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from what had spilled up out the last days before one of them could catch it.
    Worth took the candle wood out of her hand and held it over the bed. Always, Sayward reflected, her mother seemed better after she bled. Tonight her face was gentle and the skin fair. Oh, an old body couldn’t go back to the cradle again. And yet tonight she had something fresh and mortal sweet about her as a young girl.
    Many a time had she looked like this when Sayward was just a little tyke. She would sit genteel as a settlement lady on her homemade rocker, listening to Worth, her face slanted down a little, her eyes on the doorsill and a faint smile on her lips. She was that way now, propped up on her pallet. You wouldn’t hardly expect that for two days and nights she had to be waited on hand and foot.
    Worth threw the candle wood with a shower of sparks in the fire. His pack of furs was gone but he let to the floor a tightly-woven grain bag that bulged with a soft fat look. From out of his huntingfrock he took a bladder that had a thong around his neck.
    “The miller woman sent Jary some risin’,” he said to Sayward. “Next time, you kin raise with sour dough. Now you better git some on the fire — if you know how.” A rattle of chinking boards made him glance up at the hungry faces by the loft hole. “You young’uns git back to bed,” he told them shortly.
    Sayward lifted the bag up to the trencher. It felt mighty heavy. Here was not just a cupful for her mother to taste but plenty for all. It would last weeks if the Shawanees didn’t come around smelling it out. She spilled the gray white meal soundlessly in the little kettle, hoarding every pinch, feeling of it between her fingers. Not even the fur on the belly of a mink or beaver was soft and velvety as this. They must have run it through a deerskin sifter. Never had she baked wheat bread before but she well knew how, for the day after her father went she had wormed out of Jary the way it was done, just in case he came home with meal. Now the girl’s firm hands mixed the flour and some water together, working in a little precious salt and maple sugar with the miller woman’s yeasty stuff. By the time she set it by the fire to rise, her father had taken off his buckskin leggins that were wet from the fording of streams and had lain across her andGenny’s bed, some of the quilt over his bare legs, dead as a log from his long tramp.
    Twice during the night the girl lifted Jary to ease her sluggish coughing, but Worth did not wake up. Sayward thought her mother felt cooler, as if the fever she had not been free of since the girl could remember, had let up. A while before daylight she expected the dough had risen enough. Anyhow, it would have to do. She worked it into small loaves to bake the quicker and set them deep in the hearth, covering them on top and sides with hot ashes and sitting by to keep a slow fire.
    It was time for daylight when she roused herself from a half doze. A pleasing smell filled the cabin like a cloud. She scraped the ashes aside. Her small loaves lay round and brown under their grime. She brushed them with a turkey feather and wiped them clean with a greasy rag. When she looked up, her father was standing there clad only in his deerskin hunting frock that came halfway to his knees. He was sniffing hungrily.
    “You better give her a piece of the crust first,” he said, and Sayward saw it fall away white and beautiful under the whetted edge of his hunting knife.
    Up on the loft the young ones had crawled to the hole and were watching greedily.
    “It’s bread!” Worth said, holding the crust under Jary’s nose to smell.
    Her lips held that faint smile as if he had said, “Here I got two fisher fox skins for you.” Jary had always wanted a cape of those mahogany black skins. Never could you get anything finer to prank yourself out in. If a man wanted favor in a girl’s eyes, that’s what he would try to get for her. But one prime fisher skin was