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visitors—three ragged men with soot on their faces and scars on their cheeks, and the darting yellow eyes of maniacs. They were pilferers and vagabonds who preyed on frontier women. And they must have been from some far country, or they wouldn’t have come near Jack Armstrong’s camp.
    Their yellow eyes had a preternatural gleam. They were carrying long, rusty knives. They poked around in the mud and dust outside the door; Clary’s Grove was either wet or dry, depending on where the creek happened to gush from under the ground.
    “Mother Cunt,” they said to Hannah, “are ye the whore of Babylon or another harlot?”
    I hunkered up on my pallet to rush at these vagabonds, but Hannah whispered for me to stay put.
    “I’m Hannah Armstrong,” she answered in the voice of a church shouter, “mistress of Clary’s Grove.”
    “Well, we are desperate characters. And if we don’t have the run of your yard, you’ll never see the light of day again.”
    She sang to the vagabonds. “Lord Jesus is in my arms.” And she must have seen the Lord while she sang. Her face lit up, and the sweetness of her voice confused the vagabonds. Now I understood how Hannah had hypnotized Jack and the Boys. But I couldn’t just sit there. So I stood up on my battered knees and faced these pirates.
    “Be gone,” I said. My mournful squeal broke the spell they were in. They commenced to roar and slap their sides, while their scars rippled.
    “Brothers, the mistress of Clary’s Grove is living in sin, with Lord Jesus. Have you even seen such a tall pilgrim in your whole life?”
    These pirates shouldn’t have taken their brutal yellow eyes off Hannah. She ran out the cabin with her long rifle, clutched the barrel with both hands, and struck the first and second pirate with the silvered edge of the stock. Their blood began to spew, and their skulls seeped a strange white fluid. I heard the crack of bone as they seized their heads and wandered about, half blind. But the third pirate rushed right past her and was about to attack one of the babies with his knife. I was roaring mad. I tripped the sucker, grabbed him by the seat of his pants, and hurled him out the cabin like a sack of shit. And for a moment I did think of becoming his finisher once and for all. These pirates preyed on women. Wolves had much more honor than they did, but I just didn’t have the stomach to become a one-man execution party . . .
    The Boys returned after a week with dust in their mouths. They were pilferers of another kind. They might have plucked all the feathers out of a full-fledged camp, and battled for the spoils of war, but they would never have harmed a lone woman. The Boys were widow makers, yet Jack would often give up half his treasure to whatever widow he and the Boys had made.
    After all their rooting around, they returned with nothing but some potatoes and a bag of beans. Hannah didn’t scold them. She knew they were hapless cavaliers. They’d destroy a town and then rebuild it in their own reckless fashion. They couldn’t hold a hammer or plumb a straight line with a carpenter’s awl. And the Boys were stupefied when they discovered that the crooked cabin they had built with their own hands now had a wooden floor. I’d also corrected the walls.
    Jack Armstrong commenced to groan.
    “Abraham,” he said, “we brought you here to convalesce, not to prettify.”
    Hannah watched him with the shrewd eyes of a shouter. “Jack, that’s small thanks. We have a creek right under the cabin you built without a floor. We might have lost a child in one of those secret wells. And he’d be floating down the Mississip before we ever found him.”
    “Mother,” Jack said, “it’s awful hard to acknowledge the deeds of a new friend.”
    And then the Boys took to admiring the new strictness of their walls. They saw me as a wizard and I let them think I was. Jack noticed the book I was carrying in my pocket—a penny edition of Æsop’s Fables that had