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man. Is he a slave?”
    â€œJohnny bought and freed him.” Deborah was reluctant to discuss her friends with these overbearing strangers.
    â€œDo you think they’d let me do some studies of them? They could go about their work and I’d just sketch what struck me.”
    â€œYou’d have to ask Johnny—Mr. Chaudoin, and then see if the others were willing.” Deborah gnawed her lip, hating to say still another thing that would add to his conviction that she was an indelicate, unfeminine savage—though why should she care?
    She didn’t give a fig for Rolf’s opinion. Why should Dane’s matter? It did, but as to why, she was too bewildered and resentful to sort out just now. She only knew that for everyone’s sake, she must make Sara’s position clear. “Sara Field and her brother are like adopted children to Johnny. It’s thought by some whites that all Indian girls are ready game because Indian ideas about marriage and … and all that are different from ours. Sara thinks lots of white ways are crazy, but she was educated at Shawnee Mission. The man who wants her will have to get married in church.”
    â€œOr that formidable smith or giant blackamoor will get him if you don’t first slice him up with your Bowie?” Rolf grinned. He cocked his head at Dane. “Can you imagine Pater’s face if either of us came back with an Indian wife? Gad, it’s almost worth doing for that alone!”
    Thos sounded breathless. “Miss Sara has an understanding!”
    â€œOh, is that the way of it?” whistled Rolf. At Dane’s scowl and Thos’s rather wild look, he added good-humoredly, “I’m sure I wish them happy, the Indian maid and her favored swain. But I still think it would be a rare jest, Dane, if our American trophies included a daughter-in-law for Sir Harry.”
    Dane said nothing, though his face was set. Deborah concluded that Rolf enjoyed baiting his older brother and that it sorely tried Dane to hold his tongue, though argument would merely push Rolf into more reckless assertions and, no doubt, actions.
    It was also humiliating to hear them discuss an American bride in the way they’d have spoken of a Hottentot. Deborah took solace in the thought that if the pair did stay for supper, which she heartily hoped they wouldn’t, since she wanted nothing more to do with either of them, Mother and Father would demonstrate, even to these prejudiced Englishmen, that Americans could be cultured and gracious even though they worked hard to scrape together a living and lived in a crude cabin.
    How, at that moment, she wished ferociously that they were still living in the soddy! That would give these sons of obviously rich Sir Harry something to write home about! Especially if a spider or baby field mouse dropped into their plates!
    That happy thought improved Deborah’s spirits, but as they approached the cabin and sod outbuildings, she looked at them as strangers would, as she had when freshly come from New England, the bark-covered logs of the cabin dabbed with mud, while from the sod and grass roof, wildflowers and weeds grew as thickly as on the ground. The cabin was much easier to keep clean and much lighter than the soddy had been, with four windows instead of two, but snow did blow in through the cracks during the heaviest storms.
    The soddy had been warmer in winter, cooler in summer, but so dark, and, worst of all, in spite of the cheesecloth fastened to the rafter poles, bits of root and grass and plenty of bugs and spiders dropped regularly from the layer of brush, the layer of prairie grass, and the final covering of more sod.
    And when it rained!
    Deborah grimaced. If rain was from the north, that side of the roof soon began to leak and the bed and pallets had to be moved to the south; when south rains came, they were moved north.
    And for days after the sun was bright and the outside air was fresh and