As he passed a stable, a young european man bounded around the corner, eyes locked over his shoulder, running so fast that Duncan had no time to avoid a collision. The man stumbled over his foot and with a cry of alarm tumbled heavily to the ground.
“I beg you sir! On the soul of dear mother I meant no harm! Please!” The stranger clasped his hands together toward Duncan.
Duncan looked up to see half a dozen warriors racing down the street. He grabbed the terrified fugitive by the arm and led him back down the bank, out of sight of the pursuers, then up another path that lead to the rear of the nearest tavern, where they took refuge in the woodshed.
The man’s chest was heaving. His expensive waistcoat and britches were soiled and disheveled. Strands of his long brown hair hung over his face. One arm was pressed against a parcel of rolled-up leather. Duncan realized he was the man whom Mother Brumbach had chased from the cemetery.
“I thank”-his words were truncated by deep gasps-“you, kind sir . . . those bucks had rough intentions I daresay.”
“What have you done?” Duncan demanded.
The stranger pressed his hand against his chest as if to calm himself. “I don’t speak their language. I should have waited for Ralston to come back from sketching his birds. He knows the Indians, went into the wilderness two years ago with his uncle.”
“What have you done?” Duncan asked again.
“It’s a matter of anatomy, is all.”
An angry shout rose from near the river. Duncan peered through an open knothole in the flimsy plank door. The pursuers had spread out along the landing and were searching among the canoes and stacks of cargo. “Anatomy?”
“My name is Rush, Benjamin Rush. I am a student of the healing arts, apprenticed to a doctor in Philadelphia. Ralston and I were just doing a favor for Dr. Franklin and his friends. He loves his birds, and the anatomy of the aboriginals is of especial interest to me. I have measured the facial features of twenty natives in Philadelphia, though of course the Indian beggars on the waterfront there do not make the best specimens for science. I corresponded with a journal in London. They said they would publish my work if I could submit a body of evidence to support my thesis.”
Duncan stared at Rush in mute disbelief. He was only a few years younger than Duncan but looked like a lost boy. He pushed him down on a splitting block. “Mr. Rush, if you have any hope of surviving your journey you’ll need to do a much better job of explaining yourself.”
Rush propped his arms on his knees and buried his head for a moment. “This is my first venture into the frontier. They said it was tamed. Ralston and I saw it as something of a holiday.” He calmed as he spoke, and his voice became that of the educated young gentleman of America’s greatest city. “I have long opined that the American natives are of a different human stock. Consider their lack of reaction to severe elements, the epicanthic fold of their eyes, their inability to perspire, the fantastical way they run for hours, the extra ridge of bone many have on their feet, their lack of facial hair. I have reason to believe the digestive tracts may have different structures than those of Europeans.”
Duncan eyed the tied leather roll Rush had carried through his ordeal, now resting on the pile of logs beside the young scientist. Rush sighed but did not stop him as he unrolled it, exposing a row of silvery instruments, each in its own sewn pocket. Surgical knives, tweezers, a metal rule, a small bone saw, probes, long needles with silk thread, and a reed-thin stem of metal with a tiny mirror at its end.
“An odd arsenal for the frontier,” Duncan observed.
“I am a philosopher, sir. A student of humanity. When I prove the aborigine to be of a different species, just think of the lines of inquiry I will open!”
Duncan eyed the tools uneasily. “What exactly in God’s name are you doing here, Rush?”
“Gathering evidence of course. With doctors in Philadelphia paying three pounds a body, there is no end of cadavers there. But it’s damnable hard to find a native specimen.”
A chill ran down Duncan’s back. “What were you doing when those men accosted you?”
“Nothing! I swear it! I tried to make them understand what I needed. I showed them my coin. I asked about the recently dead. They did not seem to understand. Only one spoke any English, and that poorly. So I pulled out a surgical blade to help him understand. He asked what it was and I told him, very slowly, to help him grasp the word. Then he pulls out his war ax and shouts at me.”
Duncan stared in mute astonishment. “You must have an angel hovering over you to have survived so long.”
“Sir?”
“You come from Philadelphia, where they pay bounties for Indian hair, you show him your coin then display your blade, naming it your scalpel.” Duncan repeated the word, slowly, the way Rush must have done. “Scalp-el.”
The color left Rush’s face. “Dear God! I didn’t . . . I never meant to suggest . . . dear God!” he repeated.
Duncan stared at the forlorn man, wondering not for the first time how learned men could be so unwise in the ways of the world. He cracked the door and looked outside. “They’ll likely get thirsty and give up the search in some tavern. Make a hiding place at the back of the woodpile and cover yourself until dark. Then find your friend and make haste for Philadelphia.”
Duncan had taken several steps toward the church when he paused. Analie sat on the bank with a vigilant expression, as if keeping watch over the vessels in the convoy. She seemed relieved when he asked her for the mink cap. No one had said the words aloud but they all knew the dead man had worn it. Benjamin Rush waited for his naturalist friend from Philadelphia, who had gone upriver to sketch birds. But there had been no one upriver except a well-dressed gentleman without a face.
He turned the cap over. It was the work of a fine craftsman, who had created it by sewing pelts into a broad tube, then closing one end and doubling the open end up over itself, anchoring it with heavy stitches that created little pockets around the rim.
Duncan inserted his finger into one such opening and pulled out twigs and fish scales. Between two more stitches were several duck feathers. From the next opening he extracted a small piece of oilcloth folded around a slip of paper. On it four names had been written in a refined hand. Peter Rohrbach, Red Jacob, Captain Woolford, and Patrick Henry. It was signed with a flourish at the bottom. Franklin.
CHAPTER SIX
Duncan stared at the words with a chill in his heart, then finally returned the note to its hiding place, rose, and made his way back to the little church. Mother Brumbach was on her knees, transplanting violets onto the fresh graves as she sang a German hymn in a low, consoling voice. Duncan knelt and helped with the digging.
“That man you chased away today. Had you seen him in Shamokin before?” he asked.
She patted the earth around Rachel’s cross as she considered her answer. “Gentlemen in fine clothes come from Philadelphia most every week. Land company men mostly. Our missionaries from Bethlehem and Nazareth. Government men sometimes. Men recruiting for the southern plantations, though they get few takers here. We used to get few such strangers but now they just come and go. I never pay much mind.”
“But Peter knew some of them?”
“Peter was apprenticed to a printer in Philadelphia.”
Duncan chewed on the words a moment. “So he was a journeyman?” he asked, referring to those who had recently completed their apprenticeships and traveled to find work.