Maddie’s voice drew him back to the present. “Wonder what’s happening a bit south of here?”
He chuckled. “Just say it plain, Maddie.”
“All right, I will. How is the lovely Miss Swan? I see you’re wearing a pair of the stockings she made you.”
“You don’t miss much.”
“I was trained to keep a sharp eye, being a camp follower with the army. Same as you, remember.”
“Fair enough.” Clay set down his fork. “I haven’t seen Miss Swan in a fortnight or better, not since Heckewelder’s leaving.”
“Shame on you, Clayton Tygart.” Her aggravation always warranted the use of his full name. “Here it is late July and the belle of the Buckhannon is languishing.”
Jude gave a low whistle. “You sure use some hoity-toity words.”
Maddie shot Clay another beseeching look.
“Once the harvest is in, things might be different.” Clay knew his noncommittal remarks earned him no favor with Maddie no matter the reason or season.
“Well, Colonel Tygart,” she said in her gruffest tone, “I urge you to be a part of the guard you assigned at Swan Station once the harvest commences.”
He winked. “Is that an order, Maddie?”
“As close as I can get to ordering you, aye.” With that, she whisked his empty plate away. “Strike while the iron’s hot, as they say?”
“Winter’s a mite better for courting.”
“Hmm.” She began stacking plates. “Winter, my eye, when the snow’s so high you can’t even get the gates open, much less shuffle south.”
He chuckled despite himself. Maddie meant well, but he didn’t need her meddling any more than he needed Hester’s matchmaking. “All in good time.”
“Good time?” She arched her brow at him. “You—”
“If I could get a word in . . .” Jude winked at her, his voice taking on the gravity of a preacher’s. “Such talk puts me in mind of what ol’ Daniel said. All you need for happiness is a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife.”
Maddie paused. “Boone said that?”
“To my hearin’, aye, right before we buried Braddock in ’55.” Jude sat back, eyeing Clay with intent. “You just lack a good wife, is all. Now hear me out. You been stewing about all that Indian sign hereabouts. Stands to reason you’d have one less worry if you just married Miss Swan and brought her to live here at the fort.”
Maddie tossed Clay an I-told-you-so look and poured coffee from a kettle. “Too hot for coffee, but here it is.”
Clay took the dark brew, adding a piece of hammered sugar from Cutright’s store. Despite his resistance, the teasing and talk, their concern for his happiness was genuine and appreciated. “I’ll keep in mind your advice. But since it’s my wife . . .” Even the word sat oddly on his tongue. “And because I’m here to hold the frontier from ene—” he couldn’t use the word enemies though he heard it oft enough—“from Indian outrages, matters of the heart seem frivolous.”
That was as simple as he could state it. Though he wouldn’t speak ill of the dead, he had been one of the officers who’d rolled the heavy wagons over Braddock’s grave beneath the road they’d traveled in retreat. And the few terse, whispered words among the officers about General Braddock were seared to memory.
A man of weak understanding and very indolent . . . Slave to his passions, women and wine.
Let no one say that Clay Tygart, though a humble, near half-breed commander of a rude fort in no-man’s-land, was a man of weak understanding and enslaved to his passions.
22
Standing on the edge of the Swan cornfield ringed with armed men, Tessa paused to watch the work. So many laborers made short shrift of the midsummer harvest. Her small part was helping Ma bring the gleaners the noon meal and enough switchel to drink. Hatted and sweating heavily, these settlement men banded together to cut and bundle the sheaves.
Later, she would work alongside her brothers to pull the blades from the nearly naked stalks, bundling them once again for those lean winter months when the livestock needed fodder. White dent corn was her favorite, sweet and full of milk. The delectable ears were left to harden and dry till first frost. For now, her brothers kept up a robust debate about storing the crop in the corn house they’d built of notched logs near the springhouse.
“I say we pick by day and husk by night,” Lemuel told them during the noon rest.
“I beg to differ,” Zadock replied. “Pa always said it’s best left in the husk. So long as you store it dry, it won’t go to ruin.”
