Read The Frontiersman’s Daughter for Free Online Page A

way Pa had of just calling her “Daughter,” but soft and dreamy as a song. After all, she’d been named after Ma Horn’s own mother.
    She watched as her father turned and rode off down the mountain without so much as a backward glance. The slight stung far more than Ma’s smack, and she bit her lip before turning and following the old woman into the tiny cabin. Once inside the gloom made her pause. Only one window, a stingy square above a trestle table, let in light. In the corner was a feather bed, the once fine coverlet white as a cloud. A single chair sat to one side of the fireplace. Everything was as clean and spare as could be.
    Without a word Ma Horn removed the lid from a black kettle and forked a potato onto a wooden plate. A slice of hoecake and some bacon followed. Without being told, Lael took a seat at the table and ate everything without a word, aware of being watched. Afterward she fell back on the feather tick and went to sleep.

    When she opened her eyes she spied what seemed to be a hundred sundry baskets suspended from the cabin ceiling. Without stirring, she watched Ma Horn move about, using a long-handled wooden hook to fetch this one or that. Remembering what day it was, Lael nearly groaned as she turned over and buried her face in the feather tick. Images of Susanna in her heirloom wedding dress, of trestle tables mounded with roast meats and ripe vegetables and stack cakes, of old Amos’s fine bow hand as he pulled out his fiddle, threatened to undo her.
    She shut away the thought of Susanna’s dismay but had less luck with Simon. What would he think in her absence? Pondering it all, her disappointment was bitter and complete. By supper she was nearly sinking. Even nature seemed unkind, the day dawning bright as a bride, then fading to fill the sky with a full moon. A lover’s moon.
    If Ma Horn noticed her distress, she made no mention of it. As she packed her clay pipe full of dried tobacco crumbles, Lael reached into the hearth embers with a little shovel and retrieved a live coal with which to light it.
    From outside the open door came the plaintive sound of doves cooing. Listening, Lael felt almost at home. She loved the mountain silences, so different from the river bottoms below. In times past this place had eased her heartache; perhaps now it might even dull the sting of Ma’s slap and Pa’s forgetfulness in saying good-bye.
    At her feet lay a tangle of honeysuckle vine, soaked and set for weaving into baskets. Ma Horn had taught her the art years before when she’d toddled behind her in the woods. She was glad to be occupied, her hands deftly working the handles first, then the baskets themselves, finally joining the two.
    Across from her, Ma Horn puffed contentedly on her pipe, watching her weaving. Tendrils of tobacco smoke encircled them, oddly fragrant. She was so often quiet, like Pa himself, and Lael felt a little start when she finally said, “So Captain Jack’s come a-courtin’.”
    Her hands stilled on the basket. “Who?”
    “The tall Shawnee who come by your cabin.”
    The tall one. Lael felt a small surge of triumph at learning his name. Captain Jack. Oddly, she felt no embarrassment. Lifting her shoulders in a slight shrug, she continued pulling the vines into a tight circle. “He come by, but I don’t know why.”
    “Best take a long look in the mirror, then.”
    Lael’s eyes roamed the dark walls. Ma Horn didn’t own one.
    “Beads and a blanket, was it?”
    She nodded and looked back down. “I still can’t figure out why some Shawnee would pay any mind to a white girl like me.”
    Ma Horn chuckled, her face alight in the dimness. “Why, Captain Jack’s as white as you are.”
    “What?” she blurted, eyes wide as a child’s.
    Ma Horn’s smile turned sober. “He’s no Indian, Shawnee or otherwise, so your pa says. He was took as a child from some-wheres in North Carolina. All he can remember of his past life is his white name—Jack.” She paused as