“Back on in the morning,” Duncan said as they finished the last one. “The overseers must not suspect.”
“But the pigeon will know,” Ross whispered.
“The difference now since Devon’s death is that everyone knows he exists. Everyone is watching for him and he must expect it. He is not as likely to sing and if he does all will be watching for it.”
“I’ve been asking whether anyone comes back from the interrogations without injuries,” Ross reported.
“It would seem the best opportunity for the spy to meet with his handlers,” Duncan acknowledged. “And?”
“No one seems spared the beatings. But a man could fake a limp or even take a bruise to avoid suspicion.”
“It’s not one of the Iroquois,” Duncan whispered. “I’d stake my life on that.”
“As I would on my Conococheague men,” Murdo added.
“Which leaves the northern rangers and the Virginians,” Duncan concluded, “and it won’t be those who are turning to skin and bones. You can bet the spy is given extra food when he goes to the smokehouse.”
He studied the men, most of whom gathered around Jaho as he began applying grease to the chafed ankles. Duncan noticed that Buchanan, one of Ross’s Scots, had tucked his forearm inside his tattered waistcoat. He approached and touched his arm. Buchanan’s haggard face tightened in a grimace of pain, then he froze as Tanaqua clamped a hand around his shoulder. “McCallum is a healer,” the big Mohawk declared.
“He was taken to the smokehouse just this morning,” Ross explained to Duncan.
Duncan pushed up the man’s sleeve, which was soiled with blood and dirt. His forearm was swollen in a massive green bruise. The skin along the underside was stretched in a large, unnatural lump.
“God’s breath, Buchanan!” Murdo gasped. “What have they done to ye?”
“It was in the smokehouse,” the young Scot explained. “They were more angry than before. They kept asking for names of the commissioners on stolen certificates, and hit me harder and harder when I gave them no answers.”
“It’s broken,” Murdo observed.
“Oh aye,” Buchanan agreed, “sounded like a stick of wood snapping.” When Duncan bent to examine the arm Buchanan pulled it away.
“I studied medicine in Edinburgh.”
Buchanan remained skeptical.
“He is a healer in our lodges,” Tanaqua inserted.
Buchanan frowned, but slowly extended the arm. Among men of the frontier a university-trained physician was a suspect outsider, but a healer of the longhouses was always respected. In truth Duncan had seen native healers perform miracles with compounds of herbs that would baffle Edinburgh scholars. Old Jaho brought Buchanan a cup of his willow brew, then Tanaqua and Murdo pinned the Scot to the platform as Duncan performed the quick but painful resetting.
“We need a splint, two or three plain slats, and strips to tie them tight,” Duncan declared to no one in particular. The words brought a flurry of activity behind him. He turned to see one of the rangers point up to a splintering rafter and then lean over. In a blur of motion one of the Iroquois rangers took a running jump, pushing off the man’s back and landing on the rafter. Moments later he had peeled away several thick strips of wood, which were quickly smoothed on one of the stones that some used as headrests.
Duncan finished tying the splints around Buchanan’s arm with strips torn from pallets and looked up. Every man in the stable was watching him, many wearing grins. Something had shifted. The company had acted as one. Duncan nodded at Murdo and Tanaqua, and they retrieved the items he had stolen from the dinghy.
Eyes widened as he held them out for all to see. This was resistance.
Webb lifted the knife, nodding his approval, and murmured a command. The rangers from both Virginia and New York lined up. Webb paced the line then handed the knife to Hughes. “I want this as sharp as a razor by dawn,” he said. Hughes pressed a knuckle to his forehead in acknowledgment.
“From now on,” Webb continued as he handed out the spoon and fork with instructions to sharpen the handles, “every man is paired with another. Together in work, when eating, always together outside or we will know why not. Sergeant Morris, sound off the men in pairs.” They would not make it easy for the infiltrator.
The major walked back along the line, tapping several men on the shoulder. “Sick call,” he ordered. The men obediently formed a line by Duncan and Jaho, who grinned at Webb then went to work. The major had apparently seen symptoms that Duncan had not, and soon he was examining boils, deep splinters, aching teeth, and a disjointed thumb. Compresses were heated in one of the mugs over massed candles, the thumb was reset, and long draughts of the Susquehannock’s brew were dispensed. Scottish songs erupted in low tunes, and to considerable amusement Old Jaho and the Iroquois tried to learn the Jacobite songs, making many of the throat-rattling Gaelic syllables sound like bird calls. They went to sleep to the scraping of Hughes’s knife on a stone.
As the charcoal marks on the wall slowly grew in number, so too did their little arsenal. The shaft of a broken hoe was worked by Tanaqua into a club, then, with the insertion of a sharpened stone, turned into a formidable war ax before being hidden in the rafters. One of the Virginian youths recounted how he had often brought down squirrels with a sling. More scraps of leather that could be worked into slings appeared one morning by one of the yard logs, a little pile of round pebbles another morning, and to their great pleasure, eight plump onions on still another. They were quickly hidden until, after the door was barred, Webb used the knife to quarter them then distributed pieces to each man.
Duncan slept lightly that night, then not long past midnight he rose and squatted by a platform where he could watch Jaho’s blanket tent, where the old man was bent over his smoldering pot. It was nearly an hour before the Susquehannock crawled into the tent. Duncan waited a few minutes then crept to the tent, apologized to the spirits, and ventured inside.
It was empty. The spirits protected not just Jaho himself, but also his escape hatch. The old tobacco sheds had been built with planks that could be swung out on top pivot pins for ventilation in the drying season but those on the slave quarters were supposed to have been nailed shut. The plank at the back of the makeshift tent, however, was loose, held in place by the peg that now lay on the floor. He pushed against the board and dropped to the ground outside.
Once outside he hurried to the cover of the nearest tree, by the road that separated the fields from the vast swamp that bordered the plantation’s eastern side. He thought the old man would have headed toward the hills and began stealing from tree to tree in that direction, but after a few steps he halted, then followed a low murmuring sound toward the bank that sloped down to the swamp.
The old Susquehannock was not alone as he sat in the moonlight. A deer was at his side, nibbling grass from his hand as he whispered to it. Nearby a tall, graceful shape bent at the edge of the water. A night heron.
“If you walk slowly they will not shy away. I told them you were coming,” Jaho declared.
As Duncan sat beside him the heron took a step backward, then twisted its neck to give a raspy call before returning to its hunt.
They sat in silence, contemplating the starlit sky, as Duncan and Conawago had so often done.
“People of this world are scared of swamps,” Jahoska said. “They stay away from them, frightened of their creatures, or kill them with wagons of stone and dirt.”
Of this world. The Susquehannock once again spoke as if he were familiar with more than one world.
“But a swamp is the wilds between land and the water,” the old native continued. “It is the breeder of life, the dark place that makes the light place possible.”
“You could run to freedom,” Duncan observed. “Instead you go out in the night and leave presents for the company.”