“Where’s Mr. Butler? There’s been murder done!”
The shouting roused me from my morning lethargy, and I flung open the door of my office and stalked through the courtroom to see who was disturbing my peace. As I pushed open the outer door, I nearly collided with a hulking figure who seemed composed entirely of snow, fur, and buckskin.
“What’s all this noise?” I demanded. In truth, I thought that the man was a drunkard whose Christmas revels had gone on well past New Year’s. I grabbed hold of his sodden coat sleeve and he spun around, shaking the muffler from his wind-reddened face. I saw that he was sober enough, but his eyes were wide with alarm. “What is it?” I said.
The man quieted now, content to have someone to hear him out. “I’m a constable, bringing in prisoners,” he said. “A man has been murdered, up past Celo Mountain, and we reckon we have the killers.” I was too astonished to reply, so he went on. “I brought them with me, but it was a day’s ride through deep snow, and I won’t put my horse or myself through that journey again yet awhile. I’ll be staying the night at the county’s expense before I head back up the mountain.”
I gave him a patient smile and drew him inside, shutting the door against the wind. “You will get no argument from me about your intention to rest in the tavern before heading home,” I told him. “I see the sense in your statement. Nothing could induce me to make such an arduous journey twice without respite.”
“And the county will pay for my lodging?”
“I am not the man to rule on these financial matters, or even to accept your prisoners. You want the sheriff, or, failing him, the jailer. I am the clerk of the Superior Court, and you’ll have no need of my services until the case comes to trial in the spring term, three months hence.”
“No one but you is about,” he told me. “A lad on the street said I’d find you here. I brought a man with me. He’s watching my prisoners for me now. I thought you might summon someone to take charge of them so that I can go off to a drink and a warm room.” He used his teeth to pull the deerskin gloves from his fingers. “I have the warrant with me,” he said, fishing a damp bit of paper out of the cavernous folds of his garments.
I recognized my visitor now. The young man, a constable from the far reaches of the county, was the son of old David Baker, a patriot of the Revolution, one of the prominent landowners to the west. I saw this young constable sometimes when court was in session. I scanned the document, an arrest warrant penned by his brother, a justice of the peace in one of those settlements miles from here, past the wall of mountains.
Burke County is more than fifty miles long, and the wild western portion of it lies in steep mountains, with bold rivers too rocky and shallow for riverboat commerce, and an endless thicket of trees walling out the world beyond. From the Carolina piedmont there are but three portals into that wilderness: the Gillespie Gap, the Buck Creek Gap, and the Winding Stairs; from within it, the Iron Mountain Gap is the way out, leading on into Tennessee. The fortress of hills between the piedmont and the Tennessee settlement was once the hunting ground of the Cherokee and the Shawnee. Now it is the kingdom of the bear and the elk; a land of strange bald mountains, rich forests of oak and chestnut, and, scattered here and there across it in makeshift homesteads, the frontiersmen.
A determined man, or a desperate one, could eke out an existence on such inhospitable land, but it would be a lonely life, removed from polite society as I knew it. No gentleman would set his plantation west of Morganton, for here ends the fertile piedmont land of rolling hills and wide flat fields. Some people did live in the western reaches of Burke County, but they kept to themselves. Great tracts of that unforgiving land had been given as grants to soldiers who fought in the War of 1812, causing scores of land-poor farmers to come down from Maryland and Pennsylvania looking to homestead the frontier, far from their prosperous Eastern neighbors who had trammeled the seaboard with their plantations. I supposed that the constable’s family was one of these backwoods gentry, but since their holdings were miles west of Morganton, they would not be known to me. Such outsiders as appeared socially at Morganton balls and dinner parties invariably hailed from east of us, for that way lay government, society, and civilization; westward lay only the trackless wilderness, Indian country, and Tennessee.
Murder done, Charlie Baker had said. It hardly surprised me in such a wild place. I scanned the document.
State of North Carolina Burke County
This day came Elijah Green before me D. D. Baker an acting justice of the county and made oath in due form of law that Frankey Silver and [something was crossed out here] Barbara Stewart and Blackston Stewart is believed that they did murder Charles Silvers contrary to law and against the sovereign dignity of the State. Sworn to and subscribed by me this 9th day of January 1832.
D. D. Baker Elijah Green
Appended to this document was another few lines from Justice Baker authorizing law officers to take the accused persons into custody and to bring them safely before a justice of the county to answer the charges made against them.
“It all seems in order,” I said, handing the paper back to the justice’s brother. “And you say you have brought the prisoners? Two men and a woman?”
“Two women, sir,” said the constable.
I glanced again at the warrant. “Barbara Stewart and… Frankie?”
“Mother and daughter. The daughter, Frankie, is the wife of the deceased. They’re all outside with the fellow I brought with me. They haven’t given us any trouble on the journey, but all the same I’d better head back directly.”
“So you shall,” I told him. “Bring your prisoners here into the courthouse, where you may all keep warm, and I will find Mr. Butler for you, or, failing that, Mr. Presnell. And in exchange you must promise to tell me what has happened in those mountains to bring about such a grievous charge.”
I was eager to hear more of this news, but in good conscience I could not keep women waiting outdoors on such a bitter day, even if they were wicked murderesses. Barbara Stewart and her two grown offspring. The names meant nothing to me. I pictured a wizened crone and her witless children, caught poisoning some poor traveler, or a pair of madwomen perhaps, driven out of their senses by the cold and isolation of that mountain fortress. I shuddered to think that our fair country could contain such evil. However, news is currency in Morganton, as in any other bustling town, and I wanted to be enriched with the information before the gossips had spread it far and wide. I retrieved my overcoat and accompanied Baker outside. Five snow-dusted horses were tethered to the oak tree near the steps. Constable Baker’s companion stood on the courthouse walk, his pistol drawn and aimed at his charges.
Two of the prisoners squatted on the ground beneath the tree, so bundled up in their winter wraps that I could tell little about them except that they seemed indifferent to the gun trained on them, for they did not even glance in our direction.