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forty years of age. His great mane of tawny-brown hair fell well below his massive shoulders.
    He was wearing clothing right off the backs of animals. After only a short time in the colony, she had learned to identify the weird wilderness clothing to which the Indians and a few settlers resorted. This man’s fringed hunting shirt of supple deer hide hung halfway down his thighs and was confined by a cincture tied behind his waist. Suspended from the cincture on his right was a flintlock pistol of large bore, a knife on his left, a bullet bag in front. At his right side was a big pouch hanging from a shoulder strap. Tied to the same strap above the pouch was a powder horn.
    Her startled gaze dropped lower. He wore only knee-high leather moccasins and an Indian breechclout. His bare thighs had the girth of bronze cannons.
    His imposing size, his leonine head, his fierce visage—she might not believe in God, but at that moment she believed in the devil.

 
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Three
     
    "A confederate of yours?" Mad Dog Jones asked his newly purchased indentured servant. The woman in question had been sharply summoned back to the palmetto shed by an irate Radcliff.
    There were ladies of quality and there were ladies of the street. This woman with her too- bold manner obviously belonged to the latter category, an uncommon sort who was part of the Virginia Company's enterprise on behalf of Hymen. Of the women from the God Sent that Mad Dog had glimpsed, few would inspire sonnets of rapture. Discounting, perhaps, the fair maiden known as Clarissa.
    "Modesty Brown is an . . . acquaintance,” his bondsman said. The man’s eyes, the clear blue shade of Santo Domingo’s bay waters, managed a twinkle, which was one of the reasons Mad Dog had pled for the scrawny felon’s life and then bought his indenture papers. The other was the man’s will to live. Mad Dog had seen it in the felon’s eyes like a falling star flashing through the night sky, and he thought Jack Holloway might just defy the odds of surviving in Jamestown.
    Mad Dog was aware that the London Company calculated that six people out of every seven who came to the colony died within the first year of their arrival.
    He knew from his own experience that before the emigrants boarded the ships at London, Southampton, or Bristol, many of them already suffered from malnutrition, jail fever, and other communicable diseases. And conditions on the ships didn’t contribute to their health.
    Few adjusted well to the colony’s torpid climate. Furthermore, Jamestown’s small port was located in the midst of marshlands and swamps. The plague of mosquitoes, innumerable rats, brackish water, lack of nutritional crops, and, of course, the ever-present menace of the Indians didn’t help.
    Arriving during the sickly season, June through August, was as bad as a death sentence. People came down with what the colonists called the sleeping sickness, the desire to sleep all the time. Mad Dog thought it more a disease of the mind than of the body. The colony was overpraised in England. Upon seeing it, most immigrants went into a decline of spirit. Being predominantly male, the immigrants had no family life; nearly all of them were lonely if not homesick. The will to live was not strong in such defeated men. Or women.
    He studied the woman, in spirited discussion with Radcliff. Some sort of arguing was afoot. She-looked to be as rapscallion as they came, but she was no match for the cloven-hoofed Radcliff. River gossip of Radcliff’s arrival in the colony two years before had reached Mad Dog at his homestead, but he had not seen the man until today. Now all the old rage Mad Dog thought he had left behind in another country, another world, came flooding back. He battled back his emotions and refocused on the woman. "Well, your friend Mistress Brown will be most fortunate if she survives the Year of Seasoning.”
    "The woman is the most skilled of artists," Holloway said.
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