Girl in a Buckskin

come all this way, risking his scalp, to make a joke? I came to fetch you home, lass.”
    She backed away from him hastily. “I was naught but a town pauper,” she cried, “hired out to the Leggetts for a few shillings a year. A pauper, Mr. O’Hara—”
    “Most orphans are,” he smiled.
    “I’m a fugitive,” she flung at him. “Do you know what that means? I ran away lest they marry me to Joshua Smeed—”
    “When you leave the valley you will no longer be Rebecca Pumroy. As soon as we can find a magistrate to marry us you’ll be Rebecca O’Hara,” he said, “and my wife will not be a fugitive. And if you’d never run away my bones would be lying up there in the north of the valley and we’d never have met. Is there anything else?”
    She backed against the wall. “Only that you are a fool to have come back—to say these things-—”
    “I think not. Are you quite finished?”
    She caught his eye for the first time and seeing the laughter in him she turned crimson. “Aye—that is all,” she whispered.
    “Good,” he said, “then we need not speak of these matters again.” And taking her in his arms he kissed the words from her lips.
     

Chapter Twenty-one
     
     
     
    TENDERLY BECKY TOOK LEAVE OF THE LAKE. IT HAD NEVER seemed so lovely as these last few days: the sunsets lingered on the water, staining it with brilliant colors, and when night came the stars filled the sky. The breezes came from the west full of sunshine and the scent of pine and hemlock, and the woods had never been so full of game. And now that she was about to forsake the valley Becky found many memories to catch at her throat: she could remember swimming through the water with Dawn-of-the-sky at her side, she could remember the quiet of the lake on a sullen gray day, the feel of the air when snow lay deep on the ground, and the journey north she and Eseck had made when he schooled her in the ways of the forest. She could remember that here she had shot her first deer, and that the buckskin thong that tied back her hair came from the first suit of buckskins she had worn, now long since gone. Here in the cave, now almost covered over with grass and sumac, Eseck had carved a two-sided stick from poplar wood and told her gravely that Indians indeed had souls.
    Gentle Eseck, she thought—what would become of him? Would he come back before it was too late or would he live out his life on the Kennebec, with an Indian girl for his woman and only a wee-ku-wuhm roof between him and the sky? There were moments when she felt she was deserting him, for never would she find it in her to be angry with him. He had done what he believed was right, and who could say what the right of it was? The Indians had been here long before the white people. Perhaps Eseck would someday be a sachem, a wi-go-wauw, and finding the cabin here would mourn his sister and all the white men who had once tried to live on this continent.
    Perhaps, but she could not believe it. It was more likely that Eseck had chosen wrongly, and that he would die far away with only his Indian family to mourn him. It tugged at her heart, this thought, but she did not wish to go without leaving some sign for him here. The cave would vanish before another spring, its door swallowed up by the sumac, but the cabin would stand. On the rough mantel of the fireplace she placed the birch bark calendar. He might have forgotten how to read but he would know the figures and remember how she had marked each day when he was with her. And beside this on a fresh sheet of birch bark she formed a note for him in Indian signs so that he would know she had gone east with a white man to marry him and live on a farm. It was all that she could do.
    She had almost nothing to take with her. There was the suit of buckskins she wore, the small iron kettle Black Eagle had traded her, and the skirt Dawn-of-the-sky had given her. All else the French Indians had made off with. As O’Hara saddled the two horses Becky stood in the doorway of the cabin and took silent leave of it.
    She would never see it again, nor would she ever again see the valley of the Housatunnick. The roof of the cabin would decay and fall in, the door would come askew and rain would batter the walls, and with her new life so rich she would soon forget. Yet she thought that one day, when the wind was right, a sudden scent of hemlock or the odor of damp earth would bring it all back, and then she would wonder if some white settler