He takes a good handful of my hair and hales me to where the captain of these good soldiers is washing his bloody hands in a basin of water cool as you please while his men pick over the wampun and the robes for trophies of war. He asks me, what is my name and whether I speak English; then Dutch; then French; and tries me in Spanish but I will say nothing except, in the Algonkian language: "I am the widow of Tall Hickory." But he cannot understand that.

"Then if your sweetheart should offer to marry us both, would you love me the less for it?"

When he hears my English, "Praise the Lord!" he cries, and tells me straightaway how I must give over my tribes to the whites in the name of God, the King of England, and a free pardon thrown in when he sees my brand. But I shows him the babby and he calls me all kind of foul names, to whore among the heathen, so I shoves a sharp stick in his belly to teach him manners. He squawks at that but will say nothing of the soldiers or where they might be but only: that the damned seed shall be driven from the land. They took him off the barrel, for they did not want to waste good gunpowder on him, and hoist him up over the fire. Soon he was dead.

Their clean, pretty town was built within a low wood fence or stockade, the houses built of birchbark set in gardens with vines with pumpkins on em and the cooking of their meat savouring the air, as it was about dinner-time. They were cooking what they call succotash, a great pot on an open fire and a naked savage squatting before it, calm as you please, fanning the flames with a birchbark fan. The town was surrounded by tidy fields of tobacco and corn and a river near. But no kind of beast did I see, nor cows nor horses nor chickens, for they keep none. She takes me to her own lodge, where she lives by herself on account of her business, and gives me water to wash in and a bunch of feathers to dry myself, so that I was much refreshed.

And I should say that one or two guns they did have, for a little while before I arrived among em, there came a Scotsman, swapping guns and liquor in return for dressed robes and, as for the effects of the liquor, I shall say nowt about it except it sends em mad, but, as for the guns, they soon learned to use them.

But she relents to see me cry for shame and says, she is too old and stubborn to think of marriage and, besides, my young man is so taken with me that he will marry me on my own terms in the English fashion. For they are taught to love their wives and let them have their way no matter how many of them they marry and, if I wanted the toil of tilling a patch of corn with nowt but my own two hands, then he would not interfere with that.

"Then you are a good woman in spite of yourself among the Indians and so I think you will remain," she says. "Why not marry the young fellow?"

At first I would not do it because I felt some pity for this Englishman, they were very stern with their captives and made a cruel festival out of this one, what with the drink and all. Then I recall how I saw this fellow riding his high horse along the dock at Annestown when the convicts were unloaded in chains from the holds of the ship and all pity left me.

And now it comes to it, I wept, for he was a fine man.

The harvest coming on, they gathered up their corn, a very poor, small sort of corn, to my way of thinking, the heads just that much bigger than my thumb, and we dug holes in the ground six or seven feet deep and what of the corn we did not eat we dried and stored away under the earth. But the digging was a great labour for they have no shovels or spades except what they steal from the English so we made shift with sticks or the shoulder-bones of deer. And if I have 九九藏书one quarrel with my tribe, it is that the men will have nothing to do with this agriculture, although it is heavy work, but go fishing in the creek or chase deer or engage in dances and such silly performances as they say will make the corn grow.

My young son we named what would be, in English, Little Shooting Star, and you may laugh at it, but it is a name fine men have carried. And he is strapped into his little board that he might ride on my back in his birchbark carriage and I was as pleased with him as any woman might be. Which is how the fate my old Lancashire lady foresaw for me came to pass, because my boys father never sprang from the tribe of Shem, Ham nor Japhet, although his mother resembled more the Mary Magdalene, or repentant harlot, than Mary the Virgin, though the Minister does not hold with that stuff, being a dissenting man, and will not let me speak of it.

But it would come about that the little lads crown must be of tears, not gold.

By the time the weather turned, I was rattling away in the Indian language as if Id been born to it, though not a word of Hebrew did it contain so I think my old Lancashire lady was mistaken that they are the Lost Tribe of Israel and, as to converting them to the true religion, I was so busy with one thing and another that it never entered my head. As for my pale face, by the end of the harvest it was brown as any of theirs and my mother stained my light hair for me with some darkish dye so they grew accustomed to my presence among them and at six months end you would have thought she whom I called my "mother" was my own natural mother and I was Indian born and bred, except my blue eyes remained a marvel.

But still I said, I would be his only wife or never marry him.

As for gunpowder, Tall Hickory, my husband, told me, when the English first give it to the general, years back, the English told him, with much secret merriment amongst themselves, how he should bury it, like seed corn, and watch the bullets come up. And the Indians held it as a grudge ever after, to have been teased like silly children, when the English would have starved dead if the Red Man had not taught em how to plant corn.

As for me, all I ever eat among the Indians was fish, game or fowl, boiled or broiled, besides corn cooked in various ways, beans, squash in season and etc. and this such a healthy diet that it is very rare to see a sick body amongst them and never did I see there any either shaking with palsy or suffering toothache or with sore eyes or crooked with age.

Their captive they brought back lashed to the powder barrel and taunted him, how they would set their torches to a slow fuse, left him there in the middle of the village and abused him in their drunkenness for they were devils when theyd got a bit of drink inside em, I must admit it.

So he went off and got drunk with the rest. I go through the papers in the gentlemans pockets and find out weve put an end to the governor of all Virginia and I tells em so, full of misgiving at it, but they was all so far gone in liquor no sense to be had out of any of em until they slept it off but just before sun-up next day the soldiers came on horseback.

So I told her what I did to earn my living on Cheapside; and how I was a thief by natural vocation. As for my whoring, she was very much surprised to hear that English men would trouble to pay for such a thing as I had to sell, for the Indians exchange it free or not at all, and, as for my virginity being gone, she laughs and says: "If you were not good, nobody would have had you." But she grieves over my thievery until at last she says to me: "Well, child, would you steal away a bowl or wampun belt or robe from out of my hut and keep it yourself and deny it to me?"

"Whats this?" he says in his innocence. Just then it rang the hours of twelve, it being noon, and he screetches out, drops it, it breaks apart, the wheels and springs scatter on the ground, and my husband, poor, superstitious savage that he was for all he was the best man in the world, my husband fell a-shaking and a-trembling and said the watch was "bad medicine" and boded ill.

Now, the confederacy among the Algonkians breaking up, the depredations of the English upon the villages towards the South grew week by week more severe but our fierce braves held them off a while. The generals of this region held a parley, as to whether all stay and defend our villages or else beat a retreat, that is, stir our stumps and pick up our traps and leave our fields and shift westwards a piece, to new pastures, after the harvest, which was in hand. But this latter they were loath to do, since to the West lay the Rechacrians, a very warlike tribe not easily crossed. And they sent out a war party to give the English a taste of their own medicine, to start off with, but I was full of fear lest my husband not come back.

We were married about the time they were planting the corn, which they celebrate with a good deal of singing and dancing although it is we squaws who break our backs setting the seed. The season of the anniversary of my arrival in the town passed, winter comes again and by the spring I was well on the way to bringing him a little brave. It was marvellous to see the tenderness of my husbands bearing towards me when the sun grew hot and made me sweat, weary, heavy, peevish, so that I often swore I wished meself in England again; but he bore with all. Now, at this time, the general of our village held counsel how all the tribes of this part of the territory should settle their differences and join together in a great army to drive the English off back to where they come from while some of the others said, they should, instead, make treaties with the English against those other tribes who were their natural enemies and so get more guns from the English.

Now, certain men of the village, such as the general, and the priest, as I might call him, seeing he dealt with religion, had not one wife but three or four to till their fields for them and I did not like that. I would be the only one in my husbands lodge, a fancy of the old life that I could not lose. And she puzzles over that, although she herself was never any mans wife, having, so she tells me with a wink, not much liking for the sex and much fondness for her own.

They found out I was not indeed a woman of the Indian blood at last by a trick for one of em fetched my baby from where theyd left him bawling in the cornfield and showed him his knife, making as if he would stick the sharp blade into my little one.

"Now, my dear," says my husband, who was stone-cold sober because hed a mortal terror of the edge of my tongue. "I must ask you to talk to this fellow in your own language, that we might know if his fellow-countrymen will at last remember certain pledges and treaties formerly made between us or do indeed mean to drive us into the arms of the Rechacrians, with whom we are on no friendly terms, so it will be the worse for us, trapped between the two."

"Indeed I do," I says, "with all my heart."

Yet I must say, when I first saw those English topknots, I felt nowt but pleasure though their hair was of my colour; yet the Minister says I am a good girl and God will forgive me for the sins I committed among the Indians.

The squaws blamed me, how I had brought bad luck on them and; cruelly repaid their kindness to me. But, as for me, my grief is mixed with fear over the memory of the o

九九藏书网

verseer I had the ears off of, that all this will end in a downward drop, once I am back where the justice is.

"Listen, my dear," she said. "Do you not love me?"

But I ducked my head and forbore to answer that, for fear she should ask my beau to take her, too, along with me, since I was so struck with him I could not think that any woman, however set in her ways, would not have him if she got half the chance. Then she gives me a clout on the buttocks and cries out: "Now, child, see what a wretched thing this jealousy is, that it can set a daughter against her own mother!"

But for all the bonds of affection between us, I might still have thought of journeying on to Florida as the weather grew colder, such is the power of custom and habit, had I not cast my eye on a brave of that tribe who had no woman for himself and he cast his eye on me but never a word he says, it seems all along he intends to do the right thing by me, so it was my mother said to me at last: "That Tall Hickory you know of would like you for his wife." Tall Hickory being what his name signified in English, and as common a kind of name amongst em as James or Matthew might be in Lancashire.

When I went through his pockets, they were stuffed full of coin and all the children come to play ducks and drakes with gold pieces on the river. But his gold watch I wound up and give my husband in remembrance of the one I robbed the alderman of.

But my mother said: "There is no harm in it and it keeps the men out of the way."

I was scratching away with my pointed stick along the garden bean-row until the very minute the waters broke and I goes running into my mother and, an hour later, as I judge it, for they have no means of keeping exact time, she was washing the blood off my young son.

How do they live, these so-called demi-devils? The men among them have an easy life, spend all their time in leisure and idleness, except when they are hunting or fighting their enemies, since all their tribes are constantly at war with one another, and with the English, too; and the werowance, as they call him, he is not the chief, or ruler of the village, although the English do say that he is so, but, rather, he is the man who goes the first in battle, so he is commonly more courageous a man than the English generals who direct their soldiers from the back.

"Captain!" he says. "Look here! Heres a squaw with blue eyes, such as Ive never seen before!"

There was no end of the kindness of this woman to me and I lived in her cabin with her, for she had no husband, since she was, as it were the midwife of the tribe and all her time taken up with seeing to women in their labour. And it was to make potions to ease the labour pains and the pains of the women in their courses that she was picking herbs in the woods when I first saw her.

When I got my babby back and put him to nurse, for he was hungry, then I went along with the soldiers, since I had no choice, my mother and my husband dead and, truth to tell, my spirit broken. And what squaws were left living, that I used to call "sister", trailed along behind us, for the soldiers wanted women and the women wanted bread and not one brave left living in that part of the New World that now you might call a "fair garden blasted of folk". And the river watering this earthly paradise running blood.

"A bad woman?" she says. "Whats this?"

The weather being warm, at first I blushed to see the nakedness of the savages, for the men were accustomed to go clad in nowt but breech-clouts at that season and the women with only a rag about em. But soon I thought nothing of it and exchanged my petticoat for the bucksin one my mother give m九_九_藏_书_网e and she gave me a necklace, too, of the beads they carve from shells, for she said she had no daughter of her own to pet until the woods sent her this one, whom she was thankful to the English for giving away.

I had heard these Indians were mortal dragons, accustomed to eat the flesh of dead men, but the pretty little naked children playing with their dollies in the dust, oh! never could such little ducks be reared on cannibal meat! And my Indian "mother", as I soon called her, assured me that though their cousins to the North roasted the thighs of their captives and ceremoniously partook thereof, it was, as you might say, a sacramental meal, to honour the departed by devouring him; and I have often disputed with the Minister on this point, that the Iroquois dinner is but the Mass in a state of nature. And the Minister will say, either: that I lived so long with Satan that I grew accustomed to his ways, or, that the Romish Mass is but the Iroquois feast in britches.

But the soldiers caught hold of my mother as she was running to the river with her hair on fire and she shouts to me, seeing me fleeing: "You, unkind daughter!" For she thought I was hastening to cast my lot in with the English, which was not so, by any means. Then they violated her, then they slit her throat. So all over quickly, by daybreak nowt left but ashes, corpses, the widow mourning her dead children, soldiers leaning on their guns well pleased with their nights work and the courageous manner in which they had revenged the governor.

He paints his face up black and red so the babby cried to see and they do go out and all come back, with blood on their axes, and several scalps of yellow hair that he hangs on the ridgepole of the roof, besides plunder of copper kettles, bullets and gunpowder. Also, alas, rum.

"Thou shalt not!" I cried out while the others held me back from him or I should have torn out his eyes with my bare hands. How they laughed, when the squaw with feathers in her hair shouted out in broad Lancashire. Then the captain sees my burned hand and calls me a "runaway" and says there will be a price on my head over and above the bounty on the Indians. And teases me, how they will brand my cheek with "R" for "runaway" when we gets to Annestown so I cannot whore among the Indians no more, nor amongst nobody else. But all I want is the loan of his handkerchief, dipped in water, to wipe the cut on the babbys forehead and this hes kind enough to give me, at last.

"As for ourselves, we are too seemly and decent a folk for the matter of matrimony to come between a woman and her friends!" she says. "The more wives a man has, the better company for them, the more knees to dandle the children on and the more corn they can plant so the better they all live together."

They burned the ripe cornfields and set light to the stockade so it burned and our lodge burned when the powder went up so I saw the massacre bright as day. They put a bullet through my husbands head, he on his feet and all bewildered, I got him out of the lodge when I first heard the fire crackle but he was a big man, couldnt miss him. And the poor drunk, sleepy savages all mown down. I got the baby in my arms and went and hid in the bird-scare in the cornfield, which was a platform on legs with hide over it, and so escaped.

"How could I do that, mother," says I. "If I should need anything, I may use it and give it to you again as you do with our needles and the tinder-box and the knife. And so it is with such-a-one and such-a-one --" naming our neighbours. "And to tell the truth, there is nowt in all the village excites my old passion of avarice, while as for my dinner, if I need it,九九藏书网 I may have a share in any cooking pot in the Indian country, for that is the custom. So neither desire nor want can make a thief of me, here."

"How can I be that good mans wife, mother, for I was a bad woman in my own country."

The babby bust out crying. One of these brutes, hearing him, came beating among the scorched corn and pushes at the bird-scare, knocks it down so I fell out, flat on my back, the baby tumbles out of my arms and cracks his head open on a stone, sets up a terrible shrieking, even the hardest heart would have run directly to him. But this soldier puts his knee on my belly, unfastens his britches intending to rape me, hed need the strength often to hold me down but all at once leaves off his horrid fumbling, amazed.

But I sent word by my husband -- the women did not go to the counsels but were accustomed to let their husbands give their messages -- I sent word by him that it would take all the tribes of all the continent to drive away the English, and then the English would only go away to come again in double numbers, so eager were they to "plant the colony" with me and such poor devils as I had been. So I told them straight they must make a grand, warlike, well-armed confederacy amongst all the Indian nations and never trust a word the English said, for the English would all be thieves if they could, and I was living proof of it, who only left off thieving when there was nothing to steal.

As for me, I stayed with my Indian mother in her hut and learned from her Indian manners, such as sitting on my knees on the ground to my meat that was spread on a mat before me because they have no furniture. I learned how to cure and dress robes out of buckskin, beaver and other skins, and to embroider them with shell and feather. I had a housewife with me in my apron pocket and my mother was very pleased with the steel needles, likewise with the tinder-box, which she was glad to get, while my carving-knife she thought a wonderfully convenient thing, they having no notion of working metal although the women make good pots out of the river clay and bake them in an open fire very cleverly while you never see a beard on any man, since they contrive to shave themselves all over quite close with razors of stone.

But they took no notice of me, and could not agree about the manner in which, if they should wage it, the war should be waged, whether an attack on Annestown by night, creeping on all fours like bears with bows in their mouths; or picking off the Englishmen one by one when they went hunting or out in lonely places; or meeting em head on, like an army. Which they fancied best, because it was most honourable, but, to my way of thinking, putting the head in the beasts mouth. While some still held that the English were their friends because they were their enemies enemy. So they fell to squabbling amongst themselves and nothing came of all the talk which was a great sadness to me, for I was with child and so I wanted a quiet life.

We gets to a place with a few houses and they had just finished building a church and: "Here is a morsel plucked from Satan," says the one that widowed me to the Minister, who tells me to thank God that I have been rescued from the savage and beg the Good Lords forgiveness for straying from His ways. Taking my cue from his, I fall to my knees, for I see that repentance is the fashion in these parts and the more of it I show, the better it will be for me. And when they ask my name, I give em the name of my old Lancashire lady, which is Mary, and stick by it, so I live on as if I were her ghost, and all her prophecies come true, except it turns out I was and I do think my half-breed child will bear the mark of Cain, for the scar above his left eye never fades.