“We know Captain Stanton’s daughter,” one said. “That’s not her.”

Stone Girl pushed on through them toward the inn. It stood before her unchanged. Blue pine smoke rose from its chimneys. As they drew close, Captain Stanton himself came out of the front door. At the sight of her father, the child gave a shrill cry. She shook herself loose and started to run toward him. When she came near she let herself fall to the ground as if mortally wounded and crawled toward him hysterically screaming.

“Nan! Is it you?” Captain Stanton cried in disbelief, gazing at the shrunken ragged figure. Then he picked her up in his arms and carried her into the inn.

Stone Girl stood for a while uncertain and alone. She had not been asked in. The terrible look Captain Stanton gave her kept her back. She followed to the porch steps and waited. From time to time she felt others staring at her but they remained at a distance. Not even Billy, the returned hostler, came near or spoke to her. Didn’t they know who she was, she wondered, with her skirt whipped into pieces and cut off nearly to her thighs, with her legs, arms, and shoulders black with travel and torn by brush and thorns, her flesh, like Nan’s, almost to the bone? She heard the time measurer in the inn call twice before Captain Stanton came out.

“We don’t know if she will live or not,” he said grimly.

“Otter Boy die but Nan live,” Stone Girl told him. “Just give little to eat. Only thin boiled meat the first day.”

“I think we know best how to take care of her,” Captain Stanton told her caustically. “What we don’t know is what to do with you.”

“I be all right,” Stone Girl assured him.

“Maybe you will,” he agreed bitterly. “You can thank your heathen gods we are white and Christian and are not inclined to take revenge on you for your aid and comfort to the enemy.”

“I am not enemy,” she told him.

He looked at her with hard eyes.

“There’s no use lying, Claire. We know all. Your savage friends brutally murdered and scalped the people who stayed here, including my own mother. But the savages never harmed you. Nan says you joined them the first day. You went along willingly and carried and cooked for them on their murderous way. Only after a long time when your boy died did you leave them. Even then, Nan says, one of the savages followed and stayed with you. Perhaps this same Indian is in cahoots with you now and you expect to get something out of bringing her back.”

“I don’t expect something,” she told him. “She is my sister.”

His lower lip drew down.

“You must know, Claire, that she is not your sister and never has been. If she had been, you might not have abused her the way you did. You must also know that Nan has told us everything. Not that she had to. We could see the marks ourselves where you twisted and pinched her and at night where you choked her. The marvel is that she’s still alive. Her whole body is a mass of bruises, not to speak of hundreds of cuts and scratches. We took festered thorns from her legs and feet. She told us you dragged her through the worst terrain you could find, over rocks and logs, through bushes and thorn thickets. When she couldn’t walk any more, you beat her till she’d manage to go on.”