Quinn took off his hat, ran his hand through his hair, falling into the void, groping for a word.
“When?”
“Last Feb’ary sometime. Six months now. Worst thing ever happen in this house.” Capricorn sighed mightily and his voice broke. “They do my Matty too. Killin’ women like that.”
“Who did? Why? What is all this?”
“Don’t really know. Some thinks they knows. But nobody knows why they do my Matty too.”
Capricorn was near tears, and Quinn motioned the old man toward the east parlor.
“Can we sit and talk about this?”
“Capricorn don’t sit in there. New butler, he don’ allow that.”
“A new butler. Everything’s changed. What about the porch?”
“Don’ think so.”
“We won’t go to the kitchen. All right if we walk?”
“Walkin’ is fine.”
And so they walked on the road under a relentless sun, with Capricorn immediately talking of the great wealth of the new owner, Gordon Fitzgibbon, son of Lyman, and passing on then to Hillegond. Sadness smothered Quinn with each vision of her that came into his memory, and he knew he would have to turn the conversation away from her. He would find out the details of her murder from Will Canaday, read all the stories Will must have written about it. Quinn could drown in such evil but he would not. He would survive Hillegond’s death as he had others in the war: move past them; control the power of grief and anger to destroy the vessel. But he could feel the impetus for control weakening with each new death that touched him, his survival drive waning like Cappy’s eyesight. Soon there may be no drive.
And Capricorn talked on.
“This woman, she open her house to colored folks. She feed them, help them go to freedom. She save Joshua from jail, then give him money so’s he can bring other coloreds up from Carolina. Joshua’s woman stop here too. Miss Hilly a sainted lady. She in heaven for sure. She be a queen up there.”
“I was here the night Joshua came in as a prisoner, manacled to the Swede,” Quinn said.
“I recollect.”
“After that I asked you about him, but you wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“I recollect that too.”
“I saw Joshua in New York.”
“We ain’t seen him here. How that boy doin’?”
“Long time ago, but he was all right then.” Quinn the liar.
“Aw, that’s fine.”
“He was working in John McGee’s saloon. You remember John? The fighter? John the Brawn they called him.”
“Nobody forget that man once they meet him.”
“Joshua had a new name first time I caught up with him. Called himself Mick the Rat.”
“Go on. Mick the Rat?”
“That’s it. He was handling rats for John.”
“Handlin’ rats?”
“A special show to bring people into the saloon. They see the rat show free, then maybe they drink and gamble some. Joshua had a bag full of rats. He’d catch a fresh bunch every night at the slaughterhouse. Throw a light on them and while they stared at it he’d grab ’em with long pincers and drop ’em in the bag.”
Capricorn shook his head. “Joshua do that? Joshua?”
Quinn nodded. “Then he’d bring the rats into John’s place and put one into this pit in the back of the saloon. People all around the pit watching, and then somebody’d put a bull terrier in with the rat. Terrier’d kill it quick. Then Joshua’d put two rats in and the terrier’d kill them too, sometimes just one bite apiece. Then they’d put a Mexican hairless in and Joshua’d dump in four rats and the Mex’d get them all. Then five rats, then six. The rats had no chance. It was a matter of time.”
“Can’t say as I like that game.”
“No. But Joshua needed money. He was hiding two fugitive slaves and trying to move them north.”
“He always doin’ that.”
“Asked me to help him. He didn’t really know me, but he trusted me. Said that was his talent, knowing if he could trust you.”
Joshua told Quinn the bounty on one of the runaways was three hundred dollars, which made his work of hiding the pair doubly difficult. The second slave had no price on his head, being possessed of only one eye, the other destroyed by the lash of a whip from his master’s hand, marking him as an evil-eyed source of ill luck to all. Joshua had led the slaves from Philadelphia to a farmer’s cabin south of Kingston that was only marginally secure; and when he learned the slave hunters were closing in he put the problem to Quinn: We need a white man. Quinn said he was a white man.
Joshua had allies, but the known local abolitionists were of no value in this situation. Quinn, a stranger, could bring the necessary word to the inns and the grogshops where the deadliest gossip thrived and where the slave hunters had been biding their time to hear it. The slavers were also a pair, not from the South (by their accent) but Yorkers, clearly. They came equipped: ropes, manacles, rifles, pistols, money to loosen tongues. They called each other by name — Fletch and Blue — and made no secret of their ambition: “Catch niggers.”
And so when Quinn sat in the Eagle Tavern and ordered his whiskey toddies and grew garrulous, dropping the news that he’d seen niggers moving around near a cabin up the pike, then repeated his performance at the Bump Tavern at the next crossroads, well, it came as no surprise when Fletch and Blue turned up at his elbow, inquiring about particulars.
“You hunt niggers, is that it?” Quinn asked them.
“We take property back to its rightful owners,” said Fletch.
“A wonderful thing,” said Quinn. “Man owns somethin’, he shouldn’t oughta have to give it up, just on accounta the thing he owns don’t want to be owned no more. Man could lose all his cows that way.”
“Cows,” said Fletch, and he thought about that.
“You think you could show us where you seen them niggers?”
“Can’t really tell it,” said Quinn. “Don’t know the names of none of these roads, don’t know where nothin’ is, rightly.”
“You figure you could show us?” asked Fletch.
“I s’pose.” And Quinn mused on the possibility. “What’s the profit for a fella like me shows you what you’re lookin’ for?”
“You want profit, is that it?”
“Most folks do.”
“We’ll give you profit.”
“That case, we probably got us a deal.”
“Then let’s go.”
“How much profit you figure we’re talkin’ about?”
“We give you two dollars. You can buy a new horse with two dollars.”
“Not no kind of horse I’d wanna ride.” And Quinn fell silent.
“We’ll give you three,” said Blue.
“We’ll give you five, never mind three,” said Fletch.
“All you gonna give me is five? I was thinkin’ twenty ain’t a bad price for a couple of niggers.”
“Twenty; all right, twenty. Let’s go.”
“I’d like to get the feel of the twenty ’fore we go,” said Quinn.
“Give him twenty,” said Fletch. And Blue opened the flap of his shirt pocket and took out a fold of bills.
“You ready now?” Blue said when Quinn took the money.
“I’m ready,” said Quinn. “You ready?”
“We’re ready,” said Fletch. “But if’n we don’t get no niggers I’ll be lookin’ to get back that twenty.”
“Fair’s fair,” said Quinn, and he led the way out of the tavern, mounted his horse, and headed north on the turnpike.
Wrapped in blankets, the fugitive slaves squatted on the earth in a pit under the floorboards of the cabin, their retreat in times of threat. Planks covered their heads. Long slivers of light from the oil lamp in the second room of the cabin found their way down between the boards and into the soft clay cubicle of the slaves’ secret dwelling place.