"It is, if she can be made willing to it."
"That she shall, or make her bed in the forest, where good looks are not safe around yer."
Hulda was found at a window, looking out upon her former home, and at a ploughman who had nearly completed the furrows in a large field, sparing only some low places piled with brush, over one of which some buzzards circled, lofty, yet intent as anglers watching their tackle. Hard as that home had been to Hulda, she regretted leaving it for this men's tavern, where her grandmother's saucy temperament found so many incentives to bravado, and her caution, that had to be exercised in Delaware, was quite unnecessary on the Maryland side of the line.
At the little hip-roofed white cottage Hulda had felt a sense of privacy pleasing to her growing life, and her ability to read often charmed Patty Cannon to a stillness that was like the hyena's sleep, and even made her acquiescent and cordial.
But where she met men alone, unmodified by modest women's example, the bold tendency of Patty was to out-do men, and lead them on to audacities they would have feared to follow in but for her courage and policy; for she could coax either young or coarse natures, as well as she could drive.
These feats of strength and cunning, statecraft and desperation, reminded Hulda of a book she had read about the Norman knights in England kidnapping and robbing the poor Saxons; and one description of King William the Conqueror suggested to Hulda that he was perhaps a Patty Cannon in his times, as his body and legs were short and powerful, like hers, and he could bend a bow riding on horseback that no other knight could bend on foot with the legs planted firmly. He could not read nor write, and was superstitious, yet cruel as the grave. All this was true of Patty Cannon, whose feat of standing in a bushel measure and putting three hundred pounds of grain on her shoulder has been related.
She often wrestled and bound, without assistance, strong black men fighting for their liberties. She could ride horseback, sitting like men, in a way to make Joan of Arc seem a maid of mere tinsel.
Hulda was dressed in her best clothes, her hair was tied in wide braids, her fine features and large, tender, yet seeking, gray eyes, never had been turned on Patty Cannon so directly.
Her grandmother abandoned in a moment an attempt to be complaisant, and sternly ordered her to attend to Colonel McLane's chamber.
"I can support you no longer, huzzy," said the dark-eyed woman, her cheeks full of blood. "Make haste to find some easy life or Joe shall get you a husband. We are ruined. You must make money, do you hear!"