Girl in a Buckskin

island.
    She could not say why she had to go to the island, but it seemed a dearer place to her than the cave. It had been a refuge to her and O’Hara when many a night they had feared to see ominous shadows crossing the ice. She pulled the dug-out high on the sodden bank and threaded her way through the trees. Here lay the remains of their fire. This hollow in the ground was where they had rested their muskets while on watch, and here was the spot where O’Hara had slept.
    Lonely, she sat down beside the dead fire and rested her head on her hands. She was a fool not to have gone back with O’Hara, she was thinking, a fool to wait here for someone who might never return, who might even now be lying somewhere in the forest with an arrow or a musket ball in him. But if Eseck were alive—if Eseck were alive, then she must wait, for he would come back. With all her heart she must believe this, for he was her brother, with the same blood in his veins and the same level blue eyes and pointed chin and slender bones.
    A piece of oiled skin lying on the ground wedged between two stones caught Becky’s eye and leaning over she picked it up, finding it oddly heavy. She recognized it as a packet from O’Hara’s knapsack, and opening it removed a small book. It was the copy of the Bible she had seen once before when she had paused at the brook following his tracks and opened his knapsack. For a moment she held it tightly in her hands, remembering his gay smile, the set of his broad shoulders and the warmth of his voice. To be near him was like sitting in the sun at noontime on a warm day. He had been very different from Eseck. Eseck was like the moon, shedding light but no warmth, his eyes cool and remote, his quietness like the forest at night. O’Hara was all sun and warmth and brightness.
    Carefully she opened the Book, turning the oiled pages one by one. At the flyleaf she paused, seeing many names and dates written there, and laboriously she began to spell them out:
     
    ...to Cuconnaught O’Hara on His thyrteenth birth date from his Father, Rury O’Hara, Earl of Shane.Dublin, 1606
    ...to Rury O’Hara on hys Twenty-fyrst birthday from His father, Cuconnaught O’Hara, Earl of Shane.Rome, Italy, 1639
    ...to Shane O’Hara on his Twenty-fyrst Birth day from his Father, Rury O’Hara.Paris, France, 1662
    ...to Shane O’Hara from his Father, Shane O’Hara on his Thyrteenth Birth Day. Dublin, Ireland, 1693
     
    Becky closed the book and stared at it with a rapidly beating heart. Rury O’Hara, Earl of Shane; Cuconnaught O’Hara, Earl of Shane. She had known O’Hara was a gentleman by the gentleness of his ways but his clothes had been homespun and his hands roughened by farm labor. She had never thought—never believed—that he could be such a grand one. Wave after wave of hot scarlet flooded her face as she crouched over the Book and remembered her many impertinences, not the least of which was that she had thought of him with fondness. What must she have seemed to him but a common woodsy in Indian clothes who often as not left her spoon on the table to eat meat with her fingers and who hunted her own meat like a man. He would have been used to women in fine clothes who minced across wet puddles in galoe-shoes and dined from silver chargers and wore brocade gowns. She stared at her hands, the nails chipped and broken, the palms hard with calluses. She knew her face to be almost as dark from the sun as an Indian’s, and probably weathered as well in spite of the bear’s fat she greased it with to keep the skin from roughening. She had turned into a wild thing and never realized it, she, Rebecca Pumroy, born with as fine a birthright as the Leggetts and now more animal than human in her fight to stay alive.
    She thought of herself with horror, remembering how once she had worn gowns, if only of homespun, and had displayed as pretty a manner as any girl. How amused this man must have been to see her carry in a hundred-pound buck on her shoulders—aye, and quarter it without flinching, her arms red to the elbows with blood. Would he remember she had saved his life, not once but twice? Perhaps. But t’was more likely he’d tell his grandchildren of the wildness of the young woodsy he’d met once in the valley of the Housatunnick, whose only friends were Indians and who lived alone in a cave. Aye, it would make a fine, romantic story told by the hearthside on a stormy night.
    Becky stood up, her eyes narrowed.