Girl in a Buckskin

had found the cabin and brought his wife to live there, or if the French Indians had burned it with fire.
    She turned to find O’Hara standing beside her. “Come, lass,” he said, “we’ve a journey ahead of us.”
    She nodded and let him swing her up on the bay. Turning the horses they headed along the beach toward the east shore, and then with one last backward look at Shoonkeekmoonkeek Becky and O’Hara headed south toward Wnahtakook.
     
    Black Eagle shook his head. “Bad for you to go now. Woods full of war parties. They strike like the hawk— here—there. Take prisoners, many scalps, vanish like smoke.”
    “I know that,” O’Hara said. “But I got through all right and I’m sure we can get through now. Tell him so, Becky.” Becky made sign talk with Black Eagle and he shrugged. “Three Legs lucky once, his gods walk with him. Maybe this time his gods look other way.”
    “Why did you never tell me of my brother?” Becky asked him abruptly. “Black Eagle is wise like an owl, Black Eagle has known for many moons about Indian-with-the-white-scalp. Is this not so?”
    Black Eagle bowed his head. “Indian-with-the-white-scalp is my brother.”
    “He is my brother, too,” Becky pointed out.
    Black Eagle’s eyes narrowed and she saw that he was no longer patient with her. He said, “Once we had many braves. Our braves would have put on war paint and gone to avenge Blue Feather’s murder by the Long Knives. Now the tribe is poor in wampum and poor in spirit.” His lips curled. “Our braves are like women now. Indian-with-the-white-scalp was not like a woman. He was brave warrior. He went to avenge Blue Feather’s death.”
    He paused, and then added firmly, “Indian-with-the-white-scalp is my brother. He kill for us.”
    Becky stared at him with despair but in the end she said nothing. The skein was too hopelessly tangled to unweave and set straight. Black Eagle mourned the death of his people’s spirit even as he counseled peace. His friendship for the white man was an uneasy thing; if Becky had come alone he might have killed her. And if some hot-headed white man in the north had not killed Blue Feather then all this might never have come about.
    “I bid you good-bye,” Becky said, her despair dying as quickly as it had been born. “I bid you good-bye and I may never see you again. Have you any news of Indian-with-the-white-scalp?”
    Black Eagle shook his head. “Only that he lives with my cousins in the north and is no longer a paleface.”
    Becky nodded and turned away. “And does he wear many scalps on his coupstick?” she asked, not looking at him.
    “Only one,” Black Eagle said quietly. “The scalp of the paleface who killed my nephew.”
    Tears glittered a moment in Becky’s eyes but she said nothing in reply. “Let us go now—quickly,” she told O’Hara. Leaving their gift of two deer outside Black Eagle’s lodge they mounted their horses and rode across the meadow into the hills.
    At the bottom of the valley they stopped to look for the Indian trail that led from the Dutch country to Westfield and which they must at all cost avoid. While O’Hara watered the horses Rebecca climbed a tall hemlock and stared out over the sea of treetops. To the east lay the ridge they must climb and cross to reach Westfield; to the west, with the sun setting orange behind them, lay the mountains that sheltered Shoonkeekmoonkeek. Behind and ahead were the trees stretching as far as the eye could see, like green velvet tossed to the ground, sometimes wrinkled, sometimes stretched taut where the earth gathered itself into hills, green as deepest emerald on the sunny slopes but already black in the folds of the valley. Shielding her eyes Becky searched the sky where it met the trees and saw far away to the south a faint smudge of smoke.
    “Well?” said O’Hara when she climbed down.
    “A faint trace of smoke to the south,” she said. “But far away.”
    “An outpost?”
    She nodded. “Perhaps. Connecticut lies that way.”
    They found the Indian trail a few hundred rods away. Grass hung over it and berry bushes almost obscured it but under the grass the earth was beaten hard by the feet of deer and Indians. Becky went ahead to scout around and look for signs. She did not look in vain. Sometime during the week horses had come this way, and stumbling across a spring that emptied itself in a pool of rocks she found the imprint of a moccasin in the mud.
    When she returned to