Girl in a Buckskin

who?”
    “Joshua Smeed.”
    Eseck dropped his hands from her shoulders. “Joshua Smeed?” he repeated slowly.
    “I know what you’re thinking,” Rebecca said seriously.
    ”That it would be a fine thing for me to have a home of my own, with fine silks instead of homespun, a carriage to ride in and a place to invite you to dine. But—”
    Eseck looked at her pityingly. “Is that really what you believe I’m thinking?”
    She looked at him gratefully. “Then tell me what you are thinking, Eseck.”
    He stared beyond her into the dark woods. He said thoughtfully, and it was the longest speech she had heard him make, “I’m thinking that to the eyes of the town Joshua Smeed is a fine man, a fine respectable gentleman with four wives buried on Cemetery Hill and eight children to care for. But I’ve heard things. I know he uses the whip too well. His mouth is cruel and t’is very strange to me that he’s lost four wives, and him not fifty. I’m thinking he has a hard manner with them. They tell me his last wife was a fine strapping girl when he married her six years ago, yet I know when she died her eyes were powerfully grieving. Are they pressing you hard, Becky?”
    She hesitated. “Enough to make me fair uneasy.”
    “Then you must leave,” Eseck said.
    She gasped. “Leave!”
    “Leave,” he repeated. “You’re naught but a girl and an orphan as well. Do you really think you can set yourself against the town—and a man like Joshua Smeed?”
    “Oh, Eseck, you do frighten me. I thought—I hoped—”
    “You hoped what?”
    “I hoped you would tell me everything would come out all right. And yet in my heart I was terribly frightened.”
    “Then listen to your heart,” Eseck told her curtly. “It speaks the truth.”
    “Oh, why can’t they leave us alone?” Rebecca cried. “I know it may be blasphemous but they seem uncommonly cruel to people who cannot defend themselves. I daresay they mean to be kind—”
    “Their very kindness is cruelty,” said Eseck. “They must make a fine, heartbroken lady of you—yes, and a gentleman of me!” He laughed briefly. “You will have to choose, Becky. There’s naught I can do to protect you but would earn me the whipping post.”
    “But if I ran away,” whispered Becky, “t’would mean the whipping post for me as well.”
    “Only if you were caught.”
    She turned this over in her mind very carefully and shook her head. “I wouldn’t know where to go, Eseck.”
    “Why, you’d go with me,” he told her, smiling.
    Her eyes widened. “You’d leave, for me? Why, t’would mean you’d be a fugitive, too, Eseck, and that I could not bear. No town would ever take us in, we’d be caught and dragged back to be punished—”
    “I’m sick to death of towns,” Eseck said.
    “Then where, Eseck, where?”
    “North,” he said, watching her.
    North.The wilderness. The huge, shapeless forest of nothingness that lay behind the last outposts north of them. He could mean only that. “But there are Indians there,” she said, her lips trembling at memories she could not always hide from herself. “And wild animals,” she added so that he would not guess what she thought.
    But Eseck knew what she was thinking. “The war is over,” he said. “It’s true a new war has begun between the French and the English in Europe but there’s no sign it will spread to the colonies. We have peace with the French Indians now. But I wasn’t thinking of the far north. There’s a valley not five days from us where no white people have ever been except a few trappers and hunters. I heard about it once from a Mohawk.”
    “From an Indian?” Her eyes widened.
    He nodded gravely. “He said that many winters ago his people fought the Mahicans who met the first white men in the Mohawk Valley. He said that since then, after many battles, the Mahicans scattered. He mentioned a band among them, poor now, with few braves, who sought peace by running away to their old hunting ground, to a place called the Valley of the Housatunnick.”
    “The Housatunnick,” she echoed.
    “It’s not far,” he said. “I found the mouth of the valley last year. It lies up the Connecticut River west of Springfield. An old Indian trail goes across the valley over the mountains into the Dutch country beyond. North of this trail the valley is a wilderness, a green pocket of a hiding place full of lakes and beaver.”
    “And Indians?”
    “Indians with only a few braves are