He’d helped build the house, he’d lived the dream of its creation with his brother, and to this day he loved it. They’d planned to build another together. One that would be his home. Though they’d both grown up for the most part among the peoples who had traveled into Florida and become Seminoles to the whites, they’d both grown up with their good Scots father as well, and they’d been tutored in white ways as well as Indian custom. James knew how to plan and build such a home, and he also knew how to manage fields, cattle, and laborers. He was also familiar with the works of Defoe, Bacon, Shakespeare, among others, just as he had been taught the fine music of Mozart and Beethoven. But he’d fallen in love when he was very young with an Indian girl. Deeply in love. And he’d joined her clan, because he’d been needed there. And through his mother’s bloodlines he had found himself in line to be a mico for a band who had pleaded for his leadership, and so he had lived with his people in a sprawling, beautiful hammock….
