Girl in a Buckskin

sent her down country to live with old Aunt Tucker, her father’s sister, but Aunt Tucker had died before Becky had unpacked all of her trunk and after that it was one house and then another, with no one to call her own.
    Until the war that they called King William’s War ended, and Eseck one day walked into town asking if his sister Rebecca Pumroy lived here. He’d walked all the way from Canada when he’d been freed, and the sight of the fourteen-year-old boy with the lean brown face and shock of bleached yellow hair warmed many a matron’s heart. At Thursday Lecture they talked it over, strangers never being welcome lest they be fugitives or vagabonds, and they had said he might stay so long as he earned his keep.
    And since then regretted their decision many a time, Rebecca was thinking. Oh, there was nothing anyone could point a finger at exactly: Eseck earned his keep all right, cutting logs and plowing and hunting meat; he went to church on the Sabbath—when he remembered what day it was; he spoke proper to everyone—when he saw them; he worked hard, too. But nobody could quite make him respectable. He disappeared for weeks at a time, telling nobody where he went, not even Rebecca; he looked his betters in the eye when he should have been staring at the ground. The town suffered him because he had been orphaned and captured by the heathen, and because it was only fit and proper that a boy be near his sister; but they found him an intolerably bad example for their own children, brought up carefully on Pastor Sewall’s sermons and The New England Primer.
    When really he was finer than any of them, thought Becky, better and kinder than all of them put together.
    She hurried on the way home, not even glancing at Eseck. But one would have to fly swift and true as a hawk to satisfy Mrs. Leggett. The woman was standing at the door with lines of impatience pulling down her mouth.
    “What a time,” she cried, “what a time you took. Give me the posset cup. Make haste now, Mr. Leggett is already at home and the table not set.”
    Rebecca hung up her pelisse. She brought out the high salt cellar and surrounded it with trenchers, noggins and spoons. She stirred the hasty pudding and when they had gathered at last for dinner she served up the hotchpot and the turkey.
    But all the time she was thinking, Tonight I will see Eseck and he will tell me I am wrong to be frightened.
     

Chapter Two
     
     
    BECKY KNEW THAT MR. SMEED WAS IN THE FRONT ROOM by the manner in which the girls talked in the hall. Mrs. Leggett had retired upstairs, leaving Becky to scour the kettles and bank the fires. She thought Adah Ann and Prudence would never join their mother, but after many sly glances into the kitchen and a great deal of giggling they left and Becky heard their feet on the stairs at last. A few minutes later Rebecca snatched down her cloak and tiptoed down the hall.
    She could hear the men talking as she passed the front room. She did not mean to eavesdrop but Mr. Leggett’s loud voice caught her ear and she paused.
    “You must remember, Joshua,” he was saying, “that the poor child is in my charge—and upon my conscience—”
    Which meant to Rebecca that the matter was as settled as it could be without her own reply, Mr. Leggett being a weak man whose conscience was often mentioned but never consulted. Rebecca did not wait to hear more; she opened the door and hastily closed it behind her.
    Outside there was neither wind nor moon. The mist had moved in from the river marshes and hung low over the ground like an eerie white carpet. Becky could feel the dampness on her cheeks and to keep from trembling with cold she drew the thin pelisse closer. Staying away from the house she stole toward the woods, taking care not to make a sound, but even so, Eseck heard her and rose suddenly from a patch of wild grass no higher than his waist, looking like a ghost with the mist and the grass cutting off his legs.
    “Oh, Eseck, you came,” she whispered, less frightened of ghosts than of being discovered.
    “I came.”
    She glanced quickly over her shoulder. “I mustn’t stay,” she told him. “ He’s there. With Mr. Leggett. They want me to marry him; indeed, they are pressing me hard, Eseck. If he were gentle—but I fear he is not, and I’m afraid of him.”
    “Marry?” Eseck seized her shoulders. “What in the world are you talking of?”
    “The Leggetts. They wish me to marry him.”
    “Marry