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settlement out here,” Sarah said. “About a dozen families live within a two- or three-mile radius of one another. There are enough children that we now have our own school. I do some of the teaching.”
    â€œI could read and write some when Tall Bull took me. I think I’ve forgotten how.”
    â€œIt’ll come back to you in jig-time,” Sam said. “We won’t push you, Jamie. You’ve got a lot of adjusting ahead of you.” Like learning how to wear shoes again, he thought. Jamie wore his moccasins; said the shoes he’d received hurt his feet.
    â€œDo the Indians bother you out here?”
    â€œSometimes,” Sam admitted. “There are a lot of areas close by that are not settled. But the savages are slowly being forced out as more and more settlers come in. Some are saying that the nations will someday be settled from coast to coast. Probably not in our lifetime,” he added. “What lies beyond the Mississippi is pretty much a mystery”
    â€œNot to my grandfather,” Jamie said, suddenly remembering the stories his pa used to tell him.
    â€œWhat’s that?” Sarah asked.
    â€œMy grandfather. The man I’m named after. He went west to the big mountains years before I was born. Seventeen ninety, I think Pa said. He came back once, Pa said. Years before Pa and Ma got married. Said he looked like a wild man. All done up in beaded buckskins and hair long as a woman’s. Then he went west again and no one’s ever heard no more from him.”
    â€œWasn’t there a MacCallister with the Lewis and Clark expedition, Sarah?” Sam asked.
    â€œI believe there was. Seems like I’ve read something about that. He joined up with them in the west as a guide.”
    â€œThat’s my grandpa, then,” Jamie said. “I wonder if he’s still alive?”
    Sam did not want to tell the boy that he’d heard nothing good about the white men who lived in the mountains of the west. They were, for the most part, a wild and Godless lot, more savage than civilized, heathen to the soul. Some had taken to calling them mountain men. And there sure was a MacCallister among them. A bad man, some said, who had killed other men with knife and gun. He would tell Sarah not to mention the man to Jamie. In time the boy would forget all about his wild and Godless grandpa.
    * * *
    There was to be a shindig, Sam told Jamie. All the people who lived in the small community were going to gather the first warm Saturday and there would be singing and eating on the grounds. Jamie would get to meet all the folks and make new friends. It would be a grand to-do, Sam promised.
    The cabin of Sam and Sarah Montgomery was much finer, larger and better built than the one Jamie vaguely remembered from his childhood. Sam and Sarah came from monied families, and that was evident in the cabin’s construction, for it was a two-story log house with several rooms. It had a central chimney — something that Jamie had never seen before — and it was made of stone and was fireproof. It was the grandest house that Jamie had ever seen, and he said so.
    â€œIs it, now?” Sam said. “Well, let’s take the grand tour then, lad. I’ll show you your room.”
    The boy surfaced. “My own room?”
    â€œAll your very own, Jamie,” Sarah said softly. “We want you to be happy here. We think you’ve had quite enough unhappiness in your life.”
    Jamie couldn’t believe his eyes. His room, his very own room, was bigger than the whole cabin in which he had been born. And he had a whole big bed to himself, with a feather tick and two pillows.
    â€œThe corner logs of the house are not square-notched, Jamie,” Sam explained. “I had a skilled worker come in and dovetail them all. Makes for a sturdier structure. The home is built on stones for support and it’s stone-walled all around the base. The roof don’t