He began to open the door.
Wisps of smoke drifted out. He smelled the smoke, very strongly.
“Matthew? Matthew?”
He opened his eyes. He was lying on the ground, with his head on Quinn’s lap, and the odor of smoke was not confined to the realm of dreams. Indeed, smoke had drifted into the storm-dark woods and moved sinuously around them like spirits of the dead.
“Matthew?” Quinn said again, shaking his uninjured shoulder.
And he realized then that they were not alone.
He sat up.
Standing not twenty feet away in the thicket were three black men. Two were younger, and supported an older man between them. The older man, who had a pate of close-cropped white hair and a frizz of white beard, looked to be in pain; he was putting no weight on his left leg. The elder was thin, with a seamed face that looked as if it had suffered many hardships, but the two younger men were thicker-bodied and fit-looking. One was bald, with heavy eyebrows and a long chin adorned by a dark patch of beard, while the other had a high forehead, high cheekbones and expressive eyes that also held the darkness of suffering. The elder man wore brown trousers and a gray shirt, his clothing tattered by thorns. The other two were dressed in similar brown trousers, both with patched knees. The bald one was wearing a dark green shirt and the other man a white shirt stained with sweat. All their clothes were much the worse for wear, having been torn at by the claws of the wilderness.
They stood staring at Matthew and Quinn, as if trying to decide what to do. Tendrils of smoke crawled through the woods around them, and not too far behind them the smoke was thick enough to blur out the trees.
Matthew spoke. “Which one of you is Abram?”
They didn’t answer, nor did they move.
“Mars,” Matthew said to the elder, “I’ve spoken to your grandmother. Help me stand up, please,” he requested of Quinn, and she did. He wavered on his feet but found his balance. “You have to go back to the Green Sea. Abram?”
The man with the expressive, suffering eyes said, “Yes.”
“I’ve come out here to find you. There’s a group of men looking for you…all of you. Among them Royce and Gunn. They don’t want you to tell the Kincannons what you know. If they can, I think they’ll try to kill you.”
“Likely try,” said Abram.
“Who’re you, suh?” Mars asked, pain etched on his face. “Out here with a girl?”
“My name is Matthew Corbett. I’m from Charles Town, I was nearby and I heard the bell ringing last night. This is Quinn Tate, from Rotbottom.” My wife? he almost said.
“Where are the other men?” Tobey asked. “How many?”
“They’ve gone on ahead. Seven in number, but one of them knows the truth too and he’s here as I am…to prevent any more killing.”
“The truth?” Abram asked, his eyes narrowing. “What truth do you know?”
“I believe,” Matthew said, “that Griffin Royce was jealous of the attention Sarah was showing you. I believe he thought something else was going on between you in the barn. She was teaching you to read, is that correct?”
Abram nodded. “Against the law. Against the law for me to be out of the quarter and in that barn, too. A whippin’ offense. Miss Sarah said she’d protect me. Cap’n Royce told me to stay away from her, or he’d fix things. Hurt one of the women, he said, and I’d be to blame for it. I told Miss Sarah…but she say, not gonna let Cap’n Royce tell her what to do. Couldn’t tell Massa Kincannon, though. Against the law, all of it.”
“Mrs. Kincannon knows all that now,” Matthew said. “I believe also that at the Green Sea I can prove Royce killed Sarah and left that knife in her for you to pull out. He knew you’d be walking to the quarter that way. Then he waited and watched. He wanted you to run, to look guilty. But what are you doing here? Why are you doubling back?”
“Pap broke his ankle, happened last night,” Tobey answered. “Figured there’d be men behind us, but didn’t know how far they’d follow. We talked ’bout it. Ran into a fire up ahead, saw trees burnin’. Wind’s movin’ it toward the river. Heard the Soul Cryer last night, too.” He had an expression of anguish on his face. “We don’t know where we’re goin’, suh. We thought we could run away…but there ain’t no runnin’ away. River of Souls leads on and on, but it don’t take you nowhere…you just get more lost. Granny tried to help us, said for us to get away and keep goin’…but where do you go, when there ain’t nowhere? She was wrong, suh. So we talked ’bout it, and we thought on it. With Pap’s hurt…and with what’s out there…we’re goin’ back. Face what has to be faced. That’s the all of it.”
Matthew reasoned that Stamper would read their trail and see the slaves had turned back, if he hadn’t already. He didn’t care to wait for Royce and Gunn. Smoke was drifting through the woods and was caught like mist in the tops of the trees, but yet there was no sight nor sound of a moving fire. “We have fresh water,” he said, motioning to Quinn’s water gourd. “Have some if you like. Then we’ll start back.”
Quinn took the gourd’s strap off her shoulder, uncorked it and offered it to the three men as they came forward. Mars winced with pain as he was supported between his sons, for his injured foot snagged on the brush in spite of their efforts to lift him up. He was indeed leaving a clear trail for Stamper to follow.
“Can’t figure you, suh,” said Mars to Matthew after he’d had his drink. “You say you can prove Abram didn’t kill Sarah? How?”
“Leave that to me when we get there.”
“Look hardly able to walk y’self, forgive me for sayin’. All that blood, you took a bad injury.”
“I’ll survive it. Royce and Gunn found your boat. We’ve got to get back to it. Can you find the way?” Matthew was asking both Abram and Tobey.
“Best way is to get to the river and follow it down,” said Abram. “We go southwest, we’ll likely get there in maybe an hour or two.”
Matthew nodded. It was going to be slow travelling, with Mars’s broken ankle. He took a drink of water from the gourd and so did Quinn, who then corked it again and put its strap back around her shoulder. She gave Matthew an encouraging smile, and he had the thought that she was a ragged angel, come to see him through this ordeal. “Ready?” he asked the runaways, and Abram pointed out the direction they should go. Matthew started off, with Quinn right behind him and the two sons helping their father struggle on.
“There’s the fire,” said Stamper, as smoke swirled around himself and the other six men. A line of trees was ablaze about a half-mile ahead, and the dry wind that had picked up was blowing it in their direction. As they watched, they could see hungry flames jumping from tree to tree. “Lightnin’ strike either last night or early this mornin’,” he said. “That timber’s dry, gonna flare up in a hurry.”
The smoke was thickening, burning both the eyes and the lungs. Bovie coughed some of it out and said, “Trail keeps on goin’ that way. What’ll we do, Stamper?”
“I don’t like bein’ out here with a fire comin’. That damn thing jumps, it’ll get all around you. Could be the skins turned in another direction.” He looked past Magnus at Royce. “What do you say, Griff?”
“I say we follow the trail. If it turns, we’ll see it.”
“Keep goin’,” was Foxworth’s advice. “Come too far not to get ’em.”
“Fire’s movin’ this way,” said Stamper, a muscle working in his jaw. “Could be it’s already burned their trail up, we’ll never find ’em.”