The Frontiersman’s Daughter Read Free Page A

before she gave the answering call, smiling as it echoed back to her. She liked daybreak best, unsullied as it was.
    Every morning of her life she’d come out onto this porch to find things the way they’d been the day before. She loved the solid beauty of the barn and the skeleton of a fence that ran to the river and hemmed in the horses. The woods surrounding the cabin were ever changing with the seasons yet somehow stayed the same. Even the old door stone beneath her feet was as much a part of her as the roses that hid the lazy slant of the porch while attempting to climb into the cabin.
    She could hear Ma moving about with a kind of restless energy, not yet at work with her spinning wheel. Ransom was still abed and out of mischief, but Pa had been gone long before daylight. She caught sight of him now emerging from the trees, his rifle nestled in the crook of one hard arm. He wore the garb of the woods, buckskin breeches and long linen hunting shirt, heavily fringed to wick away water. She could see him scan the clearing, weighing every nuance and shifting shadow.
    He moved the quietest of any man she knew. Even his dogs had been trained to walk softly behind him, noses to the ground, nearly tripping over their cumbersome ears. Nip and Tuck had been yearlings when Pa led his first party of settlers over the Gap the Indians called Ouisita. No man had lived in Kentucke then, either Indian or white, though the Shawnee and Cherokee claimed it as a sacred hunting ground. She reckoned they still did, leaving plenty of sign in the settlement and taking what they pleased.
    Pa paused briefly to look east, and she did the same, her gaze lingering on the far mountains framed with yellow light. Was he remembering his roots or missing the land from which he came? She doubted it. He rarely spoke of his Quaker heritage, though Ma talked freely of her own family, English weavers who’d come to the colonies fifty years before.
    She always listened quietly as Ma shared memories of her loved ones, but to Lael they were simply names without faces, all of them. She’d never known anything but Kentucke, never been beyond the wilderness, nor wanted to. Ma’s talk of cobbled roads and church steeples and hordes of people pressed together in one place left her cold.
    Pa paused at the far end of the porch to drink deeply from a gourd dipper hanging above a piggin of water, his eyes on the woods all the while. For a man not yet fifty he looked older. Hardened, careworn. His tobacco-brown face was as lined as the marks on a surveyor’s map, but his frame was as lean and well muscled as that of a far younger man.
    Lael stood up slowly, the crock of butter at her feet. The half hour she’d spent churning had given her sufficient time to gather the courage to confront him. She simply had to know about the Shawnee—what they wanted and why he hadn’t moved them to the fort.
    “Any fresh sign, Pa?” Her voice shook a bit and belied her skittishness.
    He turned earnest eyes on her and took his time answering. “Aye. One Shawnee in particular.”
    One. The tall one? Somehow she sensed it was, and looked down at her apron, a flush creeping into her face. He was studying her again in that absorbing way that made her feel he knew her every thought—or worse, that she was somehow the cause of all the worry.
    “Any trouble elsewhere?” she asked.
    “None that I know of,” he replied, a wry twist to his mouth. “Just hereabouts with a gabby yellow-haired gal in an indigo dress.”
    Giving him a halfhearted smile, she fingered her heavy braid. “Ma keeps threatenin’ to shear me.”
    He shifted his gun to his other arm and returned his attention to the woods. “Reckon she thinks she’ll save the Shawnee the trouble.”
    At this she sobered, searching for a speck of teasing in his sober features. Suddenly the almost romantic notion of letting down her hair for all those dark warriors turned terrifying. “Pa, you don’t think . . .”
    He