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the bag contained some grisly remnant of her husband.
    Finally the Indian grabbed her arm and thrust the neck of the bag into her hand.
    She stood there holding it, holding its awful swinging weight, while the warrior said something to his braves. They shoved past Mrs. Lybrook and her son into the cabin and then came out carrying Mr. Lybrook’s musket and a bag of barley, four big turnips and half a haunch of cooked venison—all the ready food that had been in the house. They spoke to their chieftain and went back toward the horses. Then he raised his hand again, still smiling that mocking smile, and turned away to go after them.
    Mrs. Lybrook stood, she knew not how long, holding the bloody bag in her shaking hand, until its weight made her arm ache and she had to do something about it. She clenched her jaw, shut her eyes and prayed a moment for strength, and ordered Johnny to go into the house and wait. She took one last look after the party of Indians and captives, seeing a glimpse of Bettie Draper’s white face turned back toward her just before they vanished into the leafy shadows. Then she opened the bag and peered down into it with God’s name on her lips. She gasped and flung the bag away and sank to her knees in a turmoil of gratitude and horror as the bloody package thumped to the ground and rolled flopping to the garden’s edge.
    It was not her husband, thank the Lord.
    But she knew that her soul was marked forever by the vision of old Philip Barger’s bulging dead eyes staring up at her from among strands of bloodied white hair in the bottom of a stained linen bag.

CHAPTER
3
    Mary groaned as the horse’s progress down the boulder-strewn streambed jostled her. It was the first time she was aware that she had groaned; perhaps she had been doing so all afternoon. But now pain was working its way up through the numbness of her despair, the aches and stresses in her swollen belly forcing her to be aware of the real world they were passing through, forcing her to sit the horse consciously, forcing her to hold on to little Georgie, forcing the hideous images of the day out of her mind until they grew dim and dimmer like night-dreams retreating from daylight. She concentrated on bracing her stomach and back muscles to restrain the wobble and plunge of the mass within her, to protect it from violent motion. And gradually, as pain reminded her of her senses one by one, her view of the world expanded. Her skin began to tell her of the humid valley air, the trickling of her own sweat, the crawling of wood ticks, the bites and stings of mosquitoes and no-see-ums, the rubbing of the horse’s hair against the inside of her knees, the whip and drag of leafy branches across her face and shoulders. Then the smells: the dank breath of wet limestone, the horse’s sweating withers, the rotting of vegetation on the steep creek banks and the strong smell from her little boy in front of her, who sometimes during this ordeal had smirched his clothes.
    And she began to hear: she heard Georgie’s occasional little whimpers, the grating and splashing of hooves in the stream, the gurgle of its fast water over the rocks, the soughing of a breeze in the treetops high on the hillsides, the low, brief words of the Shawnees when they spoke to each other, the wet blowing of horses along the line and now and then BettieDraper’s voice, groaning with pain, sighing God’s name or trying to soothe Tommy with some dubious reassurance.
    The creek ravine was filling with deep shadow. Pinpoints of late afternoon sunlight flashed occasionally through the foliage ahead. Under the horse she saw the pellucid creek water curling and seething over brown and mossy stone; ahead were the horses’ rumps and swishing tails and their burdens of loot, the flicking ears and bobbing mane of her own horse, the dusky, muscular backs of the warriors and the rocky, wooded slopes of the mountains that rose steep and gloomy on both sides of the creek.
    And then