Duncan stared into the fire, fighting images of Sarah and Lister being chased by skeletons. He had also begun to grasp why Woolford had warned about speaking of dreams with the Indians. “I shall boil some tea,” he declared at last.
“No tea,” the Indian said in a dry, creaking voice. “The pipes. I never knew of these, but your grandfather understood. The dead can hear those pipes.” He gestured out toward the desolation. “Call them home, like before.”
Naked trees. “Look for naked trees,” Conawago had said when Duncan had left him at dawn that morning. “Follow the naked trees to Bark Hollow by the mission at German Flats.” After Duncan had spoken of his dream, the old Indian had spoken no more of Duncan fleeing south, but he had also denied any interest in traveling north himself now.
“Here is where I am needed,” Conawago had said with a deathbed air. “I should go across, I should explain and apologize.” He was, Duncan had realized with a chill, speaking of dying.
Duncan had felt as if he were bidding good-bye to another of his great-uncles, never to see him or his ways again. He had lit another small fire for Conawago and left him staring at the flames. “Mourning must be done,” Duncan had said as he stood to leave, “but mourning is not standing up to the enemy.”
Conawago had given no sign of hearing him.
Ten miles from the Chimney Rocks he reached the first of the naked trees, a huge hemlock, over five feet in breadth, stripped of its living bark for ten feet above the earth. Soon there were others, all oaks and hemlocks, all huge, all stripped to a uniform height. The swath became broader as he approached a rumbling sound that rose from behind a low ridge. He paused just before he reached the crest of the ridge, and looked back at the dozens of debarked trees he had passed. They were all going to die.
Bark Hollow had been aptly named by Conawago. Except for a small log house at the far end, the small valley was piled with bark. In the center, a heavy log had been mounted on a central hub fixed to a stump. Two-thirds of the way along the length of the log was fastened a huge roller stone, like a thick mill wheel with heavy striations along its rim. Harnessed to the end of the log was a great brindled ox, pulling the wheel along the circle, crushing the bark under the wheel. Leading the ox was a boy of perhaps twelve years. Duncan settled onto a rock and watched, his interest suddenly intense. Another riddle was answered. Evering had written that the third ghostwalker would be found at an ox wheel.
As Duncan took a step down the hill, still in the shadows of the trees, the boy’s head snapped up, not at him, but at the forest, as if sensing something had changed. The ox slowed and bent its heavy head toward the cabin. Duncan paused, then squatted in the shadows, studying the cabin. It was a rough, squalid place. Two men lay stretched out on benches beside the cabin, jugs beside them. A thin horse tied to a tree gazed longingly at the stream that ran by the cabin. A small, fur-covered creature lay dead on a stump, a crow pecking at its head. Beyond the cabin stood a decrepit wagon at the end of a cleared track that wound behind the ridge. On it sat three bales of the crushed bark, bound for a tannery, where it would be steeped in water for its tannic acid.
Duncan’s gaze drifted back to the boy, who was facing the ox, standing idly now, stroking its snout. Something was fastened to the boy’s waist at the rear. A rope, he saw as the boy turned and began walking again. The ox was tied to the axle of the great wheel. And the boy was tied to the ox.
Duncan stepped back over the ridge, circled the valley, and walked up the track toward the cabin. The two men on the benches, reeking of rum, did not move as he untied the horse and led it to the stream, then knelt and washed the grime from his own face.
After a moment the hairs began rising on the back of his neck. He looked up to see a musket barrel extended from one of the windows, aimed directly at him.
“I only mean to water him,” he explained in a loud voice.
“Git inside or git dead,” came a high, nervous voice. “Put him back where he was.” More gunbarrels had appeared, two others extending from rectangular holes recently chopped into the log wall.
Duncan rose slowly, tied the horse to a sapling, then moved toward the building, hands opened at his side.
“I tie him like that so when they come for him I have a clean shot,” the gaunt man inside explained as soon as Duncan entered the musty cabin. There was an accent in the man’s voice Duncan could not place.
“Wolves?” Duncan asked.
The man gestured toward Duncan’s scalp. “Man with a wound like that shouldn’t have to ask.” Welsh. It was a Welsh accent.
“Indians want to steal your horse?”
“Steal everything but the air you breathe. ’Tis a raw, cruel season. Every farm for fifty miles along the river up in smoke.”
As Duncan’s eyes drifted around the dim chamber, he saw tools tossed in one corner, several clay jugs like those outside in another. One of the guns stuck into a loophole was heavily crusted with rust, its stock split. The weapon the man carried, though appearing too heavy for him, was of much sturdier quality. Burned into its stock was a familiar R.
“You have a Ramsey gun.”
“Been through many hands, I daresay. The great laird won’t complain if I kill a few red bucks with it.”
“I came to speak with the boy,” Duncan ventured.
The announcement seemed to disturb the Welshman. “I don’t reckon so,” he said, cradling the gun in his arm now, the barrel a short swing from Duncan’s face, “since everyone knows he don’t speak. Who the devil are you?”
“How is he named? Where does he sleep?”
“He sleeps with the ox, if that’s what you mean. You be a Ramsey, too,” the Welshman concluded, chagrin in his tone.
“He does not sleep here.” The ox, Duncan knew, was the most valuable asset of the mill. At the end of the day it would not be left to shift for itself at the forest edge.
“Up at the Flats,” the frightened man explained. “Come nightfall every sane Christian is at the Flats, with the mission folk. His name is Alex, just Alex. He was too young to have remembered his family name, or from where he was taken, though most likely his kin all died the day he was enslaved, those many years ago.”
For a moment Duncan had a vision of savages closing in on them from every direction, and he had a compulsion to take up the old musket and join the man’s worried vigil. The man’s fear was contagious. “Who are those men outside?
“Hands from the farms. Came with two loads of bark last week, went back to find the families they worked for dead and scalped.”
“Sarah Ramsey. Have you seen her?”
“’Course not. And the Reverend’s party got a good head start if you be seeking the bounty on her.”
“Reverend Arnold is at the mission?”
The hollow-faced man studied him with a sour expression. “Gone north. I told him he best be charging for burials, ’cause he’d be a rich man by winter. It’s the way of Ramsey business. Where it goes you need lots of prayers and lots of rum,” he said with a twisted grin. He inserted his gun back through the window and resumed his vigil.
Duncan paced along the dirt floor of the little cabin. A pile of molding pine needles in one corner might have been a pallet. An iron cooking kettle hanging on a peg looked like it had been used for years without a cleaning. A pile of squalid rags might have been spare clothes. He paused at the jugs, all but four of which were turned on their sides, empty. Behind the four was something hollow and shiny. He bent and pulled it into the light, its metal gleaming now. It was the ornate breastplate Arnold had worn into the woods. Except now it had two large bullet holes, dark stains along their jagged edges.
He carried the plate to the Welshman, who glanced at it and winced. “Like I said, got to keep your prayers up around those Ramsey captains.”