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of nails. The load toppled from the wagon into Daniel’s hastily outstretched arms.
    Kate Bufkin had put him to work.

Chapter Three
    “L ET US PRAY,” LOYAL Bufkin began. He was seated at one end of a long board table crowded with food. There was a platter of round bread, another of cheese, and a wooden tray of roasted chickens—those that had been injured in the melee earlier in the day. The chickens were bordered on one side by a platter of boiled potatoes and on the other by a fire-blackened, deep pan of apple pan dowdy sweetened with molasses, its juices bubbling up through the broken crust.
    “Lord, we ask this blessing upon our home and take this food to the nourishment of our bodies. We give Thee thanks and praise” Loyal glanced up, his gaze darting from Daniel on his left to Kate on his right. “What was that?”
    Loyal was a man of medium height. He was fair-skinned like his sister. His once attractive features were marred by a flattened nose and flared nostrils. When he spoke, his voice carried the dry, nasal huskiness of a man given to breathing through his mouth. He stood and placed his fists on the oaken table and stared off across the empty tavern as if he were hearing war drums emanating from behind the walnut bar, where the inn’s supply of libations were neatly arranged in bottle, keg and jug.
    The inn’s only paying residents were a joiner and a parson, and both of them had retired upstairs to the only two serviceable rooms. The tavern itself had six long tables and benches and a number of high-backed chairs arranged about the fireplace. The walls were decorated with a series of paintings depicting incidents from the Old Testament: David and Goliath, Daniel in the lion’s den, and Solomon rendering judgment. The whale-oil lanterns burning directly overhead illuminated the immediate area. The rest of the room was awash in dancing shadows.
    Daniel lowered his pewter mug of Dutch beer and looked over at Kate. He had worked alongside Loyal all afternoon. The man had hardly spoken, offering only a friendly greeting and a comment about the weather, that it had been a cool spring but he was expecting a warm summer. Yet there was a haunted cast to the man’s features; though he was roughly the same age as Daniel, he moved like a much older man. His gestures were deliberate and measured, as if requiring a momentary rumination before committing himself to action. Daniel had known such men before, veterans of battle who carried the horror inside. Such men often sought the solitude of the howling wilderness or lived among their own kind yet isolated, eventually going mad.
    “I heard nothing,” Daniel told him.
    “Have you no ears?” Loyal stood, knocking the chair over. He circled the table and hurried to one of the shuttered windows in the front of the tavern. He peered through a firing port and studied the moonlit courtyard.
    “Come to dinner, brother Loyal.” Kate’s soft voice reached across the empty room.
    Loyal glanced around at his sister. Her gentle, reasoning tone cut through the heart of his panic and brought him back to reality. His vision cleared; his bunched and worried features relaxed. He placed a hand upon the strong, solid walls alongside him and, just to be sure, cocked an eye toward a water barrel he kept filled to the brim to guard against the flaming arrows of an Indian attack should one occur, a remote possibility at best. This was settled, civilized country now, and the dangers here originated among white men, not red.
    “We used to live in the north country, near Fort Detroit,” Kate recounted. “During the Ottawa uprising, our farm was burned. My father and Loyal were captured by Chief Pontiac. Loyal saw my father tortured to death. Then the Ottawa stripped my brother naked and set him free. They intended to hunt him for amusement. But he escaped them and hid until the rebellion was crushed. I was only five, but I still remember the way he looked when he stumbled into Fort