Chapter 10: Lover's Leap

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     "He'll never let me marry you," Molly cries as she hitches her horse to the post in front of the Haelig quarry in the Chimney Rock gap.

"Never you mind, Miss Molly," Henry soothes, taking her right arm in his left hand and leading her up the path in the orange glow of an October evening. "The threat of those old bones scuttling the Evergreens development ought to go a long way toward saving the orchard and settling your parents minds."

"They're from the old South," she groans, grabbing his hand in hers and pulling him up the rocky trail through the red and yellow leaves of the oak and poplar forest covering the south slope of First Watchung. "You just couldn't wed below station."

"We'll see about that," he laughs as they emerge from the woods to an expansive view of the Raritan Valley and he pulls himself up to the jutting rock. "Notice anything different about my arms?"

"Hank, hold on tight," she screams, a shiver running through her as she scrambles after him and straddles the basalt outcropping. "The librarian said this is where Winona and her lover leapt to their deaths."

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    The Lenape tale of a chief's daughter falling in love with a Dutch miner had moved west to the Delaware Water Gap along with her people when they were displaced by the settlement of New Holland. The beautiful and spurned Winona had leapt to her death, soon to be followed by the older Netherlander who had reconsidered too late. The oldest versions of this seventeenth century legend are instead placed at the Chimney Rock above the Middlebrook.
     Meanwhile, across the ocean and the centuries, the allied armies had broken through the Hindenburg Line at the second battle of Cambrai. The end of the Great War was in sight, though it would take another month of British and U.S. ground forces rooting out entrenched German troops to finish it. The largest number of American casualties for the entire war occurred in this one last push.

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     "Look at me!" Henry commands, holding Molly's arms around the rock, his arresting chestnut eyes catching her blue-turned-violet ones in the setting sun. "Tell your dad the Calco dye pool cured my stump infection."

"You can hold me without pain!" she marvels, breaking into a wide smile for the first time that day even as she's shaken by a trembling ache all over her body. "How will that change his mind?"

"He'll see dollars when he hears a daily soaking in dye for a week cured a rotten finger better than the doctor's bandages, Frenchie's prunella, mom's cider vinegar, or your old nanny's voodoo."