The bush moved a little closer.

“Ta koom? Where do you come from?

“I come from the town by the deer lick near the White Woman’s branch of the Muskingum, if you know where that is.”

“Kih. I know where the Muskingum flows better than a woman,” the voice rebuked her. The bush was thrown aside, disclosing a painted face and curly maple rifle behind it, a face young as or younger than hers and scornful of a girl. The two gazed at each other and she guessed instantly that under the paint he was not Indian born. He went on imperiously. “What do you do here? I watched you from the time you came from the house of the horses this morning. When do the white captain and his soldiers come out of the big house to fight?”

So that, Stone Girl thought, was why the inn had not been attacked and burned. The youth had been sent to keep watch on it and report while his brothers retreated with their booty.

“I look for the Tschipey, ghost, of the small white girl with yellow hair.”

“What is she to you?”

“I am born Yengwe like you,” Stone Girl told him. “She is the small white sister.”

He stared at her a long time but what went on in his mind, whether his thoughts were Indian or white, there was no telling.

“The small girl with yellow hair is not your white sister.” Then he said bluntly. “She is Indian.”

Now why, Stone Girl asked herself, should that dismay her? All morning she had doggedly faced the grim prospect of Nan’s death. But now that she was alive, alarm seized her at the fate of the child and what ordeal lay ahead. She reminded herself that she, Stone Girl, had lived through it, the stern captors, the forced marches, the strange, sometimes revolting food, the cold nights on the ground, the sight of forbidding alien faces around her, and the sound of their unintelligible tongue in her ear. But how would it be with the small, weak sister?

“Nimat. You will take me to your brothers?” she asked him.

“You are a woman,” he told her coldly. “I cannot do so.”

“Nimat, brother. If you tell me the meeting place, it will be enough.”

“Woman. The meeting place is where it can’t be found. It is hidden by the creek and the mountainside. It is too far for a young woman and a small boy.”

“It is not too far for squaws with children to make pilgrimage from the Tuscarawas to the graves of their fathers on the Susquehanna,” she reminded him. “It is a long way from Fort Detroit on the Great Sweet Water but I am here.”

“The small sister cries too much,” he said harshly. “I think by this time she does not breathe.”

The face of Never Laugh rose before Stone Girl’s eyes and the pale scraps of soft hair she had stroked and mourned over.