Hattie remembered the first time she really understood that they would be moving on again. She'd made friends--the farmer who employed her father had two little girls, just older and just younger than she. She had wept when she said good-bye to Charity and Hope. "So it wasn't only going to live with Uncle James and Aunt Nettie that made me long to have a place of my own. Or even the way Karl kept moving west. It was something inside me...." She pressed a hand over her chest, where the ache for a place to belong had so often become almost more than she could bear. "Here--something inside just hungered to be home."

"You wanted to settle in the Willamette." It was almost as if he was arguing that she didn't know what she wanted.

"That was before I found this place." Again she looked into the distance, seeing the dark green of the trees, the bright green of the meadows. Seeing the deep blue sky framed in the Vee of the gap. Seeing the future in which she would wake to the same vista each day. She would watch that twisted little pine grow to a great tree, watch the river slowly change its course as it ate away at one bank and added to the other. She would count the winters and the springs, grow old here.

And do so in loneliness.

Hattie bit her lip. "William says I'll be the Queen of Cherry Vale. How could I resist a promise like that?" She did her best to show a brave smile.

"What about the wagon and goods you left down in the cabin?"

"I'd hoped you would help Silas fetch it before... before you left." There!

She'd said it aloud. And that made it real.

Emmet considered. "I reckon I could. It's not as if I'm in a hurry." He rubbed a hand across his chin, bearded again. "If I get over the Blues by October, I guess that's soon enough."

Hattie wanted to sing. To shout. To throw her arms about him. Instead she said, "I'd be obliged if you'd show me how you planned on working the gold so it wouldn't look newly found. I'll need to send to The Dalles for supplies before winter."

"I can take care of that when I go to Fort Boise. Just give me a list of what you need."

She agreed that she would.

"So that's that. I'll be staying until September."

Until September. Less than three months to store up a lifetime's worth of memories. And he would be gone a good bit of that time, what with fetching the stores from the cabin.

What was she complaining about? She'd already had him far longer than she'd expected.

They built a cabin in a week. Emmet found a stand of pole-sized timber scarce a mile downriver. It looked, he told them, as if there'd been a snowslide some years back, clearing all but a few trees from a swath some hundred yards wide.

The poles were regrowth, all about the same size and age.

William swung a mighty ax. Silas and Emmet used the oxen to snake the poles along a trail they'd cut. Hattie and Flower dug the trenches for the foundation logs and the pits for the corner poles, using a pick salvaged from the renegades' equipment.

Hattie wondered what rabble like that had been doing with a pick. Had they known of the basin filled with gold? Or was it just another of their spoils, taken from a murdered traveler's wagon?

They built two rooms with a covered passage between. Both rooms had shuttered windows opening onto the view to the southwest, at Hattie's insistence. "It's easy to close shutters," she told them, "but impossible to see through log walls. And I'll never spend another winter in the dark, even if I have to freeze."

They lacked the tools to split logs for a puncheon floor. William promised to pound the earth flat as soon as time allowed, although they would have to remove the protruding roots and level the disturbed soil first. That was all right. The important thing was getting a roof over their heads.

Using the panniers Emmet had fashioned to carry gold, Hattie and Flower brought rocks from the creek while the men laid up the walls. They laid a simple fire ring in the middle of the passage, not having found anything suitable to serve as mortar for a fireplace. There was a way to build without mortar, Emmet said, and hy would surely have time before he departed. Right now they just needed a place to cook.

Silas found a bee tree high on the hillside behind the cabin. Although it was still early in the season, he was able to extract sufficient honey to sweeten the cream Hattie whipped the night they moved into the cabin. Flower contributed wild strawberries to the shortcake they celebrated with.

Although they had yet to build bed frames, Hattie made her bed inside her cabin.

The bearskin, washed in the creek and hung for a week to dry, covered her mound of springy branches, dipping into the nest she fashioned for Ellen. No matter the nights were warmer, she still liked a roof over her head. It made her believe she really was home at last.

Flower chose to sleep in the open, as did the men. Their cabin was still unroofed.

It was late when Hattie woke. The almost full moon, which had been just rising above the hills to the east when she retired, was overhead, flooding the land with its silvery light.

The door creaked. She saw a line of light as it opened, a line quickly obliterated as a body moved into the opening. "Hattie?" The whisper was soft as a spring breeze.

"Emmet? Come in." She sat upright, wondering what new calamity had overtaken them.

A faint scuffling as he approached. He was a paler shape in the darkness of the cabin.

"I couldn't sleep," he said, "thinking about you in here all alone."

Her sleep had not come easily either. "I'm fine. Snug as a bug." She lied, but he didn't need to know. She had slept, but her dreams had been of him. Troubled, lonely dreams. Dreams of abandonment.

He touched her face. "I was thinking about us. Back there. In the gold basin."

"I've given it some thought myself," she admitted.Some ? She'd thought of little else, night after night as she tossed and turned, too aware of her lonely bed.

"You're still my wife." Half statement, half question.

"I am, and I need you, Emmet," she said. A man shouldn't have to beg for what was his by rights. She held out her arms. "Come to bed."

He groaned as he took her in his arms. "I can't help myself," he said, kissing her face, her throat. His fingers were clumsy as they worked at the buttons of her gown. His hands were not, as they skimmed her breasts, framed her waist, and stroked across her belly.

Hattie arched to his touch, knowing that she was risking far more than a broken heart. Her mother had become pregnant twice while nursing, contrary to common belief. She still remembered overhearing the complaint that a woman oughtn't to conceive until the last one was old enough to fend for itself.

They loved with a desperate urgency. Hattie knew she would never get enough of him, but she had to try. She savored the scent of him, the taste of him. She told her hands to remember the roughness of his hairy legs, the satiny power of his manhood.

And she knew she would forget, just as she had forgotten the warmth of her mother's arms, the strength of her father's.

Once he had his strength back, Emmet couldn't rest. Each day he drove Silas and William as he drove himself. If he was to depart with a clear conscience, there was so much Hattie would need.

He helped them fence a good-sized pasture, enclosing their original shelter. As soon as that was done, he set them to constructing a shed beside the cabin in which the livestock could take refuge from weather and marauding predators come winter. One thing he worried over was a source of water for the cabin, something none of the others had thought of when they chose the site. It took him several evenings of exploration when the others were resting after a hard day's work, but he found a spring high on the hillside above the cabin. He'd show William how to use the hollow stems of elderberry to make a pipe, so that they'd have water nearby in all but the coldest weather.

He set Flower and Hattie to digging at a root cellar when they were done with their woman's chores, hating himself for not having time enough to do it for them. It wasn't right that a woman had to grub in the earth when there were men about to do it for her.

But the other half of the cabin needed a roof and both halves needed fireplaces.

The lofts needed floors, but that was beyond him until he retrieved the saws and other woodworking tools they'd left at Buff's cabin.

After three weeks of hard work, he figured they were far enough along that he and Silas could depart. Although they still had a little flour, they could use almost everything else. He hadn't seen a bean in so long he'd forgotten how they tasted, and some real bacon would set just fine in his belly. Salt, too. The salt they'd had was gone, scattered and consumed by the critters that had raided the camp in the gold basin.

He showed Silas what to do and soon the lad presented him with a crude rock mold with which he could hammer and shape raw gold. The result was a poor imitation of a coin, but it looked worn and scratched rather than counterfeited. Silas ruined a good blade chipping at the rock, but at least no one would realize they had taken the gold themselves. After all, hadn't Karl Rommel been a wealthy man?

Emmet made eighteen coins before the rock broke.

They left on a cool June morning, sometime in late June. Silas was riding one of the horses he'd brought back from the gold basin, leading the others. Emmet hoped to be able to trade them for mules at Fort Boise. They also took four of the oxen, leaving Hattie's pet, Odin, with William and the women.

Hattie held him tightly as she told him good-bye. He kissed her long and deep, hating himself for resenting her clinging. If she was so troubled at the prospect of his temporary absence, what would she do when he left for good?

He was tempted to bring Silas part way back and take his leave. It was easier to disappear than to make long farewells.

The last he saw of her, she was standing before the cabin, watching him on his way.

Dawg gave them the first warning. He was lying in the passage while they cooked one evening. Suddenly he raised his head and growled.

Hattie paused, looked where he stared, at the woods on the other side of the nearest meadow.

Nothing. Not a movement, not a sign of anything unusual.

"He probably hears a bear," Flower said. "I saw some sign this morning, up the creek." She gestured to the north, where Frog Creek--so named by William for the nightly chorus of frog song--emerged from the hills.

Hattie set the spider on the two rocks that supported it over the coals. The elk steaks within immediately sizzled. "Will it bother us?" She had yet to see a bear in Cherry Vale, although both William and Silas had sighted them at a distance. She would just as soon not ever have the experience.

"No, but it could frighten the cattle. I'll go down after supper and bring them up here." One of the best of Emmet's ideas was the leanto and small pen beside the cabin. Later, when they had poultry, it would be the hen house. For now it was a safe place for the cattle, since William insisted on staying close by at night.

"Be careful," Hattie said, determined not to let Flower see how frightened she was. If she intended to stay here forever, she must conquer her fear of bears and panthers. Neither, she told herself firmly, would bother her if she didn't bother them.

Dawg relaxed as quickly as he had come alert. Neither Hattie nor Flower gave the incident any more thought, except that Flower did as she'd said and brought the cattle up before sundown. William agreed that it was better to avoid any risk to them.

After supper they sat on the log benches before the cabin. This was her favorite time, Hattie decided, when she was tired from a good day's work, yet not so much so that she couldn't appreciate her good fortune.

"I got the shoring done in the root cellar," William said when he joined them.

"I'll be puttin' together a door soon's I can." He spoke with pride. Although he had done little building as a field slave, he showed talent in fine axwork.

Emmet had said he believed William could do things with an ax that most men would need a saw and a plane to do.

"I wish we could find a moose." Flower had made elkhide hinges for the shutters and the cabin doors. They were not strong enough, she insisted, for the thick door that William planned for the root cellar. "We'll need better moccasins for winter, too."

"Mist' Em says he don't think they's any about. But I'm keepin' my eyes peeled."

William picked up the piece of wood he'd been carving on for the past few evenings. It was a trencher, a long narrow platter cut from the heart of a fallen log. In time, William promised, they'd have a full set of dishes.

They sat talking of the day's activities, of tomorrow's plans, until it was almost too dark to see. Eventually William said, "Guess I'll take a look around," and departed. He did this each night, not content to sleep until he was certain all was well. Dawg went with him.

Hattie and Flower stayed where they were. It was a balmy night, full of summer sounds and smells. Somewhere wild roses were flowering, their scent faint on the night breeze. "William wants me to marry him," Flower said into the silence.

Since Hattie had seen the way the big former slave followed Flower's every movement with his eyes, she was not entirely surprised. "Will you?"

"No, I cannot." Pain was in her voice. And regret.

"Why on earth not?" Hattie demanded, sure she knew the answer. "He's a good man.

And who would care? It's not like we're in a city, where people would ostracize you for marrying a man of color."

Flower chuckled, although Hattie heard little humor in the sound. "Oh, Hattie, bless you. Nobody, even in a city, would care if a half-breed married a Negro.

If anything, they would think he had lowered himself, I suspect."

"Then you don't love him?"

"I have little experience in what your people call 'love'," Flower said, "but I have feelings for William. He is a good man. Strong. Honest. Brave. Decent."

Even in the gathering dusk, Hattie could see her hands twisting together. She waited.

"My body and my spirit are defiled." Flower's voice was flat and hard. "Because I chose to live instead of die, I feel as if I will never be clean again." Her hands rubbed against her upper arms much as they had when she'd all but scrubbed the hide off herself.

Remembering her cold declaration that the first man to assault her was dead, Hattie protested. "Surely you can't be expected to kill yourself instead of...."

"Oh, no! But had I fought, I would have died. I did not fight. I traded self-respect for survival."

"I think you were wise." She reached and pulled Flower into her arms. "Oh, Flower, I couldn't bear it if you'd been killed." But Hattie felt the rigidity of her friend's body and knew that she had not convinced Flower that life was preferable to the loss of honor. "And Emmet. He would have died without you.

Think about that, while you're blaming yourself for your so-called weakness. By choosing to live, you saved him, too."

Flower pulled away and Hattie let her go. "I will think on your words," she said, "but I cannot marry William."

"You'll break his heart," Hattie warned.

"Better that than freezing his love with the ice that is in mine," Flower replied. She stood and turned toward the passageway.

A shadow leapt from the corner of the cabin. The next thing Hattie knew, a gruff voice was saying, "You jest sit thar, Missus, and don't make a move. Else I'll slice this squaw's throat clean through." Flower stood rigid, unnaturally straight. Her head was arched back and firelight reflected off a shiny blade at her throat.

Hattie didn't move. Couldn't move, even if she hadn't been warned against it.

The man was just a dark shape against the darker night. She shook her head.

"What do you want?" she whispered, unable to find her voice.

"Grub," the man rasped. "Grub and a gun." He shoved Flower before him and she stumbled.

A dark line formed on the golden skin of her throat. It dripped.

"Yes," Hattie said. "Of course. I'll just...." No. She could not take him inside. Ellen was asleep. She thought frantically. "I'll have to get the meat.

It's in the tree. Down there." She pointed toward where they hung their meat, dangling from a line strung between two trees, out of reach of bears.

"Git it," the man commanded. "Quick!"

Stumbling down the slope, Hattie tried to peer through the darkness. Where was William? And Dawg? She knew it was William's habit to check along the river for signs of human approach, but it was far too dark for that now. He should have been back long since.

She lowered the elk haunch, wrinkling her nose. Even Dawg would turn up his nose at meat this ripe. But perhaps the man would take it. They had no other, save the dried elk and fish hanging in the rafters of the men's cabin.