AFTER Cleopha and Simon had been gone for weeks, Hiokatoo said to Mary, “The man loved you.”

“What?”

“Simon loved you.”

“I also loved him. He was my friend.”

Hiokatoo waved his hand back and forth as if he were fanning himself. “He was always looking at you when you were unawares. He had grown so attached to you that it troubled him. That is why he left this place.”

AFTER the Revolutionary War, doing what their hearts desired led more and more whites toward the fertile, tilted Allegheny Plateau. Mary had seen dozens of them pass through the Genesee Valley: prospectors and traders, madmen, lawbreakers, surveyors, the disaffected. But now some stayed, worked the rich soil, trapped, and built small houses. Complete families began to arrive.

I became acquainted with the whites who settled near the river, and sometimes they came to our house to ask about the herbs that made good medicines or to consult Hiokatoo about the best uses for different hardwoods. I enjoyed their visits, even though I sometimes felt they came because I was a curiosity to them. Once a little girl asked me if I was the “white woman of the Genesee” and I said, “Yes, I suppose I am.” Then I followed by saying, “I am also a Seneca. And who are you?”

“I am Irish,” she said.

“Ah.” So I told her that tale about the farmer and the horse named Coinn and the drawbridge. But I changed the part about the corpse. I had a sleeping maiden come floating down the little stream instead. And I invented an ending.

ONE EVENING Thomas, who had his own small house now, came through Mary’s door with a man named Ebenezer Allen, a Tory who had come to their flats not knowing quite how to ally himself since the severance from England. Allen was fairly short and passingly handsome in a somewhat girlish way.

He was the strangest man I ever knew. He lived with Thomas for a time and appeared daily to help Hiokatoo and me with our chores on the land. He also journeyed to Philadelphia for goods and traded them to our people in exchange for ginseng root, which he took back to the city and sold for a high price.

His manner was generally pleasant, but in time I came to see him as moody and restless. He spoke in a whining manner of all the injustices done him.

ALLEN also often appeared at the home of a white man and his Nanticoke wife, whom he helped during the day while her husband drove his cattle some distance so that they could feed on rushes. The Nanticoke, who had taken the English name of Priscilla, was so grateful to Allen for his help that for many days she worked at making a special hat to keep him warm, for she noticed that he went about bareheaded in the winter. The hat was crimson and when it was made she decorated it.