Bonaparte's leg throbbed. Another episode of gout was starting. “Go away now,” he said to Little Napoleon.
“Do you want information from the American?” asked Little Napoleon.
“No,” said Bonaparte. “Leave him alone. And while you're at it, leave me alone, too.”
Alvin had a steady stream of visitors in the courthouse jail. It seemed like they all had the same idea. They'd sidle right up to the bars, beckon him close, and whisper (as if the deputy didn't know right well what they was talking about), “Don't you have some way to slip on out of here, Alvin?”
What, they believed he hadn't thought of it? Such a simple matter, to soften the stone and pull one of the bars out. Or, for that matter, he could make the metal of a bar flow away from the stone it was embedded in. Or dissolve the bar entirely. Or push against the stone and press on through, walking through the wall into freedom. Such things would be easy enough for Alvin. As a child he had played with stone and found softness and weakness in it; as a prentice blacksmith, he had come to understand iron from the heart out. Hadn't he crawled into the forgefire and turned an iron plowshare to living gold?
Now, locked in this prison, he thought of leaving, thought of it all the time. Thought of hightailing it off into the woods, with or without Arthur Stuart– the boy was happy here, so why take him away? Thought of the sun on his back, the wind in his face, the greensong of the forest now so faint to him through stone and iron that he could hardly hear it.
But he told himself what he told those friendly folk who meant so well. “I need to be shut of this whole affair before I go off. So I mean to stand trial here, get myself acquitted, and then go on without fear of somebody tracking me down and telling the same lies too me again.”
And then they always did the same thing. Having failed to persuade him to escape, they'd eye his knapsack and whisper, “Is it in there?” And the boldest of them would say what they were all wishing. “Can I see it?”
His answer was always the same. He'd ask about the weather. “Think it's a hard winter coming on?” Some picked up slower than others, but after a while they all realized he wasn't going to answer a blame thing about the golden plow or the contents of his knapsack, not a word one way or the other. Then they'd make some chat or take up his used dishes, them as brought food, but it never took long and soon they was on their way out of the courthouse to tell their friends and family that Alvin was looking sad kind of but he still wasn't saying a thing about that gold plow that Makepeace claimed was his own gold treasure stolen by the boy back in his prentice days.
One day Sheriff Doggly brought in a fellow that Alvin recognized, sort of, but couldn't remember why or who. “That's the one,” said the stranger. “Got no respect for any man's knack except his own.” Then Alvin recollected well enough– it was the dowser who picked the spot for Alvin to dig a well for Makepeace Smith. The spot where Alvin dug right down to a sheet of thick hard rock, without finding a drop of water first. No doubt Makepeace meant to use him as a witness that Alvin's well wasn't in the spot the dowser chose. Well, that was true enough, no disputing it. The dowser fellow wasn't going to testify to anything that Alvin wouldn't have admitted freely his own self. So let them plot their plots. Alvin had the truth with him, and that was bound to be enough, with twelve jurors of Hatrack River folk.
The visits that really cheered him were Arthur's. Two or three times a day, the boy would blow in from the square like a leaf getting tucked into an open door by a gust of wind. “You just got to meet that feller John Binder,” he'd say. “Ropemaker. Some folks is joking how if they decide to hang you, he'll be the one as makes the rope, but he just shuts 'em right up, you should hear him, Alvin. 'No rope of mine is going to hang no Maker,' he says. So even though you never met him I count him as a friend. But I tell you, they say his ropes never unravel, never even fray, no matter where you cut em. Ain't that some knack?”
And later in the same day, he'd be on about someone else. “I was out looking for Alfreda Matthews, Sophie's cousin, she's the one lives in that shack down by the river, only the river's a long windy thing and I couldn't find her and in fact it was getting on toward dark and I couldn't rightly find myself, and then here I am face to face with this Captain Alexander, he's a ship's captain only who knows what he's doing so far from the sea? But he lives around here doing tinkering and odd fixing, and Vilate Franker says he must have done some terrible crime to have to hide from the sea, or maybe there was some great sea beast that swallowed up his ship and left only him alive and now he daresn't go back to sea for fear the beast– she calls it La Vaya Than, which Goody Trader says is Spanish for 'Ain't this a damn lie,' do you know Goody Trader?”
“Met her,” says Alvin. “She brung me some horehound drops. Nastiest candy I ever ate, but I reckon for them as loves horebound they were good enough. Strange lady. Squatted right outside the door here pondering for the longest time until she finally gets up and says 'Humf, you're the first man I ever met what didn't need nothing and here you are in jail.”
“They say that's her knack, knowing what a body needs even when he don't know himself,” said Arthur. “Though I will say that Vilate Franker says that Goody Trader is a humbug just like the alligator boy in the freak show in Dekane, which you wouldn't take me to see cause you said if he was real, it was cruel to gawk at him, and–”
“I remember what I said, Arthur Stuart. You don't have to gossip to me about me.”
“Anyway, what was I talking about?”
“Lost in the woods looking for old drunken Freda.”
“And I bumped into that sea captain, anyway, and he looks me in the eye and he says, 'Follow me,' and I go after him about ten paces and he sets me right in the middle of a deer track and he says, 'You just go along this way and when you reach the river again, you go upstream about three rods.' And you know what? I did what he said and you know what?”
“You found Freda.”
“Alfreda Matthews, and she was stone drunk of course but I splashed her face with some water and I done what you said folks ought to do, I emptied her jug out and boy howdy, she was spitting mad, I like to had to out-dance the devil just to keep from getting hit by them rocks she threw!”
"Poor lady," said Alvin. "But it won't do no good as long as there's folks to give her another jug.
“Can't you do like, you did with that Red Prophet?”
Alvin looked at him sharp. “What do you think you know about that?”
“Just what your own mama told me back in Vigor Church, about how you took a drunken one-eyed Red and made a prophet out of him.”
Alvin shook his head. “No sir, she got it wrong. He was a prophet all along. And he wasn't a drunk the way Freda's a drunk. He took the likker into him to drown out the terrible black noise of death. That's what I fixed, and then he didn't need that likker no more. But Freda– there's something else in her that hungers for it, and I don't understand it yet.”
“I told her to come to you though, so I reckon you oughta know and that's why I told you, she's a-coming to get healed.”
Alvin shook his head.
“Did I do wrong?”
“No, you done right,” said Alvin. “But there's nothing I can do for her beyond what she oughta do for herself. She knows the likker's eating her up, stealing her life away from her. But I'll talk to her and help her if I can.”
“They say she can tell you when rain's coming. If she's sober.”
“Then how would anybody know she has such a knack?” asked Alvin.