“He won’t be bothering you again,” he said.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
He lifted my pinkie. “You see this little finger?” he said.
I caught my breath. He did not need to say the rest, but when he did…
“There is more greatness in this little finger,” he whispered, his eyes shining, “than in all the Roscoe Ollerenshaws of the world. He is not worthy of your tears, Silas.”
It took us about three hours to get back to Rosasharon. We could have gotten there faster, but we wound through the forest slowly.
3
AS WE GOT NEARER TO THE TOWN, the trees began to thin and the wild fields slowly gave way to farmland, bordered by tall hedges and fences. The horses, sensing they were getting closer to stables, quickened their pace. I could feel my heart beating faster, too. A part of me just wanted to ride back through the forest into the Woods to hide in the deep blue night, not seeing or talking to anybody ever again.
It was at this moment that Sheriff Chalfont slowed his horse down and shuffled over to me. Mittenwool, who was walking next to me, moved aside to give him room. I could tell, from just this simple gesture, that he liked the sheriff.
“How are you doing there, Silas?” the sheriff asked me softly.
“I’m fine,” I answered.
“How’s your nose? We’ll have the doctor look at it when we get back to town.”
I shook my head. “Oh, it’s fine, thank you. How’s your arm?”
He smiled. “It’s fine. Thank you.”
We rode in silence for a while, and then he turned to me. “I was wondering, Silas, do you have anyone back in Boneville you’d like us to contact? Any relatives?”
“No. I don’t have anyone.”
“Friends? Neighbors?”
“There’s a hermit named Havelock lives about a mile away from us,” I answered, “but he’s not a friend, exactly.”
He nodded. His white mare, who seemed taken by Pony, bumped her muzzle into Pony’s neck. We watched in silence as the two horses exchanged a series of gentle nips and pushes.
“Well, you know,” he said, “you can stay with me and my wife, Jenny, in Rosasharon, if you want. At least until you’re ready to go home.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You can call me Desi.”
I cleared my throat. “Desi.”
At this point, we had lagged quite a bit behind the rest of the group, but we made no effort to catch up.
“Thank you for everything you did, by the way,” I then said. “For coming with me to the cave, and all that. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had the chance to see him again.”
His face fell. His voice was raspy. “I’m glad you got that chance, Silas. I’m just sorry we didn’t get there sooner….” His voice trailed off.
“There was nothing that could have been done differently. From the moment this pony came back for me, this was how it was going to be.”
He looked at me like he was going to tell me something, but he either couldn’t think of the right words or decided against saying anything at all, for he simply nodded sadly and turned his face away. I knew there was something on his mind, though. I knew he’d heard what Pa had said to me. It took him another few minutes to work up the nerve.
“Silas, do you mind if I ask you something?” he finally inquired, almost in a whisper.
“Not at all.”
“Who is Mittenwool?”
I was ready with my answer.
“Oh, he’s nobody,” I said, shrugging. “He’s just an imaginary friend. I guess that’s what you’d call him. That’s what my pa called him.”
Sheriff Chalfont smiled, almost like he’d expected that answer.
“Ahh,” he replied, looking straight ahead of him. “My sister used to have those. Imaginary friends. When she was little, she had two ladies who would come and have tea with her every day. She called them her companions. It was very sweet. I was a terrible big brother, I must admit. I used to tease her about it. It always made her cry that I couldn’t see them, too….” He drifted off toward the end of that sentence.
“What happened to them?” I asked. “Your sister’s companions?”
“Her companions? Oh, well,” he answered, sighing. “She outgrew them, you could say. Or at least she stopped talking about them, when she was about sixteen or so, a few years before we moved out west.” He paused to see if I was interested in what he was saying, and when he realized I was, he continued. “My family was from up north originally. Our father was a minister, a man fiercely committed to abolition, and he moved our family to Kansas so we could be free-staters. About a year after we got there, though, poor Matilda, my sister, got caught in the crossfire between some border ruffians and a couple of jayhawkers. Just about broke my heart, as you can imagine.”
I looked at him. “They stay with us, you know.”
He scratched his nose. “They sure do.”
“No. Really. They do.” I didn’t want to keep looking at him just then. His eyes seemed too eager. “That connection between people, it doesn’t get broken. They hold on to us, just like we hold on to them. Did she like plum pudding, your sister? I bet she did.”
I wasn’t looking at him directly now, as I said, but I could see, out of the corner of my eye, that his mouth opened a little, and his eyebrows came together in the middle of his forehead.
“She did, as a matter of fact,” he answered slowly.
“I bet there were times when she was sorry she ate more than her fair share.”
He swallowed hard and tried to laugh off the tremor in his chin. He seemed at a loss for words.
I reassured him. “Who doesn’t love pudding?”
It was at that moment that I saw Matilda Chalfont, who had been walking nearby, smile at me before disappearing into the trees.
Sheriff Chalfont had taken his hat off and was scratching his head. Finally, he put his hat back on, pinched his nose, sniffed deeply, and coughed into his fist.
“My wife is going to like you, Silas,” he said, his voice catching a little.
“Why do you say that?”
“I just know she will.”
“Does she make pudding?”
This made him laugh a little. “She actually makes wonderful pudding.”
“I’ve never had pudding myself,” I answered.
And then suddenly, out of nowhere, I started to cry. Not just slow tears rolling down my cheeks, but that shaking, sobbing crying where my head started hurting and my eyes couldn’t see.
He leaned over and put his arm around me.
“You’re going to be all right,” he said kindly. “Everything is going to be fine. I promise. My Jenny’s going to take good care of you.”
I ran my hands across my face, grateful for the soft words, and we rode together silently for the rest of the way back, our two horses side by side. It wasn’t until we got into town and caught up with the others that the sheriff took note of Roscoe Ollerenshaw’s petrified expression on the back of the draft horse in front of us. His face was cast down, blanched of color, his eyes closed tightly. He was trembling.
The sheriff nudged me.
“He looks like he’s seen a ghost,” he remarked lightly.
I could not help but smile.
4
THE CAPTURE OF ROSCOE OLLERENSHAW was big news, both in the Middle West and in the Northeast, from where he’d come originally. A newspaperman journeyed all the way from New York City to Sheriff Chalfont’s house a few days after our return, just to interview me about my role in the capture of this notorious criminal. News had spread about the “Demon Horse” that had come charging up the creek, providing just the distraction the lawmen needed to gain the upper hand in the gunfight. I
t was Rufe Jones who spread that colorful story, talkative as ever even in the county jailhouse. Several years later, while still in the penitentiary, he would write a memoir called Five Years an Outlaw, Being an Account of My Former Life Among Counterfeiters, Smugglers, and Boodle Carriers.
The newspaperman, who had brought a wet-plate camera with him, took a picture of Pony to print in his gazette. He asked me what the name of my horse was, and I thought of all the various names I had discarded. I answered, simply, Pony, but I could tell from the newspaperman’s face that this was an unsatisfactory reply. That is why, I’m assuming, he kept the more dramatic “Demon Horse” for the newspaper headline.
After he took the picture, we chatted about his camera for a while. He was impressed by my knowledge of pinion gears and albumen mixes. When I told him that my pa had used a combination of iron salts, silver nitrate, and tartaric acid for his solution, he remarked, What a brilliant innovation on the Herschel method! It made me proud to think of how ahead of his time Pa had been.
It was from the newspapers that I learned more details about Roscoe Ollerenshaw’s dozen years of criminal activity. His counterfeiting ring had extended all the way from the cave in the Hollow to the Black Swamp and east to Baltimore. All in all, five hundred thousand dollars in counterfeit banknotes had been confiscated, their design lifted from currency printed by the American Bank Note Company, whose intricate shadings had been thought to be uncounterfeitable. This would have made them especially valuable, had they ever been distributed. According to the Ohio Counterfeit Detector of 1861, “Of the hundreds of counterfeit banknotes we have examined, we unhesitatingly report that these are the best we have ever seen. A work of pure genius.”
Pure genius.
The name of Martin Bird was not mentioned, for which I was grateful. Nor was Mac Boat brought up anywhere. Actually, nobody ever said that name to me again.
One name that did come up, for it was an unresolved mystery to Sheriff Chalfont, was that of Marshal Farmer. The sheriff spent some time afterward trying to track down the old lawman, who I had described with such accuracy and who had disappeared so inexplicably. In the end, when he found no trace of him, Sheriff Chalfont concluded that the old man must have died from his injuries in the Woods somewhere. Naturally, I did not tell the sheriff what I had seen in the cave. There was no reason to. Neither he nor the deputy saw what I saw, of course. Nor had Rufe Jones, hiding under a blanket waiting to make his escape from the cave. And whatever Ollerenshaw saw or didn’t see, he never breathed a word about it to anyone. After both Rufe Jones and Doc Parker testified against him at his trial, Ollerenshaw was sentenced to life in prison. It seems the judge he’d been so sure that he could bribe did not come through for him, after all. A few months after his conviction, it was reported that Ollerenshaw started hearing voices inside his cell. He was moved to an asylum for the criminally insane, which is the last I ever heard about him.
It was around the time of the trial that I came across an article listing, in the tiniest of fonts, the names of all of Roscoe Ollerenshaw’s victims over the years. Toward the very bottom of the list was the name of Enoch Farmer, a U.S. marshal, killed while pursuing Ollerenshaw’s gang into the Woods near the Hollow Forest in April 1854. Six years before I met him.
Whatever fates caused my path to cross with Marshal Farmer’s, I am forever grateful. I would not have found Pa had it not been for him. I hope, now that Roscoe Ollerenshaw has been brought to justice, old Marshal Farmer has found some peace. I hope his back no longer hurts him. And that his canteen stays full with whatever makes him happy.
5
I WAS SITTING AT BREAKFAST one morning, about a week or so after arriving at the Chalfonts’, when Jenny Chalfont looked out the red-framed window of her pretty white clapboard house and said, “Oh my. Now, what is that?”
I was still shy around her, so I smiled politely and looked back down at my plate of pudding. I was not used to the company of ladies, truth be told. I was not used to any company in general, or a house that smelled of freshly baked bread and the occasional wisp of sweet perfume. And I was unused to the tender ease with which people could talk to one another. As I’ve said, Pa was a quiet man by nature. He talked, but he did not chat. My longest exchanges had always been with Mittenwool.
Sheriff Chalfont’s house was at the end of a lane with two other homes, up the hill from the center of Rosasharon. The stables were in the back, which is where we kept Pony. In front was a garden with a young oak tree, surrounded by rosinweed and yellow bunchflowers. The kitchen window faced the garden.
“What is it, darling?” Sheriff Chalfont asked, looking up from his plate at Jenny.
They had not been married long, and talked to one another with the gentle merriment that I hoped to have myself with someone someday.
“It’s a dog,” she answered, smiling. Her eyes, dark and deeply set, seemed always on the verge of laughing. “At least, I think it’s a dog. He’s just sitting there in the garden. Looks like he’s been through some hard times, poor thing.”
This piqued my curiosity, of course, and I went to the window.
Outside, sitting on the grass among the flowers, looking at the house, was Argos.
“That’s impossible!” I cried. It was perhaps the most animated the Chalfonts had seen me so far. My hands flew up to my face, and I actually laughed. “It’s Argos! It’s my dog, Argos!”
“What?”
I bounded out the door, and Argos came bouncing over to me in his wobble-legged way, wagging his rat tail and barking joyfully. I threw myself to my knees and hugged him, letting him lick the tears on my face. I’ve never felt such bliss as I felt right then and there.
How did he come to be here? The Chalfonts could only surmise that, after taking a bite out of the blue-fingered man’s leg, he followed the man through the Woods to the cave, where he then picked up my scent to Rosasharon. He was a hound dog, after all. It made sense.
I, of course, knew that it was Mittenwool who had guided him here. Mittenwool was standing right behind Argos, his arms crossed triumphantly, a self-satisfied smirk on his face. He had been absent for a few days, though I had assumed it was because he, too, was shy and unaccustomed to being around people. But now I knew what he’d been up to.
ELEVEN
O my son, look thee out a kingdom equal to
and worthy of thyself.
—Plutarch
1
THE CONNECTIONS THAT BIND us are astounding, as I’ve noted. The invisible threads weave in and around us, and tug at us in places and at times that we may not ever see, or that only make sense over time. This is what I have found.
The way we discovered that Jenny Chalfont had known my mother as a child was this. One late afternoon we were sitting in the parlor, and Jenny was reading aloud to us, as she did every evening before supper. It was a nice custom. Desimonde would smoke his pipe, a slight curl of smoke rising from the edge of his mouth as he listened, and I would sit rapt, spellbound, with Argos’s head resting on my lap.
Anyway, we were sitting in the parlor, and Jenny finished a story from a book by Edgar Allan Poe.
“It is the beating of his hideous heart,” she recited, then closed the book dramatically. “The end!”
Desimonde and I both gasped, followed by clapping.
“That was wonderful!” Desimonde said.
“I may never sleep again,” Jenny quipped, fanning herself. And added comically, “Should I read another?”
“No more mysteries, please!” answered Desimonde, theatrically clutching at his chest. “My heart can’t take it.”
“Says the brave sheriff of Rosasharon!” Jenny replied quickly, putting the book back on the shelf.
As I’ve mentioned, this kind of patter was still a novelty to me. I found myself smiling a lot, and nodding agreeably, but not knowing how to b
e myself around them, kind as they were.
“How about instead of another story, you play us a song?” Desimonde suggested, taking a long puff of his pipe. “Jenny plays the harpsichord, Silas. She’s a woman of many talents.”
“Well, I don’t know about many talents,” she demurred in her self-deprecating way. “Let’s just say I can play five songs fairly well, and ten songs very badly.”
I laughed.
“In fact, I daresay Mr. Poe could write a terrifying story about my playing!” she continued, sitting down at the harpsichord. “The Tell-Tale Ear. The story of a young woman who confesses to murdering a song.” She started to flip through the pages of her music book as she spoke, and then cast her gleeful eyes on me.
“Silas, I couldn’t help but notice you brought a violin with you,” she said. “Why don’t you take it out and play along with me? I bet you’re really good.”
I felt my cheeks turning red.
“I don’t play,” I answered quickly. “The violin was my mother’s.”
“Ohh,” she answered, smiling sadly.
Up until now, I had not talked much about myself to the Chalfonts. Whenever they had asked me simple questions about my life, I had answered vaguely, especially about Pa. And after I mentioned that my mother had died the day I was born, there wasn’t too much left for them to inquire about.
“Well, if you ever want to learn how to play, I’m sure Jenny can teach you,” Desimonde said.
“Me?” cried Jenny.
“Didn’t you used to play the violin?”
“When I was a little girl!” she laughed, once again flipping through the pages of her music book. “And I was absolutely the worst player my teacher ever had! I’m convinced the only reason she continued teaching me was because she had no choice: I was her neighbor. Which is probably why she was thrilled when we moved out of Philadelphia.”
“My mother was from Philadelphia,” I offered casually.
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