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didn’t want anything to do with this message that had been to blame for Gideon’s death, but the words “protection for the families” leapt into her mind. She thought of Deborah Williams and her children.
    I cannot leave those other families to that fate. I cannot. I must take this to Elias Brant, she thought. But then she remembered that Eliaswas no longer in Hanover. All the Mohawk students had gone to fight with the British. She had heard Gershom Lake and John Barber talking about them in front of the blacksmith shop one evening when she and Anne had been walking home from a day’s quilting at Mistress Shipley’s. “Wal, you can’t expect loyalty from no Indian,” Gershom was saying. He had sneered at them as they walked past. “Never mind them savages.” He’d looked sideways at Anne. “It’s them others. Anyone with kin fighting for those damned redcoats had better have good friends on the right side of this war.” Anne had tossed her head and sniffed, and the girls had walked on. Phoebe had thought about her father’s Mohawk student Peter Sauk, who called her Little Bird and had brought her moccasins his mother had made. She wondered if he might be fighting somewhere with Gideon. He would be a good friend to Gideon.
    But, like Peter Sauk, Elias Brant had gone off to fight — he was not in Hanover to take Gideon’s message.
    What was she to do? Take it to Aunt Rachael? What could Aunt Rachael do? But the only answer she got was the sound of Constant, the squirrel, nibbling intently on a beechnut she held tightly in her paws. “And it
is
my fault. I should never have taken the letter to Polly. Never. I knew, I just knew, he meant to see her.”She put her head down on her knees again, her heart in turmoil.
    At last she grew quiet. “Well” — she sniffed — “I’ll just have to take it to Fort Ticonderoga myself.” She sat up straight. “But Fort Ticonderoga is on the other side of the mountains. It’s on the other side of Lake Champlain. In New York. I can’t go there.”
    From somewhere inside her the words came: “Yes, you can. You can do it for Gideon. You can show Anne you’re not a traitor.”
    “I’m not a traitor! I know I’m not a traitor,” Phoebe cried, answering that voice. “I’m not a rebel and I’m not a Tory. I don’t know what I am. Just because Papa was for the revolution, do I have to be? Oh, Papa, why did you have to go off like that, and now Gideon.” She broke down again, the tears streaming down her cheeks into the collar of her dress.
    “I don’t know what I am and I can’t go over the mountains all by myself.”
    “Then who will do it?” asked that voice. “I don’t know,” she answered. Back and forth, back and forth went the argument in her mind until she put her tired head down on her knees once more and fell asleep.
    The sun was setting when she woke. She remembered everything. She shivered from the cold and from the bleakness, but she felt more peaceful. Somehow, while she slept, a decisionhad been made. She knew what she had to do. Stiffly she stood up. She kilted up her skirt and put the message in her pocket. She smoothed her clothes with her hands, then undid her braid and did it up again. She washed her face and drank again from the river. Then, with new purpose in her every move, she went to Gideon’s canoe, still pulled up on shore where she had left it the night before, shoved it into the water, and set out across the river.
    Back in her own home, she searched for the rough map one of her father’s students had once drawn for her of New Hampshire and Vermont. He had wanted to show her his home on the Onion River, near Lake Champlain, and the way he had travelled to Hanover along the military road leading from the lake over the mountains to the Connecticut River. She had stored it in one of the desk’s cubby-holes. The map was not where she had always kept it. The only thing in the drawer was the tinder-box her father had forgotten to