Girl in a Buckskin

be?”
    “Rebecca Pumroy.”
    He nodded. “It’s a bit peaked you’re looking, Rebecca Pumroy. You’d best sleep yourself.”
    Becky moved her pallet of hemlock boughs to the far side of the cave, fell across them and was immediately asleep.
     
    For all his talk Mr. O’Hara was a sick man. In the morning he was raving again with fever and when Becky looked at his arm she found the wound had opened again from the rough treatment it had endured. His leg was swollen and hot and Becky was sorely pressed to make him comfortable. She fed him broth and tea and thought to see the end of him almost any day but he struggled through to each sunrise and when a week had passed he was still alive although gaunt and terrible to look upon.
    The venison had long since gone but there was always something in the pot even if only a snared rabbit or a few roots. Not until she was certain O’Hara planned to live did Becky venture out hunting. She was gone all day and half the night but when she returned she was staggering under the weight of a deer.
    O’Hara’s hand lay on his musket when she came into the cave and she saw that the gun was cocked. A sigh of relief came from his lips when he saw her. “Sure now, and I thought you’d deserted me,” he said.
    “Perhaps it is well to tell you there are Indians living not far away,” she told him.
    “Indians!”
    “Aye, and they are my friends. If one should come near I’d be obliged to you for not shooting him.”
    He scowled at her in his surprise. “It’s a strange lass who lives near Indians and knows how to handle bow and arrow like a man. Or did one of your Indian friends shoot the arrow that killed this one, for I see no musket wound?”
    “I shot it myself.”
    He nodded, and pillowing his head on his arms watched her as she began skillfully to skin the doe. He had noticed many things between his ravings this past week, but he was not a man to ask questions—not many, at any rate. A white woman living in this wilderness alone was a sight to set any man to wild guesses. What brought her here, and what kept her here, when a few dozen miles to the east or to the west she could find her own kind and live among them? The lass had to be a fugitive or a fugitive’s woman. But if she had killed or stolen or been condemned for witchery, who could blame her for saving such a pretty head from the executioner or the branding irons? These were hard times and whatever her crime he was beholden to her for his life. But of one thing he was sure: if she had killed someone, then it was an act that had cried out to be done for many a long year, for he had never met a braver, more honest lass in all his twenty-four years.
    “I’m thinking it will be spring before I can walk on this leg,” he said suddenly. “It will go hard with you feeding a big man like myself.”
    “I can manage. But your friends—they will think you a dead man.”
    “Aye, that they will,” he chuckled. “Surrounded and killed by the Indians, and having warned my friends in time I will have died a hero’s death.”
    “You speak very lightly of such things,” said Becky. “I speak lightly of everything,” he said gaily. “T’is an Irishman’s way to see a rainbow in a mud heap.”
    “But is there no one to worry?”
    “Only old Ben. He’ll milk the cow for me—aye, and plow the field if need be if the Indians will let him.” He shook his head. “The Indians are doubling their dirty work since Deerfield was sacked.”
    “Deerfield?” She turned and stared at him in astonishment. “How is this?”
    “And why not?” he asked in turn.
    “Blue Feather said—I heard many moons ago the French Indians and the Canadians planned to attack Deerfield. The town was well warned in the autumn—”
    He looked at her with amusement, far more interested in why she said moons instead of months. “Aye, that was in the autumn,” he said, “but human nature is a fickle thing. They tell me for months on end they posted sentries at Deerfield and didn’t work the fields and lived inside the blockade—and then grew slack and careless. And when they grew careless the Indians came.”
    “Was it—bad?” she whispered.
    He nodded gravely. “Aye, very bad.”
    She huddled over the fire, her eyes huge. “I pity them,” she whispered. “I know myself—I can remember—the silence and then the war whoops, the dreadful, terrible war whoops—”
    His eyes were thoughtful on her. “You remember?” She