Indian Summer Love

By Rebecca Matthews

He was the 'every man" that every woman wanted. He was part gentleman, part beast, and all male. Educated and intelligent with a quick wit and unexpected sense of humor, he was so much more than he initially seemed. Behind that engaging smile and beneath the bronzed skin pulled taut over bulging, muscles, lay the determination of a man who was neither Indian nor white, but rather a melding of both.  He could appear in an instant, as if out of thin air, and disappear with equal stealth. All these things he had learned since being stolen from his family's cabin at the age of eight. 

Bethany Ashley was a multi-faceted woman, who felt a restlessness deep within her soul for something more—more than just marrying, being a wife and mother and toiling from before daylight until well past dark caring for a home and family. There must be more to life, she believed. To find this untapped source of fulfillment, Beth knew she had to find a partner of equal enthusiasm. Could there be someone out there to make her journey through Life worthwhile? She knew she would rather die than never to try to find that one at all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rebecca Matthews
• Release date: Jun 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393552277

Rebecca Matthews

                                                                                                                                Author Bio Rebecca is a retired R.N. who has yearned to be an author since she was an adolescent. Her first novella, A Gentleman’s Game was published in print and digital in May of 2015.  Since then she has had two more novels published by Liquid Silver Publishing, Revenge is Sweet  and Linger Longer Lodge, and a new novel is forthcoming on February 3, 2017, titled Queen of My Heart from DreamBig Publishing.  She also has several indie novels from Kindle including Blackwater Creek, When Hope is Gone, Come and Be My Love, and now Two Broken Hearts. Her books cover a wide variety of themes, locales, and characters. Several of her novels are contemporary, but she has had a lifelong fascination with the South, specifically the Civil War, the people not the politics, and loves to use it for a backdrop for her romance novels, as well as Louisiana Bayou and the area around the Jewel of the South, Savannah. Her stories take you from East Coast to West, and the Smoky Mountains to the Gulf Coast, made up of characters you will remember long after the final page is read. She lives in sunny Florida with her husband of over thirty years and their cat and dog. She feels blessed to have spent thirty years working in a career she loves, and then to have realized her lifelong dream of becoming a writer. For more information or to leave a comment, good or bad, please visit her website at: https://www.RebeccaMatthewsAuthor.com.Thank you for reading her novels and keep coming back for more.

Book preview

Chapter One

Sandusky River Valley

Ohio Territory 1814

Seth Anderson was out on a two-day hunt, appointing his eight-year-old, son Nathan the man-of-the-house while his father was away. This particular day, as his mother worked in the garden, his assignment was to watch over his sleeping baby sister Dot, and his younger brother Stephen. As the boys played on the floor by the open door of the rough-hewn farmhouse, they were oblivious to the Shawnee braves creeping up just a few feet away.

The crudely constructed, cramped cabin sat at the edge of a dense forest amidst the stumps of dozens of trees felled to build the home and provide firewood for fuel. Nature had spaced the trees in such a way the stumps now looked as orderly as tombstones in a church graveyard. Some yards away, the white settlers had scratched out a garden plot from the raw, virgin earth. A hand-dug well and a rough-hewn log lean-to for the animals completed the homestead.

Unheard and unseen, the Indians were inside the house before Nathan could sound the alarm. A strong, large brown hand clamped down hard across his open mouth making it impossible for him to scream, then hoisted the blonde-haired boy over his shoulder with no more difficulty than a 10-pound sack of flour and marched silently back out again. Within seconds, it was as if the oldest child of Susannah and Seth Anderson had never existed. There was no sign of a struggle, because none had occurred. He had just disappeared!

Wide-eyed, but silent, Stephen resumed playing with the chunks of wood he used for blocks to build a pretend fort to protect his stick inhabitants from harm. Meanwhile, his older brother was gone. Within the next few minutes, a hungry and wet Dot began to wail from her cradle. Her big brother, who was able to take care of only one of her complaints, was mysteriously absent. Hearing the continual wailing of her infant, the weary Mrs. Anderson trudged up to the cabin and looked into the open door expecting to reprimand her oldest child for not tending to his sister. Instead, shock clutched her throat making it impossible to scream, or even speak when she saw only two children instead of three.

Grabbing up the screaming infant who had worked herself into a frenzy, she confronted her remaining son.

Stephen, where is your brother? Where is Nathan? Her voice rose with each question until she was literally shouting at the boy who stared up innocently at his frantic mother, lower lip quivering and his eyes filling with tears at the ire in his mother’s voice. Meekly, he reported to her in his three-year-old gibberish.

Injun come. Nay go bye-bye.  

Stephen was apparently unscathed and irritatingly unconcerned by the incident, so she left him where he sat and propping her soaking-wet daughter on her hip she ran back outside calling for her lost son. She called and called, and cried and shrieked in fear and frustration as the realization hit her full force she most likely would never see her son again. Sinking to her knees, she crushed her noisy, sopping daughter to her chest, and sobbed into the little girl’s chubby neck. The next day when Seth returned from a successful hunt, he found the cabin in a state of disarray and his wife with their babe in her arms, sitting and staring into space while their youngest son whined with hunger nearby. Her grief was inconsolable.

Seth Anderson had chosen to bring his wife and their children, Nathan two, and infant Stephen to this wild, untamed land six years earlier in an attempt to carve out a life of their own in freedom. Their indentured servitude was finally fulfilled, and they were free to move and create a life of their own. The lure of freedom and owning their own home drew them and many others like moths to a flame to settle the frontier. The struggling young couple knew there were be challenges, dangers, and setbacks, but they never suspected they might have their child snatched from inside their home by thieving Indians. They were stunned and immeasurably saddened, but there were two other children to care for and crops needed tending and meat from the hunt needed preserving, and clothes to wash, and meals to fix and the list of chores that had to be done in order to exist in this wilderness went on and on.

The Shawnee had been warring with the whites off and on for some years as more and more of the growing population of the east encroached onto Shawnee territory. Under the great chief Tecumseh, who had a full-blown hatred for the whites, the Shawnee had rained terror upon white settlers from Kentucky through Ohio. Tecumseh refused to abide by any of the peace treaties signed by the whites and Indians, to which both sides failed to adhere.  Tecumseh was convinced these treaties would eventually destroy the Indian’s way of life, and land.

Word had spread that Tecumseh was determined to form an Indian confederacy of various tribes in the area thinking it would give the Indians a better chance at a successful final push back against the whites. In doing so, he hoped to pressure the great leaders in Washington City to make the Ohio River the permanent boundary between the United States and Indian lands. Repeated clashes had left many vacant places around the council fires, forcing the Indians to find a quick, easy way to replenish their fighting ranks by raiding white farms nearby to steal their white sons.

After the death in late 1813 of their fierce, dynamic leader Tecumseh during the conflict titled The War of 1812, the remainder of the tribe eventually split into three divisions wanting nothing more of his brand of violence and bloodshed. One group, however, did not prefer to live peaceably following repeated defeats by the white men’s army, and remained determined to follow their former leader Tecumseh’s vindictive agenda. They continued to raid and rob the white’s homesteads, stealing property and children as needed to sustain their numbers.

These young stolen boys were adopted into the tribe and raised to become braves who would eventually replace warriors lost in battle. They wanted boys who were not so young they required a lot of caretaking, but not yet adolescents who were rebellious, too difficult to manage, and would repeatedly try to run away.

This young blonde-haired boy was the perfect age. The one they left behind was too young, too much trouble. They would train and guide this newly acquired member to grow up in the Shawnee ways to replicate a lost member of the tribe. The process was not always successful, but if they failed, the captives became slaves and set to menial tasks that the men of camp considered beneath them. Bound in chains to enforce compliance with the commands given, their life became a living hell.

Nathan, a fair child, with hair nearly as white as cotton, and pale skin from his Scandinavian heritage, made a very unlikely physical substitute for a member of an Indian tribe, but nonetheless the tribe was dedicated to making it happen. The terrified boy, his face wet with the saltwater of silent tears, had not made a sound since his abduction, not even so much as a whimper. Several squaws, children, and grown men approached the raiding party to examine their booty when they returned from this most recent raid.  

The young, fair-haired boy stood straight and tall, his chin raised proudly, his gaze cast skyward apparently looking for Heavenly protection or Divine intervention to help him through whatever was to come. What it would be, he had no idea. It could be torture to the point of death as he had heard in stories about the savages. It could be some kind of ritual requiring a human sacrifice. It could possibly be an adoption into this group of heathens, who would become his forever family and where he would reside all the days of his life.

Nathan was hungry. The sun was now setting and he had not eaten since breakfast but the thought of eating made his stomach knot up with fear and disgust. What do they eat? Dogs? Worms? Maybe it was poisoned. What should I do? A million questions raced through his young mind all at once, but being a lad of such a tender age, he was without answers. Too terrified to speak, his body seemed paralyzed with fear because when they motioned for him to come to the wigwam of one squaw who looked as if she had been crying, his legs would not move.

When she gestured again for him to follow, and he did not, she frowned with disapproval. Perhaps she thought he was just being stubborn and refusing, but he literally could not make his feet take a single step! Suddenly the flattened palm of her hand caught him alongside his face with a resounding Whack! The force of her open-handed blow threw him to the ground. Then she roughly grabbed his arm, yanked him to his feet, and dragged him with her around a large fire-ring in the center of a clearing, to her dwelling. It was a funny looking house with an arched roof made of a frame of wooden poles and covered with woven mats and sheets of birch bark, tied in place by ropes or strips of wood. Some of the others, he noticed, were covered with buffalo hides. Once inside, Nathan found it was much larger than it appeared from the outside. In the dim light of the fire, he saw that there was enough room for a tall man to stand up and plenty of room for the several people he saw seated around a fire pit in the center of the room. The squaw motioned for him to sit, and this time he knew he had better comply.

He first noticed a little girl of maybe two or three, with chubby legs and a protruding tummy sitting naked on a bearskin, chewing endlessly on a piece of some kind of meat. Next to her was a toothless, white-haired old woman, whose grotesque grinning at the boy made him wonder if she was so pleased at his arrival because she was planning for him to be on the menu soon! Shuddering he quickly turned away and observed twin boys who appeared to be a little younger than Nathan. Their faces wore blank expressions as they sat enthusiastically chewing their food. Another woman was kneeling at the small fire-ring in the center of the wigwam cooking something on a hot, flat rock.

Other than the toothless, grinning granny, no one’s faces showed any sign of what they were thinking or feeling. They did not show kindness, or seem to welcome him in any way. But, neither did they show any malice or anger. Instead, they simply treated him as if he did always been there and his presence was nothing extraordinary. As he smelled the bread type material baking on the rock, and some kind of goop cooking in a clay pot, his stomach began to sing its own song of hunger, despite his determination to refuse to eat any of their unrecognizable food.

The two young boys looked at him with large, dark eyes. They wore leggings, a long, yellowed cotton shirt that he guessed had once been white, a fringed sash at the waist, and a long, sleeveless vest or a jacket over it, and moccasins on their feet of course. He noticed all the males, young and old, wore some kind of cloth wrapped around their head turban-style. The boys sat with legs crossed Indian style eating something with their fingers from small wooden bowls. Dropping to his rump, he folded his legs to mimic theirs, and waited. Would they feed him or just torture him while letting him go hungry as he watched the others eat their fill.

Instead, the old woman handed him a bowl of the hot goo, maybe soup or stew of some kind, but with no spoon to use to get it to his mouth. He watched his peers to see how he was to go about eating the runny stuff. Using their fingers to fish out chunks of meat and vegetables, they ate in expressionless silence, then tipped the bowl up and drank the remainder of the contents. He did as he saw them do. He could only guess at what the chunks were floating in his bowl, but thought he recognized pieces of fish and some other kind of meat, maybe squirrel?  

He hoped that they ate bear or beaver, elk or deer, and not anything worse. He did not think he could choke down snake or skunk. He noticed baskets of corn, pumpkins, and squash scattered around