On the path were imprints of large rounded hooves. The mule. He crouched and studied the dirt. He didn’t see any other tracks.
He swung up into the saddle as quietly as he could. He dared not go back the opposite way—the two other men might be following. He had no weapon. If he went forward, he might blunder into an ambush. Why had he let himself fall asleep? He startled momentarily, glanced this way and that—had he heard a voice calling?
You’re a fool, a fool, a fool.
He rode Maude at a walk. It was almost dark. After a while he saw something out in front—he mightn’t have noticed it if Maude hadn’t lifted her head. He ran his hand along the side of her neck, claiming back her attention. He stopped her, stood in the stirrups. He let his vision shift from side to side. Now he could see it, a black form moving slowly, rhythmically, up and down. He heard the soft cuffing of hooves. He waited until he could no longer hear them.
He considered leaving the trail again and spending the night in the woods. It didn’t seem as if the Tattered Man was following Maude’s tracks—he’d ridden past the spot where Gideon had first left the trail. Overnight, the rain might wash his tracks away.
Or it might not. And in the morning he would have to ride this way again.
He let Maude stride out until he heard the mule’s footfalls again and the dark form emerged from the blackness. Gradually it grew larger in his vision. It became a man seated on a beast. He kept expecting the Tattered Man to hear Maude, turn, and shoot—two shots had been fired earlier, so either the highwayman Jarrett had two pistols, or the Tattered Man also had one.
Closer. The mule kept plodding out in front. Closer. With a squeeze of his calves Gideon asked for speed. He stood on his left foot, freed his right boot from the stirrup. As Maude shot past, he reached out with his boot and shoved the Tattered Man off the mule. The mule sprang ahead, the rider hit the ground hard, something black and heavy went clunking off into the darkness. Maude skittered on a ways until Gideon turned her.
The Tattered Man lay motionless at the edge of the trail. The mule stood quietly. Gideon walked Maude back and dismounted. With the reins in one hand, he used his other hand to turn the Tattered Man over. The man was loose-limbed as a rag doll. Gideon smelled the cloying sweetness of whiskey. The clunking black object must have been a jug. He checked the man’s waistband and found nothing. He ran his hand down one leg. In the boot, something round and hard: a knife handle. He drew the blade from its sheath and tossed it aside. In the other boot, a pistol. He sniffed the barrel, caught the peppery fresh-fired scent.
He put the pistol down. Why had the Tattered Man split off from the others? Maybe they’d given up on him, and the Tattered Man had set off in search of another victim. Or maybe the others were following and were not far off. As Gideon placed his fingers against the man’s neck to search for a pulse, the Tattered Man shot up his hands and grabbed Gideon by the throat.
The Tattered Man yelled and wrenched him sideways. Gideon hit the ground hard and felt air whoosh out of his lungs. The man straddled him, pressing his thumbs into Gideon’s neck. Gideon struck at the man’s face. The man snarled and choked him harder. Gideon’s other hand fell upon the pistol. Red and orange sparks flew at the edges of his vision. He swung the pistol as hard as he could and struck the Tattered Man on the side of the head. The man came down as if poleaxed. His forehead thumped the earth next to Gideon’s head.
He fought his way out from under the Tattered Man. He knelt there panting.
Hoofbeats. Fifty yards away and coming fast.
He scrabbled to his feet and grabbed Maude’s reins. He hauled himself into the saddle and turned her down the trail. She galloped.
***
Gideon came out of his reverie. He looked around at the bright autumn woods in Panther Valley. He was a lawman now, the sheriff of Colerain County. He hadn’t planned it that way, but it was what he’d become. He was doing his job, he told himself, riding to True’s grandmother’s house, wanting to hear from her own lips the story of a preacher’s hanging, a strange and disturbing happening from thirty years in the past. He stopped in the road and reviewed what True had told him: At the mouth of a hollow on the north side of the road, look for a cabin and a log barn with a bunch of deer antlers nailed to the gable end. Take the branch road between the house and barn, ride up the hollow, and you will come to the Burns place.
He figured he still had a ways to go.
He let Maude move out. Again he let his mind drift.
***
After a week had passed, after he’d arrived in Adamant and found work digging a house foundation, he went to the county jail. He had decided to explain to the sheriff what had happened, what had occurred in the Seven Mountains when he’d been set upon by the highwaymen. He stopped on the stoop, hesitated before opening the door. The jail was built from the same pale-gray limestone as the courthouse in town. He wondered, Am I weak, to feel the need to explain what I have done, to justify my actions? A stronger, harder man would feel no guilt at beating down a robber who’d tried to kill him, then riding off and leaving the man unconscious and perhaps badly hurt on the road. But he knew himself, and he figured he would not have peace of mind until he’d gotten it out in the open, told someone in authority what had taken place.
He knocked, went in the door, and introduced himself to the sheriff, a placid-looking, gray-haired man named Israel Payton. When the story was out, and Gideon stood there holding his hat in his hands, the sheriff came out from behind his desk. He shook his head and said No, he had heard nothing about such an incident. He had never even heard of a highwayman named William Jewell Jarrett. However, he assured Gideon, a bemused look on his face, no jury in Colerain County, no prosecuting attorney or judge, would consider it anything other than justified to strike back at a man who was trying to throttle you to death. The sheriff examined the yellowing bruises on Gideon’s neck. He looked Gideon up and down. You are a well-put-together young fellow, he said, with at least some sense of right and wrong. Can you read and write? Gideon nodded. The sheriff smiled. It so happens I need a deputy. You want the job?
Come, oh thou traveler unknown
Whom still I hold but cannot see
Nine
Abruptly Maude planted her feet. Ahead of them the road curved through a stand of tall laurel. Gideon spied a horse and rider half-screened by the slick green leaves. The rider called out, “Good day to you, fellow traveler!”
The man walked his horse forward out of the long green tunnel. He stopped twenty feet away. The horse was a dun, maybe fifteen hands tall, lean and fit. The rider was about Gideon’s age. He was clean-shaven, had dirt smudging his cheeks and chin, and wore a low-crowned carriage hat pitched back on his head.
The man rested his hands on his saddle’s pommel and looked at the star on Gideon’s coat. “Hullo there, sheriff.” The man lifted his head, sniffed at the air. “I believe we’re in for some weather.”
Gideon studied the man’s face. It appeared to be open and guileless. For some reason the man reminded him of himself two years back. He also made Gideon think of the Tattered Man. Maybe it was the way they’d met on the road. Or the fellow’s tone of voice, forward and conspicuously friendly. Well, this is all rather foolish, Gideon thought. It is only because I have been remembering that fight in the Seven Mountains that I feel suspicious toward this stranger. Was that what being a sheriff did to you, made you look at people as if they were all potential outlaws?
“Good day to you as well,” he said. “I am Gideon Stoltz, the county sheriff, as you noticed. Your name, please?”
“George England, sir.” The man fingered his hat brim. “From a little burg called Chinclaclamoose, ‘bout a day’s ride west of here. Tongue-twister of a name, ain’t it?” His smile broadened. “I am headed to Adamant in search of employment. Can a man find a job there?”
“The ironworks hires a lot of men, and there are mills and some other businesses.”
The young man nodded ami
ably. “So I’d heard. Pardon me for asking, but ain’t you a bit young to be a sheriff?”
Gideon frowned; decided not to answer that question. “Where did you stay last night?”
The man shot a thumb back over his shoulder. “At a farm up one of these here side hollers, four, maybe five miles down the valley.”
“What was the family’s name?”
The man shrugged. “I never ast. Paid for my lodging by splitting half a cord of wood. They worked me hard, but they fed me good.”
Gideon studied the man’s eyes. Sheriff Payton had told him to look carefully into the eyes of any person he spoke with. Little shadows or tightenings, twitches, coldnesses, hard blinking, a sudden oblique glance—they told you things the owner of those eyes might not want you to know. But there seemed nothing evasive or suspect in George England’s level, friendly gaze.
“Safe travels,” Gideon said. “I hope you find Adamant to your liking.”
The young man touched his hat brim again and passed by, still smiling.
***
The forest gave way to a hayfield on one side of the road, a picked cornfield on the other. At the edge of the cornfield three people gathered pumpkins. A woman in a gray cloak and bonnet waved to Gideon from the seat of a wagon. A young girl struggled at rolling a pumpkin half as big as she was. A boy took the pumpkin from the girl, hefted it to his shoulder, placed it on the wagon’s bed, then stood and stared at the strange passerby.
Gideon arrived at what must be the mouth of Burns Hollow. As True had said, the offshoot road led between a farmhouse and a log barn whose end bristled with racks of deer antlers. He followed the road, and after another mile through the woods he came to a pasture. A cow stood rubbing her chin on the top rail of a fence. A horse kept in with the cow whickered.
The cabin sat in a flat where three small drainages met. “The old ’uns put the house there on account of the spring,” True had told him. “I can taste that good freestone water yet.”
In front of the cabin Maude shied and danced sideways. Something hung from the gate post, and the breeze had shifted it. It took Gideon a moment before he identified the object: an owl, hanging upside down, dead. The bird’s broad brown wings dangled stiffly downward, and dried blood matted the pale speckled breast. The owl’s meat-hook beak gaped open. Feathery tufts, like little horns, adorned the owl’s head. The owl hung from a cord knotted to one feather-clad leg. The other leg was a bloody stump.
Smoke scudded sideways from the cabin’s chimney. One end of the log structure attached to a smaller building, a dozen feet square, stone-built to the gables: a relic of the days when the first thing a pioneer family built was a stronghold against Indian attack. Vertical slits interrupted the stone walls. Gideon wondered if he was being watched through one of the slits, perhaps over the sights of a gun.
He sat patiently on Maude. Made sure his face and the star on his coat stayed visible. After a while he heard footfalls, then the sound of a bar being lifted and set aside. The cabin’s door opened.
Gideon touched his hat. “Mrs. Burns, I am …”
“I know who you are.”
Her hair was long and gray. She wore a linen dress cut short enough to reveal heavy brogans on her feet. A shawl covered her shoulders. She held her arms crossed at her breast. Lifted an eyebrow above a dark and guarded eye. “What’s the sheriff want with me?”
“It has to do with Judge Biddle.” He hadn’t prepared a speech and wondered how to go on. “He killed himself last week.”
She nodded toward the field. “Turn your mare in with my stock. Then come in the house.”
But when I hated all my sin,
My dear Redeemer took me in
Ten
With a gourd dipper the old woman filled a kettle from a wooden bucket, then hung the kettle over the flames on a chain dangling from a crane. A pot hanging below a second crane gave off a mouthwatering aroma.
She asked over her shoulder, “Did you meet a stranger on the road? Riding a dun horse?”
“Yes.”
“At first I thought you was him coming back.” The old woman straightened. “Will you drink some coffee?”
“Coffee would sure taste good.”
“That young jake showed up here yesterday around dusk. Wanted a bed for the night. I turned him away.”
As the water came to a boil, Gram Burns ground coffee and put it into a stoneware pot. She lifted the kettle off its hook with a forked stick, tipped it using a pot holder, and filled the pot. She turned her deeply lined face toward Gideon. “You ask him where he spent the night?”
“He told me he stayed on a farm up a hollow four or five miles from here. He said he paid for his lodging by splitting some wood.”
Gram Burns snorted. “He didn’t stay on no farm. He slept out in the woods, and not too far from here. He was back again this morning, nosing around. I sent him packing.”
“How did you do that?”
“A rifle ball smacking into a tree next to your head sends a pretty strong message.” The old woman narrowed her eyes at him. “You call yourself a sheriff? You should have arrested him when you had the chance.”
“And what law did he break?”
“No doubt he has broke a whole book of laws. Just look at him and listen to his palaver, and you can tell.”
Gram Burns’s suspiciousness made Gideon’s own mistrust of the traveler seem mild. “You can’t arrest a man for asking for lodging or for sleeping in the woods,” he said. Not even, he thought, for playing loose and fast with the truth when addressing the sheriff. On the other hand, a person could possibly be arrested for endangering someone else’s life with a firearm.
The old woman fetched the pot and poured the steaming coffee into two mugs. She lowered herself onto the bench across from Gideon. “I like my coffee perishing hot and devilish strong. If that don’t suit, water yours down from that jug.”
Gideon found the coffee just the way he liked it. He looked around the cabin. Carved horn spoons and wooden butter molds hung on the walls. Pumpkin rinds and apple snits lay drying on a rack near the fire. Bunches of dried plants were tied to square-headed nails driven into the ceiling beams. His eyes stopped on something brown sitting on a wooden chest among a scattering of small objects: the owl’s severed foot.
“So the judge killed himself,” the old woman said. “How’d he do it?”
“He shot himself. He used a shotgun.”
“Guess he wanted to make sure.”
“And I want to find out why,” Gideon said.
The old woman stared at him. “Why are you here talking to me?”
“I want to look at events from his past. I want to learn about anything that could have made him decide that life wasn’t worth living anymore.”
“What is it you want to know?”
“Your son—my father-in-law—told me that you saw the Reverend Thomas McEwan hang.”
She continued to stare at him.
He felt flustered at having broached the subject so baldly. “I just wondered—the hanging—if it might be in some way connected with Judge Biddle killing himself.”
“Yes, I saw them hang the reverend.” Gram Burns brought her mug to her lips. She studied Gideon through dark eyes—eyes that reminded him of True’s. “Bet there was a thousand folks in Adamant that day.” The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deepened. “Afterward, some wouldn’t talk of it, as if they hoped that would make it all go away. But the reverend didn’t want anyone to forget what they’d seen, nor what he had done. And he’d want me to tell you about it. Yes, I believe he would.”
She rose and refilled their mugs, then eased herself back onto the bench. “I’ll tell you the whole story,” she said. “And I’ll tell it to you straight. But there’s some things you need to know, you bein’ a stranger in this place.”
She took a long sip of the coffee and held it in her mouth for a while. Gideon found himself doing the same, wondering if its bitterness was necessary for the tale
.
“I was born down in Adams County. My pa was the restless sort; he always figured the land was better in the next valley over, or the one after that. He didn’t prefer having neighbors too close at hand.
“We come up here to Colerain County in seventy-five. ’Course, it wasn’t a county back then. It was a wilderness. There was game everywhere—deer and bear and turkey and elk. Indian paths went through here. It was the Indians’ traveling territory and hunting ground. You can bet they didn’t like the settlers moving in. They wanted to put an arrow in you, or brain you with a tomahawk or a club—or, if you were a woman or a girl, carry you off and make you a squaw.
“We was here for a while, clearing off this land. Then the war came. We had to leave in seventy-eight. They called it the Big Runaway. You heard of that?”
Gideon nodded. The Big Runaway had taken place during the War of Independence, when British officers led Indian raids against settlements on the frontier, causing a great loss of life and forcing people to flee to more settled areas south and east.
“I was ten years old then. We stayed away most of a year, but as soon as things quieted down, we came back.
“I grew up on this place. I didn’t get sick and die, like two of my brothers and three of my sisters did. I got married and started having babies of my own. I married a good man, Ezekiel Burns. He was steady, put his mind to his work, didn’t drink or chase other women.
“When we heard they were putting up an ironworks over to Panther, Zeke went and got himself a job. We loaded our flitten in the wagon, and the children walked alongside, the two that was old enough. I carried the baby. That would be David, your wife’s pa.” She looked over the rim of her mug at Gideon.
“Please go on.”
“We got one of the cabins they put up—the same one Davey lives in now. My husband, he helped cut the stone they used to build the furnace and the ironmaster’s house. When they finished building the big house, I went to work there.
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