"We cannot go east?"

"There are men coming toward us. Evil men, I think." I paused. "Do you know Max Bauer?"

"What of him?"

"He is one of them, I think."

She was silent for several minutes. "He is Joseph Pittingel's man."

"Who has a ship that is overdue."

"Maybe he is coming to help?" she suggested. "He was often in Carrie's home. She knows him."

I shrugged. "They are saying in the settlement that Pequots took you. Pittingel says it. Bauer, also."

"They are not eager to find me, I believe." She spoke calmly. "I am sorry for Carrie that she was with me when they came."

Yance came suddenly, soundlessly, from the willows. "Indians," he said. "A lot of them, I think."

Chapter VII

Following him, I looked past his pointing finger at a thin column of Indians, all of whom seemed to be warriors, advancing along a trace from the southwest. Within the range of my vision, judging by their spacing, there were at least forty in the group.

"Wait," I suggested, "and let them pass, then cut back behind them. It is our only chance."

If we could do it. Leaving Yance to watch, I went back and explained quickly. "No sound," I added, "and then when I say, we must move quickly and quietly."

We waited then, watching them come. I knew not the clothing or the paint these warriors wore, for it was different than any I had seen. Were they Pequots? Mohawks? I held my musket ready, knowing that its one shot could mean but one enemy dead. I had pistols, and there might be a chance to reload.

My throat was tight, for fear was upon me. We were but three men against forty, and if they rushed, we should have small chance indeed. Two musket shots, then our pistols and knives, with Henry's spear, and I yet knew nothing of Henry, whether he could fight or even if he would. Yet he was stalwart, and he carried himself like one who knew his way with weapons.

Where they came from we had not yet been, so there were no tracks of ours, and if they held to the trace they now followed, they would still see no sign left by us. But--I smiled at the thought--if they held to the trace, they would surely come upon Bauer and those with him.

We held still, making not the slightest move, scarcely daring to breathe, and the first of them came abreast of us and not fifty yards away, flitting through the forest with scarcely a sound.

They were slim and wiry men rather than muscular, yet a few among them seemed powerful, and no doubt all were strong enough. They carried spears, but bows and arrows as well as the tomahawk were much in evidence.

Slowly they passed us by, and my first guess had been close, for I numbered them to be thirty-two and no signs of battle among them, so if it was a raid they were upon, it lay before them.

No sooner had the last of them disappeared in the forest than I straightened up and beckoned. We went down the slope, past some pines, and took the very trace they had followed, retracing their steps back to the way from which they had come.

We passed the lake, keeping it close on our right, and a half-dozen miles farther we made camp in a pleasant nook among giant oaks where we swiftly gathered some fallen twigs and branches and built a small, warm but almost smokeless fire. Hidden as we were in a deep place among the trees, the fire would not be seen beyond our circle of trees.

In a dish, hastily made of birch bark, we sliced up some venison; then, when it had been simmering for a half hour, I added a couple of handfuls of cattail pollen. Diana watched us curiously and somewhat skeptically, I thought, but she made no comment.

Yance put together two cones of birch bark and plugged the bottoms; then we filled each with the soup. One went to Carrie, the other to Diana. Carrie hesitated, looking doubtful, but hunger overcame the squeamishness at trying something new. Meanwhile, I mixed up more of the soup, adding to what had been left.

Glancing over at Henry, I said, "You've been in the woods before?"

"They were different."

"You move like a woodsman."

He looked at me, his head up. "I was a warrior in my own land. I led men in battle."

"Looks like you may get a chance for battle," I commented. "Was it in Africa?"

"I am Ashanti," he said simply.

"A slaver?"

He shrugged a shoulder. "There was war. When the war was over, the victor had slaves, or he killed them so they could not attack again. Some of the slaves we sold for guns or cloth."

"How'd you become a slave? Did you lose a war?"

"No, we took slaves aboard the ship, and there were not enough slaves for the ship, and then the wind started to come up. Suddenly I was pushed from behind, and I was a slave, also."

"So now you know how it feels."

He shrugged again. "Some win, some lose. I lost then; now I win. I am free; I will stay free." He stared at us defiantly.

I smiled. "Why not? We are not slavers, nor are we owners of slaves. We do our own work."

His look was disdainful. "A warrior does not work!"

"No? If you stay with us, you will help. You will work, and you will fight. Otherwise"--I pointed toward the woods--"there is freedom out there. Take what you will of it."

He did not move; hands on hips, he stared at me. "I have told them I would help," he said. "My promise is my blood. I will stay until they are safe."

"Good! We can use you."

A few minutes later Yance asked, "What did he mean, he was pushed from behind?"

"Pushed down a hatch, probably. It has happened before. Men who take slaves are not particular who they enslave. I had much talk of this with Sakim, who had once traveled from Cairo to Timbuktu."

We gathered wood for the fire, and Henry did, also. We kept it low, and every now and again one of us would move out into the woods, away from the fire and even the low sound of the voices there, to listen.

That night we stood watch, Yance, then Henry, finally I. At dawn we moved out, and I let Diana set the pace. Cape Ann and the settlements were east of us and a little north of east now.

We traveled slowly, for Carrie's strength was waning, and I feared for her. If Diana Macklin tired, I did not know, for she walked proudly, quietly, making no complaint but thoughtful always of Carrie Penney.

When we had two hours behind us, we again neared a small stream that ran northward into the river. There we stopped to rest, and Henry wandered down to the river. We found huckleberries growing in a few patches near the stream and busied ourselves with picking. Yance wandered about, restless and uneasy.

Glancing through the leaves, I could see Henry had rigged a pole and was fishing.

Yance paused near me. "Think we should try for the settlement? Can't be more'n nine, ten miles across there."

I had been giving it thought but worried that we knew nothing of Max Bauer or where he was, or of the others, coming south with Lashan.

Had they given up? I decided they had not. The girls were precious to them, for such a girl as Diana would bring five or ten times what a stalwart young black man like Henry would bring. Also, they dared not let us escape, for once it was known that white girls were being taken, they would be hunted down.

The woods were thick, but there were streams to cross and meadows. Somewhere over there were the Indians who had passed us and no doubt Bauer and his men. Yet it must somehow be done.

I went to where Diana picked huckleberries. "Know you of any settlement on the great bay south of Cape Ann? It might be easier to reach."

"My father has a friend at a place they call Shawmut. He is the Reverend Blaxton. He lives alone there, I think, with one servant."

"Is he the only one?"

"There is another at Winnesimmet. Samuel Maverick has a fortified house there, a place with a palisade and several guns mounted."

"A good man?"

"Yes, he is. A very kind, genial man, but he has great physical strength, and he is said to be absolutely fearless."

"He knows you?"

She hesitated. "He may remember me. My father helped with the raising of some of the beams of Maverick's house, but I met him but once when I was a little girl."

"It is good. We will try for his place."

"We would be safe there if he would take us in, for they would fear him. Or be wary of him, at least. He is a man of reputation, well known in the colony and in England, and I think even Max Bauer would hesitate to face him."

We picked berries a little longer. A thought came to me. "He is a married man?"

"He is. He married the widow of David Thomson, a very good woman. I have spoken to her."

Henry came up from the edge of the stream. He had six good salmon and a large pickerel. "I will fix them," he said. "It is better to eat them and carry the weight inside than out."

We were eating the fish when Yance returned. He had gone off suddenly into the woods, and he squatted beside me when he got back, taking a piece of the fish, baked in the coals. "Found a trace ... old one. Runs off south by east."

"A likely way?"

"Aye. There be deadfalls here an' yon, but we could make two, three miles ... maybe more."

We moved out at dusk, taking the dim trace, and once we had gone into it, I left Yance to lead and fell back. At the campsite I studied it with what light was left; then I began carefully cutting out the tracks of two people.

There was no way to choose whose tracks, so I simply took those tracks of which there were fewest. Carrie had moved around mighty little, so with a little brushing here and there and then a sifting of dust and broken leaves, letting the slight breath of air dictate where it fell, I left behind a camp that showed only three people: Diana, Henry, and myself.

A really fine tracker, if he took the time, could read the true story, but they were going to be moving fast, and I wanted to mislead them. They had lost the trail, I was sure of that. Now they would find it again, but of only three people. Where were the other two? Or where was the other one, Carrie, and who was the stranger in moccasins, which was I.

At the entrance to the trace and for some way along it, I erased all sign of travel, scattering a few twigs, some bits of bark. Then I started running, a long, easy stride to overtake them, but it was full dark before I did, and when I felt I was close to where they might be, I slowed my pace to come upon them quietly. They had covered almost two miles and had stopped briefly near a small stream.

We moved on into the night, pausing frequently so that the girls might not tire too soon. At one stop I sat beside Diana.

"I liked your father," I said.

She turned her face toward me. I could see the faint whiteness of it in the shadowed place. "He is a good man. I do not think shaped for this life, nor this country."

"To make a country we need all kinds. He is a thoughtful man, and such are needed. He reads, he thinks. Too many of us are so busied with living that we do not."

I gestured about us. "A man must think, but he has not enough to nudge his thinking. From morn till night we are busy with finding game, hunting food, cutting fuel, shaping wood for houses. Ours is too busy a world, and there is no time for considering."

"I know ... even father. There are days when he has not the time to touch a book. There is no market where one can go and buy what is needed. It must be hunted, gathered, or made with the hands."

"And at night," I added, "a man is too tired. I fall asleep over my books, but we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think. Shaping a country is not all done with the hands but with the mind as well."

We were silent, and she dipped water from the stream and drank, then again.

"How will it be," I asked, "when you return?"

She was quiet for a minute, and then she said, "It will be the same, I think. Perhaps worse. If it were not for my father, I would walk away one day and never look back."

"Why don't you ..." I caught myself, not wishing her to misunderstand, "and your father come south to Shooting Creek? You would like it there, I believe, and there is a place. One of our farmers was killed by Indians, and his cabin is a strong one. It is empty."

"Thank you."

She gave no sign that she thought it a good suggestion or not, so I said nothing further. After a moment we started on, walking steadily into the night. Yance carried Carrie for more than a mile, and we stopped again.

Henry was impatient. "It is foolish. We cannot escape. They will surely find us."

"Would you leave them?" I asked.

He threw me a disdainful glance. "Of course not, but we will all be taken." He paused a minute. "You do not know them. They are vicious, and they are cruel."

"Whose slave were you?"

"A ship's captain. He has been much along this coast, and he has made swift attacks on Indian villages and carried some of them off for slaves. I was his servant."

He turned his head toward me. "To lie in the hold of a ship was not good, and there was no chance for escape. So I let them hear me speaking English and telling another slave that I was once servant to an Englishman. It was not true, but it worked as I hoped it would, and the captain sent for me. I became his servant and henceforth was upon deck. Then I taught him to trust me."

"And how did you get ashore?"

"Lashan needed a man, and there was no other, so for this one time they left me ashore to help him. It was what I had been waiting for."

"If we get through this, you will return to Africa?"

He was silent, thinking about it. "I know not," he grumbled. "I have seen much since then. Perhaps there is a better life here."

"There are slaves here, too."

"There are slaves everywhere. Many are slaves, one way or another, who do not realize they are, but I shall not be a slave. There is opportunity here even among white men."

"You are not worried about your color being a handicap?"

"Worried, no. In some ways it will work against me, and in others it will work for me. You wonder why I speak English as I do? I learned it from an Englishman who was a slave in my country. He was captured when a party came ashore from a ship. He began as the lowest of slaves, but it was discovered that he knew something of treating illnesses, although he was not a medical man. Then he became my teacher, also. Soon he was my father's adviser and confidant. When my father died, he returned to his country and returned with gold and diamonds my father had given him.

"He stood upon the shore with me before his ship sailed, and he said to me what I should remember, that any man can be a slave, and a few men, if they will it, can become kings. He put his hand upon my shoulder and told me that in the world were two kinds of people, those who wish and those who will, and the world and its goods will always belong to those who will.

" 'When I came to your land, I was a slave, but I shouldered whatever burden was given me. I looked for other burdens, and for those who will shoulder a burden there will always be many burdens to carry. Finally I helped your father, whose burdens were growning too heavy for him, and your father rewarded me, first with freedom and second with wealth.'"

Well, it seemed to me it was time to move along, so I got up. "Henry," I said, "it looks to me like you had a good teacher."

"Yes, it is so, although it took me much time to learn it. What he taught was good, but what his life showed me was even better."

The day had not yet come when we stopped in a hidden place in the midst of a thick stand of young pines. It was the side of a knoll where the ground broke steeply off, then shelved to a narrow bench. There we bedded down and were instantly asleep. This time we felt secure, and all slept, and deeply, too.

The sun was not yet up when I awoke. For a moment I lay still, listening to the forest sounds, identifying each as my ears came upon it. Rising, I went to the edge of the bench where we had slept and looked all around. A moment, and then as I started to turn, I heard the faintest clink of metal on metal.

My breath caught and held; then slowly I exhaled and looked in the direction of the sound. There not thirty yards away was a camp! And in the camp, striking flint against steel, was Vern, about to light a fire!

Chapter VIII

Very, very carefully I stepped back. When out of sight, I turned swiftly and awakened Yance. Accustomed to trouble and knowing me, he was instantly awake and alert. He moved to awaken Henry, and I went to the girls.

Gently I touched Diana's shoulder and put a finger across my lips. Her eyes flared open; there was an instant until she realized, and then she moved quietly to awaken Carrie. My gestures toward the enemy camp were enough to warn her. Swiftly, quietly we moved away through the woods, going directly away from their camp. Somehow we made it, or seemed to.

The leaves were wet with dew, or perhaps there had been a whisper of rain during the night, but there was no sound as we moved quickly along. That they would find our camp was without question, for once they started to look about for dry wood, they would undoubtedly come upon it. The first problem was distance, the second to leave no trail, yet it was distance of which I thought at first.

Max Bauer had not seemed to be with them, so perhaps the two groups had not come together. Or it might be that Bauer was too shrewd to allow himself to be found with the men who had actually been holding the girls. And it was he who worried me most, for I doubted the tracking skill of Lashan or Vern.

"If aught goes amiss," I warned Diana, "go at once to Samuel Maverick. From what you have said, he seems a good man and a solid one. Go to him, tell him all, and trust to his judgment. If he knows your father, he will get word to him."

The war party of Indians, I believed, had gone off to the north of us, raiding some other Indian people, I suspected. Bauer should be close by, but I suspected he was now behind us, as was Lashan. With luck--and mentally I crossed my fingers--we should have a clear way to Shawmut.

We moved well through the long morning, and when it came to high sun, we were upon the banks of a goodly stream, one flowing north into that great river that I assumed to be what the Indians called the Merrimack or something of the sound.

"This must be that river called the Musketaquid," Diana said. "Father came once to its shores and fished here while with other men who looked for land for the future."

The river worried me. It was a good hundred yards wide and perhaps more, and we had to cross it. Yance and I could swim, and no doubt Henry could, but I doubted the girls could, for it was not often a woman has the chance to learn, and Carrie was young.

Leaving Henry with them, Yance went downstream, and I turned up, for well we knew that Indians often conceal their canoes along the banks after traveling, hiding them against the next crossing. There were places where canoes were left for years, used by whoever came and left hidden on one side or the other.

We found no boat, it not being our lucky day, but Yance came upon several logs lying partly in and out of the water. They were of modest size, and there were others nearby.

Choosing dry logs, we found several of the proper length and bound them together with vines. The river moved with incredible slowness, and while we worked, we studied what currents we could see so as to know how best to control our crossing. Meanwhile, the girls ate huckleberries picked from bushes along the shore.

When the raft was complete, and a pitifully small thing it was, we had the two girls climb aboard, and with them we put our muskets and powder horns.

Henry came suddenly from the woods. "They come now!" he said.

"Yance?" He looked up at my question. "You and Henry. Get on with it. I'll wait a bit."

I kept one pistol with an extra charge of powder and ball laid out close to hand. And I had the bow and the arrows. They shoved off. Yance being a powerful swimmer, I knew he'd do his part, but Henry proved just as good, and the two of them, with tow lines, started swimming for the far bank, letting what little current there was help them along.

They weren't more than a dozen yards out when somebody yelled, and I heard crashing in the brush. The first one I sighted was the fat one, and he slid to a halt and lifted his musket to fire. It was no more than thirty yards, and I wasted no lead on him but put an arrow into his brisket.

His musket went off as he staggered, the ball going into the air, and he lost hold on his musket and grabbed the arrow. It was buried deep, and I saw him tugging as he fell.

Slinging my quiver to my back, I took up the pistol. There was more crashing in the brush, and somebody called a question. The fat man had fallen out of sight behind some brush, but I could hear him groaning there.

Suddenly a tall, thin man appeared in view, looking about. I lifted the pistol, but he saw me and dropped from sight. A quick glance showed me the raft was a good sixty yards into the stream and no longer a very good target, as the girls were lying flat, and you could see nothing of Yance or Henry but their heads and occasionally the flash of an arm.

There was more movement in the brush, and I took a chance and fired at the sound, knowing I'd best get going. Then I hastily reloaded, and taking the pistol in hand, ran along the shore until I reached a bend large enough to give me some cover. Then I tied my pistol to me and went into the water. When I was a dozen yards out, I went under and swam some twenty good strokes before coming up for air.

I was downstream of them, and I heard a shot but no other sound, and when I cleared water again, I turned my head for a look back, and there were three men on the shore, two of them getting ready to swim and a third running along the bank looking for me. He spotted me just as I took a breath and went under, but I changed direction and went downstream and swam a good thirty strokes before I came up again, just shy of midstream.

Looking back, I could just barely see what I believed was the raft, and it was close to shore. I swam toward the bank then and came out on the bank among some deadfalls. There was no sign of the raft or of my people, but I could see at least two men swimming.

Shaking the water off my pistol, I swore softly, bitterly. I had no more powder with me, and my bowstring was wet. All that remained was my tomahawk and knife.

Taking a quick look along the shore again, I went into the trees and started toward where my path should join theirs. There was a thick stand of maple with occasional oak and in spots a pine tree or two. Nobody looked to have wandered these woods, but there was not too much brush, and I moved quickly, running through the trees.

My one thought was to rejoin Yance and the rest, and what followed was brought on by pure carelessness. I jumped a deadfall, leaped up to another, and ran along the top of it for thirty feet or so, then dropped to the earth and broke through the brush and found myself looking into the end of a musket held by a grinning redheaded man with a scar across his nose.

He has another one there now, for my reaction was instantaneous. Seeing the musket, I threw up a hand and grasped it, jamming it back into the man's face. He staggered, but another leaped on my back, and I went down into the leaves, bucked hard, and almost threw the man off. I came to my knees, swinging a fist into the nearest face, for there were three at least, and then I lunged up with a man still clinging to my back.

A broken-off tree, felled by some wind, was near, and I slammed myself back against the tree and a stub of a broken branch that thrust out from it. The man on my back screamed and lost his grip, and I lunged away from him and into the brush. Somebody shouted and swore, a gun blasted behind me, and the lead hit bark from a tree near my head, but I was running again, weaving a way through the forest that would show them no target for shooting among all those tree trunks.

That I was a good runner served me well, for I had run much in the depth of forests before this, and leaping some obstructions and using others, I ran as never before, thanking the good Lord and all my ancestry for the long legs of me.

I had escaped by merest chance and because I had come upon them almost as suddenly as they upon me, and they were ill prepared for what followed. Fear helped me much, and I ran, bearing off toward the river again and hoping my brother and those with him were already to the east of me.

When I slowed down, I felt for knife and tomahawk. Both were with me. My quiver had been thrust around and was still across my shoulders with my bow. Luckily he who leaped upon me had wanted my throat and nothing less.

Suddenly I came upon the tracks of Yance and the others and made haste to scatter leaves across them and to drop a dead branch along the trail as though it had always been there. Then I walked away into the woods.

As the crow flies, it was likely no more than fifteen miles from where we now were to Shawmut, but by the route they would take and that I must take, it would be no less than twenty. In the wilderness there is no such thing as traveling in a straight line, for one turns aside for trees, rocks, embankments, cliffs, and what not until one may cover half again the distance a straight line would require. Also, such diversions, no matter how small, can lead one far astray unless the traveler is alert.

The land over which I moved was strange to me but very familiar. Strange in that I had never before traveled over it but familiar in that it was wilderness country, and in the wilderness I was ever at home.

My moccasins made almost no sound on the damp leaves, and in most places I could, by twisting and turning, avoid the dry whisk of leaves and branches as they brushed my clothes. My buckskins, stained by travel and by lying on grass and leaves, merged well with the foliage and tree trunks through which I moved.

What worried me most of all was that for the time I was virtually unarmed except for combat at close quarters. If seen, I should have to use every skill to avoid offering a target, and among these woods were enemies who knew every trick of woodcraft.

When there was a path, I ran, taking the usual easy pace of the Indian or woodsman in the days before horses were commonly used, for at this time there were no horses in the Massachusetts Bay area and few elsewhere aside from the Spanish colonies of the far south. Our own horses we had left in a secluded pasture where Macklin could from time to time attend to them.

I had no food, yet often had I gone without food for several days at a time and could endure. Nonetheless, I kept a wary eye for huckleberries or whatever the forest might offer and soon came upon a thick patch at the edge of a meadow.

There were bear tracks about, but I saw none, although it was a likely place for them, and I picked and ate for nearly an hour before I started on. Huckleberries were tasty enough, but I had need of meat.

Suddenly coming upon two red deer and having a goodly chance at the one, I measured the distance with my eye and let fly with my tomahawk. Many a time had I hit such small marks as the end of my thumb, but this time the fates were not with me, for the unkind beast turned his head, and I missed. The deer ran off, and I went hungry to my tomahawk and returned it to my belt, mumbling a few unpleasantries the while.

No longer running, for I had come into an area of low hills, scattered rocks, and much fallen timber, I went carefully. It is a thing a man must forever guard, that he not twist an ankle badly or break a leg, for to be down and helpless is often to die. There was no sound but the wind in the leaves, no movement but small animals or birds. It had become suddenly warmer, and I tried for a look at the sky, but the foliage was thick, and I could see naught but patches of low gray cloud.

Several times I sat to think, to try to imagine where Yance and the others might be, but all I could surmise was that they were north of me and but a few miles off, yet I hoped our enemies were following me instead of them, and, rising, I went on.

Of Shawmut I knew nothing. It was not a settlement, merely a place, and of it I knew only that two or three men lived there. That it was close by to the sea and that a fair harbor was near, I did know, and some among those to whom I had talked at Jamestown or Williamsburg had suggested it might in some while become an important place. Such things are commonly said of this place or that along a coast newly discovered, always to be taken with a grain of salt.

Throughout the sultry afternoon I plodded on, lonely and a bit weary, my thoughts forever returning to Mistress Macklin, from whom I tried in vain to draw them away, at first by force and then by trickery. Neither would suffice.

Why should I think of her? I scarcely knew her. A likely maid, of course. Downright beautiful, when it came to that, and a lass of some poise and presence, and no more of a witch than most girls of her age, who are all up to some trickery or other. Yet who was I to talk of women? I knew less of them than of deer or beaver, and they were much more chancy things from all I had heard.

Noelle was but a child when she left for England, so the little I knew of women was by observing the wife of my brother or those of my friends, and they were not helpful. A woman who has trapped her game has a different way about her than one who is still on the stalk.

My ignorance of women I covered very well by a seeming indifference and by keeping my opinions to myself, most of which, had they been expressed, might well have been wrong. It was easy enough to see why the young men of the Cape Ann area might be doubtful of Diana, for she had a disconcerting way of looking at a man.

Yet aside from her beauty there was much in her to admire, for she was a quietly capable person who did not scream, faint, or cry so far as I had seen. She looked matters in the face and did something about them, and my mother had been such a woman, and Lila even more so.

The Indian girls I had seen among the Cherokees or Catawbas and the white girls I had met in Jamestown were much alike. They all knew how to move, to sit and to bend to show their figures to the best advantage, and I was used to that. Diana, with a better figure than any of them, did nothing of the kind, or did she? In some more subtle fashion? It worried me that she seemed innocent of guile, that she seemed only concerned with what was at hand. So I came to avoid her, while thinking about her.

Yet I was being foolish and very vain. Why should such a girl think to use such wiles on such as I? Who was I, after all, but a tall young woodsman from a strange wilderness to the south, a man without any of the graces of which I had heard women speak.

I was much too serious. Yance was full of laughter and fun and great at dancing. Kane O'Hara, who had won a Spanish wife, was a gifted talker, a storyteller, and a man with a ready smile and eyes that twinkled with merriment. Jeremy, my father's friend and Lila's husband, was every inch a gentleman. He carried himself with style and knew much of the world. People, and women especially, listened when he spoke.

And I? I talked little and at the dances sat along the wall and watched, more at home in the forest than among people. No doubt I would live alone forever, for what woman would find me attractive? Who would want a tall man with high cheekbones and a face like a blunted wedge who knew nothing but hunting and tracking?

I would think of Diana no longer.

Chapter IX

When at last I came to Shawmut, it was to a cove inside of what was called Fort Hill, and I came by canoe with a friendly Indian who would accept no gift for the favor. "There are good men here," he said, and left me standing on the shore at the foot of a path that led to Beacon Hill.

Here all was still, a peaceful place indeed, with some trees off to the south beyond some sand hills and poor grass. On the ridge of Beacon Hill, before me, there were a few cedars and what appeared to be elms. Only the cry of sea birds gave sound to my hearing, and I walked along in my wet moccasins looking for the house of the Reverend Blaxton, which I heard was close by.

By some he was considered eccentric, for he wished only to live quietly here beyond the reach of too many voices and to walk along his hill, down by the sea, or to read his many books. A good life, I told myself, a very good life indeed.

The path wound along the hill, and no doubt he knew I was coming for some time before I reached his gate. A Pequot woman served to keep his house, and he had a sturdy man who had come to help from time to time. The house itself was of logs flattened a bit on top and bottom to fit more snugly and well thatched with flags, rushes, and sedge from the swamps below the hill and along the shore.

He met me at the door, a grave but pleasant young man of about thirty years. "You are Reverend Blaxton?"

"I am."

"I am Kin Ring Sackett from Carolina. My brother and I have been searching for the two maids who were lost."

"Taken by Indians, it was said."

"Indians are suspected of too many things they have not done," I said, "nor were any Indians involved in this."

He hesitated a moment, then said, "Will you come in? I entertain but rarely here."

"It is a lovely place." Indeed it was, with wild flowers all about a fine view of shore and bay. Walking up the hill, I had seen a profusion of plants. Blueberry, blackberry, strawberry, and wild grape vines seemed to abound everywhere. "I envy you."

The comment seemed to please him, and when we stepped inside, it was quiet and cool. The floor had been paved with flagstone, neatly fitted, and there was a fine hearth and fireplace, with a small fire burning, enough to warm some soup.

"From Carolina, you say?" I was looking at his books. "It is far."

"We are in the western country," I said, "far out on the frontier. Beyond us are naught but Indians, although we hear of Frenchmen and Spanish wandering there."

He glanced at me as I stood looking over the titles of his books but made no comment in that respect. "Why have you come to me, then?"

Turning, I said, "For advice, in part. Secondly, not to lead those who follow me too quickly to the house of Samuel Maverick."

Then, accepting a cup of warm broth, I explained all to him. How Mistress Penney had sent for us and how we had come swiftly to help, how our efforts had resulted in finding the girls already escaped and in company with a black slave who was helping them and escaping himself.

"It is a serious matter, that," Blaxton said. "I look upon slavery with no favor, but to help a slave escape is looked upon almost as thievery, for you deprive a man of property."

"Aye, but they did not help him."

"It will not be seen in that light. They were white. It will be assumed that because he left with them they aided him rather than otherwise."

He sipped his broth, as I did mine, then asked, "They are with Maverick now?"

"I hope so. I had a brush with those who followed them and tried to lead them down the wrong path. They would have come along swiftly, for my brother Yance was with them."

"Yance? Yance Sackett?" He smiled suddenly. "I have heard of him. Heard nothing good but much that I admired. Although I am a man of the cloth, the people of the congregation and I do not always agree." He gestured. "I find it more pleasant here."

After another brief silence he said, "If they were not taken by Indians, then by whom?"

"There were three white men, men of the sea, by all accounts, and two black slaves, one of whom helped them escape ... a fine young man."

"White men?"

"Slavers," I said, "and obviously awaiting a slave ship to pick them up. The ship was overdue."

"You did not see such a ship?"

"There was a ship offshore. She seemed to be coming in. We were at the mouth of the Merrimack," I added, "a place used by traders and such."

"I have heard of it. But you only saw a ship offshore. Perhaps it was coming in. You assume very much."

For that matter he was correct. I sat, turning it over in my mind. It was true, we knew nothing. Even the maids assumed much, and we had only what Henry could tell us and what Diana believed.

"We believe Max Bauer was leading those who tried to intercept us," I suggested.

He put his bowl down hard on the hearth. "You believe! If you are to mention such men, you must know."

It nettled me, yet he was right. The girls had been taken away, the girls had escaped, but for whatever we suspected, we could prove nothing. We knew nothing; we had nothing.

"One of the men," I added lamely, "was seen working on the shore for Joseph Pittingel."

He smiled, an ironic smile. "You are, indeed, an innocent," he remarked. "Joseph Pittingel is a man of many interests. He gives largely to the church. He is often called to advise in matters of the colonial administration. I fear the best thing you can do, or the girls themselves, for that matter, is to be still about what you surmise."

He refilled my empty bowl. "I must speak to Samuel of this," he commented. "He is a thoughtful and a knowing man. I am afraid the young miss is in trouble, also, this maid of Macklin's."

"That she is suspected of being a witch? Surely you put no stock in that?"

"I do not, nor will Maverick, yet there will be others who will, and we must think of them." He looked at me suddenly. "You have spoken with her. What kind of lass is she?"

"Beautiful," I said quickly, "and sensitive, but she thinks. She has a good mind, an excellent mind, and far beyond her years in good sense."

He chuckled suddenly, and I did not know why, but he glanced at me slyly. "It is not often I hear a young man comment on a woman's mind."

"She is worthy of comment for her beauty," I replied stiffly, "but among us a woman's mind is important. On the frontier a man and his wife are two. They walk beside each other. To survive, the two must work as one, sharing thoughts as well as work. It is not the same, I hear, in the cities of Europe."

"You must guard your tongue," Blaxton advised. "Joseph Pittingel is a shrewd and dangerous man, skilled in the usages of power. He can have you deported, sent back to England."

"Back?" I shook my head. "He could not send me back. This is my home, this is my country."

He looked at me sharply. "This is your country!" He shook his head as if astonished. "It is the first time I have heard that said. 'This is my country!' It has a nice sound, a fine sound, but most of us, you know, are English."

"I was born here. I have not seen England. To me it is a land far off where a king reigns."

"He reigns here, also," Blaxton reminded. "It is not good to forget that."

"Where I live," I said, "is beyond the mountains where only Indians are. I do not think the king reigns there nor has power. It is a man himself who rules himself, and it is people working together. Perhaps you may think us wrong, but we do not often think of the king."

He considered that, then smiled. "To tell you the truth, we do not often think of him, either, yet it is not well to forget. You can be sent home to be tried by his courts, sent to his prisons, or executed by his officers."

We finished our broth and sat there in silence, enjoying each the company of the other. Finally he nodded to indicate the books. "Do you read, then?"

"I do. In our home there are many books, and my teacher was a good one." I glanced at him. "You might not approve. He was an infidel, a Moslem."

He shrugged. "I would say this to none but you and perhaps to Sam Maverick, but I have myself read a book by a Moslem and found it not at all bad. Did he speak of religion?"

"Only to say there were many paths, all directed to the same end, and he advised me not to be too quick to put my religion upon the Indian, for he had one of his own that served him well."

"You have courage," Blaxton said, "to face that wilderness. The sea and the woodland ... I love them, but I do not venture. I walk these quiet paths, stand upon these headlands, pick my berries, and sometimes--rarely--I fish. For a few trinkets, an Indian will bring me fish or mussels. It is a good life and an easy one if the demands you make are not too large."

"You have your books. They are the best companions."

"Aye." He glanced at me, and I think at the moment he really liked me, although he was a distant and aloof man. "Within this room I can talk to the Hebrew prophets, to Plato and to Aristotle. It is good company I keep here."

He stood up. "Let us go to Maverick's place. You will see how well it can be done."

As we walked along, I said to him, "Then nothing can be done against the slavers?"

He glanced at me. "What slavers? Who is to testify? It is all surmise and wild imaginings. Understand, I am inclined to believe there is something in what you say. To me Pittingel is too smug, too knowing, and too sly. He seems sometimes to hold us all in contempt, yet that may be only an attitude.

"In any event, slavery is no crime, although frowned upon in many quarters. It has been with us, my friend, for several thousand years.

"And if no slavery, how is the work to be done? A man who comes to this country wishes land of his own, and he will rarely stand to a bit of work for anyone else.

"I do not approve of one man enslaving another, yet so it has always been, and the mere fact that Joseph Pittingel transports slaves into the country or to the West Indies, this will be no argument against him. He will lose favor in some homes, will find himself quietly put aside by some of our people, but to others it will mean nothing. You must face reality, my friend."

Of course, he was right. Yet, there had to be a way. I thought suddenly of those other girls. "I knew but one of them," Blaxton said when I suggested it. "A handsome lass and pert." After a moment he added, "I feared for her. She was too filled with zest, and I am afraid--I should not say this--but I am afraid she had too little of the Lord's goodness in her."

He glanced at me. "I tried to talk to her of God, and she kept reminding me, without saying a word, that I was but a man and she knew it. She disappeared suddenly, and it was suspected she had run off with someone ... aboard some ship or other.

"Another case of a maid where many would be inclined to say, 'Good riddance.' I would say there has been some knowing selection going on here. The mistake was when they took Carrie."

Maverick's place was a considerable fortress, with a goodly house and several guns mounted on the palisade. He had the sort of men about to defend such a place, a rough and ready lot, for he dealt in furs, and many of these were men who spent much time trapping. With so many of them and his strong place he had nothing to fear from Indians. I knew he was a respected man but one who went against the grain of the congregations because of his easy ways and tolerant views.

It was said he had been close to being expelled on several occasions, but his own forthrightness as well as the fact that his father had been a minister of some influence prevented that.

He welcomed us and put out mugs of cold cider on the table.

"They are here," he assured me, "and well. Your brother did us well by bringing a haunch of venison with him, and the maids are resting. They arrived last night, and my wife has seen to them."

"We have talked much," Blaxton said, "and I think you should hear what he has to say."

I spoke briefly, having consolidated my argument by talking with the Reverend Blaxton, and Maverick listened while drinking his cider.

"Blaxton is right, of course. It will do no good to speak against them, and it will do you much harm. With all politeness, I must remind you that you are nobody here. Or less than nobody, coming from the wild lands to the south. Joseph Pittingel is a respected man, and feared as well. I have had few dealings with him except to use one of his ships to freight some mast timbers to England."

It was bothersome that those who had done this thing should go free of blame and lay ready to perform the same deed again, yet what could be done, I knew not.

"This lass," I said on a sudden thought, "the lass you spoke of who was taken before this? There has been no word of her?"

"None. She had a way of walking near the shore, and some said it was to give a bold eye to the sailor men, but I know naught of that. One day we saw her no more and her mother came wailing and worrying about her, and we conducted a search, but all felt she had but run off and not been taken at all."

"Such a maid--" I started to say when Maverick interrupted.

"Aye, I ken her well! A bold lass for her years, and she not yet sixteen! It would take more than a kidnapping to curb that one! I have seen her kind before this, and such women endure. They have a quality that takes them through when others might fall by the way. Bold she may have been, but there was good steel in her, too!"

"So she may be alive," I said.

"Her?" Maverick snorted. "It would take a deal to dampen her down. I confess, I liked the lass. Trouble she was, trouble for her mother from the first, and a worry to the congregation, for she flaunted herself about, ready to make eyes at any man who looked well to her, although, mind you, I think at that time 'twas all in play, not that she was not ready for something more. Had her good mother been wise, she'd have married her off--"

"It was planned," the reverend said, "but the lass would have none of it. She wanted none of the local lads but something more. I do not know what exactly, but adventure, I think."

"I think"--I spoke aloud, but it was to myself I spoke--"I think I shall go to the West India isles! I think I shall try to find this lass."

They stared at me. "To find one maid in all the Indies? You are daft. Daft, I say! And if you found her, what then? Do you think you would be permitted to speak to her? And if so, what?"

"An affidavit," I said. "A sworn statement. Or even the lass herself! Then we would have evidence that might take these men to the gallows!"

Chapter X

It was easy talk, yet the thought rankled that such things could be done and that those who did them would go unpunished. A man could say it was none of his affair, but how many would suffer until somebody did make it his business?

Maverick was patient. "You know nothing of the Indies," he said. "It is a different world than this, and it is nothing like Virginia or the Carolinas. It is a place of pirates, cutthroats, and sharp businessmen. And how would you go about finding one girl? A girl who is probably kept from sight?"

I did not know. All I knew of the Indies was hearsay, and not much of that, yet the more I thought of it, the more I decided that this I must do.

Yance was quiet, and that was unusual for him. Despite his flamboyance, Yance's thinking was sound, and he could see, even as I could, the problems involved. In the first place, there were many islands, and to which one had she gone? Had she survived the trip? Many people died aboard ship and were buried at sea, for the life was rough at best, the food poor, and many a tough sailor man failed to survive a voyage.

Jamaica, Hispaniola, Grenada, Cuba, Martinique, the names themselves were enchanting.

"You would have no chance," Reverend Blaxton assured me. "It is a fine thing you think of doing, a noble thing, but you would waste time better spent in some other way. We do not even know that she was not taken by Indians or murdered somewhere along our own shore. It would be like searching for one snowflake in the dead of winter."

"Anyway," Yance said practically, "you've got your crop back home, and Temperance will be wondering what happened to us."

"I did not mean for you to come, Yance. I meant for you to go home and let them know where I have gone."

There was a deal of talk, which, as is always true in such cases, seemed to arrive nowhere, for there is always a repeating of arguments and a rephrasing of the same ideas and much time wasted. Yet as the talk went on, I listened with half an ear and thought my own thoughts, worrying over the possibility as a dog over a bone.

When first the words came to my lips, they came almost unbidden, yet the idea would not let me abandon it. The Indies were foreign to me, and I should not be treading the familiar ground of the forest or mountains or swamp but at sea and among islands and men of different backgrounds than I, and I would be among cities, which I scarcely expected to enjoy.

Yet what if I found her? From all that had been said, I guessed there was a core of steel in the lass, that whatever else she might be, she was not one to be easily conquered by circumstance or condition.

That she was possessed of more than her share of healthy animal spirit seemed likely, and the restraints of living in a community ruled by the congregation would be irritating and confining to such a one.

Well, to suppose. If she was indeed taken by slavers to the Indies and sold there, what then? What would become of her? Many a girl might give up, accept the life, and sink to the depths, ending when cast out as no longer useful, eaten by disease, or soaked in alcohol. But I could not believe that would happen to such a girl as this one. There was strength in her; for good or bad there was strength, and that must count for something.

Suddenly the door from an inner room opened, and Diana was there. She moved into the room like a dream of beauty and went to the fire to stir it.

"How is Carrie?" I asked.

She looked over her shoulder at me. "Sleeping, and the poor child needs it. She is exhausted."

"And you?"

"There is not the time. I have things to consider." She looked around again. "They will be coming, I think. They have had their time at Cape Ann and some other settlements."

"What do you mean by that?" Maverick asked.

"She means," Blaxton replied, "that they will have taken the time to raise the question about Diana as a witch." He watched Maverick fill his glass and then added, "Joseph Pittingel, if he is involved, is a shrewd man. He would take the time to cast rumors about, even to making a few comments of his own. 'The maids have gotten free, how else but that Diana is a witch? Also, were they really prisoners at all? Was this not some diabolical plot of her own? How could they vanish so utterly but by witchcraft?' He will use the very argument Sackett offered at first, from what I hear, that no Indians had been seen for some time."

"There is a place amongst us," I said. "If you like, you may come to Shooting Creek."

She hesitated only a moment and then said, "It is far, and we are known to none there."

Maverick interrupted. "Then come to Shawmut. Become our neighbors. Thomas Walford, the smith, who helped me, would surely help you. He is a rough but goodly man."

The remark irritated me, yet why should it? She would be safer close to Maverick than elsewhere. Was it because she might have accepted my offer had he kept still? I was being the fool again. It was something I was doing more easily these days.

Yance was looking at me and grinning like an ape. At least I had the good sense to say nothing, although Diana glanced once at me as if expecting some word. Yet what could I say? It was far to Shooting Creek, and what had we to offer that was not here?

"I shall go to the Indies," I said, "and I shall find her. I shall find that girl, and somehow I will discover what is being done."

Henry had come in the door as I spoke, and he said, "If you wish, I shall come with you."

"It is no place for a free man who is black," I said, "although I'd welcome it."

"There are freedmen there," Blaxton offered. "It has been said there are several thousand that do live in Jamaica. As long as he was with you, he would be safe."

"And I can ask questions where you would get no answers," Henry said. "Some of my people lived in the hills of Jamaica and some on the other isles. They would know who I am, and they would tell us what they could."

"What if you ran into some of those you once captured?"

He shrugged. "They would be afraid. No one wishes to fight the Ashanti."

"We will go, then."

"There is no ship," Diana interposed. "None but that of Pittingel."

"There's Damariscove," Maverick suggested. "Many a vessel calls there for water or trade. Why, there was a settlement there before the Pilgrims arrived with their Mayflower!"

"Aye, Damariscove!" I had not remembered it. "Of course, we will go there."

"Is there need?" Diana spoke sharply. "Why should you sail off searching for some girl you have never seen? Does she sound so attractive to you?"

"It is for you," I protested, "and for others like you. This ugly business must be stopped and stopped now."

"How noble of you!" Her voice held irony, and the tone dismayed me. I stared at her, about to make some angry retort, but said nothing. That seemed to irritate her even more.

"I have not asked you to do this for me," she said, "and I would not. It is a fool's errand, going off to find a girl you know nothing of on an island you have never seen and where you'll find naught but enemies."

She turned around to look at me. "Do you believe for one minute that Joseph Pittingel or Max Bauer would let you go? At the first word of such a thing they would have you dead, killed in some manner. You would do better to go back to that far land from which you come and cultivate your corn!"

Her disdain for my sense was obvious, but it only made me resolve the more. "Believe what you will. I shall go."

I got to my feet, wishing to have no more words with her. Maverick was frowning at his pipe, Blaxton seemed amused by something, and Yance was smiling. What a smug lot they were! I'd be well rid of them, even Yance!

Turning to the door, I said, "Tomorrow, then, Henry. We will be off to Damariscove and a ship if we be so fortunate."

Diana turned away, ignoring me, and I stepped out into the darkness.

It was very still and damp; a fog came in from over the bay and from the sea beyond. Many a tale of the sea had I heard from my father and those of our men who had sailed with him, tales of bloody sea fights and ships captured or sunk, of Newfoundland and of the Irish coast. How long before I'd see my beloved hills again and the slopes all pink and rose with rhododendron and laurel? How long?

As a boy, I had walked the seaside when with my father. I went to the shore above Hatteras, a long and sandy shore, with a salt sea wind blowing and the salt spray in my eyes and the sea birds calling as they swooped above. Long had I looked upon ships and dreamed of the places of their going, the far places, the mysterious places, the wild romantic names, Shanghai, Gorontalo, Rangoon, Chittagong, and Zanzibar.

Dreamed of them, yes, but of my own hills the more. I wanted only to be back there, but first to stamp out this ugly thing, for I thought of Noelle in such a plight and no one to come to her aid. If harm were done to any whom I loved, I should come back; if it were from the dead, I should come back and lay a hand upon those who were evil.

The fog moved around me in strange curls, caressing my cheek with ghostly fingers, placing a chill kiss upon my brow with a small touch of moisture. The palisade loomed before me, and I went to the gate. A shadow moved, and a man stood there. "I be Tom," he said, "on guard this night. Is there aught I can do for you?"

"I thought of going out," I said.

"I would not," he said. "There be unholy things i' the night and a whisper of moccasins, methinks. I'd stay within and be glad, for the wall is strong."

"Aye, you are right, and if all goes as I expect, I'll be needing rest before I go down to the sea."

"They'll be bedding for the night soon," Tom said. "The master is no late stayer these nights. Ah, I've seen the time when they made the welkin ring with their singing of songs and drinking of ale, but not with the reverend here. Besides, there's a deal of work to be done, and all must rest."

"Is there trouble with Indians at all?"

"It's been a time since. Oh, there's petty thievery and such like but no more than is expected. You can't blame them," he added. "We've so much that is new and some'at curious to them, so they be picking up this and that to look at and sometimes to carry off. They do not have the same thoughts about ownership as do we, an' 'tis but natural."

"Aye." He made sense, this man. I wished all might be as understanding, yet it was much to expect when most newcomers thought of the Indians as savages, ignored by the good Lord unless saved.

It may have been my father's easy way with folks or perhaps my mother's way or Lila's or the teaching of Sakim, but I was not one for believing all who believed not as I to be therefore heathens. Many are the paths to righteousness, and ours, I think, is but one.

Inside they'd put down a pallet for me close by the fire, but I drew it somewhat away. I liked not to sleep too warm but cool enough to sleep lightly so my ears can hear what moves about.

All were asleep, or seemed so. I drew off my boots and looked to the charge on my pistols and then stretched upon my pallet and stared up at the dark timbers, lit by the flickering fire. It was in my mind to go south to the Indies, yet there was uneasiness on me, for I should be venturing far from lands that I knew and among men who were strangers to me and whose ways I knew not.

In the night it rained, and I awakened to hear the sound of it on the roof and in the yard outside. Lying awake, I thought of the rain falling in the forest, and I wondered where Max Bauer was and those who had been with him. Here I was safe. Yet Diana had spoken truly, for if they were slavers and discovered my intent, they would kill me or seek to kill me. Nonetheless, I knew this foul business must be ended or no maid would be safe to walk free upon the land.

Or was it simply that something deep inside me still longed for the sea, something inherited, something only half held, some unnamed yearning? What man truly understands his motives?

Yet there was something else, something of which I had heard my father speak when talking to Jeremy or the others, that where man was, there must be law, for without it man descends to less than he is, certainly less than he can become. Even on the frontier where no law had yet come, man must have order, and evil must be restrained or punished.

No man had made me my brother's keeper, but if no other moved to restrain evil, then I must do it myself. These men had injured one whom I--I could not complete the idea. It was not true. It was only that--

I went to sleep.

Morning dawned, cool and damp with a wind from off the bay. Yance and I walked outside into the sea wind and stood together. "Don't worry about my crop," I said. "The birds and the squirrels will harvest for me. Tell them where I am gone and that when spring comes I shall be with them again."

"Kin, be warned. They are not easy men."

"Aye. That I know."

"Where will you go?"

"To Jamaica at first to ask about where many sailors come. I do not think there are secrets at sea even though some may believe so. At Damariscove, where I go to find a ship, I shall also ask."

"Kin, do you remember John Tilly? And Pike? They were trading to the Indies in the Abigail, named for our mother. And the Eagle, too, the craft that took mother to England. That one traded to the Indies, also."

"Aye. I remember."

Henry came to the door. "Do we go now? I am ready."

"And I. Good-by, Yance. Care for things until I return. And do not go off a-hunting. Stay close to Temperance for a bit."

"You know how to give advice," a voice said, "and do you take your own?"

It was Diana, standing alone and very still just outside the gate. I blinked at her, not quite understanding, but I held out my hand. "I will come back," I said.

"Oh, will you?" She looked straight at me, her eyes wide. "And what then, Kin Sackett? What then?"

"An end to this bad business," I said.

Her fingertips scarcely touched mine, and then she turned sharply away. What in the devil was the matter with the girl?

"Go, then," she said over her shoulder. "Go."

Chapter XI

Quiet lay the water over which we moved, with no sound but the ripple of our passing and the steady chunk of the oars. Fog lay thick about us and somewhere ahead an island. A long, thin, wooded island, and there was the harbor, Damariscove, settled, it was said, by a Captain Dammerill.

Yet the fisherman whose boat we hired shrugged when I said it. "Aye, it may be, but there were lads as came ashore there to dry their fish many a year before he ever caught the shadow of it."

My father, too, had spoken of this, for fishers from the Grand Banks had come here to smoke or dry their fish before heading homeward for the shores of Europe. I spoke of this, and he looked at me again.

"Did he have a name, then?"

"He did. Barnabas Sackett, it was."

He chuckled. "I ken the man. Ah, a rare one he was, too! A rare one! Tricky and sharp but strong! He made a name for himself amongst we who come from Newfoundland, for we love a daring man, and that he was."

He turned to glance my way. "You do favor him, although you're taller. D' you ken Tilly and Pike, then? They were his friends, and if it is to sea you are going, you'll be in luck, for there's a ship of theirs at the island now, or there was."

"Of John Tilly's?"

"Aye. The Abigail. She's been about a bit but seaworthy. She's been taking on water and trading for fur."

My father's old ship and in port here! Suddenly I was impatient at the chunking of the oars, the slow, steady movement through the water. I had been relaxed, resting, waiting to arrive at Damariscove and thinking if I was lucky we might--I swore softly, bitterly. The ship might be gone before we arrived. Why could I not have known?

As if in answer to my impatience a small breeze blew up, and the fog began to thin. The old man went forward and hoisted the sail. Yet even so our progress was slow, too slow.

There was naught to be done but to hope she would not sail until we arrived. Henry looked around, amused by my impatience. "There will be other ships," he said.

"Aye, but yon's a special ship, and I would dearly love to sail in her, be her master whoever he may be. If he be John Tilly--"

The fog lifted, and the wind picked up a little. It was not yet midday, but Damariscove was far off. A gull dipped low above us, and I felt a queer excitement stir within me.

I was at sea! How often had I heard stories of the sea and of ships! Of my father's battles with pirates. What was the man's name? Bardle, Nick Bardle. There was another, too, but I had seen him, knew him from long ago when Yance and I had slipped aboard his ship at Jamestown and spiked his guns. A rare bit of action that and one that pleased our father, although it was done without his knowledge.

Jonathan Delve, that was the name. An evil man and one who hated our father.

Finally I dozed, rocked by the movement of the boat, and when I awakened again, it was fairly dark, and there was a darker line along the sky with a light showing low down near the sea.

"Are we there, then?"

"Yon," our boatman said. "Would ye be landed?"

"Not if the Abigail is close by. I'd like to board her."

"At night? They are a touchy lot aboard there and wary. I'd say you'd best be known to them if you'd board, but I'll take you alongside. And there she lies, two points abaft the beam. I'll bring her around, and we can hail her."

There was a stern light showing and an anchor light in the chains. We edged in close, and a hail came from her. "Lay off there! Lay off!"

"Is John Tilly aboard? If he is, I'd speak with him."

"The cap'n? Lay off there. Who be you?"

"The name is Sackett," I said. "I think it will have a familiar sound."

"Sackett?" The watchman exclaimed. "Well, I'll be!" In another tone he called out, evidently to someone else on deck. "Joel? Call the captain. Tell him we've a Sackett out here."

I saw light come into the darkness as the door yawned open; then there was a rush of feet, and a strong voice, which I knew at once, called down, "Sackett? Is it you, Barnabas?"

"It's Kin," I answered. "Kin Sackett, his eldest, and seeking passage to the Indies if it is there you'll be going."

"Come aboard, lad, come aboard!"

They dropped a ladder over, and I went up with Henry after me. My first time on a rope ladder, but I had the hang of it from words my father had spoken. The boatman had been paid, and there was naught to do but hoist our gear aboard, and little enough we had of it.

He was a strongly made man, his hair white and his beard neatly trimmed. "Ah, lad! It is good to see you! How is my old friend, your father?"

"He is gone, captain. The Senecas killed him ... finally. Black Tom Watkins was with him, and they died well."

"That he would do." He paused for a moment. "So he is gone! It is hard to believe."

"My mother is in England. She took Noelle and Brian there for their education."

"Aye. I knew of that, and I have seen them both ... in London. It was only a short time ago."

"You saw them?"

"Aye. I had brought my ship up the Thames and sought them out. Your brother is a handsome lad, strongly built and something of a scholar. But your sister? She is a beauty, Kin, a beauty! I declare, lovely as your mother was. She will be even more beautiful when she becomes a woman, and she has not long to wait, believe me! Ah, what a handsome pair they are!

"Brian is a scholar. He has been reading for the law but much else besides. But there's been trouble, too, over your land in the fens. William, of whom your father often spoke and who was by all accounts an honest man, died. His nephew fell heir to his holdings and has laid claim to your father's land as well. I fear there will be trouble."

"Brian will know what to do, and if it is help he needs, we will come."

"Help is less important now than friends in positions of power. I do not know, Kin, what will happen."

We walked aft together, and in the comfort of his cabin over a pot of coffee we talked long into the night of the old days and the new, and in the end I told him what I wished to do.

"To find one girl, Kin, I doubt if it can be done, yet you are your father's son, and he was not a man to be stayed by doubt. What I can do I will do."

"There is gossip alongshore; this I know. I want to know the gossip about the ships of Joseph Pittingel and what I can discover about a man named Max Bauer. I believe these stolen girls would be sold to outlying plantations where they could be kept unseen."

"If it is waterfront gossip you will be wanting, then Port Royal is the place. They be a packet of rascals there but friendly enough if they like you, and you'll have a good name among them."

"I will?"

"Aye, they'll know the name Sackett, for Barnabas made a name. Have you heard the story told of how he took the pirate ship in Newfoundland and then hung high the pirate Duval until he cooled down? Pirates favor a bold man, and your father was that, lad, he was all of that."

He glanced at Henry. "A slave?"

"A friend. He volunteered to help. He's an Ashanti."

"I know them. He will find some of his people in the islands, but most of them have taken to the hills in what is called the Cockpit County, and the wise do not go a-searching for them. There be those who call it the Land of Look Behind because you'd better or they'll be all over you. On Jamaica and elsewhere, too, they are called maroons."

"They will receive me," Henry said coolly. "I was a king among them."

"But these are long from Africa, most of them," John Tilly suggested. "Will they remember?"

"They will," Henry replied, "and if not, I shall remind them."

Fair blew the winds for Jamaica, and the good ship Abigail, named for my mother, proved a good sailer. Soon I was lending a hand at the sailing, learning the ropes, as the saying was, and taking a turn at the helm.

Each night we had a man or two back from the fo'c'sle to tell us what he knew of Joseph Pittingel, his ships, and of Max Bauer. Soon a picture began to come forth, a picture of a man both shrewd and dangerous, a man who had many friends or at least associates throughout the islands and along the coast of the mainland. A man even more formidable than we had assumed and a situation that must be handled with extreme care, for he had friends in important positions who could cast a man into jail or have him hanged.

That he was a slaver came as a surprise to many of those to whom we talked. This he had apparently kept from anyone, yet here and there a seaman would drop a word to let us realize that there were those who did know. A picture of the man became clearer, a picture of an adroit, cunning man who presented one picture to officials and to merchants and another entirely to those he considered menials.

John Tilly listened, asked a question or two, and when the last of the seamen had left the cabin, he said quietly, "This is no easy matter you have taken upon yourself, for if the man has the least suspicion of what you do, he will surely have you murdered or thrown into prison, and he will have the power, you can be sure."

"I think of Noelle. What if it had been she?"

"Aye, and the poor lasses with no man to stand by them. It must be done, lad. It must be done."

"First, to find that girl. Henry will help, for you know as well as I that there are no secrets from the slaves. He can go among them and among the maroons as I could not, for they would tell me nothing."

Several times we passed ships at sea, but they were either too far off to be seen clearly or they made haste to seek distance. It was a time when piracy was rampant, and many a ship would not hesitate to seize another if opportunity allowed.

Wet blew the wind against our faces, leaving the taste of salt upon our lips. Much was the time I spent upon deck, my body growing accustomed to the dip and roll of the vessel and the sails overhead, all strong with wind. At times the rain beat against our faces like hailstones, but I could see how a man could grow to love such a life, and how easily he could come to live upon the sea.

There was a power there, a power in the roll and swell of the waves that told a man he was but tolerated here. This was a world of fish under the sea and gulls or frigate birds above it.

Captain Tilly was a cunning man with wind and sea, knowing very well how to get the most from his ship, and we went swiftly along the coast to the south, and I never knew when we passed our old shore along the Carolina coast.

The seas grew warmer. We worked often without shirts, and the whiteness disappeared from our bodies, and they grew red, then brown, strongly tanned by tropical suns. Jamaica was a long green shore of a deeper green than found in our northern lands.

We sighted Great Plumb Point and the Pallisadoes, a long neck of land staggered here and there with trees that gave the neck of land its name, for they appeared a long broken wall to keep men out. We held our course along shore to Little Plumb Point and passed between it and Gun Key, then round-ing the point and coming at last to the well-sheltered bay.

Captain Tilly stopped beside me as I stared shoreward. Never had I seen so many houses or stores and drinking places along the waterfront. If there was one, there were at least twenty ships in the harbor, and more seemed to lie deeper within the bight of land.

No other place had I seen but Jamestown, and you could have tucked all of it into a corner of this.

"Be not trusting, lad," Tilly warned. "They are knaves aboard there and proud of it. They'll have your money, and if you say the wrong word, you will be killed out of hand. Port Royal is said to be the wickedest city on earth, the Babylon of the west, they call it. They be pirates and those who prey upon them and more jewels and gold than you'll see ever m London town."

We dropped our hook close in before the town, and a boat was got over the side. Tilly eyed me as I got into the boat. "To a tailor first, Kin Sackett, for in that outfit of buckskins you'll stand out like a lone tree on a headland, and every man in town will know where you go. And I've just the man for you."

"I've no great sum about me, captain," I said doubtfully. "Yonder we lived off the country, and while we've gold at Shooting Creek, I'd naught with me when we came along to Cape Ann and Shawmut."

He chuckled. "Ah, lad! Think nothing of it. I'll be your banker here. This ship was given me by your father, and all I have is by his favor. You'll be needing money, for nothing speaks but money. Money and a man's cunning or strength, for they be fighting men here, and strength is respected."

He glanced at me suddenly. "Can you handle a blade, Kin? You'll no be wearing more than a pistol in your sash. Here is the cutlass and the knife."

"Aye," I said doubtfully. "I've been well taught as a boy, for my father was a swordsman and Jeremy Ring as well and in another way Sakim, also. We fenced much as boys, but I've never fought for blood with a blade."

I caught myself at that. "Except with a knife," I said, "among the Indians. No year passed in those mountains without attacks by Indians, so we'd had our taste of that."

"Aye. I've heard of those attacks on your forts." He looked at me and shook his head. "Your father gone! 'Tis hard to believe. He was so strong, so fierce a fighting man, and he seemed like one to live forever."

He had seemed so to me, as a child. He was a gentle but powerfully muscled man, trained in the arts of war by his father, who had been a professional soldier. He came from the fens, in the country of Hereward the Wake, and many a story did I hear of wars and struggle by land and sea.

"It is a jungle yon," Tilly warned, "and the men and women are savages. Port Royal is no place for the good or the weak. Killings happen by day and night, rights are many, and rum is the greatest evil of all."

Captain Tilly, I recalled, was not only a ship's captain but an ordained minister. It was he who had married my father and mother these many years agone. Yet minister of the gospel or not, I knew well what he spoke of Port Royal was the truth, for many a tale had I heard of the place whilst mingling with the seamen in Jamestown on our rare visits there.

With four stout seamen at the oars, we pulled for shore, Captain Tilly, Henry, and I, and soon were alongside the landing. I was first up the ladder. Beyond the rough planks of the landing was a stone-built dock and beyond that a line of dives, sailors' "rests," and the like. A drunken sailor, kerchief tied about his head and gold, diamond-studded rings in his ears, staggered past.

Tilly pointed with his thumb at a narrow street. "Up there," he said, "there be a tavern that's clean. It be called the Bristol. Go there, and tell them I sent you, and have something to eat and wait. I shall send a tailor to you."

Henry looked at me. "If it is well with you, I will be looking about for some of my people."

The narrow streets were crowded with seamen from the ships, some of them obviously piratical craft, others merchantmen of one variety or another. Looking about, it became apparent that good business could be done here had one the mind for it, for many goods, looted undoubtedly from merchant ships, were going for less than the market price. If a man could buy here, then get away with his cargo without losing it again, he might quickly become a wealthy man.

We found the Bristol, and I entered and spoke for a room, using the name of Captain Tilly; once in the room, I had hot water brought to me and bathed there. Scarcely was I finished when there was a knock at the door. Knife in hand and pants hastily drawn on, I opened the door.

A short, fat florid man with a balding head stood there; behind him was a black slave. "Master Sackett? May I enter?"

Without awaiting my reply, he walked in, followed by the slave. "Measure him," he said grandly, choosing the best chair in the room. "Measure him carefully!"

He glanced sharply at me, then at my buckskins. "We will have something for you. We work very quickly. I have," he said proudly, "forty men employed and several women. All slaves, all my own."

"I came aboard ship very quickly," I said apologetically. "There was no time to secure proper clothing."

He shrugged, waving a hand with a gesture of dismissal. "In Port Royal it is often the case. One moment a mere seaman and the next rolling in wealth. We get all kinds here and are surprised at nothing.

"You would be surprised," he added, "at the number of the gentry we receive here, many in abject poverty. Some have been shipped out as slaves or prisoners to be sold as slaves. Imprisoned for debt, most of them."

"How about women?" I suggested. "Are any of them sold as indentured servants?"

"Many! Some likely lasses, too! Some of them use themselves wisely and end doing very well for themselves. Most--" He shrugged. "Most do not. Most are mere slatterns, passed on from one to another, ending doing the most menial tasks."

He went on, chattering away, noting the measurements as the slave chanted them to him. He glanced at me several times, stripped to the waist as I was, and then said, "Have you ever engaged in pugilism? You are obviously an extraordinarily powerful man."

Then, hastily, he lifted a hand. "I do not mean to offend! Fisticuffs are often staged here and much money wagered. One of the best we had was a gentleman down on his luck. He did very well, you know. Owns a plantation of his own now."

"I am afraid I know nothing of such things," I said, "but I am flattered to be considered a fighting man. I have come here"--the idea came to me suddenly--"looking for what may be the least marketable item Port Royal may have. I mean, with so many ships being taken... well, there must have been some books aboard some of them. Books of history, of knowledge."

I glanced over my shoulder at him. "It was in my mind to open a school for young gentlemen in Virginia. There is nothing of the kind, and when the chance came to come here, where so many rich prizes are brought--"

He was astonished. "You come to Port Royal for books?" He got quickly to his feet. "I never heard of such a thing! To Port Royal, of all places! Men come here for strange reasons, but certainly none for anything ... I am sorry, Master Sackett. It is not easy for me to grasp."

"Do not worry yourself about it," I said, "but if you hear of any such, please inform me."

He looked at me closely. "Captain Tilly said you were a young gentleman."

I waved a hand. "Of course! I came to Virginia expecting to find a plantation, but after living much in the forest and surveying much land, it seemed to me it would be better... better to own the land and let somebody else work it.

"Besides, she lives--"

" 'She'?" He smiled. "Ah, now I begin to understand."

"You understand nothing!" I said. "She has a younger brother, and there are others about. If I started a school, I could then have access to her home."

He chuckled. "Oh, well! I suppose it does make a kind of sense!" He got to his feet, looking over the measurements he had compiled. "Do you know? I might have clothes that would fit. I might have."

"How could that be?"

"It often happens. Clothes are ordered, then for one reason or another he who ordered them does not appear. It seems I have clothing ... Your shoulders are a little broader, your chest deeper, your waist ... yes, your waist is smaller. With just a little work, a few minutes only, I could have an outfit that would suit admirably, something to make do with until your own are finished." He glanced sharply at me. "That is, if you want them."

"I shall want three complete outfits," I said. "You choose the colors that will suit me. I haven't the time."

"You trust my judgment?"

"I do. You appear to be a man of taste. Ordinarily I would not consider such a thing, but I have much to do and am but lately from the forest and am lacking in awareness of what is being worn.

"One thing only. A little on the conservative side? I am no fop."

"Of course." His vanity was pleased, I could see that, and I felt he would do me well. Yet I had other thoughts. "In such a place as this," I commented, "I expect most of the talk is of piratical ventures, looting, slaving, and the like. Do you hear anything at all of outlying plantations? I would assume life on some of them is very refined."

I was choosing my words with some care. My world in growing up had been one where English of the Elizabethan sort was well spoken, but growing older and in wilder lands, both Yance and I had become careless. Yet here I had another sort of impression to make, and Captain John Tilly was obviously a man of repute.

"On the contrary! Little that happens in the Indies is not known in Port Royal. Information, you know, is the foundation of piracy. I do not approve, but one does not voice such opinions here. I do not approve, and yet the successful pirates do not rely upon chance. They learn to know which vessels carry treasure of easily sold goods, and they seek them out."

"Are they slavers?"

He shrugged. "Very few. A slave ship can be smelled for miles, as a rule. Pirates avoid them. The cargo is difficult to handle, dangerous to carry, and offers far less profit than open piracy or privateering."

"Not even white slaves?"

Was I mistaken, or was there a subtle change in his manner? "I doubt if there are any such," he replied.

"When a man begins to deal in human beings," I commented, "it would seem to me color would be a minor consideration."

"You want three outfits, then?" He stood up and closed his book with a snap. "Come, Charles, we must be off."

He paused. "The one suit I could deliver tomorrow if it is acceptable."

"It would be a favor," I said.

He lingered as Charles left. "Slavery, of whatever color, is not a topic much discussed here. I would suggest avoiding it ... if you will permit."

"Of course. I am a stranger, and I do not know what it is that concerns your citizens. In any event, I shall be here but a few days ... if I can find what I want."

"The name is Jayne." He hesitated. "Augustus Jayne. If you have need of me, please call."

When he was gone, I sat down near the window. Jayne might know something and might not, yet if he did not know, I believe he suspected.

The idea of seeking books to open a school was unusual enough and harmless seeming enough to enable them to pigeonhole me as a mere eccentric. Yet in all the loot taken from vessels of all countries, there must have been books, for many ship's officers carried them, and many brought along whole libraries when going to the colonies. Also, I suspected they were the least marketable of items.

The search might allow me admittance to many places otherwise closed to a stranger, even into homes on some of the outlying plantations.

Yet two days later I had learned nothing. Henry came and went, and several times I saw him with neatly dressed black men, most of them very black indeed, several with bloodshot eyes. They were maroons, down from the hills. They carried themselves proudly and went their own way, having little to do with either whites or the other blacks.

My clothes arrived, and I dressed, then stared at myself in the mirror. Accustomed as I was to the wearing of buckskin leggings and hunting coat, all fringed to let the rain off easier, I was startled to see what a fine spectacle I had become. Pleased yet displeased by the result.

A doublet of forest green, the sleeves slashed to show the linen shirt beneath, knee breeches of a somewhat deeper green that met high boots of Spanish leather. The collar of the doublet was covered with a band of rich lace of white. As I was staring at myself and wondering whether to admire or laugh, Captain Tilly knocked at the door, then entered. He paused a minute, looking me over carefully. "You look quite the young gentleman, Kin. You are a strikingly handsome man, and that can be an advantage at times."

"Thank you, captain. I like myself better in buckskins, but if this is the style, then I shall wear it, and if any laugh, they shall answer for it."

"Aye, you being your father's son, I suspected as much, so I brought this." He lifted the sword case he had by bis side. "It is a good blade, one your father left aboard ship, and I rousted it from an old chest for you. Wear it in good health."

The blade was a good one and came easily from its sheath. I stretched it, moved it, tried the balance. "Aye! A handsome blade, although it has been years since I used one."

"You have fenced?"

"With father, as I said, and Jeremy as well, with Kane O'Hara and with Sakim. They were reputed good, so I expect I have been well taught."

"Be careful! There are fine swordsmen here and deadly fighters, although they favor the cutlass and the cut and slash method rather than parry and thrust."

A thought came to me. "My father had an old friend, one who chose not to stay in the mountains."

"Jublain? Aye, a fine man and a fighter. I wonder now what has become of him. He went back to England, then to the Low Countries, I believe. He was never one to stay still, but a rover always. I heard somewhere that he'd gone out east, to the Moslem lands."

We talked long, and then he returned to the Abigail, and I bedded down for the night, but I did not sleep. After a bit I got up, moved by some strange restlessness, and went again to my window. My room was in darkness, the street but dimly lit by reflected light, and a man stood on the corner across from the hotel. As I stood beside the window, I could see him but dimly, for he was in deep shadow. He stood there a moment, then crossed the street, going away. At once I knew him. Only one man was so large yet moved so easily.

Max Bauer!

Max Bauer here! Had he followed me? Or was it mere coincidence?

He had disappeared now, going away into the street below, yet I was sure he knew I was here. He might even know what room I was in.

And life was cheap here. No need to attempt murder himself, for it could be bought here for a few shillings or even a gallon of rum. Every second, every minute, I must be on guard. I must be aware and ready.

And I was ready.

Chapter XII

Dawn found me awake and, soon after, breakfasting in my room. There was much thinking to be done. Henry would be out, and I had great confidence in his chances of gaining information, for there were no secrets from the servants and slaves. Yet I could not depend upon him alone.

Augustus Jayne, the tailor, was another possibility, for tailors often visit homes, and there is little that escapes their eyes. Did he know something? Or was it merely my imagination? Certainly if a trade in white women existed, it was very much undercover, even here in this pirate port.

Looking out upon the street, I tried to find any possible lurker, anyone who might be placed there to watch for me, but saw no one who seemed to be lingering there.

Charles, the slave of Jayne. He would go most places Jayne would go, and if they traveled into the back country, he would eat with the servants of whomever they visited and would hear most of the backstairs gossip. Henry could talk to Charles.

One thing I had already noticed. The maroons, although few of them were about, were regarded with awe and respect by the other blacks. Perhaps because of some innate quality, perhaps because they had escaped, taken to the hills, and had set up their own world there.

The streets, when I emerged upon them, were crowded with bronzed and bearded seamen, some roughly clad as from the ships recently arrived, others bedecked in priceless gems and silks from the Far East. In the drinking shops they slammed handfuls of gold coins upon the table and called for rum. Often enough they were served in cups of gold or silver, sometimes set with gems, and aside from rum, easily the most popular of drinks, one might find wines from all the world there and the best of food.

They were a hardy, brutal lot, ready to use the knife or the fist, and stabbings were routine. If a dance were in progress, the music was not stopped for a killing; they simply danced around the body until that set was over. These were men who lived in the shadow of death, whether by gunshot, blade, or the gallows, a roistering lot of every nationality and race under the sun, mingling with no thought of anything but rum and women. Moving among them, I gradually got the feel of the crowd. The women were there, also of every nationality, but mulattoes and quadroons predominated.

Suddenly I glimpsed Henry. He was standing alone near a stall that sold basketry, looking very handsome in his neat black coat and his white shirt. A girl moved through the crowd toward him, saying something, but he waved her aside. She left with an angry glance and a flounce. He waited, and I did, with the crowd moving past me.

A slim black man moved through the crowd toward Henry, but when he came near to him, he did not stop or seem to notice but walked on past, turning up an alley near the basketry stall. After a moment Henry followed.

At that moment something plucked my sleeve. It was Charles. So concentrated had I been on Henry's movements that I had not seen him approach.

"Captain? I am Charles, from Augustus Jayne. He has need of you for a fitting."

A fitting--now? I doubted it, yet I went along, following behind him to the door of his shop. It was a very strong door of oak set with iron straps and bolts. Charles tapped; the door opened, and we entered. A huge black man was guarding the door.

Jayne was waiting for me, tape measure in his hand. As Charles usually did the measuring, this also surprised me.

As he started measuring, he talked softly. "Your name sounded a bell in my ears. I was sure I had heard it before this. 'Sackett?' I said, it is an unusual name, and then I recalled a letter I had long since from England but one of a series of letters I review from time to time because of the information they contain, much of which can be profitable." He stepped back, glancing at me from the corners of his eyes. "Information is a commodity, you know, often calling for better pay than goods."

"If you have information," I said, "I will pay."

"Oh, no! I was not suggesting ... far from it. Only that you would know that sometimes a tailor is not only a tailor. I have a friend in London who is interested in information and is often very helpful to me. It was in a letter from him that I found the name ... Barnabas Sackett."

"My father."

"Ah? I suspected as much. My friend is Peter Tallis."

"My father spoke of him."

"He would, of course. Peter Tallis is a man of many parts and of much knowledge. He has, I believe, friends such as I in most of the ports of the world. We write letters to him and advise him as to conditions.

"You see, although the name sounded in my memory, I did not place the reason. Then it came to me. A friend to Peter Tallis is a friend to me. Or I am a friend to him."

"So?"

"I measure you in case of spies, and let me tell you, my friend, in Port Royal there are spies everywhere. You spoke of white slaves. I suspect you did not want one for yourself, knowing what I do of your father."

"You are right. I seek a certain girl who might have been sold as a slave, a kidnapped girl taken from what is called New England."

"There were several such, as well as some from New Amsterdam, from Carolina and Virginia."

"This girl was from the Cape Ann area. It would have been a year ago. More, I think. She would have been sold by--"

"Ssh! No names, please!"

"Very pretty, and--"

"Of course. Aren't they all?"

"A girl, I have heard, of independent mind and not one to scream about her lost honor unless she could gain something by screaming. From hearsay, a very courageous, somewhat unmoral young lady who did not take to the life in New England nor the strict ways of the elders. She was stolen away, but I am not altogether sure she would have objected very much."

"Ah, yes. You make it much easier, Master Sackett, much easier! For there are not many such. Most of them sink ... or die of fever or of something ... despair, probably."

"Not this one."

"You would save her?"

"I doubt that is the word. I would talk to her. I will do what she wishes in that respect, but I seek to put an end to this business."

"A knight errant? No white charger?"

"None. An attempt was made on a girl I ... well, a girl whom I know."

"Does Captain Tilly know why you are here?"

"He does. And Samuel Maverick, of Shawmut, and the Reverend Blaxton."

"Maverick I know. He does business with us. A very shrewd, competent man. All right. Your credentials are good. I have heard of such a person. A very handsome, shrewd, and healthy young woman and not a slave."

"Not a slave?"

Jayne smiled smugly. "Not at all! In fact, she is mistress of one of our fairest plantations! A woman with a will ... and as they say, where there's a will, there's a way, and she found it."

He completed his measurements, then suggested a glass of wine, and I joined him. Seated comfortably, his plump vest thrust forth importantly, he told the tale with some relish.

"Ah, yes! I like enterprise! It is what will keep our world alive when the old world has gone to seed! Enterprise! A good English trait! And our lady ... oh, yes! I do not hesitate to call her that, for if she did not deserve the name when she arrived, she certainly does now!

"What a woman! She was sold to one of our landed gentlemen, not an elderly man by any means but a lonely one. His wife had been a cold, unresponsive, greedy woman, and when she died, many of us breathed a sigh of relief for him. But he was not a man who liked living alone, and on that great estate back of the north shore, he was much alone. His house was a great old mansion, splendid place, for the man had taste.

"It was what led him to Adele."

"Adele?" I knew not the name and felt a sudden disappointment. "This cannot be she whom I--"

"Wait. There cannot be two such. As for the name, who cares about a name? Most of the population of Port Royal are using names not their own. One chooses a name if one wills, perhaps one more suited to the personality. After all, only a few inherit great names. The rest must make them for ourselves, and trust her. She will."

He paused, lighting a long cigar. I had seen them but rarely. He refilled my glass. The wine was white, of delicate flavor, and I, who drink not often, found it to my taste.

"When such slaves are sold, they are usually sold on order from the customer. They have the sale made, and they seek out the merchandise, subject to approval of the buyer. In this case the buyer died--a duel, I believe--so he was left with the merchandise."

" 'He'?"

"Only that. I say no more. The result was that he held a quiet little auction, a secluded place, only a few trustworthy and possible customers.

"The wench was bold. She appeared before them, and she looked over the lot and saw our man--her man--and looked right into his eyes. 'You,' she said. 'I want it to be you.'

"There was some bidding, of course, for she was a likely lass, but several had heard what she said and had lost interest. Our man bought her.

"He bought his clothes from me, so I had the story from his own lips, and an amazing story it was! On that first night when they arrived, he was about to order her confined when she demanded to speak with him alone.

"Once alone, she faced him boldly. 'You have a slave,' she said, 'and you may have a willing slave or wife--'

"Wife?" he exclaimed.

" 'Wife,' she said, 'or slave, whichever you like, it matters not a whit to me, but treat me like a lady, and I shall respond like one. Treat me as a slave, and I will make your life a hell.'

"She gestured. 'This place needs care. It is rich and beautiful, but it needs someone who loves it ... and you. I have never kept a house like this, but I can, and for you I will. My father, while he lived, had a small business. He traded to the Indies and to England. I helped him keep his accounts. I can help with yours. You will come home tired, and I can make you comfortable. If you wish to talk, I can both talk and listen. So choose. Am I to be a slave brought to your bed when you need me, or your aide, your mistress, and your friend?'"

Jayne chuckled. "You can imagine. The man in question was a quiet sort and had not really planned on buying a woman. In fact, the idea was furthest from his mind. I suspect he both wanted and needed someone desperately, and he went to see what sort of woman could be had. Now he had one, and her nerve appealed to him.

" 'You will not try to run away?' he asked.

" 'Why? Would I run from a man I wanted to buy me? Would I be so foolish? I had no home. Now you can give me one. I had no one to serve. Now I can serve you.'

"He put her in a spare bedroom, and of course she did not run away. When he came in from riding about the plantation, his robe and slippers were ready for him. Where his former wife had been cold and selfish; Adele was warm and seemed to think only of his comfort."

"But was she honest? Was not this all a sort of game?"

"That's just it. She was honest. She sincerely liked the man, as she had known she would from the start, but also she had seen the need in him and the loneliness. She had an instinct for such things.

"Within a few months he was living better than he ever had, was enjoying life for the first time, and was completely happy."

"And then?"

"He married her. Oh, he did not have to! She told him that, plainly enough, but it was his wish. And he never regretted it."

"He is dead?"

"On the contrary, he is very much alive. At this moment she probably knows more about his plantation than he does, but she seems not to. Here and there she makes a suggestion ... only that. But he listens, and they have prospered."

Augustus Jayne sat back and smiled, eyes twinkling. " 'They are living happily ever after,' " he said.

"But what makes you think she is the one I seek?"

He chuckled, then grew serious. "The timing is right, or close to right. But that is not all. A few weeks ago I was at their place, seeing him fitted for a court dress. They were going to a ball at the governor's palace.

"He had not come in from the fields when I arrived, and she sat me down and told me she knew something about me--which her husband did not, I am sure--and that she wanted information about a certain man. About Joseph Pittingel."

I was startled. "Why? Why about him? I should think--"

"So should I have thought. That she would have had quite enough of him. But you mistake the lady. She has iron in her system, that one. Joseph Pittingel treated her with contempt. She despised him. She wanted something to use against him."

"Then she might help me!"

"What is it you want of her?"

"Evidence. A sworn statement as to what happened. I want to see the whole shameful business destroyed."

Jayne shook his head. "You will ask too much, my friend Sackett. Adele--she allows me to call her that--will not do it. She would have to reveal herself. She would have to go before a court or the governor or a notary and make a statement that would reveal all. She will not do it, not for herself but because of him. Because of the man she married.

"You see, no one knows. She is a woman of mystery, appearing from nowhere, and by the first time she appeared with him, she was his wife, completely in command of herself and her future.

"No, I am afraid not. She will not risk all for you, nor for revenge. She has other ideas in mind."

"Such as?"

"She wants the man destroyed, ruined, finished. I do not think she cares whether he is dead or alive when it is over. She wants him ruined for what he tried to do to her and for what he has done to others."

"Well, I shall just have to go see her."

Augustus Jayne smiled smugly again. "That will not be necessary. She is here ... now."

Chapter XIII

He held aside the curtain into an inner room, and I stepped through. There was also a door, I noticed, that was hidden by the curtain. That door had remained open, and now he paused beside it. "I have much to do, and you will have much to discuss. Kin Ring Sackett, Madam Adele Legare."