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rope jerking at his neck. And she saw one of the braves in the rear guard staring intently at her, then looking back up the creek, then staring at her, looking angry. He said something to her in a sharp voice and reached threateningly toward the tomahawk in his waistband.
    Mary scanned the landscape behind her quickly. It looked no different from what she had been seeing ahead. She faced forward. Must memorize, she thought. But I mustn’t make them suspicious.
    She peeked cautiously back over her shoulder again. The Indian was now looking back over
his
shoulder. I’ve made him uneasy now, she thought. Now perhaps he fears we’re being followed.
    Now Mary tried to remember everything she had ever heard the menfolk say about Sinking Creek and New River and the mountains to the west of Draper’s Meadows, hoping to remember some clue that might indicate she was indeed still on Sinking Creek. The men had hunted down into the New River Gorge, and they had come back with awesome descriptions of cliffs and rapids and jumbled boulders and mountains rising so steep they blocked all but the midday sun. Mary never had been taught to read, and thus had an unspoiled eye and ear for pictures and sounds. She could remember almost everything she had ever heard, had learned ballads and hymns on first hearing and could remember the look of almost everything and everyone she had ever seen.
    She remembered the menfolk saying that one could follow Sinking Creek about four leagues down from Draper’s Meadows, and it would suddenly vanish from sight into the ground. But you could still follow its valley, about a league farther, until the creek came out of the ground between two steep hills and flowed into the New River in sight of a great sheer cliff curved like a horseshoe. Or you might, they had said, want tofind easier going by leaving the creek where it first goes underground, and veer off to the left, straight west on an easy deer path along the north slope of a straight-ridged mountain, right down to the New River’s edge. And there you’d be at an elbow bend in the river with a palisade cliff on your right and a natural stone arch straight across on the opposite shore. There’s a spring there with water that tastes like gunpowder, and Adam Harmon’s hunting shack is nearby, they had said. Mary Ingles had envisioned all those landmarks as she had heard them described. The Indians were going toward the setting sun now, and so must be headed for the New River, which was their roadway through the mountains to the unknown lands of the Northwest. Will always said he believed, from things he had heard, that the waters of the New River eventually reached a great river called, as he had heard it, the Ho-he-o, or the O-y-o, hundreds of miles through the wilderness. But no one was sure of that, of course, except perhaps the Indians, as no white man had ever explored down the wild New River Gorge farther than ten or twelve leagues.
    Mary turned over and over in her mind those remembered descriptions of geography she had never seen, all the while hugging Georgie in front of her and trying to hold her muscles against the burning weariness. The great weight of her womb felt as if it would simply tear loose and fall out of her onto the ground, but for the broad horse’s back she held between her thighs.
    Georgie seemed to be asleep, or simply dazed. His head lolled back against her bosom and she stroked his hair. She leaned forward and saw that his eyes were closed. The dried blood on his face was flaking away. He had only been scratched by briars and was not really hurt. Her heart squeezed with tender concern. Pray t’ God these heathens’ bloodlust has cooled, she thought, and they’ll not hurt my boys. Nor my baby when it comes.
    Surely they will, though, she thought. A newborn babe can only be botheration to ’em in flight. Be ready, she told herself; be strong enough to bear it if they choose to kill it.
    But Lord, how can anybody be that