An Undisturbed Peace by Mary Glickman Page B

delivered with dramatic gestures and facial expressions. Despite the delights of being an object of desire, Abe found himself struggling to stay awake until Tobias Milner brought up the legend of an Indian woman who, it was rumored, lived in the woods thereabouts though few had seen her.
    â€œYou could run into Dark Water out there, if you happen to meander off established tracks,” the farmer said. “And if you do, pray to the Lord for deliverance is my advice. She’s more than fearsome to look at. The sight of her can freeze the blood of the bravest man. To hear her war cries is to hear the howls of hellhounds. It’s a sound that’ll ring in your ears the rest of your life.”
    It took Abe time to catch on. At first he thought Tobias Milner was surely speaking of a child’s nightmare, an old crone, a barbarian witch, no doubt a harmless creature made shibboleth to frighten children into good behavior. Why his host would juggle fairy tales in the air was inexplicable. He affected a bemused interest.
    â€œMight she steal my soul?” he asked, the joke playing visibly about his lips.
    â€œShe’ll steal your life without thinking twice,” Tobias Milner said. “Just ask Teddy Rupert. Are you headed his way?” Rupert was the owner of a vast plantation half a day’s ride west at the very boundary of the Cherokee Nation. Abe nodded. Milner harrumphed and continued. “He lost a son to her flaming arrows. Now, Billy was a selfish boy and fairly impolite. I’ve no doubt he likely insulted her, as the story goes. But she cut him down for it, didn’t she, and for a Cherokee woman to murder a white man in peacetime and in such a cruel manner. Well, there’s no excuse. No excuse at all.”
    â€œFlaming arrows, sir?” Abe asked in disbelief.
    â€œOh, yes. Ones soaked in Injun pitch. They’re thicker than the usual, you know. More like pegs or stakes. And once they pierce the flesh, the poor devil pinned by them cannot move while the flame devours his flesh. I’m telling you, these natives are savages. You can cover their nakedness and teach them English, stick a plow in their hands too, but they remain as malicious as Amalekites and as godless as the people of Sodom whom the Lord saw fit to destroy.”
    â€œHusband, please!” With two words, Esther put an end to the conversation. The two older girls had gone pale and trembling in the hearing of it while the youngest seemed eager for more details.
    While the talk drifted into safer realms, Abe wondered if his Marian knew this Dark Water. It hardly seemed likely the wilderness round about teemed with Indian women living on their own. In the previous year he’d come across only the one.
    Before he retired that night to a cozy makeshift bed of pillows and comforters set up in the kitchen on a wide shelf usually reserved for the larger pots, Abe went to the stable to check on Hart. On entering, he stepped over the sleeping stable boy, a youth worked hard enough from dawn to dark caring for three cows, four goats, and two horses; the structure that housed them; as well as the chickens and geese kept separately that he did not stir from his slumber, not even when Abe stumbled over a bale of hay in that odorous dark and banged into a stall door, rousing every animal the Milners possessed. They lowed, bleated, and neighed alarmingly, although at his insistence, they quieted soon enough. Hart was calm throughout, nodding his great head from over a stall door at the end of the aisle. He nickered softly at Abe’s approach. “How are you, my friend?” he asked the horse, petting his neck in long strokes once he’d entered the stall. Hart poked his nose along the length of Abe’s trunk, sniffing in his pockets for a treat. The peddler could not help but laugh and hug the beast’s head uselessly in an effort to make him stop.
    â€œThat horse surely loves you,” a feminine