Her husband had seen Priscilla sewing the hat and had assumed it was for him. When he came home with the cattle one day, he saw something moving on the horizon and that something was tipped with red. When he discovered it was Allen wearing the beautiful new hat, he flew into a rage and decided that in his absences he had over and over again been made a cuckold, which we were certain was not true.

Instead of pursuing Allen, he went straight home, held his wife still while he wrapped her long black braid round and round his hand, and then jerked on it and by this method dragged the innocent woman forty rods to our house, where he left her, bruised and humiliated, on our doorstep.

Now I saw something that I had not seen in a long time. Hiokatoo picked up his tomahawk once again. He was much incensed by the unjust treatment of Priscilla at the hands of her husband, and he threatened him and bade him to depart, saying, “Jogo!” which means “go off.” That man, knowing Hiokatoo as he did, went straightaway.

Allen, in fact, had never touched Priscilla, nor she him. But later he drowned an old man who had a young wife whom Allen coveted, even though he had married by then.

And later still, stories came to us illustrating that he had been unexcelled in his cruelties toward the revolutionaries. One time when he was scouting in the early morning he came upon the house of a colonist who was known to be fighting the British: he went in at the door, killed that man, cut off his head, and threw that head into the bed where the poor wife lay with an infant. Then he took the baby, shook it until its neck snapped, and tossed the small body into the embers on the hearth.

Once when I repeated these events to him, remarking that it could not be the truth and that he should know that someone was busy blackening his name, he answered and said that the story was correct.

And he added, “I should not have done that. But I want to know exactly who is spreading these tales. Someone, no doubt, who has a grudge against me; someone who is trying to diminish my importance, my position in this valley.”

A day later he stood on my doorstep and said, “Besides, you yourself have done some strange things. You know what they say about you and that mute Negro, don’t you? They say you may be a witch. Or some sort of ghost.” He laughed. “Here you’re white enough to pass for one.”

Before I silenced him for weeks with a cutting remark, I stopped to ask, “ ‘Mute’? What does that mean?”

IN THE next years Hiokatoo grew thin and feeble and all but lost his eyesight. Sometimes Mary longed for Cleopha and Simon, but especially for Simon, who had often been her companion on long walks on the flats. Now she went out by herself and returned to hear her husband breathing hard.