There were only five of the yellow-skinned, stocky pirates in sight when he swung his chains at the nearest and yelled for his men to fight.

They fought. Emmet was able to pull a short, curved sword from a pirate's hand and he used it well. Two more went down before him, even as one of his crewmen fell with the blood spurting from a head all but severed from his body.

They fought, but the outcome was predetermined. Two American sailors still stood when the rest of the pirates, who had only been on the dock, not far from the ship, returned and overpowered them.

The captain--if that's what the mustachioed pirate was--paced before the two remaining captives, ranting and raving in that curious singsong language.

Suddenly he stopped and swung his sword at Emmet's companion, nearly cutting the man in half.

Then he looked at Emmet and smiled. And lifted his sword.

Without thinking, Emmet broke free and dashed to the rail. A shot sounded as he sank into the warm water, but he felt no bullet's impact. He wondered how far he could swim with manacled hands.

Far enough, for he found a hiding place under the dock where he stayed until dark. Apparently the pirates believed him dead, or didn't care. He hid out for the better part of a week, pounding his chains with a rock until they parted.

And all that time he wondered what he could have done to save his shipmates. He had been responsible for them and he'd gotten them killed.

He was incredibly, undeservedly fortunate, he realized later. The small port city where the pirates docked was a shipping point for two major Dutch nutmeg plantations. Within a month he was on his way to the Netherlands, filling an able seaman berth on a ship redolent with the scent of exotic spices.

From Amsterdam he'd shipped aboard an American merchant vessel for New Orleans, where he'd met Buffalo Jones. At that time he'd never wanted to see another ship, nor to have the responsibility for another person.

Hattie saw them coming. She was picking early blackberries in the copse when she heard the unmistakable bray of a mule. Running into the meadow, she looked toward the river and there they were, both of them, trying to persuade a stubborn mule that it should step into the water.

She stood and watched as Emmet finally lost patience and whacked the mule with a good-sized chunk of deadwood. It leapt forward into the river, and immediately began swimming downstream. Emmet splashed after it and caught its lead rope, swimming ahead and pulling it along. When he reached the shore where she waited, he climbed the steep bank and wrapped the rope around a convenient willow.

"Great God, but I missed you!" he said, pulling her hard against him. For a moment he simply stood there, holding her. Then he was kissing her--her mouth, her eyelids, her nose, her temples. He dug his fingers into her hair and held her face between his hands. "Is everything all right here?"

"Everything's fine." She pulled free of his arms. "But your mule's going to lose that load if you don't get it out of the water." Laughter threatened to spill over the brim of her joy.

Emmet cursed. "That damned mule!" I should have traded it for more coffee. It's been a curse on us both ever since the first time I loaded the flour on it."

She helped him pull the mule up the steep bank. Emmet hitched it again, this time on a short tether. "I have to help Silas. Can you keep an eye on the mule?"

"Of course." She would just stand here and feast her eyes on him. For the first time since he and Silas had departed, nearly a month ago, now, she felt the cold globe of dread in her belly melt.

She had made a calendar, scratching the dates on the inner side of a large fragment of pine bark. Calling the day he left the twenty-first of June, she calculated it was now the seventeenth of July. In six weeks he would be gone for good.

The oxen swam across without protest. It was only then she noticed that there were five.... "Emmet, a calf! Where on earth...?" She looked more closely as it scrambled up the bank. "A bull calf!" Had he brought her silks and satins, she could not have been more pleased. Now they could breed Bessie next year.

"Got another surprise for you," Silas said, shaking himself as a dog would, spraying water for several feet around. "But you gotta wait 'til we unload the oxen and I can go back after it." He looked at Emmet and they both laughed aloud.

She walked with them to the cabin. William had managed to floor a part of his room's loft, so they had a place for the bacon--Hattie's mouth watered at the thought of the rich, thick gravy she could make from the bacon grease.

"Where's William," Emmet said as they unloaded, "and Flower?"

"William's cutting wood," she said, "up behind the cabin. He decided it was high time he got started on the winter's firewood." She hesitated. Time enough later to tell him about Flower. Why ruin his homecoming with bad news?

"He's right," Emmet said. "Well, that's that." He dusted his hands together.

"Guess we'd better go back for your surprise."

"Guess you had," Hattie agreed. She felt like Christmas, wondering what it was.

She began on supper while they went back. Unable to imagine what they could possibly have brought her that would put such self-satisfied grins on their faces, she took stock of what they had already unloaded. Four barrels of flour--400 pounds--the same weight of bacon. Four sacks of beans, each weighing fifty pounds, she guessed, and two big bags of salt. One bag of beans had gotten wet. She'd have to open it and spread them out so they wouldn't sprout. And what was this?

Hattie laughed. Coffee beans! Trust Emmet to make sure they had enough coffee.

She tried to lift the big bag and could not. Enough to last the winter, she'd guess.

William came in shortly thereafter, setting the milk bucket on the bench. "See they're back," he said. Hattie noticed how much more precise his words had become.

After Flower left he'd asked her to teach him to read and had begun making an effort to speak without the thick accent that sometimes made him difficult to understand. "I wants to be worthy of her, does she come back and decide to have me," was the only explanation he offered.

Hattie now doubted Flower would ever return, but she hadn't the heart to tell William so.

Emmet called her from the meadow. Wiping her hands on her skirt, she went to the edge of the bench.

He stood beside his horse, arms akimbo. "Come down here," he called. Silas knelt at his feet, holding, concealing something.

She went, picking her way down the path they'd worn in the hillside. William was right. They'd have to lay some log steps here before winter, else it would be a regular slippery slide.

As she drew near the thing Silas was holding became a fat body, a big, snouted head. "A pig? You brought me a pig?"

"A real mad pig," Silas agreed, grinning fit to die. "She don't much like water."

"She's been bred," Emmet said as she knelt beside Silas. "Ought to have you a fine litter come fall."

"That's why Em got her so cheap," Silas added, looking at her worriedly. "It's gonna be hard to raise the piglets through the winter."

Hattie couldn't help herself. She burst into laughter, as much at their flagrant attempts to convince her that a bred sow was a wonderful gift as at the gift itself. "Thank you," she said when she could finally control the laughter. "I can't think of a better surprise. She's wonderful." She scratched behind one ear, was rewarded with a contented snuffle. The sow evidently had forgiven them for whatever indignity they had subjected her to.

"You really like her?" Emmet said, doubtfully.

"I really like her," Hattie assured him. "And I can already taste those pork chops, come spring." But to herself she said,Oh, Lord, what am I going to do with another mouth to feed? Another eight or ten mouths, if she knew her pigs.

She would be lucky to bring the piglets through the winter, let alone feed any of them to a size to butcher.

"Where's Flower?" Emmet asked again as they sat to supper.

There was a guilty silence as William and Hattie looked at each other. Finally Hattie gave a slight nod. "She... she's gone, Mist' Em," William said. "She's gone away."

"Why?" He knew Flower, knew her sense of honor. She would not have abandoned Hattie without strong reasons.

"It was that man...."

William interrupted Hattie. "One of them renegades--the one they called Pyzen Joe--he showed up here a couple a' weeks ago. He wanted food an', well, I 'spect he wanted a woman too."

"He said if I gave him food, he'd go away," Hattie said, her voice thin and tearful. "Then he said he was going to take her, threatened to take us both."

Emmet forced himself to remain still. "What happened?" he said, surprised his voice could sound so mild.

"Dawg, he licked me awake after the bassard knocked me cold, and I slipped up here with a ax handle and paid him back." He grinned. "Miz Hattie, she was plumb mad and I had to keep her from smashin' his brains out with a rock."

"Oh, Emmet, Flower killed him," Hattie said, weeping openly now. "She cut his throat and he bled to death. Right beside the fire."

He took her into his arms and stroked her back as she gave way to sobs. "God!

Why wasn't I here?" Once more he had failed those who depended on him.

"Don't see as how you coulda' done much more'n we did," William said. "'Cept maybe you coulda' kept Flower from leavin'."

"William was wonderful," Hattie said, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. "He dragged the body off and cleaned up the blood, and everything. But he wouldn't go after Flower. He said he had to stay with me."

Emmet reached across the table and clasped William's hand. "Thank you," he said.

"Thank you for staying." He knew how much it must have cost William to stay when his heart must have gone with Flower.

William simply nodded, his big dark eyes once more swimming in tears.

The last of the wagon's cargo arrived on the day Hattie calculated to be the first of August. Silas had taken it on himself to make trip after tiring trip back to where they'd left her wagon, two hard days' travel each way. By the time he brought in the last load, the oxen and mules were drawn and tired. The balky mule had been worn into submission, and would now cross the river with only a modicum of urging.

There was still so much to do. Emmet and William had enlarged the pen adjoining the house, had built a second leanto so that Ditey the pig--short for Aphrodite--had a snug little home. There were mangers in the shed for the hay Hattie spent part of each afternoon cutting in the meadows.

"She swing that scythe as well as any man," William said, as they paused to breathe one afternoon. They were felling two of the big firs on the east side of the largest meadow. William planned to let them cure over the winter and use them for floor boards come next summer.

Emmet had no intention that Hattie would be here come next summer. He'd been reluctant to let her stay when it was the three of them: Flower, William, and Hattie. Now, with only William to depend on, Hattie could not stay. He would take her with him when he left in September, no matter how she protested.

He would take William too, except that he knew the Negro would never leave Cherry Vale. He truly believed he could live free here, and who was Emmet to gainsay him? Until others came in, William was as free as the hawks that circled on the wind. After that--well, life held few guarantees anyhow.

He said nothing, however. Hattie was happy, filled with plans for the winter, for next year when she would have an entire growing season to plant the seeds she was still convinced would sprout.

She had planted her carefully packed trees and shrubs, spreading their tender bare roots over the soil she'd mixed with dry elk pellets. Each day she watered them--apple and peach, black walnut and two grapes that looked like nothing more than dry sticks poking from the ground. There were roses too, and lilac. Those she planted near the cabin. To Emmet's amazement, one of the grapes had already put forth a single tiny green leaf.

"I'll not plant any seed until spring," she said. "And I'll save some of the beans to plant, too." She left the seed in its sealed keg, placing it far back inside the root cellar where it would stay cool.

Part of the magic of those summer days was Ellen. She no longer protested the hours she spent in the cradleboard. Her bright blue eyes were constantly moving, watching the world around her. She could roll over now, and often did. William had built her a bed--a cage Hattie called it--of peeled willow tied together with strips of green willow bark.

William was Ellen's favorite, after her mother. She laughed whenever he came near, stretched her tiny arms to him of a morning. She allowed Silas to hold her, seemed to enjoy Emmet's efforts to amuse her, but it was William whom she loved. Emmet acknowledged a petty twinge of envy. She was everything he would want in a daughter.

Hattie too was a delight. She worked hard--Emmet had never seen a woman who could match her. Yet she always had a smile ready, never seemed discouraged at the amount of work necessary to prepare for winter.

More than once he opened his mouth to tell her it was all unnecessary, that he would be taking her to the Willamette come fall, no matter what she wanted. As many times he closed it, the words unsaid. She was happy. He would not destroy her dreams until he had to.

He and Silas made several trips up the canyon through which they'd traveled when coming to Cherry Vale. Staying on the same side of the river, they soon came to a slide area far wider and more unstable than anything the fleeing party had crossed earlier. The rocks there were sharp and angular, broken and rough. They would lay up dry, holding together and needing little caulking.

Again using the leather panniers, they hauled several loads back and set about building fireplaces in each of the cabin's rooms. The least Emmet could do, he figured, was leave William with a decent house, after what William had done for the rest of them.

Emmet broke into sweat every time he thought of Pyzen Joe and what he would have done to Hattie, Ellen and Flower, had William not been there to protect them.

Another reason why he was not going to leave Hattie behind. Pyzen Joe wasn't the only barbarian likely to find Cherry Vale.

All too soon August drew to a close. Soon it would be time to leave, if they wanted to get over the Blues. He said so one night at supper. The nights were cooler now and they were christening the new fireplace in Hattie's part of the cabin.

"When?" was all Hattie said, but he saw how she shrank into herself.

"As soon as you can get ready," he said, not meeting Silas's questioning eyes across the room.

"Me? I've done all I can. Your shirts are mended, What else do you need?"

Damn! He wasn't doing this the way he wanted to. "You're going with me. I won't leave you...."

"With you?" He heard her swiftly indrawn breath as she bent over, laying Ellen in her bed. "Why?" The word was soft, almost a whisper.

"Because I can't leave you here, alone. You'll never make it through the winter.

Not just the two of you."

"Mist' Em!"

"No, William. Let me." She came to him, standing over him, her arms folded across her chest. "You want me to leave this--all this that we've worked for--and go with you just because...." Her voice broke. He could see the whiteness of her knuckles as she clasped her hands at her waist. "You want to take me to the Willamette Valley?"

Emmet nodded. "You'll be better off there," he said, hoping she would see the reason of it.

"And where will you be while I'm being 'better off there'?"

"I... ah... I don't know," he admitted.

"But it won't be with me?"

"You know it won't. I told you I'd be leaving...."

"You did indeed. Well. Yes." She turned away and stared into the fire. After a few moments she said, "Can we talk of this tomorrow?"

"Sure. We've got a few days before we need to go." He figured they'd leave most of her stuff with William. With all the gold she had--he'd hammered out some iron molds and she now had a goodly bag of coins to spend. Coins that were crude counterfeits of every gold coin he'd ever had in his pockets.

Silas and William left then, going quietly and leaving him alone with Hattie.

She stood before the fire a long time. Finally she turned. "I want to be alone tonight, Emmet. Do you mind?"

Hell, yes, he minded. But something in her face prevented him from protesting.

"I'll see you in the morning then," he said, going out the door.