All together they made an army that few men would challenge.

Simon called out first. “What’s gone wrong?”

Daniel recognized Simon’s expression for what it was: worry for his wife.

“No trouble with Lily or Jennet.”

They stopped at the edge of Curiosity’s garden, where the smell of herbs in the sun filled the air, and waited for Daniel to reach them.

“Hannah wouldn’t tell me anything,” he said before they could ask. “All I can say is that she was agitated, and we aren’t welcome in there while they’re talking.”

“That’s not like Hannah,” Gabriel said. And: “I’m low on powder; can I get some of yours, Ben?”

It was their way, to get ready for the worst, but this time Runs-from-Bears raised a brow. “I don’t recall being so quick to prime my rifle at that age, do you, Nathaniel?”

“Huh,” Luke said, winking at Gabriel. “I seem to remember a story about a battle at William-Henry when you two were hardly older than Gabriel. You volunteered, as I recall.”

“And at Saratoga,” said Ben.

“Then there was Crown Point,” said Simon. “Not to mention—”

Runs-from-Bears held up a hand in surrender. “True enough. But unless I’m losing my eyesight I don’t think I’ve seen a redcoat or a scalp lock around here for more than thirty years.”

“Hold on,” said Ben. “What kind of trouble are we talking about—talking trouble or shooting trouble?”

“I have no idea,” Daniel said. “Except that Hannah went looking for Martha and Callie first.”

The men looked at each other. “Sounds like Jemima,” said Blue-Jay. “I think I’ll check my powder after all.”

They laughed on the way back to the house, but it was an uneasy laughter. Daniel checked his knives, and tried to imagine what could have put his sister Hannah into such a state.

When Birdie saw her father and Ethan set off on the hillside path she went and looked for the rest of the men, and at that point she realized that she had been tricked. Every one of them was gone, and she was pretty sure she knew where they were.

It was her own fault; she should have known better than to trust Daniel, who was inscrutable as inscrutable could be. Now all the grownups were headed home, and that meant somebody was in some kind of trouble.

She took five minutes to locate all the little people and another five to remind them what was expected of them as Bonners. The three oldest boys got mad at her, as they always did when she was looking out for their best interests. She didn’t particularly care just at this moment. She was too busy thinking about what could be so wrong that everybody headed uphill at the same time.

It could be Lily, but as soon as the idea came to her she dismissed it. It was way too early for Lily’s baby, and the grown-ups weren’t quite moving fast enough for that kind of emergency.

Birdie slipped quietly through the crowd and into the woods behind the trading post. She waited a while to make sure the boys weren’t following her, and then she started uphill.

If her father didn’t know she was following, he couldn’t send her back. In fact, he hadn’t said anything about her staying put. He hadn’t said anything to her at all about what she might and might not do this Fourth of July afternoon. Birdie filed that fact away in case she needed to defend herself.

She was a good runner, sure-footed and fast, but she had already run three races and she knew she wouldn’t be able to catch anybody up. At the fork in the road she had to come out of hiding to see which way they had gone, home or to Curiosity’s.

The most recent tracks were on the path that led up to Curiosity’s, which put her mind to rest about Lily. And still when she got to the edge of the clearing, she was out of breath and hot enough to keel over. She knew better than to rush right in; she’d sit where she was until she had come up with a plan.

A good plan was crucial. Without a plan she’d get caught before she could figure out what was going on, as had happened in the cloakroom at the schoolhouse. A well-laid plan was built on good information; that was something she had learned from her father and mother both, and they were experts. In their long-ago youth they had both got themselves into bad trouble and then planned their way out again, and more than once.

Birdie approached the house from the blind side, and then walked around it pausing to listen at every window. She had started to wonder if maybe the grown-ups had gone on to Uphill House when she heard the sound of her father’s voice in the kitchen.

The kitchen was hard. There were two windows on one wall, and there was the door that went out to the kitchen garden and pasture and outbuildings. Anybody standing at the windows could see her, and anybody in the garden or pasture or outbuildings could see her at the kitchen door. Birdie changed direction and stood for a minute with her back against the wall, considering.

Were the women in the kitchen too? If all the Bonner men were there, it seemed unlikely that anybody else would have room.

Birdie considered. She could go in the front door, but it was next to impossible to do that without making a floorboard creak, and Da would hear her. Ma claimed he had roused out of a deep sleep more than once at the sound of a step in some other part of the house. His hearing was as good as his eyesight, and he was known for his eyesight for a hundred miles around, and more.

There was a trellis on the far wall, where Curiosity had trained morning glories to climb. People mostly didn’t come around that side of the house because it wasn’t convenient—another word from her notebook—which made it perfect for Birdie’s purposes. She would climb the trellis to the window that opened into the girls’ room, and then she could sit in the upstairs hall and hear everything. As long as the kitchen door was propped open, which it always was in the summer to let the breeze through.