June 1791

Northwest Territory

The past months had not been easy for Isaac and Sophia, but in the evenings when they sat outside the simple cabin that they had built with their own hands—on their own land—listening to the symphony of sounds that the wilderness made, before turning in for the night, they knew that what they had there was good. Over the course of their journey westward, Sophia had picked up pieces of stories from those who had not been so fortunate in their ventures. Some families had arrived at their land to find that it was unsuitable for practically any kind of farming while others had been killed in their beds by hostile Indians.

"We're blessed," Isaac had said one evening, after a long, hot day working in the field. "We're truly, blessed by God, Sophia." She saw the exhaustion in every move of his body, but his eyes shone like the eyes of a man holding his newborn child for the first time. She sometimes doubted whether they would have the time to make ready for their first winter, but such worries never seemed to concern her husband very much.

Whenever he thought he saw her starting to fret he would appeal to a higher authority than himself: "Remember, my love, what our Lord said in James 'the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.'" To her, it always seemed as if he drew out the word "long" to a silly length; she hadn't yet decided whether he did it on purpose or without even realizing it.

Nevertheless, in her moments of trial, her husband was an encouragement to her, even when he was not at her side. One of those moments came when she mending one of his shirts. The thread she had been able to purchase along their way was, sadly, not of the best quality, making what should have been a routine task frustrating and tedious. Just as she was about to toss the whole project aside, her ears perked up at the sound of singing.

Isaac had been working on putting up some fence rails down near the edge of their homestead where a pair of barely noticeable ruts stood in for what would have been a road in a more civilized country. He had never had a strong singing voice, but that had never seemed to stop him. The song seemed to cut through the buzzing of the insects and the heaviness of the humid air, until the familiar words and almost doleful tune reached her ears:

Let not conscience make you linger,

Nor of fitness fondly dream,

All the fitness he requires.

Is to feel your need of him;

This he gives you,

'Tis the Spirit's glimm'ring beam.

"Come ye sinner, poor and needy," she thought to herself, recalling the first line and title of the hymn. Poor and needy certainly described their present condition. Yet the message of the hymn was to hope in the Savior. Surely splitting rails in the heat of the day was no less burdensome a task than mending a shirt. If her husband could remain cheerful in his work, she decided that she could do the same, knowing for whom they were each ultimately doing their best. For each other, yes, but also for the one before whom they promised to love one another until death's final parting. Sophia threw herself back into her work and the other tasks around the cabin so heartily that she quite forgot about her husband's singing.

It was near midday when a crashing sound directed her attention once more toward her husband's work. Stepping to the cabin's only door, where she could see down the hill to the fence and the trail, she saw that a wagon seemed to have come around the bend in the trail too quickly and had spilled some of its cargo near where Isaac was working. She saw her husband drop his tools and quickly walk over as if he were going to help the men reload what appeared to be long, wooden crates. When Isaac glanced back toward the cabin, she waved, but he made no motion as if he had seen her. Sophia let out a happy sigh of thankfulness, grateful that she should have a husband who was kind enough to leave off from his own hard labor to help others with their own difficult work. Drawing additional encouragement from her husband's benevolence, she returned inside to her own work, once again immersing herself in it to the point of nearly cutting herself off from the rest of the world.

Some time later, her stomach began to tell her that it was past the time when she and Isaac should have stopped work to eat. Rising to venture outside, Sophia thought it odd that Isaac hadn't come up to the cabin already. He was never one to wait long before eating, and his was the more physically-demanding task.

Peering down the hill, she did not see Isaac where the last fence rail had been put up. Taking a bit of salted beef in her apron in case he wanted something before they came back, she strode down to the end of the fence, wondering whether he had gone back to the creek or around the bend to clear brush for putting up the fence. She saw his tools near the trail, almost as if they had been dropped there without care.

Crossing over the trail, she stepped through the line of brush to the creek, but did not see him there; he never went very far in either direction up the creek just for water. Back on the trail she walked around the sharp curve until the path straightened out once again, but she did not see him there either. Puzzled, she hiked up her skirt and trotted to the top of the small rise that concealed the next hundred yards or so of the trail. Upon cresting the top of the gentle slope, however, she did not see him in the distance.

"Isaac!" she called out. But no response came. She ran back to where he had been working on the fence rail and found his tools in the same place. "Isaac!" she yelled, panic rising in her voice. She frantically scrambled back up the hill to the cabin and darted into the small patch of trees behind, hoping to find him sleeping peacefully in the shade. When she stumbled into the little grove, however, she saw nothing but the grass and the trees and heard nothing but a warm breeze washing over the branches.

Sophia nearly tumbled back down the hill and, upon reaching the bottom, hurled herself up the trail in the opposite direction. Her toe stubbed against a rock in the path and she fell forward, saving a nasty scrape to her face by throwing out both her hands at the last instant.

As she began to pick herself up, she noticed that her right hand was wet, almost sticky. As she raised it, she saw that her hand was covered in blood. Now her heart was racing, fearing that she might bleed to death without Isaac there to help. But as she wiped at her hand and wrist, she found that she was not bleeding at all. Looking down, her panic became horror. There in the middle of the path was a small pool of blood along with the handkerchief that she had given Isaac that very morning before he went to work on the fence rails. Gazing up the path she saw that the grass on one side had ruts, about the right width to have been made by wagon wheels not long ago. She continued running up the path, keeping a close eye on the ground, and following a trail of blood drops.

A terrible idea about what had happened to Isaac began to form in Sophia's mind, but there was no time for that. She ran as fast as she could, back to the cabin, wrapped up a few pieces of salt pork and some cornbread, and grabbed the small bag of money that had made its way with them all the way from Virginia. She did not even glance over her shoulder at the cabin before making her way back to the path and then southward, following the only clues she had that could lead her to her husband.