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Duston used the knowledge the boy obtained. With the help of Mary Neff and the boy, she “dispatched,” as Dwight delicately phrased it, ten of the twelve Indians. The other two escaped. Hannah Duston returned to Haverhill with ten scalps.
    Now that’s what I call tough.
     

Five

     
    It’s almost impossible these days to find a really goo vet who makes house calls like Steve Delaney’s. At ten-thirty that night, we got out of bed to finish the take-out seafood lasagna he’d brought for dinner, and as we ate it, I started to ask, “Steve, if I’d had a baby six days ago and—”
    “Are you breaking the news?” Steve has a really beautiful smile. His blue-green eyes change colors. He has a pointer, Lady, and a shepherd—German shepherd dog—India, but if he wanted a breed to match his looks, he’d own a Chesapeake Bay retriever. His brown hair waves like a Chessie’s, and he’s muscular, with no fat. “Let me finish! It’s strictly hypothetical.”
    “Damn.”
    “I’m serious. Suppose I’d had a baby six days ago, and suddenly the house is surrounded by hostile Indians. Algonquins. Native Americans. Someone. I don’t know who they were yet. Anyway, you’re out in a field, and then you discover that there I am, baby to my breast, about to be murdered and scalped.”
    “I grab my sickle, slay them all, and rescue the damsel in distress.”
    “That,” I said, “is exactly what Thomas Duston didn’t do. He supposedly despaired of saving Hannah and the baby, and rescued their other kids instead. Seven, I think. Possibly eight. These experts can’t get their stories straight. Anyway, if I’d been Hannah, I’d have been none too thrilled to see him rushing off, leaving me to be taken captive.”
    I waited while Steve ate some lasagna. He had a grandmother or maybe a great-grandmother who was apparently the world’s last believer in some nutty health craze called “Fletcherizing.” She made him chew everything thirty times before he swallowed. After a long while he said, “If they had seven or eight children, he must have figured out by then that Hannah could take care of herself without any help from him.”
    I subsequently learned' that Nathaniel Hawthorne had had an identical take on Thomas and Hannah Duston. Thomas Duston, Hawthorne wrote, probably “had such knowledge of the good lady’s character as afforded him a comfortable hope that she could hold her own, even in a contest with a whole tribe of Indians.”
    “There is that,” I agreed. “Killing and scalping ten People doesn’t just come out of nowhere. And, of course, she had ample motive. She’d watched them murder her child, and she was terrified of what was going to happen when they got to the settlement, wherever it was. Canada. But lots of people were taken captive, lots of women, and I’ve never heard of anyone else who did what she did.”
    “You’re going to take Rita’s money after all?”
    I’m a freelance writer. Besides, this is going to be more work than I planned. By the time I’m done, I’ll have earned five hundred dollars.”
    “Round-trip plane fare to Minneapolis is—”
    “No! I’m donating it to Malamute Rescue. That’s the deal I worked out with Rita. Besides, for the millionth time, if you won’t go to Owls Head with me, I am not going to Minneapolis with you, especially since I have already celebrated, if you can call it that, an early Thanksgiving with my father. And I am not doing Thanksgiving here and then going to Minneapolis for a late Thanksgiving—”
    “We could still try to get tickets for—”
    “No! It’s too late to fly, it’s the busiest travel time of the year, and I’m not driving all that way, and you know that your mother would much rather see you without me around, anyway.”
    I’ll spare you the rest.
    The next morning, I was the first one up. After letting the dogs out in the yard for a minute, I leashed Rowdy at one end of the kitchen and Kimi at the other. Food is