“We have no end of comments about circumstances,” Woolford interjected after the fifth witness, “but not a word on the criminal acts of the accused.”
“Mr. Lister was found bending over poor Frasier’s body, the boy’s blood on his hands,” Ramsey snapped. “The night Evering died, everyone was accounted for except Lister. He killed Evering because of his hatred for everything English, more particularly because Evering had doubtlessly discovered his lie. He killed Frasier because Frasier had discovered evidence of the first crime.”
“There are other circumstances to be considered,” Woolford declared. “I call on Mr. Lister’s advocate to explain,” He pointed to Duncan, in the front row.
“McCallum?” Ramsey gasped. “Impossible! You cannot ask a prisoner to-”
Woolford ignored Ramsey, motioned Duncan to rise. “There are other motives to consider,” the ranger said, “and other men who were unaccounted for the nights Evering and Frasier were murdered. And there is the science of their deaths. Science does not lie.” He addressed Ramsey now. “Science, like justice, instructs the truth.”
Ramsey’s anger seemed to subside. Here, at least, was the kind of talk Plato would have preferred at a trial.
Duncan quickly led them through the scientific evidence, explaining how it proved Evering had been killed in his cabin with two blows from a hammer, how Frasier had also died of a hammer blow, a single blow to the head. Before being killed, Evering had smashed one of Sarah’s dosing vials of laudanum, had, as Sarah could confirm, been allowing her to awaken, had been speaking with her of her plight and of the Ramsey Company. Jacob-another friend of Sarah, Duncan added-had died when his path had crossed that of the Company.
“The ferryman? He was a heathen,” Ramsey scoffed, his patience paper-thin now. “Two killings will be sufficient to stretch this man’s neck.”
“There were four murders, counting Sergeant Fitch,” Duncan rejoined, speaking to the assembly in front of him. “All arising out of Ramsey Company affairs.”
“Do not presume,” Ramsey simmered, “that by digressing you will save a minute of this killer’s life.”
“I call my first witness,” Duncan said in reply.
Ramsey pounded his gavel angrily. “You will not mock this tribunal, sir. You have no authority!”
“I call my first witness,” interrupted Woolford in a loud voice. The officer gave Duncan an inquisitive nod.
“Reverend Zettlemeyer of the German Flats mission,” Duncan announced. Woolford repeated the name.
The Moravian, dressed for the pulpit, emerged from the back of the assembly. Duncan lost no time in asking him about the settlers in the lands between Edentown and the mission. Of his own accord, Zettlemeyer produced a piece of paper-a map. When Ramsey objected, Woolford ordered Duncan to proceed. Pike, sitting between two soldiers on a front bench, rose as if to leave; his sergeant, the Irishman, blocked his path. The major hissed an order. The sergeant pointed him back to the bench. Duncan held the Moravian’s map for all to see, pointing first to two crosses marking German Flats in the north and Edentown in the south.
“What are the little squares?” he asked the missionary. There were over two dozen squares scattered around the map.
“Each is a homestead, a farm,” the German replied, “all those within forty miles of the mission.”
“Who has such a map?”
“I made this copy from two identical ones I sent to Reverend Arnold four months ago.”
“We must know all our neighbors,” Ramsey said, as if in protest. “The Reverend had to know all the sheep of his flock.”
“Are some of that flock present?” Duncan asked the missionary.
Zettlemeyer nodded and motioned a man and a woman forward, introducing them as the survivors of two different homesteads. Duncan asked them to mark their farms on the map, then all the others that had been attacked by Indians. He soon displayed the map to the assembly, now showing many Xs, all along the river.
When Duncan called the next witness, Pike growled out a futile protest. All the way to the stool, Pike’s sergeant looked at his feet. The big Irishman quickly confirmed that Major Pike often consulted a map kept in the leather cartridge case on his belt. Pike made a quick sideways motion as if to slide off his bench, then felt the chill stare of his sergeant and moved no more. He said nothing as a ranger approached and pulled the leather cartridge box from his belt. Duncan accepted the case, opened it, and pulled out another map. He held it up beside Zettlemeyer’s map.
Duncan showed how the map had been folded, addressed on the reverse, and marked for postage. “Why, Major Pike,” he asked, pointing to the addressee’s name, “would Reverend Arnold send you one of his maps?” When Pike did not reply, Duncan paced along the front of the assembly. “And why would it be precisely the same map, with the same marks as those we’ve made today by the homesteads that were destroyed?”
A confused murmur swept through the crowd.
Pike make another effort to slip away, and was stopped by one of the rangers.
“The map sent by Arnold,” Duncan declared, “wasn’t an intelligence report. It was a plan.” He held the map back up for the assembly to see. “Arnold and Pike knew where all the raided homesteads were, three months before the raids.”
The stunned crowd was silent as Duncan placed the maps in front of Ramsey on the table. The patron seemed confused, and then worry creased his brow as he noticed Pike’s stricken expression. Ramsey had begun to grasp that it was not Lister who was on trial now. He stared so intensely at the maps that he took no notice of Duncan’s next witness, until Jonathan replied to Duncan’s question about the time spent by the Ramsey children with Reverend Arnold.
“An hour each day, sir,” Jonathan said in an eager tone. “Father said we must have religious instruction at least an hour each day.”
“And did not the vicar offer lessons drawn from life here in Edentown?”
“Oh, yes, sir, we-”
“How dare you!” Ramsey shot up from his chair, color filling his face now. “Crispin! Remove the children this instant!”
Crispin’s response came without hesitation. “I may have the power to remove the Ramsey children, sir, but I have no power to remove a witness.”
“I believe you were describing how the vicar escorted you around the works of the town,” Duncan continued.
Jonathan’s gaze now rested on his older sister, standing at the wall, her hands on the shoulders of young Virginia. “Yes, sir. The smith, the carpenter, the butcher, the cooper.”
“The butcher?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Every day the butcher. Reverend Arnold helped arrange the meals, said there were great lessons to be had in a butcher shop. He spent time in his own cousin’s butcher shop as a boy, and told us that each creature on earth had a destiny in life and death. He said those years had shown him how every human endeavor could be anchored in the teachings of the Bible, how his cousin operated a most Christian meat shop.”
“What would a young assistant do in a Christian butcher shop?”
“Sweeping clean. Killing the animals.”
“And how does a good Christian butcher dispatch those creatures meant by God to serve him in their death, Jonathan?”
Looks of confusion passed through the assembly. Ramsey looked up from his paper.
A small hand shot up from one of the rear benches. “I know, Mr. McCallum! I know!” Virginia Ramsey did not want her brother to have all the attention. The girl jumped up, blurting out her answer without waiting for her schoolmaster’s bidding. “If you please, sir, if God wishes to use our hand when he requires another creature to be dispatched to heaven, we must seek to avoid their suffering. First you say the words ‘God wills it so’.”