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roof that sheltered his wife and children. But the way it had worked out, Lorene and the squaw’s son were devoted to each other. He unslung his rifle and began polishing the barrel with his sleeve. “Pity my mother sent you all this way for nothing. I’ve said everything I had to say to John. There’s no need for any further discussion.”
    “I wouldn’t have come if it was just about making peace between you and your brother.”
    “Ahaw.”
Somehow the Potawatomi word for “yes” seemed stronger. “You would. You’d go anywhere and do anything, as long as it was my mother did the asking.”
    Cormac shook his head. “John is a vicious fool and he’s set to ruin Shadowbrook. I think that’s something you ought to go back and fix, but it’s not why I’m here.”
    Quent shrugged. “My father’s made it clear Shadowbrook’s not my lookout anymore. John’s the eldest. The house, the land, everything goes to him.”
    “Quent, listen …”
    Cormac’s tone had changed. Quent stopped rubbing the gun’s brass and looked up. “There’s something behind your teeth. You’d best spit it out.”
    “Your father’s dying. He’s only got a few more months. That’s why Miss Lorene asked me to find you. She said I was to tell you that afterward you could do as you liked with her blessing, but if you let your father die with the last words between you spoken in rage, she’ll never forgive you. And you’ll never forgive yourself.”
    Cormac felt better for saying it. He squatted and began attending to his own rifle, examining the severed carrying strap. Quent walked away and stood at the edge of the clearing, staring into the trees. Every once in a while Cormac lifted his head and examined the other man’s rigid back.
    The shade was thicker where Quent stood and the forest floor was a mass of nodding bluebells. There were no bluebells at Shadowbrook; it was too far north. There were plenty of other flowers, though. No place on earth was more beautiful. At least none he’d seen. But for him the land of the lakes would always be haunted by Shoshanaya’s ghost. In the Ohio Country he was free of that, free to be his own man. And in the Ohio Country he wasn’t a slave owner.

    “This land be your pa’s land, but it don’t rightly belong to no human being,” Solomon the Barrel Maker told Quentin Hale in 1732 when the boy was nine years old. Solomon had been born to a slave bought by Quentin’s grandfather. He had always been Hale property, and he understood the difference between possession and ownership. “This land belong to God Almighty. It got a lot to teach you. No way you can have learned it all. Not yet.”
    The land known as the Hale Patent had been given to Quent’s grandfather back in 1696 by King William and Queen Mary. It comprised a great swathe of upper New York wilderness that had been presented to a minor court functionary originally from the Kentish town of Lewes not because he was a noble or had any particular claim on the crown, but because he was judged foolhardy enough to take his young wife and go live there.
    To the south were the Dutch families, people with names like VanSlyke and de Vlackte and Schuyler, who had settled the far reaches of Nieuw Netherland before the English took it from the Dutch in 1664. The fierce Kahniankehaka, who were part of the Iroquois Confederacy and whom the Europeans called the Mohawk lived to the west. North were the hated French. It suited the British to plant on some hundred thousand acres of the wilderness between them a colonist firmly tied to the English crown, and the English tongue, and the English way of doing and being.
    By the time Ephraim Hale—born on the Patent his father had named Shadowbrook—came into his inheritance, the land had changed them all. They were English, yes, and certainly loyal to King George II. But by nature and nurture and instinct they were what the land of their birth had made them: Americans, accustomed to living