Gideon saw the crease running from the ironmaster’s nose to the corner of his mouth deepen and darken.
“In the courthouse in Adamant,” the preacher said, “in November of 1805, the Reverend McEwan was convicted of murdering Nathaniel Thompson with a blow to the head, and then secretly burying his body in the parsonage garden. Justice—man’s justice—was swiftly dispensed, and McEwan was hanged. It is said that he struggled at the rope’s end for nigh onto a quarter of an hour, before his body, which had been powerful in life, gave up the ghost.”
A murmur passed through the congregation.
“The Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, recognized our sad and perilous condition when he said: ‘From within, out of the hearts of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, and evil eye, blasphemy, pride, and foolishness: All these things come from within, and defile the man.’
“But Thomas McEwan,” the preacher continued, “went to his death a forgiven soul. For as surely as the Bible tells us that all men are sinners, it also reveals the path to divine forgiveness and final salvation, saying: ‘For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness: and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.’”
The preacher’s voice strengthened. “God promises that all who repent their sins, who call upon the Lord for forgiveness, shall receive it.
“Before his life was forfeit, as he stood on a cart beneath the gallows tree, a rope around his neck, McEwan confessed his sins—of evil thought, obstinacy and pride, cruelty and violence. He confessed to the murder of Nathaniel Thompson, although in this we must entertain the possibility that he was deceived—not by the guiles of the Common Enemy, the Prince of the Power of the Air, but by one who lives among us still.”
The minister paused. The congregation sat in silence.
“We sometimes think we can hear souls shrieking around us. Souls which have become debased; souls belonging to our brothers and sisters whose lives were cruelly and unfairly cut short. We hear people speak of ghosts and phantoms, spirits and revenants. Some of you here believe you have seen the spirit of a man called Calhoun, who labored in the ironworks until he met with a deadly accident and was immolated in the furnace.
“Why do we believe in ghosts? Why do they appear before our eyes, their cries assail our ears? Is there a shifting, barely glimpsed world that parallels the one in which we dwell? Or is it our own guilt that creates these spectral beings, our own deep and abiding guilt that calls them forth and presents them to our senses?”
At that moment the side door to the church opened. A figure stood in the little-used entry, lit from behind by the low autumn sun: a man stooped and bent, leaning on a staff, wearing a broad-brimmed hat from which a long white buck tail dangled.
A collective gasp came from the churchgoers. As Adonijah Thompson turned his head to look at the visitant, his face became open to Gideon’s scrutiny. The ironmaster’s eyes began to blink rapidly. The skin over his cheekbones paled.
The stooped man eased the door shut. His clothes were ragged and stained. His head was held low. The extravagantly decorated hat shaded and obscured his face; beneath its brim a white beard could be glimpsed. Gripping his staff, the man hobbled to the nearest pew, a front row bench where no one else sat, and lowered himself onto it.
“The source of murder,” the preacher went on, “as of all human perfidy, is that Original Sin, which the hearts of men are full of, the ever-flowing spring that sends forth its perverse and wicked stream.”
Slowly the ironmaster rose. He stared at the man seated alone at the front of the church. Adonijah Thompson’s hands trembled. His shoulders shook. He cast quick glances about him, at this man, that woman, then back at the old man in the buck tail hat. The ironmaster picked up his own hat and clutched it to his chest. His mouth worked convulsively. He began stumbling along the pew, the people shrinking back or half-rising to let him pass. “No,” he groaned. He stopped to stare again at the ragged man sitting hunched over in the front row. “No!”
The ironmaster turned and staggered up the aisle toward the door at the rear of the sanctuary.
Gideon edged down his own pew, reached the aisle, and turned to follow the gray-clad back. He felt the eyes of the congregation on him: people he had never seen before, people he vaguely recognized, and people he knew, among them True’s parents and brothers and sisters-in-law. Their eyes were wide and filled with fear.
Death, like an overflowing stream
Sweeps us away; our life’s a dream …
Thirty-Seven
Maude soon caught up with the gray-clad man striding down the blue road. Gideon slowed her to a walk. Thompson was breathing heavily. He looked up, blinked. “What are you doing here?”
When Gideon did not reply, the ironmaster turned his face back to the road. He stared straight ahead. He kept walking. “Get off my place,” he said.
“I will keep you company. In case you want to confess anything to me.”
They continued on. Anyone seeing them might have concluded that they were two friends out for a Sabbath-day constitutional, one walking and the other horseback.
They passed the furnace. Smoke rose from the stack. The deep-throated roaring of the blast reached their ears. A man’s voice could be heard from inside the building, calling out for stone and coal.
The ironmaster muttered to himself. Spittle clung to the corners of his mouth. He looked up at Gideon, then stopped abruptly. “Why should I confess anything to you? Clear off my ironworks now, you double-Dutch bastard.”
“Mr. Thompson, you know that I am the sheriff of Colerain County. I go where I need to go to see that justice is served.”
“Go roll your hoop, boy.” The ironmaster strode onward.
Gideon clucked to Maude, who resumed her steady pace.
They came to the big house. The ironmaster bounded up the steps and went inside. As he sat waiting, Gideon gave Maude the reins. She began shearing off grass next to the road. Her head moved from side to side, her lips exploring the tussocks, gathering the withered tan blades into her mouth. She blew through her nose, a sound of contentment. Gideon looked up. Clouds were creeping in from the west, turning the sky to milk.
The ironmaster came out of the house. He had taken off his coat, revealing a white shirt with bloused sleeves. He wore knee-high black boots, brilliantly polished, with silver-roweled spurs. He was hatless, his hair queued up behind his head. He ran down the steps. Maude raised her head. The ironmaster strode up to Gideon. He drew a pistol from his belt, cocked the hammer, and aimed the gun at Gideon’s breast. Gideon felt heat wash upward through his body. His pulse pounded in his head. The pistol in his boot and the rifle in its scabbard seemed miles away. Fool. He felt a stab of grief at how he had failed True yet again. He had not taken her warnings seriously enough. He would die at the hands of this man. It would destroy her.
The pistol’s octagonal muzzle framed a round black hole. Gideon stared into the ironmaster’s eyes. They were fierce and unyielding. Then slowly they became dull and inward-looking. Adonijah Thompson’s chest heaved. “Dear God,” he said. He turned the pistol and placed its muzzle against his temple. He pulled the trigger. The hammer fell. If there was powder in the pan, it failed to ignite. The ironmaster slowly lowered his hand and dropped the pistol in the grass. He turned and staggered off.
Gideon took a deep breath. He sat up straight and gathered in the reins. He felt the reassuring link between himself and Maude, the charge of empathy going through the reins from his hands to her mouth and coming back to him again. He held the reins lightly but firmly, as if holding two small birds, one in each hand, not wishing to harm them and not willing to let them fly free. He felt Maude playing with the bit, biting it softly and then releasing it. He clucked to her, and she began to walk. His hips moved in synchrony with her limbs. It felt like he was walking through her.
Together they followed the gray man who went quickly and disjoi
ntedly down a road through a grove of tall pine trees until he came to the stable.
When the ironmaster emerged through the open double door, he sat bareback on the stallion Vagabond. Glistening swirls marked the horse’s black coat. The stallion’s nostrils flared, and his neck arched. He flicked his ears toward Maude. She gave a whicker and cut a little flirt to one side, and the stallion whinnied in a guttural way and stepped toward her. The ironmaster, using the reins and the pressure of his legs, turned the stallion and made him hew to a straight line down the road, headed away from the ironworks.
Maude ambled forward to walk alongside the black.
Gideon said, “You paid George Baker two hundred dollars to kill your brother Nathaniel. You told him he could find Nat in the logging camp at the head of Egypt Hollow, where you had stashed him away. Baker went there and stabbed your brother to death. Baker is now my prisoner. He is prepared to testify that you paid him to kill Nat.”
The ironmaster stared ahead between the stallion’s ears.
“Your brother is not the first person you have killed,” Gideon said. “Many years ago, you shot an Indian boy to death not far from this spot, while he made a sound like a turkey, trying to lure you in to an ambush.”
The ironmaster looked at Gideon, his eyes wide.
“Then in the autumn of 1805 you killed some other man, whose corpse was later dug up in the garden of the parsonage by Sheriff Bathgate, and misidentified as your brother Nat, while Judge Biddle and the Reverend McEwan stood watching.”
“I didn’t kill that man.” The ironmaster took both reins in one hand. He combed the fingers of his other hand through the stallion’s mane: a strong hand, age-spotted, the tendons sharp beneath the skin. “One of my workers. A woodcutter. He died of some disease, probably the diphtheria, in a bark shanty down the valley. Hadn’t worked for me much above two weeks. He came from away, no next of kin that anyone knew of, no one to miss him.” The ironmaster looked down the road. “He was the same size and build as Nat, had the same color hair. I dug him up out of the shallow grave they’d laid him in and carried him to Panther in an ore wagon. I had sent Nat to go work for McEwan in the first place. Told him to provoke the old preacher. It wasn’t hard, let me tell you.”
He smiled his tight upside-down smile. “That overbearing bastard got what he deserved. What he so richly deserved.” The ironmaster spat. “He spoke with such piety about God and Jesus and ‘loving thy fellow man.’ An arrogant bully. Proud as a louse.”
“At the trial,” Gideon said, “a witness, a teamster named Samuel Lingle, swore he saw a man in a dark robe and a white cap, at night under the full moon, digging in the garden at the parsonage.”
“Lingle worked for me. I had him walk by that night and then tell the sheriff what he’d seen. I myself had seen the reverend out one morning early, standing in his garden, wearing his robe and cap. That night I stole into his house as he slept. I put on his robe and cap. I went back out and buried the dead man—I’d dressed him in Nat’s clothes, put Nat’s ring on his finger. I made sure he had wounds on his head.”
“Your brother left this place …”
“The day Nat came home and told me the reverend had struck him with a maul, I almost cried out with joy. I spirited Nat away, made sure no one saw him. I gave him enough money that he could have set himself up handsomely. He agreed to never come back. We shook hands and said goodbye—forever.”
“How could you do such a thing? Your deception caused Thomas McEwan to be wrongly hanged. You cheated Hiram Biddle and Rachel McEwan out of a life together. In the end, your treachery drove the judge to take his own life.”
“You should have seen how McEwan talked himself into believing he’d gone sleepwalking and buried my brother. Oh, he was guilty. He might as well have killed Nat when he hit him with that maul. And the honorable Hiram Biddle, the high-and-mighty judge, proved no more perceptive than the self-righteous Bible thumper.”
“It’s true the preacher could have been brought up on charges for assaulting your brother,” Gideon said. “But what you did was much worse.”
“He got his comeuppance. All that rigmarole about confession and salvation. No. He burns in hell.”
“As you will.”
The ironmaster’s mouth twitched.
“This has preyed on you for thirty years,” Gideon said. “Just as it preyed on Judge Biddle.” He reached into his boot and drew out the pistol. He cocked back the hammer and pointed the gun at the ironmaster. “I arrest you for murder. Not for what you did thirty years ago, but for hiring George Baker to kill your brother.”
The ironmaster stopped his horse. “Tell me. In the church. Who was that?”
Gideon kept silent. Would Adonijah Thompson now submit? Had he swallowed the lie Gideon told, about Gib Baker incriminating him? Did he think the state’s attorney would now have no choice but to prosecute him? Did he believe his brother’s ghost had really come back?
Or was it now dawning on him that Gideon had played a trick almost as devious as the one the ironmaster himself had played thirty years past?
Gideon stared into Adonijah Thompson’s eyes. A weary look overcame the ironmaster’s gaunt, sharp-featured face. It reminded Gideon of the look on Hiram Biddle’s face, as the judge had stood in the brush, holding in his hand a dead grouse, on that last day when they went hunting together.
“You’ll not shut me up in jail,” the ironmaster said. “You’ll not put me on trial or hang me.” He straightened in the saddle. “Go ahead. Shoot me dead.”
Gideon had wondered from the beginning if he would be capable of that. He thought about what this man might have done to True. He thought of all the people that Adonijah Thompson had harmed. How he had probably sent George Baker to Hammertown, to watch for the Dutch Sheriff and kill him if he could.
They sat looking at each other.
“So. You will not release me.” The ironmaster looked at Maude. “That’s a nice mare. You ride her well. But I don’t think she can catch this black.”
“She has a big heart, and she doesn’t give up,” Gideon said. “We will follow you as far as we must.”
“Then follow me to hell.” The ironmaster spurred the stallion, and the black horse lunged forward.
Gideon didn’t have to ask Maude to follow.
The ironmaster never looked back as he galloped down the road. After a ways, he turned the stallion off into the brush. Vagabond jumped over rocks and fallen limbs and crashed through brambles. Gideon slowed Maude. He put away the pistol. He let Maude pick her way over and around the worst of the obstacles. By now the ironmaster was out of sight. Gideon followed by sound, then by finding the trampled brush.
The stallion’s hoofprints turned onto a path. The path left the brushlands and descended through forest to the bank of Panther Creek, then turned east.
The creek ran high and fast. The water surged and braided itself in white strands around rocks. The path came to a hill that the creek bent around to the left. The stallion’s tracks led up the steep hill. On top of the hill Gideon found a clearing with a rock face at its edge. The creek went brawling along in its bed, sixty feet below. The ironmaster could have ridden off through the woods downhill and away from the creek. But a slew of tracks told Gideon that Adonijah Thompson had asked the stallion to do something, and the black had refused him.
Gideon rode all around the edge of the clearing to make sure. No tracks led off into the forest. The only thing the stallion could have done was go over the cliff and into the creek below.
He looked but didn’t see anything, only Panther Creek raging past. He turned Maude away from the brink. He leaned back in the saddle as she muscled her way down the hill. At the bottom of the hill, the path led back to the water’s edge.
Rapids in the creek roared. White water sideswiped boulders and spumed into the air and toppled onto rocks.
As they followed the path, the creek calmed and broadened. They came around a bend. The stallion stood in the shallows
, his head low. Blood ran down his flanks from gashes made by the ironmaster’s spurs. His sides heaved. He stood on three legs. One front leg was broken. The jagged bone stuck out through the hide.
An empty tale, a morning flow’r,
Cut down and withered in an hour
Thirty-Eight
Gideon swallowed against the lump in his throat. “What a noble, beautiful animal. I got down off of Maude and ended his suffering.”
Horatio Foote rose from his chair and broke up the blackened logs in the fireplace with a poker. It was a raw, rainy night on the cusp between fall and winter. The headmaster placed a log on the embers. It caught fire quickly, flames crackling and leaping up its sides.
Gideon took a sip of the headmaster’s whiskey. He pictured again the black stallion, so cruelly used. He thought of the lives destroyed by what Adonijah Thompson had done thirty years ago, and the crimes he had recently committed.
He thought of his mother, dead now a dozen years, the good memories of her hidden away in his mind. Could he find them again? He thought of David, tried to picture the bright and cheery baby and saw only the still, vacant face. He thought of True, and his heart filled. What could he do to ease her pain?
He could love her. Maybe it would be enough.
“When I got back to Panther,” he said, “my deputy had arrived. We went down the creek with some men. We found the ironmaster’s body in an oxbow a mile downstream from his horse.”
Gideon watched the flames lick up from the fire and vanish into the chimney’s maw.
Many questions now had answers. Gideon had even figured out how his brother-in-law Jesse Burns had been linked to the murdered Yost Kepler. This morning, in a store in Adamant, Gideon had encountered a Dutch man newly arrived in Colerain County. The man told Gideon that he had bought a farm in Sinking Valley, where many Pennsylfawnisch Deitsch were settling. The man had a beard lining his jaw and wore plain clothes, one suspender crossing his breast, and a broad-brimmed black hat. To Gideon’s questions he replied in halting English, in an accent thicker than nudelsupp, “This man, Chesse Burns, a farm for me he found.” It turned out that Jesse got a commission whenever he located property for some Dutchman to buy. Gideon wondered what would happen when word got out that Jesse Burns was bringing in the damn Dutch. He certainly wouldn’t be the one to tattle on his brother-in-law, but no doubt the truth would out.
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