Heading the other direction, Tessa ran along a deer trail till her lungs cried for air and she nearly couldn’t stammer out a sensible greeting. Ma stood in the fenced garden patch, hoe in hand, planting squash and beans. How Tessa hated to end her tranquil task.
“Ma, get to the cabin fast as you can.”
Without comment, Rosemary leaned her hoe against the split-rail fence and made for the log structure just a stone’s throw away, taking her prize hen with her. Inside the cabin, she and Tessa shut the massive black walnut door, heaved the crossbar into place, then barred the sole shuttered window. Embers glowed in the blackened hearth that overtook the west wall, built inside lest the stones be torn down and entry gained through the outside opening. Through an adjoining door was the two-story blockhouse that earned the name Swan Station, with no openings save loopholes to jam a rifle barrel through.
All smelled damp. Rank. The hen strutted about, making discontented noises, deprived of its bug eating and dirt baths. Ravenous when she’d left this morn, Tessa now eyed the barely visible stack of corncakes atop the table with woozy disinterest.
“Tell me everything from start to finish,” Ma said in her easy way, as if they’d been bedeviled by no more than a swarm of yellow jackets.
Tessa told the tale with far more detail and elaboration than her taciturn brothers would. Save Ross, all were men of action, not words. She recalled with special force the whoosh of Shawnee arrows and the precise moment the Cherokee brave had pitched headfirst onto the riverbank before being pulled away by his fellows. How the lone frontiersman spoke of the war hero Tygart. The telltale pewter hue of the river warning of the coming rain, which even now drummed with such force on the roof she lifted her voice to finish the telling.
Ma’s gnarled, liver-spotted hands opened the Bible resting on the mantel, and she began reading. “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress . . .”
But Tessa was too focused on the sounds outside the walls to pay the holy words much mind. Their cur, Snuff, began howling from the edge of the clearing, a low, mournful lament. Their livestock were belled, all but the pigs, and roamed the near woods. Prickles shivered her skin.
Passing to the wall, Tessa looked out a loophole to the pasture. Her brothers had taken two of their fastest horses to Fort Tygart. Another was missing. Likely Ross had taken a third bareback, making a precarious dash to warn their brothers in the far fields and their nearest neighbors on his way to the fort.
Mimicking her mother’s calm, Tessa built up the fire, then took her father’s worn rifle from its perch on a pair of antlers to check powder and bullet lead.
Lord, let the wait be not long.
They had been lulled into a lethargy after a long, quiet winter when the Indians kept to their villages and ceased raiding. Spring meant yet another season of watching their backs had begun. Her muscles tensed at the thought. Not till hallowtide or chestnutting season could they rest easy.
All her life had been spent looking over her shoulder. Such unceasing, ingrained guardedness wore a body down. Day was never begun without a long, measured look out a cabin loophole. Ever clever, her second-eldest brother, Zadock, had designed a straw man to thrust in the doorway when it first opened of a morn. How they’d laughed at the foolish sight bedecked in their homespun rags and a tattered hat! Yet here the straw man remained just inside the door to do its duty, a burnt hole through the worn felt brim proof of its purpose. She couldn’t imagine a day not dogged by danger, when one’s own shadow wasn’t suspect.
Folks overmountain didn’t live on the razor’s edge of peril. Soon Jasper would return from there with far more than salt or the needed stores. He reappeared just as heavily laden with word of society’s ease, of bread and sweetmeats to be had in confectioneries, shiny cloth in shop windows, books and ink and reams of spotless paper brought in by tall-masted ships from England. Was it wrong that her girlish heart longed for an unfrayed ribbon or sturdy cobbled shoe? A book to call her own? She’d never known such, born in this wilderness place, and doubted she ever would.
But oh, what she’d give for a pretty petticoat.
2
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
1770
The overly crowded parlor reminded Clay of why he preferred the far-flung frontier. Chambers like this, no matter how genteel, were a cauldron of barely civilized scents that left him longing for clean air and expansive views. Heavy perfumes barely masked perspiring, unbathed bodies layered in lush fabrics amid the city’s heat. He pulled discreetly at his own freshly laundered stock, casting a baleful eye at the tall, closed windows with their British crown glass.
Two more days. No longer would he be confined to brick buildings and slop-strewn streets. True, he could turn a corner here without being met with a hatchet, and a pint of ale was as easily gotten as the plague. But in the bowels of teeming Philadelphia he felt tethered. Suffocated. Even dim-witted. Lulled into a civilized lethargy that the wilderness never allowed him.
Close to a hundred Philadelphians had come to hear him talk, crowding into his kin’s glittering parlor on Front Street atop the Delaware River’s western embankment. He was far from an orator, yet they sat spellbound, starved for news about the latest unrest from a region most had never seen nor wanted to. Or mayhap drawn by him most of all, the white Indian, a so-called redeemed savage brought back from the brink of heathenism in the nick of time.
The aftermath of the last war weighed heavy. He read the questions on their faces, the fears there would be another. Mayhap his coming was a blessed reprieve from the angry outpourings about the Stamp Act being forced on the colonists by Parliament. Mayhap it gave them reason for thankfulness that somewhere else in the world there was more danger, turmoil, and uncertainty.
“Colonel Tygart.” His host—and uncle—was before him, a blushing belle on each arm. “More of your admirers wish to meet you.”
Clay inclined his head. Gave a small bow. If she’d lived to see it, his aunt would be pleased her training had taken hold. The young women looked at him coyly, each fluttering their fans hard as a hummingbird’s wings.
“I was captivated by your speech,” said one. “We only glean the scantest bits from newspapers and broadsheets of exploits in the West. Never have I heard a firsthand account such as yours.”
“No doubt your call for men and arms along the border will be heeded after so rousing a message,” said the other, touching his coat sleeve with the tip of her fan. “From a true hero of the Seven Years’ War—and a former captive. How horrifying!”
“I didn’t mean to paint so grim a picture,” he returned, “given I lived to tell the tale.”
“I’m sure you’ve spared us the most distressing details as any gentleman would. My only wish is that you looked more the part.”
Bemused now, he smiled. “Greasy buckskins, feathers, and the like?”
They giggled like schoolgirls, though his uncle remained unsmiling. His Quaker kin still found it hard to make peace with his straddling both worlds. And his forsaking their faith had widened the rift. Though he’d been back among the whites for as long as he’d been with the Indians, he retained an Indian taint.
“I regret hearing that the abundance of game grows less and less the farther colonists push west, the prized elk and buffalo foremost.” His uncle’s thoughtful comments surprised him. “Though I’m glad the predatory wolves are not the threat they once were.”