“Has Mister Wilkinson so sworn, that the men you have locked up for the marshal are indeed the fellows he says they are? Because I’m here to tell you they are not,” Father said.
“Wal, no, not yet he ain’t. They’s just a couple of coloreds, far’s I’m concerned, and I’m holdin’ ’em for the marshal, like he asked, till he comes back from Port Kent.”
“With no arrest warrant.”
“Wal… yes, sir. Yes. That’s so.”
Grabbing Mr. Wilkinson by his shirt collar, Father drew him to the steel door that led to the cells and said to the jailer, “Come along, and bring your keys. Mister Wilkinson here is going to tell you that the men you have locked up are not the men the marshal is seeking.”
“Wal, sir, y’ know I can’t release them without the marshal’s say-so,” the man said, although he was already unlocking the door to the jail.
“You will do as I say,”said Father.
“Yes, sir, I b’lieve I will,” he said, and he swung open the door, and we all walked into the cell block and went straightway back to where Mr. Fleete and Lyman awaited us. They both grinned broadly when they saw us and came to the front of their shared cell and grasped the bars, watching as the jailer unlocked the cell door and swung it wide.
“Mister Brown, we are mightly relieved to see you,” said Mr. Fleete. “That there fellow, he’s the one told the marshal we run the Cannons off to Canada,” said Lyman, pointing sternly at Mr. Wilkinson. “They come up on us over in Timbuctoo yesterday evening. Said we knew where the Cannons was hiding. Said they killed their master down in Virginia. We don’t know nothing about that, now, do we, Mister Brown?”
“No, Lyman, we don’t,”said Father.
“This ain’t legal, you know” the jailer said to Father, as we all marched back out to his office. Father still held Mr. Wilkinson by his shirt collar and had his gun tight against the man’s ear.
“Just don’t try to stop us,” said Father, “and no harm will come to either of you. We’ll all worry about what’s legal and what isn’t later on. Right now, however, these men have not been charged and therefore are free.” He let go of Mr. Wilkinson and lowered his gun, and we did like wise with ours and, with Mr. Fleete and Lyman in the lead, made to leave the jader’s office. John was the last to depart from the building, and when he turned to draw the door closed behind him, as he told us later, he saw the jailer extract a handgun from his desk, and he shot the man. It happened so quickly and unexpectedly that we barely knew of it, except for the loud gunshot and the sulphurous smell of the powder, for we were already outside and crossing the grass towards the horses and wagon.
“Go!” John shouted, and we ran. “He pulled a gun!”
I leapt onto the wagon seat and grabbed the reins, and Mr. Fleete and Lyman, their faces filled with fear, jumped into the back. Father, Jason, and John mounted their horses, and we all broke for the road out of town. When the wagon passed the open door of the jail, with the others on horseback racing on ahead, I looked to my side and saw the jailer come to the door. He had been wounded in his left arm, but he held a revolver in his right, and he aimed carefully and fired once, and then we were gone, the horses pounding up the road, heading north out of town — towards the pass to Ausable Forks this time, instead of back the way we had come, through Keene, where we had shot Billingsly.
It was not until we had run nearly a mile that I took it into my head to check my passengers, and when I glanced back I saw with dismay that Mr. Fleete had been shot in the chest. Lyman sat ashen-faced and expressionless beside him, looking out at the passing scenery as if he were alone. Father and the others were still a ways ahead of us, too far to call, and so I drove on. Shortly, when we had gotten several miles out of town, I drew the wagon up under a tall spruce tree beside the road at the crest of a short hill. I turned in the seat and stepped into the back, where Mr. Fleete lay.
As if explaining a living man’s absence, not a dead man’s presence, Lyman said, “Ol’ Elden Fleete, he’s gone back to Africa.”
“Oh, Lord!” I cried. “What have we done? What have we done, Lyman?”
“It ain’t we that killed him, Owen.”
Then Father and John and Jason appeared on horseback beside the wagon, and they looked down and saw what had happened and grew dark with anger and sorrow. Especially Father. “Bring him on back to Timbuctoo, where he can be dressed out for a proper burial. I only wish it were the slave-catcher who was dead,” he said, “not the slave.”
“Mister Fleete was not a slave, Father” I said.
“We know that, Owen. We know it. But those other fellows don’t.” He clucked to his horse, and we all fell into a somber line and made our slow way back down through Wilmington Notch to North Elba.
There was a terrible sadness amongst all the Negroes when we delivered Mr. Fleete’s body over to them, but no indications of surprise. For them, I suppose, the astonishing thing was that one of them had managed to live so long without having run from the world and hid from it in a hole. That was something about Negroes which I found mystifying in those days — that they constantly expected death and yet did not anticipate it. Later, of course, I came to the same viewpoint myself.
But the consequences of our rash acts were not as dire as I, for one, expected, although they were, indeed, catastrophic for the Negro community in general. We had inflicted a serious wound on the slave-catcher (not a mortal one, it seemed), and that was probably a positive good. Although it seemed to me that there had been more than enough blood spilt. On the way back from Elizabeth town, John confided that he hoped Billingsly would come looking for revenge, so we could kill him properly. Two white men wounded for one black man dead: that was the trade-off. Not quite fair, I thought, but closer to even than most of these exchanges allowed. And we had surely scared our Keene neighbor Mr. Partridge straight back to his deer-hunting ways, stifling any rising ambitions he may have held for assisting slave-catchers and sharing in the rewards of that heinous activity. The unfortunate jailer in Elizabethtown, whose name I never learned, was one of those who, in Father’s phrase, were merely doing their duty, and though he had paid dearly for it, he would have a scar to show and a tale to tell for the rest of his days. He would be able to say that he had been one of the first innocent victims of the Browns’ nigger madness. Mr. Wilkinson, our one-time ally, had beat his retreat back to Tahawus, where he would continue to drive his Irish miners, but with no further pretensions to providing aid and succor to Negroes, and that was actually in the interests of Negroes and those of us who might have otherwise allied ourselves with him. It’s always useful to know your enemy and to have him know you, as Father was fond of saying.
Despite their astonishment and sadness on learning of the death of Mr. Fleete, our family was overjoyed, of course, to see us return to the farm that night uninjured, and Susan wept with relief at the sight of her husband freed from jail. However, their anxiety, as we learned on our arrival home, had been greatly increased that afternoon by a piece of intelligence they had received in our absence from Captain Keifer. He had sent his eldest son down to North Elba on horseback to warn us of what we already knew, that Marshal Saunders had come looking for the Cannons in Port Kent, and to inform us of what we had not even guessed — that in truth, as the marshal had claimed, Captain Keifer had not transported the Negro couple to Canada after all. Further, the two had been surprised in the kitchen of the Quaker’s home by the marshal and his deputies, and the man had promptly arrested the couple and was now transporting them south to Albany, whence they would be returned to Richmond, Virginia, there to stand trial for the brutal slaying of their master.