"What did the chiefs say of this man?"
Felton grimaced. "Why would I tell the Iroquois?"
"Because they have suffered murders too. Similar murders, ritual murders."
"Nonsense. If that is what they tell you, they toy with you. Everything those Iroquois chiefs do is about negotiation, another move on some great chess board. Their truths are like quicksilver."
"Was Bythe's murder a move on that board?"
"God rest his soul, yes. Bythe meant to root out the French sympathizers among the tribes, to strengthen the alliance. I have vowed to my uncle that we will even the score before this war is over."
"Bythe's murder was almost identical to Burke's," Duncan observed. "Skanawati was in chains at the time."
"Skanawati has confederates," Felton replied. "And while one murder might mean a personal feud, more than one surely means it is part of the war. The Iroquois begin to glimpse that English expansion will be unfettered if the French lose. Have you not wondered why the army has found no signs of the raiding party you yourself reported?" The Quaker did not wait for Duncan's reply. "Because the army scouts are all Indians allied with the Iroquois. The army has gone blind and doesn't yet realize it."
Duncan considered Felton's words. "Did Bythe understand that?"
"Of course. Which is why I have been his trusted eyes and ears these many months."
Duncan mounted his horse. Felton rode alongside for a moment. "I admire your courage, Scotsman. Murderers in front of you and bounty hunters behind."
"Lord Ramsey is in Philadelphia," Duncan countered.
"His money reaches far beyond the city. News in the wilderness spreads like it has wings," Felton said as he wheeled his horse about. "Every teamster in the convoy will know by tonight. You'll have a few days at most before word of the bounty reaches Shamokin. Thirty pounds is enough to tempt even the most saintly of Christians. Whether they take you for the bounty or kill you to stop you finding their treachery, either way they will be fighting over scraps of your hide by the end of the week." The Quaker pressed his heels to his mount and was gone.
Duncan watched Felton gallop away, puzzling over the threatening tone that had risen in his voice, then turned to catch up with his friends. But suddenly he reined his horse around to watch Felton disappear down the road. Bythe had told the magistrate that Burke's rifle was headed north with a renegade from a smaller tribe. Felton, Bythe's trusted eyes and ears, who seemed to be urging Duncan to flee, insisted it had vanished with an Iroquois into the west. Either the dead provincial official or the zealous Quaker scout had lied.
As they climbed the ridges he pushed down his fear of bounty hunters by revisiting the murders in his mind. It was easy to assume the murders were a consequence of the war, but Duncan's every instinct said otherwise. Bythe had started out thinking he knew those responsible, had assured the Pennsylvania government he would expose the French agents behind the murders. But that had been wishful thinking, since such a solution would have avoided enmity between the tribes and the English. After Burke's murder what Brindle and Bythe had hoped for was a solution that would show that Skanawati had been manipulated by the French, allowing them to declare him their mutual enemy's unknowing victim. But there had been no signs of a French raiding party at the tree where Bythe was attacked, only tracks of two men in moccasins in addition to Bythe, and no one outside the convoy could have known Bythe would be going to the tree. The Quaker emissary had paid for his misjudgment with his life.
Duncan found himself wondering why the dead Quaker had so abruptly decided to go to the boundary tree. He recalled his conversation with Brindle. Bythe had seen Van Grut's journal, after which he told Brindle he understood what had to be done. He had discovered new information in those pages that changed his perspectives on the murders. The code. What he had seen on those pages, Duncan now realized, had been the code. Bythe had recognized the code, had known its workings, and had gone to the tree with a borrowed knife to use it.
Above a patch of blood on the tree had been four symbols and an incomplete one, all with slash marks through them, with another, longer set of complete ones carved overhead. Based on Van Grut's sketches the Pennsylvanian had thought he had found a way to leave a message for the killer. But what he found at the tree had been the killer himself, who recognized that Bythe, though no surveyor, had learned enough to be dangerous.
There had been a hole in the bloody tree, three feet from the ground. Bythe had struggled, ripping out the nail that had fastened his hand. Duncan had followed the path of blood to the stream above the waterfall. The Quaker had stumbled to the water, where the killer had finished him, then had returned to carve his death message on the tree.
The four warriors accompanying them set a merciless pace. They insisted on paddling at night under the bright gibbous moon as the others slept in the bottom of the two large canoes. When Duncan tried to join them, he struggled to maintain their rhythm, but finally surrendered and lay back on the packs. It was one of the most beautiful nights he had experienced in years, and it put him in mind of moonlit sails among the Hebrides taken with his grandfather as a boy. The two sturdy canoes, readily offered to them when they had reached an Indian village at the river's western bank, were like creatures of the night, the water singing at their prows, the silver ribbons of their wake pointing ever north.
For long, calming moments, Duncan thought not of the terrible mystery that drove their journey, but only of the deeper mysteries that animated the strong, silent people of the wilderness. He had come to realize that the poetry in the souls of Conawago and Skanawati, even of the four braves in the canoes, was something that would forever elude the logic of Europeans. The most Duncan could hope for was to experience it, the way an artist experienced the impossible crimson and gold of a sunset.
"When he sleeps," an unsteady voice said near his ear, "the chief keeps the skin of a snake pressed close to his heart."
He turned to see Mokie's face in the moonlight. She was frightened. "You mean Skanawati."
The girl nodded. "Near scared mama to death when she first saw it."
Duncan gestured the girl closer. "The tribes consider the birds to carry messages to the gods," he explained. "But snakes are especially sacred. Snakes bring dreams, and in dreams, the tribes say, you visit the spirit world."
"You mean he talks to ghosts?" There was now more curiosity than fear in the girl's voice.
The words gave Duncan pause. He had almost forgotten Skanawati's words from the first day they had met him. He had embarked on the Warriors Path to speak with ghosts, not just to speak with them, but to be told how the Iroquois would leave the servitude of the English king.
"I was talking to ghosts that night with my pipes," Duncan said.
The girl nodded again, yawning. "I think it was them who brought me back from that dark place." She nestled into Duncan's shoulder to sleep. "I hope they take him where he needs to be."
The girl's last words strangely disturbed Duncan. He could not shake the feeling that the truth he so desperately sought was indeed bound up between Skanawati and his ghosts.
When he looked away from the sky again he saw that Conawago was awake, half-turned to look behind the canoes. More than once in their voyage Duncan had seen him looking over his shoulder. "Are we being followed?" Duncan asked.
"I feel it, yes. But it is a busy river. I could be mistaken."
"The killer has only struck on the Warriors Path," Duncan reminded his friend.
"The killer," Conawago countered, "makes ritual murders on the trail. Off the trail he may not need to be so fastidious."
By the time they landed below Shamokin the next morning, Mokie had repeated, without Duncan's bidding, what she and her mother had been instructed to do were they to reach the Indian town alive. Find the trail that rose above the southern edge of the town, they'd been told, and go to the fort that was not a fort, then ask again for the great bear.