“Mary,” Sheninjee said in an even lower voice, “better to ask them, not order them.”

She took a few steps forward and appraised the young white. She looked from Shawnee to Shawnee. “Is this action for justice’s sake?”

The captors looked as if they could make out neither her physical presence nor her question.

“Will your chief be proud of his warriors when this story is told all across these lands?”

The shortest of the three Shawnee looked at the tallest.

“Please,” she said, “let him go.”

Exchanging glances, the men set their faces against her.

Her son began to cry. She handed Thomas to Sheninjee, but the child continued to cry and the cries became louder and angrier until they had turned to wails so disconcerting that the Shawnee involuntarily took steps backward.

She advanced as they retreated and raised her voice above her son’s crying. “I beg you.”

Thomas screamed and the Shawnee, to a man, winced. As if to take some action to end the overwhelming sound, the tallest Shawnee lurched forward and with drunken bravado sawed the binding thongs away from the young white’s wrists. “There. You are free.” Then he looked at Mary. “Ha.” He paused and then he laughed again. “You may leave,” he said to the white man.

Now the shortest Shawnee was also laughing. He tottered over to the prisoner and said, “Use your ears for boat sails!” Then he held his sides, bent over suddenly, and vomited.

“Get up,” Mary said to the white, who looked stupidly at her. “You must get up on your own and leave without our help. The Shawnee would be angered if we assisted you. They would see it as losing face.”

She tried to hold the young man’s clouded gaze and even as she did so, she despaired for him. But he moved his lower jaw to one side in a kind of spasm, in a concentrating contortion she recognized from having seen it on Sheninjee’s face in the act of love. And then the youth was up out of the chair and hurling himself like a demoniac across the room, drops of blood marking his path out of the door.

The Shawnee stared in disbelief. Mary turned from them; her husband handed her the child, who made no sound as his mother walked out of the dead traders’ house.

CHAPTER III

[ III ]

The Genesee Valley 1763 — 1833

AT GENESEE, her Seneca sisters came to her, flanking the Seneca mother she had never met. The mother carried with her a shawl of blues and burgundies and dark greens, and in one effortless gesture she lifted a corner of it, shook it out, and draped it around Mary’s shoulders where flakes of snow had begun to accumulate.