The haunch was too heavy for her, so she dragged it up the hill, wishing the moon would rise. It had been full shortly after Emmet and Silas had left, and was now in its last quarter. They would have no light tonight.

The man sniffed. "Hell, that ain't fit to eat!" He moved and Hattie heard Flower gasp, but she could see nothing in the dark of the passageway beyond indistinct shapes.

"Dried meat. We have dried meat. And fish. I'll get it," she stammered. Oh, God!

Had he killed William? "Don't hurt her."

"Yore mighty particular about a filthy Injun," the man said. "'Specially one who'll fuck any man comes along. But don't fret. I'll leave her be."

Hattie gestured toward the men's cabin. "The meat's inside. I'll need a light."

Perhaps she could find a weapon. A club. Anything.

"No you won't. You kin feel around 'til you find it. Now git." Another scuffle.

"Hurry up now."

Hattie wished she could see what he was doing to Flower.

She went inside, feeling her way along the walls. The dried meat hung far above her head, but William had made a rude stool so she and Flower could reach it.

Somewhere here.

Please, God, she prayed as she dragged the stool to the center of the floor.Please don't let Ellen wake .

Her hand found a bundle. It smelled like fish. She pulled it free of the slipknot holding it, swung her arm in search of another bundle. Found one and pulled it down as well. Quickly she carried them to the door. "Here," she said, holding them out. "Take them. And let her go."

"Not on yore life. She goes with me."

"No!"

"Less you'd ruther take her place." She heard the leer in his voice.

"Please. You said you'd let her go when I gave you food."

"Changed my mind. Git me some rope."

"Do as he says, Hattie," Flower said, suddenly. "I will go with him."

"No you won't!"

The shout came from behind the intruder, even as Hattie heard a hard crack of sound as wood struck bone.

Dimly she saw the pale shape that was Flower pull free of the falling darker figure. Then he was on the ground, motionless.

"You all right, woman?" William said. "He didn't do you no harm, did he?"

Hattie heard more than saw Flower fling herself into William's arms. Hands still shaking, she stepped to the fire ring and lit several of the rushlights they kept beside it.

Her legs shook and her teeth chattered, despite the warm summer night. Behind her William murmured to Flower and she replied, their words indistinct because of the buzzing in her ears.

The intruder would have killed them both, she realized. He would have raped them and killed them. Her hand closed around one of the cobbles of the fire ring.

With returning strength, she swung around and crawled toward the shadowy figure on the ground. She came to a stop beside it and reached out a hand.

Hattie touched a leg, covered with ragged cloth. Light touches led her to a torso, to a bearded face. She moved to kneel beside his head, touched it and found blood-soaked hair.

She checked again. Yes, he still breathed.

If he woke he would only threaten them all. Taking a deep breath, Hattie lifted the rock above his head.

Chapter Nineteen.

The stone was plucked from her hands.

"No, Miz Hattie, you mustn't do that." William knelt beside her and enfolded her in his strong arms. "You let me take care o' him."

She shook with the force of her anger. "No!" cried, pulling herself free. "No!

Let me." She scrabbled on the ground for another weapon. "I have to kill him!"

If she didn't, he would kill her, would kill Flower. He would kill Ellen with no more thought than she would swat a mosquito.

"I will kill him for you," Flower said. Her voice was distant, cold. "For all of us."

Hattie saw the flash of the blade, heard the sound it made, like ripping silk.

And she heard the thud when Flower dropped it to the ground.

"It is done," Flower said. "I am revenged."

A pale blur in the dark, she rose and moved away. "Now I must cleanse myself."

Hattie heard her footsteps until she was on grass, then she might as well have been a ghost for all the sound she made.

William helped Hattie to her feet, then released her. He started to turn away, in the direction Flower had gone, but Hattie grabbed his arm. "Wait! Let her go.

She needs time to come to terms with what she did."

"She all alone, Miz Hattie. Maybe she needs me."

"Oh, William," she said, hearing the pain in his voice, "I'm sure she does. But until she admits to herself that she does, you mustn't try to help her." She wasn't sure she could explain it to William in terms he would understand, but she knew that Flower needed to be alone, to make peace with herself.

She tried to put herself in Flower's place, to know she had killed two men--two defenseless men--in cold blood. Never mind that if either had been able they would have raped her--and worse. She hadn't given them a chance.

Good for her!

Hattie didn't know how she would have felt if she'd been allowed to bash the renegade's brains out, but it would have taken her a long time to come to terms with it.

She put her arms around William and held him close, patting his back gently. "Be patient, William. Give her time to heal."

He nodded. Before she released him, she felt the long, shuddering breath he took.

Three days later, they still hadn't seen Flower.

"She went, Miz Hattie," William said, his voice low and choked. "She went off and left us!"

"But she'll come back, William," Hattie promised, not entirely believing her own words. "She'll be back."

Emmet stopped at Goat Runner's village, finding the Bannock chief and his band preparing to move into the mountains for the summer. "I bring you tobacco," he said, signing to supplement his sketchy knowledge of the Bannock tongue.

"It is good," Goat Runner agreed, "that gifts are given freely among friends.

"My woman has a gift for yours." He gestured and his wife brought forward a pair of beaded moccasins. "We saw your woman from afar," Goat Runner said, "and she was bare of foot. Now she will be well shod."

"I also bring news," Emmet said when he had thanked both Goat Runner and his silent wife. "The renegades are dead. They thought to enslave my friends and found that not all of us are weak and helpless. The daughter of Buffalo Jones fought with us."

"Ahh," Goat Runner said, "she is as brave as her father. Tell her she will always be welcome in our village, as you will." He stood silently for a moment, then said, "When you departed you gave us mules in return for guarding your lodge. Now you have done us a great service. I shall return your mules."

"Thank you," Emmet said, "but I have no need of them. Instead I will ask of you another great favor."

"Come," Goat Runner said. "Let us smoke and talk on this."

Hours later Emmet finally was asked to speak of the favor he sought. In the meantime, he had been feted and had met one of the men who'd escaped when the renegades ambushed a hunting party. Any lingering doubts that he'd been justified in cold-bloodedly killing them fled when he heard of the torture they'd inflicted on the Indians before killing them.

"My woman has found a place to call home," he said, when Goat Runner eventually asked him what favor he desired. He went on to describe the canyon and the wider valley downstream.

"I know the place," Goat Runner agreed. "The valley is a place where we meet the Nez Perce in peace, to hunt elk and deer. As long as your people remain upriver, they will not be molested."

Emmet again thanked Goat Runner. "My woman may remain for many years," he warned, "but she will respect your hunting grounds. I give my word."

They parted with mutual assurances of eternal friendship. Not that it mattered to Emmet, who would soon be gone, but Hattie would profit by the Bannock's goodwill.

The cabin had not been disturbed, nor had the wagon. It was a matter of a day's work to reattach the wheels and pack the wagon--Silas did most of the packing, for he'd plenty of experience. "We ain't gonna get this to the valley," the boy predicted, pushing a chest of hand tools onto the tailgate. "Not up that river."

"We've got to," Emmet said, wishing they didn't.

The river flowing through Cherry Vale had turned west again, instead of flowing south into the Boise. So they had cut overland, a simple matter without a wagon.

Going back they would go a more roundabout way, forced to find easy grades and wide passages. "With any luck we can take it a good ways above where the river makes that big horseshoe bend. I'm hopin' to go up that wide drainage to the east."

Because of the narrow canyon downstream of Cherry Vale, they would leave the wagon somewhere reasonably concealed and pack its contents in. Emmet wasn't looking forward to the many trips that would require, even with four oxen and two mules carrying loads. No, make that five oxen, for once they got to Cherry Vale, they would have the use of Odin as well.

He wondered if Hattie would be pleased with the surprises he had for her.

It took them three hard days to reach the horseshoe bend, then the better part of a week to make their way up to where the wagon would go no farther. They loaded the oxen and mules and made their way uphill, following winding game trails ever higher. The night they topped the divide, they lingered over a sagebrush fire.

"Hat says you'll be leaving come September," Silas said as they sipped coffee after the meal of spitted rabbit stuffed with wild onion. "Where you headin'?"

Emmet stirred the embers with a stick. "West," he said. "I don't know.

Australia, maybe. China." He shrugged. He'd seen Europe, northern Africa, Greece. He'd been in Panama one Christmas, Cairo another. "Anywhere I haven't been, I guess."

"Want company?"

He sat up and looked across the dying fire. "You? I thought you were wanting a farm."

"That was before. I figure now I have some gold, I can go see the world before I settle down. You did."

"Yeah, but...." Emmet heard the implication, even if Silas hadn't put it there.

He'd seen much of the world and it was time for him to settle down.

What Silas didn't know was that there was no settling down for him. A home, a place to belong, was for them who could accept responsibility. Not for care-for-naught wanderers like him.

"I'd like company," he told the boy heartily. "We'll have us some grand adventures." At least he was capable of seeing that Silas came to no harm until he learned the ways of the world. He wasn't entirely without a sense of duty.

Silas went immediately to sleep, as the young and the innocent were liable to.

Emmet watched the stars slowly wheel overhead.

Luck had been with him when he signed on theHilda Jane , after a miserable year as a cook's helper on a coastwise trader. Caspar Knowles had been the pattern of a Yankee trader, a godly man who treated his hands with decency while demanding excellence of them. Emmet, who'd never been asked to extend himself, found unknown depths of strength and intelligence under the tough captain's tutelage.

After a year of trading in the Baltic and the Mediterranean, Captain Knowles had told the no longer scrawny boy that he had a future at sea, asked him to sign on for another voyage.

Emmet had, and when they returned once more to Boston, he was second mate. He and Captain Knowles were not quite friends--the Captain's sense of fitness would never allow that--but they respected one another. When Abner Masterson found himself a wife and retired from the sea four years later, Emmet had been offered his post. At twenty, he became first mate of theHilda Jane .

That was the year the captain decided to try the China trade. He'd tired of fighting the British for markets and cargoes in the small world of eastern Europe. So they'd rounded the Horn and sailed to Hawaii, carrying cargo for the missions there, as well as two dedicated couples who would do their best to convert the happy heathen to the burdens of Christianity.

Then on to the fabulous East. But they never reached their destination. A storm blew them off course. Bad water, taken on at Honolulu, had caused recurring bouts of bloody flux, until no man on board was fit to man the lines.

They were easy prey for the pirates who came alongside one dark night.

Emmet had suffered a recurrence of the debilitating ailment and had been unable to stand his watch. He was asleep in his bunk when the first shout came, was staggering along the passage when the battle came to him. And he was too weak to prevent the taking of the ship, once Captain Knowles and half his crew had been butchered and shoved overboard.

The few who survived did so because they were too weak to fight, but not so sick to be killed out of hand. Emmet and his fellows soon found themselves chained in a stinking hold with no idea of the fate intended for them. Their captors spoke a singsong language completely incomprehensible to them.

Oddly enough he recovered on that hell voyage, despite too little food and water. By the time they reached land, he and most of his shipmates were as close to good health as a man could be, given the oppressive heat, inadequate water, wormy rice twice a day, and bodies bruised by random kicks and blows.

Perhaps that was why he'd taken the chance when he saw it. They were herded on deck the morning after they docked, still manacled, but otherwise unchained.