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if weighing what she knew. “You could say he and your pa are right well acquainted. He was one of the warriors who captured him and his men and carried them to the Falls of the Ohio.”
    Listening, Lael looked back. Her recollection of the young warrior standing outside their cabin was as fresh as yesterday. Silver arm bands. Buckskin breech-clout. She’d counted three eagle feathers fluttering from his dark hair. The telltale trade blanket had been draped over one broad shoulder, and his skin was baked the color of dried blood. Captain Jack looked Shawnee to the core.
    She suppressed a sigh. “Ma nearly had a fit, finding six Indians at her door.”
    Ma Horn drew deeply on her pipe. “And you didn’t?”
    “I . . .” Lael left off, unable to sort out the tangle of emotions she’d felt at their coming. Fear. Curiosity. Fascination. Shame. “It’s been hardest on Ma,” she lamented, looking down at her basket.
    Ma Horn nodded sagely. “I reckon she don’t like the reminder.”
    So that was it. Ma’s black mood hinged on being confronted with a past better left alone. Lael looked hard at Ma Horn, free to ponder it all for the very first time. She felt a sudden stab of sympathy for her moody mother. Was she now reliving the ugly day of Pa’s capture? Her own disgrace? Could she ever forget the shock of his homecoming or the ensuing silence that shut them out and seemed to overlook two lost years? When they thought the worst was over, the Canes and Hayes clans had brought about a court-martial branding him a traitor. Had that returned to haunt her too?
    “Some family skeletons are best left buried,” Ma Horn said, interrupting her reverie.
    Lael sighed and set down the basket. “Seems like the Clicks have more than their share.”
    The old woman’s face creased like a dried apple when she smiled. “We ain’t a boresome bunch, are we?”
    Lael shot her a wounded look. “Am I supposed to be proud of that?”
    “Beats cryin’, don’t it?”
    Lael swallowed down another sigh and looked at the finished baskets at her feet. Tomorrow they’d fill every one. The long days offered plenty of daylight to wander the woods, and a huge harvest still waited. As if pondering the work ahead, Ma Horn rose from her rocking chair and bade Lael good night, taking a small pallet in the corner and leaving Lael the prized feather tick. Though she’d protested, Ma Horn wouldn’t hear otherwise.
    Left alone, she moved the tallow candle closer and took Simon’s note from her pocket. Smoothing the crumpled paper, she wondered if Ma Horn watched her from the shadows. The bold words still seemed to leap off the page. That he’d remembered her middle name and signed off with his own was almost intimate somehow. But it was what he didn’t write that held her. Simon Henry Hayes was in need of a wife and he meant to have her.
    She expelled a rush of air, suddenly sleepy, wondering when her father would come back to fetch her. How had he and Ma explained her absence at the wedding? Likely, they hadn’t. Her disappearance would simply be another secret whispered of in the settlement. Just one in a long line of secrets.
    Truly , she thought wearily, the Click clan is rife with them.

6

    Lael and Ma Horn traipsed from hollow to cove, then ridge and river bottom and back, baskets adorning their arms like jewelry. Every morning they would go gathering once the dew was dried, with nary a thought for the heat. Though her feet felt scalded, Lael refused to complain, knowing she’d toughen in time.
    “Take care to find four of the same plant before you take the one, lest they won’t grow back,” Ma Horn cautioned her, standing knee deep in a patch of boneset.
    Lael helped strip the tiny white flowers and leaves from the stalks, listening as Ma Horn talked.
    “Boneset tea will nearly always break a fever, but it’ll make you sick if you take it hot. Now, look at this Jack-in-the-pulpit. Take this here hoe and dig some roots. Nothin’